Second part of the Desert Island Whatever game… after the books, the records – music, that is, sounds to have on a desert island.
And if I cheated with my kindle adding a few thousand titles to my one crate of essential reading, well, when it comes to music cheating is even easier.
Just give me an internet connection, and on my desert island we’ll never be short of music.
But ok, it’s a game, we play it anyway.
My desert island records… there’s a lot of them. Continue reading
No, not the candy bar!
The wonderful BBC Radio 4 series We are the Martians, about our ages-old relationship with the Red Planet, is available online as streaming podcasts.
Well worth your time.
It always goes like this: I re-watch Death on the Nile, and a week later I re-watch Evil Under the Sun. So why not write a post on the movie?
Four years after Death on the Nile, EMI made another Agatha Christie adaptation, choosing the 1941 novel “Evil Under the Sun”.
The ingredients were basically the same of the previous movie: a stellar cast (with Peter Ustinov, Jane Birkin and Maggie Smith returning, even if the ladies were cast in different roles), an exotic location (Mallorca, doubling for an unspecified Adriatic Island), the same screenwriter (Anthony Shaffer) and the same Oscar-winning costume designer. Even the poster concept was similar.
The result is on a par with the previous film: a good adaptation, with a cunning plot and an unexpected finale, with a beautiful look and a great selection of great actors. Continue reading
And so I went and started watching Yellowthread Street, the ITV-produced TV series from 1990 based on the wonderful – and highly recommended – novels by William Leonard Marshall.
So far I had only seen the title sequence… admittedly not much to express an informed opinion.
But Emma, in the comments, pointed me towards a handful of episodes available on YouTube. Only one season was produced, and there’s only six episodes available at the time of writing, but six is better than nothing.
Now, based on the general wisdom, I was led to believe that the series sucked. And it was easy to believe the general wisdom, because it is difficult to imagine someone being able to translate on the screen the mayhem and the intricacies of Marshall’s novels.
But talk is cheap.
What do the episodes really look like? Continue reading
And stay close to Bette Davis
The Kinks, Celluloid Heroes
‘cos hers was such a lonely life
Was she the greatest actress of old Hollywood?
To be completely honest, I don’t give a damn – Bette Davies had such power and subtlety, such an energy charge, that she “pierced the screen” like they used to say.
And this is the Second Annual Bette Davis Blogathon, and I invite you to follow the link to In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood blog to find the complete list of all the fine blogs that will entertain you and inform you with posts about the movies of Bette Davis.
As for Karavansara, you know what our topics are, and so we’ll go for a true classic of exotic adventure and mystery – Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile
Just a gallery of wonderful covers from old pulps.
I always liked the covers of Startling stories, and one of them in particular, that you see here on the right, is the image that flashes in my mind when I think about pulp covers.
All these covers were created by a guy called Earle Bergey, and this post and this gallery dedicated to him.
He was specialised in something that was called “Bim, BEM, Bum!” – a beautiful woman menaced by a monster of some sort, with a hero ready to act heroic.
Enjoy!
Karavansara 