every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with random anti-alphabetical cheats)

In Cold Blood (1967)

Based on Truman Capote’s classic non-fiction novel about two 1950s murderers, this is supposed to be one of the Great Films. I’d never seen it, and didn’t particularly want to, because the true crime genre bores me, and because it stars Robert Blake, known to me mostly as that smirking guy with a pet parrot on TV’s Baretta.

True to its reputation, though, the movie is very well-made, certainly a classic of the get-inside-crazy-people genre. The names have not been changed to protect anyone, so it’s about Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, two ex-cons who broke into a family’s home in small-town Kansas on a November morning in 1959, and killed everyone who lived there.

If Capote’s research is to be believed, Smith had an awful childhood, and Hickock’s amoral personality was the perfect fuse to make both men become the shitty people they were.

Early in the movie, Blake as Smith talks lovingly about a parrot, which is either a weird coincidence or was turned into an inside joke by Baretta‘s producers a few years later. The parrot line is the movie’s only laugh, albeit unintentional.

In a particularly grisly moviemaking decision, the murders were filmed in the house, rooms, and hallways where the actual murders took place. Such realism!

There’s excellent off-kilter music by Quincy Jones, sharp black-and-white cinematography, committed and believable acting, and an engrossing script by Richard Brooks (Blackboard Jungle, Elmer Gantry), who also directed. In Cold Blood is excellent, it’s art, and it is, indeed, a Great Movie.

But so what? There are awful people in the world, who commit awful crimes. Smith and Hickock are two such people, but nothing’s gained by spending two hours with them, and turning their murder-spree into entertainment. I already knew that some people are awful, but if that’s news to you, here’s a picture that explains it.

Verdict: YES, grudgingly.

♦ ♦ ♦

In Like Flint (1967)

James Coburn stars as our man Flint, America’s answer to James Bond, in this clever, likable action spoof and sequel to the previous year’s Our Man Flint. He’s a spy who knows everything about everything, oozes self-confidence, dances with the Bolshoi Ballet, and speaks fluent Dolphin.

Mad scientists have stolen three minutes from the President of the United States (Andrew Duggan), and it’s up to Flint to find out what they’ve done with those minutes. With the bad guys’ mastery of time, I wish the good guys could go back to ’67 and rewrite the scene where women plot to take over the world, because Flint’s response is painfully sexist. Still funny, though.

There are a thousand gags, and some sparkle. My favorite is in the Oval Office, with Andrew Duggan as the American President, and Lee J Cobb as a top advisor who’s been caught in a sex scandal. President Duggan is saddened but understanding, and says to Cobb, “I will never turn my back on you,” then immediately swivels to talk to someone else in the room, literally turning his back.

Most of the real Bond movies are over-the-top ridonkulous but don’t seem to know it, and the audience is supposed to take them seriously. In Like Flint is ridonkulous with a wink, which is a great deal more fun. Sorry, Ian Fleming.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

In Search of America (1971)

A bizarre whisper-rap choir performs over the opening credits. Then a young man (Jeff Bridges) quits college to find himself, as kids did back in the ’60s and ’70s, but unlike most counterculture types, he invites his parents and grandmother to come along.

While another two-minute silly-song plays, Mike buys a bus even older than the Partridge Family’s, and with unexplained money and help from Dad he remodels its interior as living space for the whole family, with a sink and a stove and a toilet, etc. Then the whole family rolls off in the bus to a mini-Woodstock where there’s no rock’n’roll, one brief mention of drugs, and no hint of sex or politics.

It’s obvious where the story’s going, and also obvious that this was made for television. Wikipedia says it was the pilot episode for a TV series that was never made, after the network nixed a key plot point. Along with being sanitized for 1970s prime time TV, it’s the songs that sink this, including “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” in heavy rotation on the soundtrack.

Written by Lewis John Carlino, who, like Bridges, went on to far better things (The Great Santini, The Mechanic).

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

In Search of the Castaways (1962)

This is one of the first movies I remember seeing in a theater. Mom & Dad took the whole family, and I loved it, and developed an early crush on blonde cutie Hayley Mills.

Watching again, it’s not quite as good as I’d remembered. A couple of kids have a message in a bottle from their father, a captain shipwrecked and presumed dead. They convince some rich guy to fund a rescue sailing, and an adventure is underway.

It’s a novel by Jules Verne, reduced to a Disney comedy with sappy songs, punctuated by moments of cheesy greenscreen grandeur. Features the great George Sanders, the insufferable Maurice Chevalier, the pleasantly uptight Wilfrid Hyde-White, and the aforementioned Ms Mills, who did something for me when I was 7, but doesn’t do it now.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Edge (1967)

Here’s a bunch of American “left-wing activists,” all white, well-off Greenwich Village types, and one of them is itching to assassinate the president. You can argue whether that’s a good idea — there’s lots of arguing here — but you can’t argue that it’s not boring. These people talk and talk and talk, and if they ever actually do anything, it must’ve been during the part while I was asleep.

It’s a bizarre accomplishment to make a movie on such an incendiary topic into something so earnest and relentlessly dull.

Robert Kramer wrote and directed, and he’s unanimously hailed by critics as a great filmmaker of the 1960s & ’70s American radical left. He made Ice (1969), which I liked, and this, which I didn’t, so now I’ll have to watch a third Kramer movie, as tie-breaker.

Verdict: NO.

9/8/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.

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