Gaslight Noir on the Criterion Channel

While many of the Criterion Channel's featured categories highlight newer or international films, the lineup for September 2023 also includes one of my favorite classic sub-genres, "Gaslight Noir." If you love films like Gaslight (whether the 1940 or 1944 version), this is a collection sure to send delicious chills up and down your corseted spine.

Most of the iconic noir classics take place in their own present day, usually the 1940s and 1950s, but gaslight noir sets the action in an earlier age, usually the 19th century and often in London or elsewhere in the UK or Europe, although looming manor houses in America can also provide a suitably sinister location. The protagonist is most often a young woman who is both victim and de facto detective, striving to solve a mystery before she meets a tragic end. The films provide a heady mix of Gothic sensibility, noir style, and romance, and many of them appeared in the wake of the success of Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and the 1943 adaptation of Jane Eyre, the Gothic masterpiece that Daphne du Maurier's original novel of Rebecca uses as a thematic touchstone. 

Here is the full list of films available this month on the Criterion Channel as part of the Gaslight Noir collection (use the links to read my discussions of these films):

Ladies in Retirement (1941)

Gaslight (1944)

The Suspect (1944)

Experiment Perilous (1944)

Hangover Square (1945)

Dragonwyck (1946)

Ivy (1947)

Moss Rose (1947)

Blanche Fury (1948)

Corridor of Mirrors (1948)

So Evil My Love (1948)

Madeleine (1950)

So Long at the Fair (1950) 

While I've seen and written about several of these films, quite a few are new to me, and I'm really looking forward to watching them. I hope to add several new Classic Films in Focus posts about these movies in the coming weeks.

For more in-depth discussions of the Gothic tradition in film, check out my essays:

"Consuming Passions: Gothic Romance and the Bronte Sisters"

"The Housekeeper in the Gothic Film Tradition"

Searching for Silent Treasure on Paramount Plus

We signed up for Paramount Plus to watch Star Trek, which is probably why most people subscribe to the streaming service, but it has turned out to be a very interesting opportunity to watch classic movies that don't necessarily appear on other streamers. Classic movie fans still mourning the loss of Filmstruck mostly find their content on HBO Max, with its TCM hub, or the Criterion Channel, but the collapse of the DVD market has made old movies harder to find in general as streamers focus on original content instead of large libraries full of hidden gems. Venerable old studio Paramount, however, has less original content to offer and instead fills out its catalogue with lots of iconic and obscure features from its distant past, including a surprising number of silents. If you're looking for classic movies you haven't seen before, and especially if you're looking for silents, Paramount Plus might be worth your while, but the interface leaves the hard work of finding its buried treasure to you.

I originally wrote about classic movies on CBS All Access, as it was then called, back in 2020, so I wanted to follow up with a look at its current catalogue under the Paramount Plus moniker. The service still has quite a large collection of classic movies on offer, ranging from comedies and dramas to horror and Westerns, although your best method of finding them is to search the entire category A-Z for each genre because you can't search the library using people's names or general terms like "silent" or "classic." Mixed into the groups are numerous silent features, but you'll only identify them as such if you recognize the titles or click on them to get to a brief info page that includes the release date. You can follow one listing to a group of similar films, so once you find a silent picture you can more easily turn up others, but it's a haphazard method of discovery, for sure.

In spite of the effort it takes to find them, Paramount Plus does have some real gems tucked into its collection. Here are a few of the silent movies currently on offer:

The Mark of Zorro (1920)

The Lost World (1925)

Little Annie Rooney (1925)

The Black Pirate (1926)

Sparrows (1926)

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)

The General (1926)

 

 

         The Thief of Bagdad 1924) 

         The Eagle (1925)

         Blood and Sand (1922)

        Orphans of the Storm (1921)

The films themselves come from several different studios, but the prints included on Paramount Plus seem, after a casual survey, to be generally good quality, unlike the unwatchable prints sometimes offered up by Amazon Prime. Thus far my experiences watching silent movies on the service have been good ones, even if I would really like a better way to search for them and better information about them in their listings. 

