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Recent Posts
- Dishing up Pulp Curry in a new way: why I am starting a Substack newsletter
- Book reviews: Deadly dames, midcentury Brit pulp and 1970s science fiction
- Mackenna’s Gold (1969): Gold, Ghosts and Frontier Violence
- Orphan Road book launch
- Orphan Road now available
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- Cover reveal: Orphan Road, my follow up to Gunshine State
- Breakfast in the Ruins podcast: New English Library Bikermania
- Why 1973 was the year Sidney Lumet took on police corruption
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Author Archives: Andrew Nette
Cold Light of Day DVD commentary for Arrow Video
I’m excited to announce the upcoming release of my first DVD commentary, done with my fellow Melbourne film historian and friend, Dean Brandum, on British director Fhiona-Louise’s 1989 film, Cold Light of Day.
This little known film, critically attacked when it was first released, is based on the life of Dennis Nilsen, a mild mannered and unassuming civil servant, who was in fact one of Britain’s most shocking and prolific serial killers for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, until his arrest in 1983.
Starring the little known Bob Flag (the face of Big Brother in Michael Radford’s 1984) as Nilsen, this film is indeed one of the most realistic and chilling depictions of a serial killer put on the screen. It is also among the handful of films made in the United Kingdom based on the activities of British serial killers (Richard Fleischer’s 1971 film, 10 Rillington Place, about the murders committed by John Christie, and the Ian Merrick’s excellent 1977 effort, Black Panther, the story of murderer Donald Neilson, are two others.
Dean and I discuss why it is that a country which has experienced so many real life serial killers has been so reluctant to put them on the screen, as well as Nilsen’s life and crimes, and many other aspects of this confronting but fascinating film.… Read more
Parker on the screen #1: Mise a Sac (1967)
With Melbourne is back in Covid-19 lockdown, I have a bit more time than usual on my hands, so I’ve decided to start a project I have been meaning to undertake for a while now – to watch and review all the screen adaptations of Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake’s crime fiction character, the master thief known as Parker.
Regular readers of this site will be well versed in my adoration for Westlake in general and his character, Parker, in particular. I wrote about what it was that so fascinated me about Parker in some detail on Pulp Curry back in 2014. And my second novel Gunshine State is an Australian homage of to the Parker series.
A few ground rules for what I intend to be an occasional series. I’ll tackle every film, except for John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), which I have already written about in some detail here. This means: Made in U.S.A (1966), Mise a Sac (1967), The Split (1968), The Outfit (1973), Slayground (1983), Payback (the director’s cut – 1999), and Parker (2013). That said, I will not do them in the order they appeared. While Made in U.S.A is the first film to be based on a Westlake book (although the adaptation is very tenuous), I’ve had issues getting a copy to watch, so I’ll tackle Mise a Sac first.… Read more
Posted in 1970s American crime films, Crime film, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, French cinema, Heist films, Neo Noir, Parker
Tagged Alain Cavalier, Classe Tous Risques (1960), Claude Saudet, Cold Sweat (1970), Daniel Ivernal, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Eyes Without a Face (1960), heist films, Michel Constantin, Mise a Sac (1966), Parker, Point Blank (1967), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The Nickel Ride (1974), The Score, Violent City (1970)
Up periscope: a celebration of submarine cinema
I love a good submarine film. The claustrophobia of the confined setting, the tensions arising from a group of people having to co-exist and operate in a completely unnatural, extremely dangerous environment, is all pretty much guaranteed to hook me in every time.
I was reminded of this while I was watched the 2014 thriller Black Sea on the weekend. A hard as nails, embittered Scottish deep sea salvage expert, Robinson, (Jude Law), takes a job with a shadowy backer, to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars of gold rumoured to be in a sunken Nazi U-boat sitting on the bottom of the Black Sea. He has at his disposal a surplus communist era Russian submarine and recruits a fractious crew of washed up seafarers, half of whom are Russian because they are the only ones who know how to properly operate the vessel.
I don’t know why this film passed me by when it first came out but it ticked virtually every box on the my list of requirements for a good submarine film. The crew have to contend with a never ending series of life threatening technical and nautical challenges. Within the narrow confines of the aged submarine, the tensions between crew members ratchet up along ethnic grounds and how they will split up the gold.… Read more
Posted in 1960s American crime films, 1990s American crime films, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Dystopian cinema, Ernest Borgnine, French cinema, Gregory Peck, Heist films, Jim Brown, Rock Hudson, Samuel Fuller, Sidney Poitier, Spies, War film
Tagged Assault on a Queen (1966), Ava Gardner, Black Sea (2014), Burt Lancaster, Das Boot (1981), Ernest Borgnine, Gregory Peck, Harvey Keitel, Hell and High Water (1954), Ice Station Zebra (1968), Jim Brown, Jude Law, Matthew McConaughey, On the Beach (1959), Patrick McGoohan, Rene Clement, Richard Widmark, Robert Wise, Rock Hudson, Run Silent Run Deep (1957), Samuel Fuller, Sidney Poitier, Stanley Kramer, Submarines in cinema, The Bedford Incident (1965), The Damned (1947), U571 (2000)
Pulp Friday: No Orchids for Miss Blandish
‘In 1939, amidst violence and wartime shortages, one hardboiled noir took the nation by storm, provoked moral outrage, and inspired legions of imitators.’
My latest piece for the CrimeReads site is a look at the popularity and controversy around James Hadley Chase’s 1939 blockbuster, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. You can read my story in full at the CrimeReads site here.
The article is a sequel of sorts to a story I did back in April on the popularity of mid-century faux American crime fiction in Australia and the career of one of the country’s least known most successful crime writers, Alan Yates, who wrote under the pseudonym, Carter Brown. A link to the full piece is here.
Posted in 1970s American crime films, Australian crime fiction, Australian pulp fiction, British crime cinema, British pulp fiction, Crime fiction, Film Noir, James Hadley Chase, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers
Tagged British crime fiction, faux American crime fiction, hardboiled crimefiction, I the Jury (1947), James Hadley Chase, Mickey Spillane, mid-century crime fiction, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Rene Lodge Brabazon Raymond