Doctor Redux

Happy Birthday, Michael Parenti.

From late '93: "The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State"

Did LBJ Do It?

No, he didn't.

The great Rob Clark, aka Lone Gunman, with a typically deep and funny podcast on the question.

For all of Rob's priceless casts, go here.

Dial "S"

During a set in New York City, he died of a heart attack at his piano, sixty-one years ago tonight.

Sonny Clark was 31 years old.

Raw

Is what 2020 will be. Raw for us all ~ the few good and for the many bad.

Anthony Mann understood. In 1948's Raw Deal a man (Dennis O'Keefe) breaks out of prison, an escape arranged for by his crime boss (Raymond Burr) who owes the man $50,000 and hopes he will die in the attempt, but carried out by the prisoner's girlfriend (Claire Trevor). The couple go on the run, taking with them a hostage (Marcia Hunt). The prisoner and the hostage fall in love.

The picture is a harsh and tragic love triangle among a doomed escaped con and two very different, needy women. Under Mann's direction and John Alton's astonishing photography, Raw Deal is a bleak, woeful, fiercely beautiful cry of despair. And perhaps the most forgotten great movie of the 1940s. As always with Mann, his characters struggle to survive within a ruthless, tyrannical system, for the most part individually, while trying to maintain some sense of principle and dignity. 

Happy New Year!