Have you watched classic movies on Paramount Plus? Have you uncovered any hidden gems from the silent era lurking in its collection? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Classic Movie Stars on THE MUPPET SHOW

Thanks to Disney Plus, viewers can finally enjoy all five seasons of The Muppet Show, and at my house we've been delighted to have access to the long-awaited fourth and fifth seasons, which were never available on DVD. The release has created some controversy about Disney's decision to include content warnings on a handful of episodes (which are, in some cases, painfully necessary), but for Muppet fans the more pressing questions often involve trying to figure out who the guest star is, since some of these folks might have been famous in the 1970s but are truly obscure now. Luckily for classic movie fans, the guest list also includes some fantastic stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and their appearances on the show offer a delightful snapshot of these stars as they appeared in the late 1970s. 

For many viewers who were kids in the 70s, these guest spots might well have been their first introduction to entertainers from their parents' or grandparents' eras, which means that Gen Xers in particular might have been meeting Milton Berle, Edgar Bergen, Danny Kaye, and Gene Kelly for the first time. Other stars were much more familiar to the average 10 year old of 1978, including Mark Hamill, Don Knotts, and Rich Little, while many of the British guests would have baffled American children and adults alike (the show was filmed in London, so British guests were much easier to acquire). Of course, today even the "current" stars of 1978 look like classic ones, but every season of the show mixed classic stars, current American celebrities, and British talents to provide a weirdly educational cultural smorgasbord for unsuspecting child viewers. Singers and dancers had obvious appeal, as did comedians, but that didn't stop the show from featuring action stars like James Coburn and Roger Moore or magician Doug Henning. The classic movie stars were just part of the mix.

Each season has at least one classic star, although some were better known in the 70s than others thanks to musical careers, television roles, or later film roles. In Season One, you can see Rita Moreno, Lena Horne, Peter Ustinov, Vincent Price, and Ethel Merman. Season Two offers Don Knotts, Milton Berle, Edgar Bergen, George Burns, Julie Andrews, Peter Sellers, and Bob Hope. Showing up in Season Three are Danny Kaye, Harry Belafonte, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Season Four is comparatively light on classic movie stars but includes Liza Minnelli, while Season Five ends the series with James Coburn, Tony Randall, and Gene Kelly. Each of these is worth watching, but the episodes with Moreno, Price, Andrews, and Belafonte are particularly good, so start there if you're a classic film fan but not someone with a lot of previous experience with The Muppet Show. 

A handful of the classic film stars who appear on the series also have cameos in the original 1979 film, The Muppet Movie, where you can spot Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and James Coburn along with Orson Welles, Telly Savalas, and many younger stars who also appeared as guests on the show. Many of the Muppet films are also streaming on Disney Plus, so if the classic stars on The Muppet Show whet your appetite for more of Kermit and the gang, there's plenty of content available. 

Want to know everything there is to know about The Muppets? Head on over to my friends at Tough Pigs to find news, articles, podcasts, and commentary! You can also check out the essay anthology, Kermit Culture, that Anissa Graham and I edited; it's available in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon. Our second anthology, The Wider Worlds of Jim Henson, looks at films and other productions like The Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock, and Labyrinth.

Classic Movies on CBS All Access

We picked up CBS All Access to watch the new Star Trek shows, which are worth the price of the service by themselves, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the classic movie offerings in their library. Streaming services have not generally been interested in the classic film audience, and those that specifically catered to us met premature ends for not raking in as much money as the owners wanted (Alas, Warner Archive and Filmstruck, our time together was too brief). CBS All Access might avoid the fates of those services since it offers exclusive new shows like Star Trek: Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks and other more recent feature films, but it has the ability to give classic movie fans some great content as it launches its new Paramount Plus name in 2021 with a massive expansion of the available titles. Right now, though, you can get a taste of the pleasures that might be on the horizon by sampling the classic movies CBS All Access already has in its catalog.

Now owned by ViacomCBS, Paramount Pictures goes way back to the silent era, with a full century of movies in its vaults. That means that classic movie fans could get easy access to a lot of lesser gems from the golden age of Hollywood, including the Bulldog Drummond series of the 30s, the Hopalong Cassidy films, and the Hope and Crosby road pictures, not to mention big hits from director Preston Sturges, the classic noir genre, and dozens of great comedies, Westerns, and dramas. A quick perusal of the movies made by Paramount over the decades shows the depth and breadth of the titles that could be made available as the service seeks to increase subscribers by opening the treasure chest of offerings.

