Jack Carson

Blues in the Night

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The band all together playing

A jazzy, noirish take on the “getting the band together” drama, Blues in the Night benefits from crisp images and snappy dialogue. On the downside, everyone in it is about ten years too old for their role, there is quite a lot of “hep cat daddio” slang to digest and the racial politics are a mess. But if you can take the rough with the smooth, it’s bright and well paced, with a good plot, interesting acting and even a few good tunes – look on it as a semi-musical, maybe. It’s also the film that convinced Elia Kazan to pack in acting and take up directing. He says he was convinced he … Read more

Phffft

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Nina and Robert dance

The comedy of remarriage is really a creature of the 1930s but here it is alive and reasonably well in 1954 in Phffft, a screwbally kind of thing starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a married couple of eight years who decide wedlock isn’t for them, then try the alternatives only to eventually have a rethink about why they got divorced in the first place. Eight years, not seven. Columbia had actually wanted to make a version of George Axelrod’s hit play The Seven Year Itch but the rights were tied up (it would become a Twentieth Century Fox film directed by Billy Wilder the following year) and so Axelrod sold them … Read more