Send us a text

WILLIAM WYLER: PART 2 OF 4: THE DESPERATE HOURS

Paired with last week’s Detective Story, TGTPTU’s Big Willie Winter continues with THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955), another black-and-white film adaptation by William Wyler and a rare feature from the director to not earn a single Academy Award nomination.

Perhaps first home invasion picture, The Desperate Hours was adapted from a book that itself was inspired by tragic, real events (bonus fact: Richard Nixon would become involved in a lawsuit defending Time Magazine against the real-life victims who hadn’t agreed to a photo shoot in questionable taste at their former family home). Playing the lead heavy, Humphrey Bogart who with his character’s younger brother (played by Dewey Martin who, fun fact, was first married to a woman from Portland, Oregon and subsequently singer Peggy Lee) and a lug with more muscle than smarts on the lam take over a suburban home (bonus fact: the fictional house where the story takes place would later be used for the television show Leave It to Beaver) and soon butt heads with head-of-the household Daniel Hilliard, played by Fredric March, after seeing a bicycle left outside, a key indicator of a family with kids or, as those on the run know, prime hostage material. Wyler shows his mastery as a director getting an amazing performance from a child actor playing March’s son and providing depth and gravitas to all the characters.

Oddly cast from the script and the book, Bogart at age 56 was significantly older than the original story would have his Glenn Griffin (Paul Newman, who would play the role on stage before the film was released, was only 30 years old). But the performance is nuanced, perhaps measured by Bogart’s at the time being diagnosed with the cancer that would soon kill him.

During the course of The Desperate Hours (bonus snark: perhaps more accurately entitled The Desperate Afternoon Leading into that Night and on into Late the Next Day), Wyler ties in his recurring themes of pacifism, masculinity as performance, and the dangers of the police state in this film that, while feeling set-bound, it should be recalled that the play was written and performed after. All the same, a truck flips, a person is run over, and March has to pretend he’s drunk to disgust a visiting schoolteacher and save his family. Good stuff.

So give up sixtyish minutes for respite, ours will discuss it: flowers for Wyler, service ages for WWII vets, the elusive reality that started the Boomer Generation, and perhaps try a Bogart impersonation or two.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Bluesky: @mrkoral.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias

Send us a text

DETECTIVE STORY

Season 13’s 4x4 has reached its 1/2way point with our 9th of 16 movies and a new director, provisional co-host Ryan’s pick of the 15-time Academy Award-nominated, 3-time Oscar-winning director William Wyler. This week, we cover the first of Ryan’s four curated Wyler flicks DETECTIVE STORY (1951).

Up for four Academy Awards, including Best Director, but winning none, Detective Story was Wyler’s 22nd talkie and his earliest we’re covering the for the pod (the directorial powerhouse also shot about thirty silent films prior the talkies and two documentaries during WWII when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces). Like many of Wyler’s works, the picture was adapted from a successful contemporary play and stars Kirk Douglas (Spartacus nine years later) in the main role of Detective Jim McLeod with stage roles reprised both by Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No eleven years later) as a booked burglar who goes (SPOILER) for a gun and by Lee Grant (featured on TGTPTU seventy-two years later and amazing always) as a flighty shoplifter in a performance that would win her Best Actress at Cannes.

As a play adaptation, Detective Story is staged almost as a bottle movie, escaping its second-floor New York City precinct set only to introduce main characters in the opening minutes and for an aborted car ride. Speaking of abortion, the film’s creative team couldn’t under the Hays Code. This silencing through censorship changed a major component of the play when adapted, namely when Detective McLeod who sees in black-and-white (morally, not just because of the film stock) confronts the messiness of the gray world in his pursuit of a doctor’s medical malpractice manslaughter during a birth gone bad and, subsequently, upon learning of his wife’s secret life prior to knowing him when she’d used the same doctor’s services for...

So join the boys as they kick off Big Willy Winter with Ryan parodying the Fresh Prince lyrics; Ken maps Inspector Harold Francis Callahan (a.k.a. “Dirty Harry”) onto Det. McLeod; Tom gets thirsty for Lee Grant; and Jack stays awake. And keep subscribing and following for next week’s pairing with The Desperate Hours.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegoodthepoda1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias

Send us a text

4X4 III: TSAI MING-LIANG 4: DAYS

TGTPTU’s back to finish (cough) the job handily (cough) with a happy ending (oh boy) for our coverage of director Tsai Ming-liang, coming together (really, dude?) to get every ounce our four gents have to offer, pulling and tugging (grow up) on each’s points and hot takes for this fourth and final 4x4 film of Jack’s offering (was that a pun?) called, in its English release (are you serious?), DAYS (2020).

If you like washing your vegetables in your bathroom or the feel of burning paper during your non-erotic electroshock massage sessions and also like to take things slow, boy-howdy do we have a film for you. Or if you like your massage erotic, well, this possibly sad, possible love story might be up your rainy, post-apocalyptic Bangkok alley (or busy street). And for fans of the previously covered Goodbye, Dragon Inn who enjoyed its minimal subtitles due to its paucity of dialogue, get excite: There is even less talk and zero subtitles in this latest Tsai Ming-liang joint.

Naturally, actor and muse Lee Kang-sheng returns. Also billed, Anong Houngheuangsy in his debut film. Lee Kang-sheng plays an older dude who goes to the city for an obscure medical treatment for his back. Anong Houngheuangsy plays a younger guy on his grind (and occasionally Grinder?). About an hour into the film, these two hook up, a gift is exchanged, and the two have a quiet, postcoital meal outside a restaurant. Then they return their separate, silent ways after about forty-five minutes of shared screentime. And with just minutes to spare in this movie just over two hours long, we watch Anong Houngheuangsy’s character at a bus stop as he sits and waits and waits and waits until, wait for it, what appears in BMI and skin tones to be a herd of Americans passes by.

Listen along as the foursome wraps up (and Thomas declines to rank) Tsai Ming-liang’s four covered movies. EPISODE SPOILER: Ken reveals for perhaps the first time to English-speaking audiences the sitcom origins of Tsai Ming-liang’s films.

Next ep, we begin the first pairing of the four William Wyler films chosen by Ryan: Detective Story (1951) and The Desperate Hours (1955).

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegoodthepoda1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias