Cereal At Midnight

 In his essay that's included with the new Blu-ray for 1957's Monster from Green Hell , Don Stradley asks "Would the hardworking souls who made B movies back in the 1950s believe we'd still be discussing their work 70 years later?" It's a reasonable question: these movies were made on the cheap and were never intended to be anything more than disposable entertainment, created for quick thrills and the hopes of making a couple of bucks so the filmmakers could do it again. But something happened that these entrepreneurs never could have predicted: we fell in love with their movies. We didn't fall in love with them because they were slick and polished, we fell in love with them because they were rough and raw. They featured actors that didn't feel like gleaming stars of Tinsel Town, but real people. The films offer unabashed spectacle, or the dime-store equivalent thereof. We love these movies because we can see the fingerprints of the creators who made t...

It's a great time to be a John Sturges fan. At the time of this writing, many of the director's films are being restored and given high definition and Ultra HD upgrades from the previous DVD editions, offering the best home media presentations to date for modern film fans. The last few years alone have seen the restorations of  Underwater! , Last Train from Gun Hill, Bad Day At Black Rock, and  The Great Escape , with even more planned for the coming months. There's never been a better time for cinephiles to discover or re-evaluate the work of an under-praised filmmaker who may not have had a particular auteur style, but was a master all the same. Now the preservationists at The Film Detective have added another film from the Sturgis library to our shelves: 1950's The Capture . The Capture is a wonderful film that plays to the strengths of its director and defies categorization by equally serving elements of crime, romance, western, and noir. The story begins with an in...