Blackmoor Vituperative

We watched Double Indemnity this evening, which stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. I am a huge fan of the genre, yet somehow I had never seen this classic. It was so much more hokey than I expected. From the self-consciously hard-boiled narration, to the snappy nonsensical patter, to the “twists” in the plot that are more spoof than suspense, I kept thinking that Larry Blamire would have made this movie if Billy Wilder hadn’t made it first.

I enjoyed it, but I chuckled a lot.

Tonight’s entertainment at Castle Blackmoor was a Jodie Foster double feature: Foxes and The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my parents went to drive-in movies. During one of the movies we went to (Eaten Alive? Smile? Alien?) I remember seeing a trailer for Foxes, but I had never seen the movie itself until tonight. It had a very “after school special” vibe to me. The moral of the story? As far as I can tell, the moral is to not accept rides from extras in the David Lynch movie next door. (Also, Cherie Currie is probably a high maintenance girlfriend.)

The second movie was The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane. I first (and last) saw this when I was about 13 or 14, on TV, or perhaps HBO (which was not a given, back in those days). At the time, I thought that I should very much like to meet Rynn Jacobs (played by Jodie Foster), because she was like me: clever, lonely, and somewhat homicidal. Lucky for me, I did marry someone who fit that description. But back to the movie… this is probably one of my top ten favorite films. If this is not the best Jodie Foster movie of all time, it’s in the top three, definitely.