Nan Leslie

The Devil Thumbs a Ride

by
Lawrence Tierney in a publicity shot thumbing a lift

It’s only in B movies that the bad guy gets top billing. That’s the case with The Devil Thumbs a Ride, a showcase for Lawrence Tierney, playing a villain who looks like he’s been lifted out of the 1930s and dropped into this 1947 noir. Cold and deadly, side-of-the-mouth diction. He fits in perfectly with this mix of the ugly and the quaint, the terse and the acidic. The whole thing is a cliché, but a cliché done with a considerable amount of flair. Tierney plays a hood, a murderer who shoots a man in cold blood and then flees the scene of the crime by picking up a lift with a drunk … Read more

The Woman on the Beach

by
Peggy smokes and Tod scowls

The Woman on the Beach is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Designed as a dreamy, psychological tear through the unconscious, where libido is locked in a fight with other bits of the psyche, it wound up looking like it had been in a fight with itself. After a negative preview screening, panicked director Jean Renoir took it away and cut out 30 minutes of it. After reshooting all the scenes between leads Joan Bennett and Robert Ryan, he recast the only other significant woman in it. Out went Virginia Huston and in came Nan Leslie, who plays the significantly named Eve. The result? “I produced a film which was, I think, neither … Read more