Mike Hodges is the director of the canonical crime film classics Get Carter, A Prayer for the Dying, Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Having just published his debut novel, Watching the Wheels Come Off, he reflects on his relationship to storytelling on the screen and off. Mike Hodges, you’ve had a prestigious career [...]
Category Archive for ‘Film’ 
The Architects of Scare Season
Oct 29, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts
For the past seven years, the Saw films have existed synonymously with all that is most terrifying about Halloween. This year, as millions of horror fanatics prepare to flock to Saw 3D for their annual Halloween weekend scare fix, Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunston, writers of Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and Saw 3D, [...]
Insulting Your Intelligence (“Just gimme some noiriness”)
Oct 28, 2010 in Books, Film, Guest Posts, Television
I sometimes wonder if the popularity of noir isn’t largely due to the fact that no one seems entirely clear on what the hell it is. Not that a busload of perfectly smart people haven’t ventured a definition or two. A great deal of thought is expended on virtually a daily basis trying to pin [...]
The Box and the Key
Oct 19, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts
For a good five or six minutes after the movie ended there was a notable silence and everyone just sat there in expectation of there being more to come—a final scene which would explain what we had all been watching for the last 2½ hours. Needless to say, such a scene never arrived and so [...]
Thrilling Crime
Oct 14, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts
Image Entertainment’s 14-disc set of all sixty-seven black-and-white, one-hour episodes of the NBC series Thriller (1960–62) officially hit the streets on August 31. Why should you care? Because Thriller provided several of the best telefilms-noir nobody has ever seen. Existing in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock—who actively sought to undermine what he rightly saw as [...]
Crime Fiction and Fact: Real vs. Hollywood
Sep 20, 2010 in Books, Film, Guest Posts
If there’s one thing I know about, it’s crime. I’ve dealt drugs, used drugs, been shot at (and shot back), participated in high-speed chases with the cops, and lived with a call girl. I’ve been involved in stabbings, check-kiting, armed robberies, and some other tricks and stratagems of the hustling trade. Even spent two-plus years [...]
Sex and Violence, Please
Sep 17, 2010 in Books, Film, Guest Posts
The announcement of Little Brown’s new suspense line, Mullholland, is a cause for rejoicing in mystery-writer circles…and not just because an attractive new market for the craft has revealed itself. The launch reaffirms the notion that neither the book nor the mystery is dead, and that’s always good news to a writer trying to keep [...]
In Praise of the Erotic Thriller
Sep 10, 2010 in Books, Film, Guest Posts
I blame the movies. Or, at any rate, bad movies. Well, I suppose Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction were only half bad and could conceivably fall under the “guilty pleasures” category. But it’s the torrent of uninspired imitations that gave the genre a bad name: remember Shannon Tweed and a cohort of surgically augmented Hollywood [...]
Prose and Pictures
Sep 07, 2010 in Comic Books, Film, Guest Posts
Not everyone was schooled on comic books. But I was. I had a roomful: Superman, Batman, The Green Hornet, Spiderman; Archie, Betty and Veronica, Riverdale High, Little Archie. I had Classic Comics too: The Three Musketeers, The Last of the Mohicans, Robinson Crusoe (all of which I considered books until I finally read a real [...]
