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

It (1927)

Even if you know nothing about old movies, you probably know that Clara Bow was “the It Girl” — ‘It’ meaning va-va-va-voom sexappeal. What I hadn’t known is that “It” was more than merely a studio publicity campaign for Ms Bow. It was actually a movie built around her, called It. And wait, there’s more.

The theory of “It” was not invented for Clara Bow or this film. “It” was a concept many people took seriously, popularized by author Elinor Glyn, who wrote, “‘It’ is that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With ‘It’; you win all men if you’re a woman, and all women if you’re a man. ‘It’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction…”

Ms Glyn was considered an expert on such matters, not because she possessed any ‘It’ herself or any specialized training, but because she’d made her name writing Three Weeks, a scandalous best-selling 1907 novel about an extramarital affair. That book made her so famous that in addition to being well paid for borrowing her “It” concept and making a movie of it, Ms Glyn plays herself in It.

OK, enough history. How’s the movie? It’s a lightweight comedy in which a counter girl at a department store, Betty Lou Spence (Bow) intermittently pursues and rebuffs Cyrus Waltham (Antonio Moreno), son of the store’s owner.

Nobody in a movie can simply fall in love; there must be complications, and the complication here is that Waltham mistakenly believes Betty Lou is an unwed mother, and thus beneath him. Unmarried birth apparently makes a woman ineligible for any standing in 1920s society.

Some of the movie’s comedy is still funny — I laughed a dozen times, and Bow’s performance is fine, but any ‘It’ element eluded me. She’s attractive, of course, or she wouldn’t be the lead in a Hollywood movie, but she’s nothing special by show-biz standards, even with a skirt blow-up scene à la Marilyn Monroe.

What struck me most about It was the clearness of the imagery. The film must’ve been restored by perfectionists, for I’ve rarely seen such an open portal to the past. The street scenes, the interior of the department store, the open-air double-decker bus, an extended visit to an amusement park — it’s all as vivid as being there, albeit in black-and-white and with a piano as the only sound.

The movie’s best and funniest bits come from William Austin, who later played the first Alfred in the first Batman (1943). Here he amusingly overacts in all his scenes, as Waltham’s presumably gay ‘man Friday’.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

It (2017)

In the town of Derry, Maine, kids tend to go missing and get killed. It happens a lot. You could look it up.

One kid looks it up at the Derry Public Library, and then joins with a band of friends to find the murderous clown Pennywise, who’s responsible for all the mayhem.

The story revolves around that bunch of adolescents, and their nonstop quips are an annoyance, like real adolescents only moreso because you can’t tell ’em to shut up. One of the kid actors went straight from this to Stranger Things, playing basically the same character — a teenager running from and after monsters all the time, making wisecracks.

It was a Stephen King novel, which I read in the ’80s and remember well and fondly. In the book, these kids come back as adults to battle Pennywise again, but the movie ends while they’re still kids, saving the adults’ half of the story for the inevitable It 2, which I probably won’t bother with.

It is an adequate horror movie, filled with the expected tricks of noise, lighting, and gruesome makeup. Pennywise is rendered scary, and some of the ‘ordinary’ adults in Derry are almost as frightful as the damned clown.

If there’s a problem, it’s probably me. I’ve seen many, many movies, lots of special effects, and there’s almost nothing in It that I haven’t seen a hundred times before, perhaps a thousand. When the maggoty bleeding arms of a dozen dead children pop out of Pennywise’s mouth and start swinging at the Scooby Gang, I don’t scream, I shrug.

The book was soooo much better. The movie is basically Goonies with more blood, more screaming, and a more annoying bunch of kids. The redhead is cute, though.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

It Began without Warning (2017)

This is a snappy blood and horror six-minute short, as adults and children inside a house come after each other with a hammer, a bat, a knife, etc. No dialogue. The abortion by drill bit is something I hadn’t seen before.

