Chillpak Hollywood Hour

On this second episode of Year 20 (“the year we get it right!”), Dean and Phil have crime on their minds! They start with an appreciation of director Jules Dassin’s classic film noir Night and the City. Then a Hitchcockian thriller, Mirage, by Edward Dmytryk, the man largely responsible for Jules Dassin getting blacklisted gets analyzed. Both films show telltale signs of having been directed by men with quite different experiences of the Hollywood blacklist. A neo-noir that never disappoints is Robert Altman’s Philip Marlowe adaptation The Long Goodbye. Dean and Phil discuss the film as a “satire of melancholy” and share many stories about the filmmakers and actors’ remarkable approaches to telling the story. Another 1970s mystery film, the ill-fated Agatha about the real-life disappearance of the great mystery novelist Agatha Christie for 11 days in 1926 gets reviewed. The final suspense picture on the Chillpak crime blotter this week is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterful The Wages Fear. Dean reviewed it several weeks back, and now it’s Phil’s turn to compare and contrast it with William Friedkin’s 1977 adaptation of the same source material, Sorcerer. Finally, one new blockbuster, the crowd-pleasing The Devil Wears Prada 2 gets analyzed both as a legacy sequel and as a very hopeful harbinger for the summer movie season.Chillpak Hollywood Presents ... is a listener-supported joint. To receive new shows and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit deanandphil.substack.com/subscribe