Don't Always Disagree

                Near the end of 1930, Attorney General William Mitchell at the direction of President Herbert Hoover sent a small team of Prohibition agents to Chicago to bring down Al Capone. The head of this team was Elliott Ness, a member of the US Treasury Department. Under the auspices of the DOJ he put together his own team of agents made up on those he deemed to be both brave and incorruptible. This caught the attention of the press, who christened them ‘The Untouchables.’ They managed to severely impact the flow of illegal alcohol to Chicago and assisted with Capone’s conviction in 1931 on tax evasion charges. His band of agents then disbanded, their mission complete. What this tv show supposes is, maybe they didn’t?               In reality, after Capone went down Ness’ life didn’t go that great. He married and divorced several times and moved...

                Despite its reputation, “Dragnet” was not the first radio or television procedural that claimed to accurately portray the activities of a police department. It’s not even the first to do so for the LAPD. “Calling All Cars” was a radio program that ran from November of 1933 to September of 1939 that advertised itself as dramatizing actual police cases handled by the Los Angeles Police Department. “Gangbusters” drew its cases from police departments nationwide and started on the radio in January of 1936. It made the jump to television in March of 1952, but despite decent ratings was cancelled after “Dragnet” became such a hit that it was seen as unnecessary. This is pretty indicative of its general reputation, it succeeded to the point where people forgot its predecessors.               There were also a number of movies that claimed such...

                The more I see good actors giving bad performances in terrible films, the more sympathetic I get to how uncertain their chosen profession seems to be. So much of how they’re perceived and what they’re judged on is completely out of their control. Scripts get constantly rewritten, their makeup and wardrobes are a series of choices made by others, and they need to trust the directors and editors to make them look good in the final cut. The more I dig into the nuts and bolts of what on paper are completely acceptable films but which in practice are boring and nonsensical, the more a lot of trends become understandable. I never quite understood the way that actors, once they reach a certain level of success, suddenly start getting handed producer credits as part of signing on. I thought it was a way to grab a piece of the backend, and I’m sure that’s a lot of it, but I think it’s more important that they b...

                Movies are always worlds unto themselves. They operate by their own internal logic and set of rules that can swing wildly from mostly realistic to completely bananas. Even movies that are attempting to be grounded and realistic are inherently fictitious, and I don’t just mean the plot and characters. Nobody has to stand in line at the post office. Nobody has to visit three different restaurants before the wait time is acceptable. Nobody has an inconvenient burst of diarrhea during an important meeting. If anything like that does happen it’s inevitably going to become part of the plot or if it’s a comedy it’s going to end in a punchline. The gap between a straight drama like ‘Gods and Monsters’ and a fantasy adventure like ‘The Mummy’ is not all that wide, and not just because they both star Brendan Fraser.               What straight dr...