Early signs indicate that Paramount Plus WILL open that chest, even if classic movies aren't its core content. In the first place, it has too much good material not to use it, and, in the second place, some of those goodies are already on its current CBS All Access service. You can watch the 1927 silent hit, Wings, which won the First Oscar for Best Picture, or catch Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March in The Desperate Hours (1955). Sunset Blvd (1950), Sabrina (1954), The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), That Touch of Mink (1962), Father Goose (1964), and Teacher's Pet (1958) are also in the current library. With many of Hollywood's most iconic classic stars in its pictures, Paramount Plus can be sure that its older movies will appeal to casual viewers of the classics as well as diehard fans. You don't have to live and breath classic movies to appreciate Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn!

While Netflix continues to dominate the streaming market, it has zero interest in satisfying the tastes of our niche of viewers, and Amazon Prime can be very difficult to navigate when it has multiple bad prints of public domain films dumped into its catalog and a smattering of quality classics mixed in without a grouped category to make them easy to find. (I can spend HOURS hunting through Amazon in the hope of finding a decent print of a movie on Prime, and most of the time I don't have much luck.) Lately I've stopped trying to find something on the other services because CBS All Access has been more than happy to offer me a nice collection of classic movies that I can enjoy. I am hopeful that the relaunch in 2021 will bring me lots of options and make Paramount Plus the streaming service I know it has the library to become.

(PS - If you already have CBS All Access, go watch That Touch of Mink immediately! It's a delightful comedy with an absolutely adorable performance from Doris Day.)

Cozy Up with Acorn TV

When I'm not watching movies, there's a 90% chance that I'm watching a cozy murder mystery. I'm obsessed with them; I read a lot of cozy mystery series and enjoy them, but I love seeing the characters and stories embodied in television series. For the most part, the murder mysteries that I like best hail from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. I'm not a fan of dark police procedurals or crime shows "ripped from the headlines." I want a cast of quirky, interesting characters, a distinctive and detailed sense of place, and an unusual murder (or three) for the audience to solve along with the detectives. Thankfully, the streaming service Acorn TV dishes up a wide variety of cozy mystery series from several different countries.

UK offerings include the venerable and beloved Midsomer Murders and the adorably quirky Agatha Raisin. I've watched every episode of Midsomer so far, but if you're new to it you've got enough entertainment ahead to last most of 2020. The show is famed for its dry sense of humor and hilariously dreadful murder methods (hint: never go on holiday in Badger's Drift!). Agatha Raisin has a delightful Scooby gang vibe with middle aged romance added to the mix; the relationships between characters on the show are dynamic and interesting without being maudlin. With only one season so far, Queens of Mystery is a newcomer that started very strong and has lots of room for future development, and its particularly knowing treatment of the genre is great fun for cozy fans. The British fare also includes a solid collection of Agatha Christie adaptations, especially the excellent Agatha Christie's Marple, featuring first Geraldine McEwan and then Julia McKenzie as the iconic sleuth.

Australia is ably represented by Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, starring the fabulous Essie Davis as a 1920s private detective who lives and loves with equal abandon. Adapted from a wildly popular book series (I've read them all, and they're terrific), the Miss Fisher series is currently getting a second life with a feature film sequel that should appear on Acorn later in 2020. A spin-off, called Miss Fisher's Modern Mysteries, is also available on Acorn, with Geraldine Hakewell as a relative of the original Miss Fisher living in the 1960s. I enjoyed the spin-off but wasn't quite as enchanted by it as the original show, perhaps because the four episode series had less time to develop all of the interesting supporting characters. If you're looking for a particularly funny Australian murder series, Acorn also offers all 13 episodes of the tragically short-lived Mr. and Mrs. Murder, in which married crime scene cleaners solve murders and get entangled in ridiculous situations along the way.

My last recommendation hales from New Zealand, where police detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) solves murders in The Brokenwood Mysteries. Great leads, lots of fun recurring characters, and gorgeous scenery make this series one of my current favorites, with new episodes dropping on Acorn each week as the latest season is released. The show has a surprisingly strong first episode that hooks the viewer immediately, and later seasons build on that solid foundation. If you've exhausted Midsomer Murders and want something with the same mix of dry humor, murder, and detective work, this New Zealand show is the perfect choice.

Acorn TV has dozens of mystery series and other programming to choose from, but these are the shows I have especially enjoyed since I first subscribed to the streaming service in 2019. With new shows and seasons regularly appearing, Acorn has been well worth the cost of $6 a month or $60 a year. Do check it out if you're looking for great cozy mysteries to keep you warm through the winter!


Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Acorn TV and received no payment of any kind for this post.