Movie Review: Shadow of a Doubt

1943. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Choosing a favorite Hitchcock movie is a hopeless challenge. Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and the unbearably suspenseful scene when Raymond Burr comes home early. North By Northwest has Cary Grant dealing with a worst-ever case of mistaken identity. Strangers on a Train has that amazing plot, plus the carnival scene. Psycho has Norman Bates, the shower scene and its overall weirdness. Vertigo, its own weirdness and Jimmy Stewart. Finally, the scene in The Birds in which the birds attack the townsfolk caused me, as a child, …

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Thank You Lord (for Kelly Willis)

The lesson a music fan can take away from the career of Kelly Willis may be this: If you resist the manipulation of major-label tools, you might not be invited to walk the red carpet at the CMAs. But at least there’s a chance you will earn respect through the virtue of solid songwriting and performing skills, and still get to be the same real you. Recording three albums for MCA, beginning in 1990, Kelly was a promising, attractive — if not a little bland — act that the label had a hard time marketing. After being released from her …

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Movie Review: Heroes For Sale

1933. Starring Richard Barthelmess, Loretta Young. Directed by William Wellman. It wasn’t my intention to watch a movie about an economic depression, labor troubles and soup lines. I was actually hoping to find some escape from those topics. But the TCM Archives “Forbidden Hollywood” DVD series has been on my Netflix list for quite a while and I thought it might be a welcome alternative to the almost-always-pessimistic nightly news. There weren’t any financial troubles in the 1930s, right? Richard Barthelmess stars as Tom Holmes, a WWI grunt who takes a German machine-gun nest and captures an officer before being …

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Country Music Reclamation Project: Mama Tried

If you live in Minneapolis, you’ve probably read the recent news item about a couple of teenage burglars who beat an 85-year-old man nearly to death in the process of stealing a few bucks from his modest home. The man has survived, but the photos they show of him on the news are sickening — red bruises all over his face, and stitches around and over the top of his scalp, the result of attempts to relieve swelling in his brain. This is the kind of thing that makes me sick and angry, and I don’t have any sympathy for …

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