Great doomy noir-Western from Raoul Walsh, a remake of his own High Sierra. An outlaw on the run is reluctantly persuaded to take one one last job, a train heist, but finds himself beset by double-crosses on all sides. Fantastic location shooting and McCrea, Mayo and Malone are all terrific.

Wow! That is good work. There is a bunch of Arkin's 1970s work I haven't seen, and most of them are a lot more accessible than those.

I've seen 2 out of those 3! Feeling very pleased with myself.

I've always wanted to see Deadhead Miles as well, but I am not sure if it got much of a home video release.

Oh yeah, and if this didn't come across clearly, Alan Arkin is a comic genius. Particularly in the 1970s.

I liked it, but I always like aimless American 1970s character films, even when they are broad comedies like this.

It is directed by Dick Richards, who made a film I really love but isn't much respected - Farewell My Lovely - and a bunch of other solid studio films. But, this, this feels different. A distaff disaffected Last Detail where everyone is on the road to nowhere, but it might just end with some hope.

There are robberies, guns with blanks, a driving test, Kellerman singing a country song in a dive bar, and it ends with nuns. None of it should work, but Alan Arkin is miraculous at making things that aren't funny when written down really hilarious when he says them.

The film is a proper 1970s artefact. It's a comedy but laced with a weird sadness, and torrent of ennui. The hippy dream is dead and everything seems really grimy. Arkin was a gunnery sergeant but doesn't have any sense of being patriotic. It would be a downer but it is just relentlessly silly.

Mostly it is a bunch of skits hung together in a really fun and ramshackle way. Arkin trying to steal a car is probably the highlight. However, there is a real sadness to the film at the oddest moments.

It works almost as a found family film with Kellerman as the mother, and Phillips as the daughter along for the ride with Arkin's put-upon father car owner. But, it doesn't really play like that until the end, or in the saddest moments.

Alan Arkin plays a driving instructor and former Marine sergeant Rafferty who picks up two female hitchhikers (Sally Kellerman and Mackenzie Phillips), who are going to New Orleans. It is a knock about comedy for long stretches, with the eye-rolling, nebbish Arkin, put against a couple of hippies.

Hal Ashby and The Last Detail. Sally Kellerman's work with Robert Altman and then Alan Rudolph. These are the films I was thinking about during Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. It is a freewheeling comedy-drama that is mostly on the road, with sojourns to Las Vegas and Tucson.

The poster for Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent (2025)

First watch: The Secret Agent (2025). Another film set in director Kleber Mendonça Filho's hometown of Recife, this time against the backdrop of military dictatorship and political resistance. Harking back to the 70s political thriller, the film has great texture and an immersive sense of place. 1/3

It is very studied and a fine adaptation, but I am not sure it quite comes fully alive as a film. It is better than merely an academic exercise, but it doesn't try to escape the source material. But, I did like it and I don't want to talk myself into negativity.

Voisin is really great in the first half, superbly unknownable. A very difficult character to play, but he does it with ease. I really need to catch up with the Ozon films I haven't seen.

Poster of Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins

Tonight's film

Obviously, my fondest memory of The Stranger is that George W. Bush was roundly mocked for reading it in 2006.

Well, we aren't laughing now. Considering, you know.

Denis Lavant and Swann Arlaud are also in it, which adds something.

I liked it, though. And Ozon remains a wonderful and interesting director. The moments of sensuality in the film are pure Ozon, and the moments that the film really takes flight. The bodies, the faces, the eyes - not the death, murder or court case.

Perhaps, the film needed to take more chance on adaptation, as this is one is beautifully wrought but a little calcified. It is good, it is really good at times, but there felt something a little absent at the heart of the film. A precise recreation, rather than alive adaptation.

I think it is really hard to have Camus's impact on screen. When you see Marie Cardona (Marder), the picture perfect beach, Morocco standing in for Algeria, and an ability to observe the world. You aren't caught in Meursault's immutable ennui, nor late 1940s French social and political positions.

Then the murder. Then the darkly comic interpretation of a baying court case, that feels like a tennis match, which barely registers on Meursault's (Benjamin Voisin) face. The second half picks up the pace, and Ozon tries to deliver the existential hammer at the end, denying God and a priest.

The film is at its best in the blinding sunshine. Caught on the sharp monochrome. On the Algerian beaches. The tension of a colonial outpost. The beautiful and angelic Rebecca Marder. It is glacially paced but the tension keeps you watching.

It's been a good fifteen years since I read Albert Camus's novel, but François Ozon's film is a fairly faithful adaptation. It ends up on screen as coolly analytical procedural, which captures the events, the death and murder, but perhaps not the ferocity of alienation that is the heart of the book.

Poster of The Stranger

Off to the cinema to see

It looks slightly more relaxed and reflective to me, based on this trailer, than a generic action post apocalypse film. It might not be, but that is what I thought. And that appealed to me.

I feel like Into the Mystic is now the most famous/beloved Van Morrison song, and I am not sure why or when this happened.

Yes, completely agree, and I still have plenty left to see as well. A wonderful career.

Robinson seems very happy with being self-lacerating on screen, even for the mildest characters, whereas Cagney can create sympathy in his worst. Both are remarkable. Cagney probably has more range (musicals!), but there is an intentional harshness to Robinson that seems startling even now.

Yes, I think Cagney and Robinson are the right comparison. And, my take is somewhat similar to yours. Obviously, Cagney stayed a leading man to the end of his career, whereas Robinson transitioned to a supporting actor, after his HUAC issues, but there is a similarity in experience watching them.