And the countdown continues in my quest to watch and find something inspiring in every single one of Yahoo’s 100 Movies to See Before You Die…
Children: [singing] Just you wait, it won’t be long.
The man in black will soon be here.
With his cleaver’s blade so true.
He’ll make mincemeat out of YOU!
And you thought, “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you,” was creepy. Fritz Lang’s thriller masterpiece starts off with the original schoolyard rhyme about a serial killer. That, along with the mass hysteria caused by neighborhood children’s deaths, the killer’s tell-tale whistling and the heavy-handed use of dark, ominous shadows, and you have a movie that serves as a springboard for scary movies for years to come, even if the ending is a little anticlimactic.
Kasper Gutman: I couldn’t be fonder of you if you were my own son.
But, well, if you lose a son, it’s possible to get another.
There’s only one Maltese Falcon.
The best thing about film noir is the dialogue, and this film is a perfect example of that tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic talk that makes me giddy. The story is as convoluted as they come — bordering on the absurd so much that it reminded me of “The Big Lebowski”; I was just waiting for someone’s rug to get stolen — but you have to love a cast of eccentric fools who are all searching for a gold-encrusted statue of a bird, with Humphrey Bogart as the only voice of reason.
