Union Depot (1932), is a gritty Warner Bros. pre-Code melodrama about a down-on-their-luck couple (Joan Blondell and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) who meet at a busy train station, and in the next few hours they fall in love, pull some small-time swindles, and get mistaken by the Feds for notorious big-time counterfeiters. There’s a creep stalking Blondell, then a murder and a hair-raising railyard chase. It's all fast fun and romantic while also being dark, sleazy and frank about the hard times that make decent people do desperate things.
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972). Legend has it that the red queen was murdered by her sister and returns every century for a killing spree. Luckily the red-cloaked, cackling lady’s latest comeback happens during the giallo era, so we can enjoy her dastardly deeds in this sumptuously colorful and gory ultra-glam gothic slasher. High fashion, creepy music, beautiful people and a flooded castle make this a memorable murder mystery.
Plunder Road (1957) is a fantastic and unique noir heist story, where nobody speaks for the first 15 or so minutes, but you get to know the caper team (a colorful bunch of losers) through listening to their thoughts as they pull off their meticulous plan. They steal $10 million in gold, split up and spend lots of time on the road getting it from Utah to L.A., which means we get three stories with different fickle-finger-of-fate outcomes, and an inventive plan for the gold involving a smelter and car parts. Great work from Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper (best known from The Young & The Restless), Elisha Cook Jr. and Wayne Morris.
The Man without a Body (1957) was the weirdest movie I saw this year; surreal, bonkers mad science fun, in which a dying George Coulouris steals the head of Nostradamus to use in an experimental consciousness transfer. The glitch is that old Nostra, picked for his superior intellect, is so clever he refuses to play along, going so far as to ruin Coulouris with disastrous stock predictions. Outlandish fun with a jaw-dropping climax.
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) and Beyond the Time Barrier (1960) turned out to be a perfect unplanned double bill of creepy tales, both starting after military pilots land to find Earth drastically different and most of humanity gone. From there, Earth Dies Screaming follows a small and interesting band of survivors fighting an alien invasion, while the pilot in Time Barrier gets dumped decades into a dark future and resolves to get back to the 1960s to change that outcome, a feat not done without some startling physical complications. Nice thing about The Earth Dies Screaming: it’s eerily silent, with minimal music and lots of stiff upper lips.
No Name on the Bullet (1959). I did a big binge on Audie Murphy movies this year, with so many great discoveries I could easily have made this an all-Audie list. Picking just one favorite: here Murphy plays a hired assassin who wanders into a town where everyone knows his presence means someone’s getting killed, but nobody has a clue who the target might be. There’s no shortage of people with secret shames, shady pasts and enemies, so the rampant paranoia, threats and violent reactions start tearing the town apart. That leaves only the honest doctor (Charles Drake) unafraid, and in a position to “cure” the weary hired gun. It’s a slow burn with Murphy excellent as the mild-mannered, focused, legendary gunman.
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