This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We've got mystery-themed editions of the blogathon every week this month, and for this second Thursday in September the theme is historical mysteries. Now, I'm not certain whether this is supposed to mean mystery movies based on real events in the somewhat distant past, or movies that would otherwise be called historical films but have a mystery at the heart of them. In the end, I went with one movie that's clearly in the first category, one that has a real mystery subject as a main character and then runs away from fact as quickly as possible, and a third where part of the mystery is whether one of the characters is a real person:
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976). I just blogged about this yesterday, in part because I knew the "historical mysteries" day in the blogathon was coming up today. The movie is based on a real serial killer in Texarkana, AR/TX in 1946. Ben Johnson plays the Texas Ranger brought in to investigate because he's an expert at this sort of murder case. The murderer, dubbed the Phantom, eventually disappears, and to this day nobody knows what really happened to him.
Time After Time (1979). Malcolm McDowell plays British author H.G. Well, who not only wrote The Time Machine, but in this movie believes he's invented a time machine. He's about to show his new invention to his friends, but the party is crashed by Jack the Ripper (David Warner), who hijacks the Time Machine and takes it to 1970s San Francisco. Wells, having put a safety feature in the machine, gets it back and follows Jack to San Francisco. The movie has next to no basis in reality, but it's entertaining enough.
The Man With a Cloak (1951). Leslie Caron plays a young woman coming to America from her native France to help her boyfriend, a leader of one of the student revolutions in 1848, by visiting his grandfather (Louis Calhern). She finds that there might be somebody trying to kill Grandpa. Coming into all of this is Dupin (Joseph Cotten), which happens to be the surname of the detective created by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, this Dupin may actually be Poe himself.
3 comments:
I'm 0 for 3 with your picks today. I knew there would be a lot of older films for this category that I've missed.
I love Time After Time and almost chose this one. It's a great movie. I have not heard of the other 2 nor the serial killer that the 1st movie is based on. I had to look it up. It's very interesting andnid love to see these movies
The Town that Dreaded Sundown sounds vaguely familiar - I will need to google this one
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