Tipping My Fedora

25. WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988), with Simon Brown

The 1988 live action and animation hybrid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, can certainly lay claim to being the most unusual Film Noir yet featured on Tipping My Fedora. A 1940s murder mystery set in a parallel universe in which humans and cartoons co-exist, it was a huge gamble for the studio and its director, Robert Zemeckis, hot off the success of the first Back to the Future movie. The gamble paid off however, both critically and at the box office, but how well does its technical wizardry stand up today?

Joining me to discuss this highly unusual Neo-Noir is my very good friend Simon Brown, an independent scholar who specialises in early film history, horror, adaptation studies and film technology.

He is the author of Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of The British Film Industry (Uni of Exeter Press, 2016) and Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television (uni of Texas Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book about director Robert Zemeckis.

24. David Shire's Noir Film Music (1974-76), with John Leman Riley

The great film composer and songwriter David Shire turns 88 today. To celebrate, I am joined by film music historian John Leman Riley to look at some of Shire's classic 1970s Neo-Noir music scores, including:

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (Sargent, 1974)

THE CONVERSATION (Coppola, 1974)

FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (Richards, 1975)

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (Pakula, 1976)

For more information about the life and work of David Shire, please visit his homepage at: http://davidshiremusic.com/

John Leman Riley’s career has embraced photography, librarianship, archiving, teaching and lecturing, academic writing and editing, as well as journalism, reviewing, exhibition catalogues, CD and DVD notes and the like. Often focusing on film and film music, classical music, and Eastern European culture, he has been published by Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh University Presses, Routledge, Greenwood, BFI, Rough Guides and others.

Highlights include Dmitri Shostakovich: a Life in Film (Tauris), Discover Film Music (Naxos) for which he curated two accompanying CDs of excerpts, Sound at the Film Society, (“The Sound of the Silents in Britain”, OUP), Keeping the Icons on the Wall: Shostakovich’s Cinema and Concert Music (“Dmitrij Šostakovič tra Musica, Letteratura e Cinema”, Leo S Olschki), Soviet Cinema: Between Art and Propaganda (Cité de la Musique, Paris, and Caja Madrid), Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies (“Contemplating Shostakovich: Life Music and Film”, Ashgate), and Live Cinema: Silent Film, Orchestral Accompaniment and the Special Event (“Archival Film Festivals”, Edinburgh UP).

He regularly writes for and is Reviews Editor of the DSCH Journal (www.dschjournal.com) and was the English Language editor for Apparatus Journal (https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus).

In From the Woods to the Cosmos, on the Severin BluRay release of Viy, he discusses Russian and Soviet horror and sci-fi cinema.

Commissioned by the South Bank Centre, he wrote, produced and directed Shostakovich: My Life in Film, telling the story of the composer’s film career with an orchestra playing the scores to film clips. Shostakovich was played by Simon Russell-Beale in London and, at the Komische Oper, Berlin, by Ulrich Matthes (Goebbels in Der Untergang).

He writes at https://johnlemanriley.substack.com/

23. Neo-Noir Film Music, with John Leman Riley

Film and music historian John Leman Riley is back and joins me for a discussion of some of the great Neo-Noir scores composed by Ennio Morricone, Michael Small and Jerry Goldsmith.

In this episode we focus on four great films and their soundtracks:

THE SICILIAN CLAN (Verneuil, 1969) - music by Ennio Morricone

THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (Argento, 1970) - music by Ennio Morricone

KLUTE (Pakula, 1971) - music by Michael Small

CHINATOWN (Polanski, 1974) - music by Jerry Goldsmith

 

John’s career has embraced photography, librarianship, archiving, teaching and lecturing, academic writing and editing, as well as journalism, reviewing, exhibition catalogues, CD and DVD notes and the like. Often focusing on film and film music, classical music, and Eastern European culture, he has been published by Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh University Presses, Routledge, Greenwood, BFI, Rough Guides and others.

Highlights include Dmitri Shostakovich: a Life in Film (Tauris), Discover Film Music (Naxos) for which he curated two accompanying CDs of excerpts, Sound at the Film Society, (“The Sound of the Silents in Britain”, OUP), Keeping the Icons on the Wall: Shostakovich’s Cinema and Concert Music (“Dmitrij Šostakovič tra Musica, Letteratura e Cinema”, Leo S Olschki), Soviet Cinema: Between Art and Propaganda (Cité de la Musique, Paris, and Caja Madrid), Stalin (and Lenin) at the Movies (“Contemplating Shostakovich: Life Music and Film”, Ashgate), and Live Cinema: Silent Film, Orchestral Accompaniment and the Special Event (“Archival Film Festivals”, Edinburgh UP).

He regularly writes for and is Reviews Editor of the DSCH Journal (www.dschjournal.com) and was the English Language editor for Apparatus Journal (https://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus).

In From the Woods to the Cosmos, on the Severin BluRay release of Viy, he discusses Russian and Soviet horror and sci-fi cinema.

Commissioned by the South Bank Centre, he wrote, produced and directed Shostakovich: My Life in Film, telling the story of the composer’s film career with an orchestra playing the scores to film clips. Shostakovich was played by Simon Russell-Beale in London and, at the Komische Oper, Berlin, by Ulrich Matthes (Goebbels in Der Untergang).