It’s a horror short. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else to be said about it.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

This titular It is a giant octopus, super-sized by radiation from all the atomic weapons and atomic submarines of the 1950s. And it’s pissed off, popping out of the water to wrap its tentacles around ships, and pull them down to Davy Jones’ locker.

It Came from Beneath the Sea is not in my top ten sci-fi movies from the 1950s golden era, but it’s fun, held back by a tedious romance but helped by Ray Harryhausen’s excellent stop-motion effects. In the movie’s most famous moment (you’ve probably seen the clip, even if you haven’t seen the movie), the giant octopus climbs out of San Francisco Bay and onto the Golden Gate Bridge, seriously delaying the evening commute.

Scripted by Hal Smith (The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind) and George Worthing Yates (The Tall Target, Them!).

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Richard Jewell (2019)

You might remember the name Richard Jewell from the news in the ’90s: He was a security guard, working the Olympic Games in Atlanta, who dreamed of being a cop. One fine day working at the Olympics, he spotted an abandoned backpack and reported it, as protocol required. A pipe bomb was in the backpack, which killed two people and injured dozens when it went boom.

The FBI, being the FBI, couldn’t quickly find a suspect, so they tried to pin the crime on Jewell.

Clint Eastwood has recreated and filmed these true events, and he’s arch-right-wing so I was on edge. ‘Dirty Harry’ Eastwood would be my last choice to make a movie that’s against the abuse of police powers, and argues not to trust authorities, but to my pleasant surprise, Richard Jewell is a very good movie.

It’s clear early on that Mr Jewell shouldn’t be a cop, or even a security guard. Though only a rent-a-cop, he fancies himself law enforcement, and like many cops has no respect for any Constitutional limits to his authority. In a flashback, the film shows him working campus security, illegally forcing his way into a dorm room.

But it’s also clear that while he’s mildly pathetic, he isn’t the mad bomber.

Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell is everything the part calls for. Never noticed him before, but he’s been a supporting actor for ages, just never in much that I’ve seen.

Sam Rockwell (Moon) is great as Jewell’s lawyer, mostly brusque bluff and bluster and not the stalwart attorney-at-law you usually see in movies and on TV. He doesn’t believe Jewell is innocent, until he starts checking the evidence and timeline. Can’t remember any other movie lawyer where it actually crossed my mind that I’d want to hire that guy, if I needed a lawyer.

The picture paints reporters as ghouls and cops as incompetent, which they are, of course, in this case and many/most others. The drama locks you in quickly, and like Jewell, you’re not getting away until it’s over.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

–30– (1959)

I haven’t been a fan of Jack Webb. To me, he’s Dragnet (monotone cop worship with staccato dialogue) and The D.I. (a Marine drill sergeant delivering nothing but staccato dialogue). This flick stars Webb as the night editor at a major metropolitan newspaper, and it probably landed on my watchlist in hopes it would be over-the-top ridiculous, like Dragnet and The D.I.

I’m a sucker for stories about reporters, though, and in this one the cameras never leave the newspaper’s offices. With oodles of zingers between grizzled and rookie reporters, it’s almost a comedy, but there are also moments of melodrama as we await word about a little kid stuck in the city’s storm drains, or when Webb wants to weasel out of adopting a child with his far-too-young wife.

In addition to starring in –30–, the auteur Webb produced and directed. He is not known for subtlety, but as an actor, just this once, he comes across as human, not his usual no-nonsense nonsense. As director, he gives the movie a few sanctimonious moments, but only a few. Some of the jokes are painfully sexist, because it was filmed on location in 1959.

Overall, though, it rocks like geology. 30 with Two Dashes might be the best work Jack Webb ever did.

William Conrad (radio’s Gunsmoke, TV’s Jake and the Fatman) co-stars, and steals every scene he’s in, as a city desk editor who reminded me of the late Lou Grant.

Written by William Bowers (Alias Jesse James, Cry Danger, Split Second).

Verdict: YES.

11/8/2025

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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