He writes at https://johnlemanriley.substack.com/

 

22. Hitchcock Noir: REBECCA (1940) and SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943), with Brad Friedman

Sergio is joined today by podcast buddy Brad Friedman to discuss two of Alfred Hitchcock's first engagements with American Film Noir: the Gothic romance Rebecca (1940) and the dark small-town psycho-thriller, Shadow of a Doubt (1943).   

Brad blogs about Golden Age mystery books and movies at Ah Sweet Mystery: https://ahsweetmystery.com/

Spoiler alert: the plots for both these films, including their respective endings, are explored in great detail. 

21. Noir Boxing Movies, with Steve Hunt

Boxing features in more Hollywood movies than any other sport - and this was certainly true in the era of classic Film Noir. Where does this fascination come from - and how have Noir boxing movies rung the changes over the decades?

Sergio is joined by Steve Hunt, host of the superb Boxing Movie Podcast and author of the new book, Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History. Together they look at five of Steve's favourite noir boxing films. 

KID GALAHAD (Curtiz, 1937)

THE SET-UP (Wise, 1949)

CHAMPION (Robson, 1949)

KILLER'S KISS (Kubrick, 1955)

THE HARDER THEY FALL (Robson, 1956)

To listen to Steve podcast, please visit: https://boxingmoviepodcast.alitu.com/

You can find his homepage at this link: https://www.stevehuntboxing.com/

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-boxing-movie-podcast/id1742325024

Steve's book, Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History, is now available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon in the UK (https://shorturl.at/h02Bc) and from McFarland (https://shorturl.at/8i5ll) in the US.

20. Radio Noir: MR ARKADIN (1955)

Will the real "Mr Arkadin" please stand up?

For the podcast's first foray into audio noir, we tip our hat to Orson Welles - whose birthday it was this past week - and look at the strange case of his noir maudit, MR ARKADIN. Also released as CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, we will consider the many iterations of the film (following in the path of Jonathan Rosenbaum's seminal essay, The Seven Arkadins, first published in Film Comment magazine in 1992). Incredibly, the various versions - including radio dramas and novelisations as well as variant edits of the film, has now risen to a total of 10 separate Arkadins!

We will also present the full audio drama from which the film was primarily derived, Man of Mystery, one of 8 (or 9) episodes that Welles was known to have written for his The Lives of Harry Lime radio series (first heard round the world from 1951 to 1952). 

The entire Harry Lime series of 52 half hour episodes is available for download from the Internet Archive at this link: https://archive.org/details/TheLivesOfHarryLime

To read Rosenbaum's original essay, please visit his homepage at this link: jonathanrosenbaum.net/

 

19. SEVEN (1995), with Dr Laura Mee

David Fincher's seminal neo-noir thriller SEVEN is now thirty years old. A surprise commercial success and critical hit, this dark, powerful, densely-layered and genuinely scary and challenging thriller proved to be a hugely influential Neo-noir.

And then, there was that box ...

To celebrate, Sergio is joined by Dr Laura Mee, Principal Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire. She primarily researches horror cinema and adaptation and is the author of two books: Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and a book on THE SHINING in the Devil's Advocates series (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Dr Mee has written on films including AMERICAN PSYCHO, ROOM 237, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE and The Conjuring series.

She is the co-founder and co-convener of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies' Horror Studies group, a UK network of horror scholars who host regular online events on a wide range of horror topics - you can find more information at baftsshorror.weebly.com. With colleagues Shellie McMurdo and Kate Egan, she is the co-editor of the Hidden Horror Histories book series from Liverpool University Press. (https://liverpooluniversitypress.blog/2023/10/27/hidden-horror-histories-call-for-proposals/)

Dr Laura Mee research profile: https://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/en/persons/laura-mee

18. Mabuse Lives! with David Kalat

Before such monstrous miscreants as  Ernst Stavro Blofeld, The Joker, Hannibal Lecter and Bellatrix Lestrange besmirched page and screen, perhaps the greatest supervillain of them all was Dr Mabuse. Hell-bent on world domination, his devilish plans were chronicled in books and movies throughout most of the 20th century. And now he's back in a brand new box set bringing together his six dastardly movie appearance from the 1960s, courtesy of Eureka video in their Masters of Cinema series.

https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/mabuse-lives-limited-edition-box-set/

 

 

To celebrate I am joined by David Kalat, the world's foremost authority on the mad doctor and his schemes, in a special edition of the podcast spanning some 100 years of movie mayhem.

David Kalat is a film historian and a forensic technologist. He has contributed audio commentaries to the home video editions of numerous classic movies, written extensively for Turner Classic Movies and other publications. In 1997, he founded the independent DVD label All Day Entertainment, to rescue and promote motion pictures whose artistic value, historic importance, and all-around entertainment value merit a second-chance in the commercial marketplace. David Kalat also partners with other media companies such as Eureka, Kino-Lorber, the Criterion Collection, Classic Media, and others to bring the same attention to important films from around the world. He is the author of numerous books on film history, including The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse.

https://www.alldayentertainment.com/publications