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Peter S. Fischer, the late-blooming TV writer and producer who co-created Murder, She Wrote after serving on such other crime-solving series as Columbo, Baretta and Ellery Queen, has died. He was 88.

Fischer died Monday at a care facility in Pacific Grove, California, his grandson Jake McElrath announced.

He became a prolific novelist after he exited Hollywood, writing murder mysteries, of course.

Fischer, who had worked with Columbo co-creators Richard Levinson and William Link on the iconic Peter Falk series as well as on the Jim Hutton-starring Ellery Queen, accompanied the pair to a meeting with CBS executives in 1984, he recalled in a 2011 interview.

“CBS wanted to do a murder mystery and they called Dick, who was our ringleader. He said, ‘Ok, I’ll bring the boys,'” Fischer said. “We went over there and pitched a premise called Blacke’s Magic, about a retired magician who solves mysteries. It became...

Marlon Brando had few if any hits in the 1960s, but this wartime spy picture is a not-bad thriller with some tense moments. Both Brando and Yul Brynner have been blackmailed into a risky mission as spy and sea captain; they’re more than a little disillusioned to find themselves transporting a boatload of Nazis and political prisoners headed back to Germany. Persecuted victim Janet Margolin is beyond caring — she’s a victim on a voyage of the damned.

Morituri

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1965 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 123 min. / The Saboteur, Code Name Morituri / Street Date May 21, 2019 / Available from Twilight Time Movies / 29.95

Starring: Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, Janet Margolin, Trevor Howard, Martin Benrath, Hans Christian Blech, Wally Cox, William Redfield.

Cinematography: Conrad Hall

Original Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Written by Daniel Taradash from a novel by Werner Jörg Lüddecke

Produced by Aaron Rosenberg

Directed by Bernhard Wicki

The dark, dank, morally murky...

“This Is A Holdup?”

By Raymond Benson

Woody Allen’s very first directorial effort was the low budget, no frills Take the Money and Run, released in the summer of 1969 to an unsuspecting audience. While Allen was already somewhat familiar to the public via his numerous television talk show and stand-up appearances, as well as his small roles in three late-60s motion pictures, no one was quite prepared for the zany, nebbish onscreen persona that Allen debuted in Take the Money. It was a cinematic guise he would keep to the present day.

The intellectual Jewish nerd that Allen presented (here his character’s name is Virgil Starkwell) quickly became the guy whom we all thought Woody Allen really is. Some folks might have said, “Oh, he’s just playing himself.” Perhaps certain characteristics of the real Woody Allen may have been a part of Virgil Starkwell, or Fielding Mellish,...

Here's a brief look – to be expanded – at Turner Classic Movies' June 2017 European Vacation Movie Series this evening, June 23. Tonight's destination of choice is Italy. Starring Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue as the opposite of Ugly Americans who find romance and heartbreak in the Italian capital, Delmer Daves' Rome Adventure (1962) was one of the key romantic movies of the 1960s. Angie Dickinson and Rossano Brazzi co-star. In all, Rome Adventure is the sort of movie that should please fans of Daves' Technicolor melodramas like A Summer Place, Parrish, and Susan Slade. Fans of his poetic Westerns – e.g., 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree – may (or may not) be disappointed with this particular Daves effort. As an aside, Rome Adventure was, for whatever reason, a sizable hit in … Brazil. Who knows, maybe that's why Rome Adventure co-star Brazzi would find himself playing a Brazilian – a macho, traditionalist coffee plantation owner,...

It’s not exactly remarkable that cinema has been around long enough to chart the rise of modern psychology. The first century of film covers society’s entire 20th, a hundred-year span rife with innovation in a great many fields. But as art is keen on investigating the psyche, it’s little surprise that cinema would try to keep pace in some way with the study and expression of it. From the psychological thriller to the psychodrama to most horror films, the study of the mind onscreen sometimes unfolds perfectly naturally, and other times feels like a stiff lecture from somebody who read a really fascinating article in Time the month before. Look no further than Psycho for an example of both, but look to three films that played at the TCM Classic Film Festival for some pretty wild takes.

Based on a novel by a prominent psychologist (once president...

By Lee Pfeiffer

If there is such thing as a family-oriented sex farce, the 1969 hit "Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell" fits the description. The delightful concoction stars Gina Lollobrigida as Carla Campbell, a vivacious woman of relative wealth who lives in a modest Italian village. She is known for her rather upscale lifestyle that includes a live-in maid, Rosa (Naomi Stevens) and the fact that she can afford to send her 18 year-old daughter  to a fancy American university in Switzerland. Life is very pleasing for Carla, who is known for using her money for charitable purposes. She has told everyone that she came by her wealth when her husband, an American officer named Captain Campbell died in action during WWII. She tells a moving tale about how she married him when he took shelter at her house when she was only 16 years old. They fell in love, married and had only...

Charlton Heston movies: ‘A Man for All Seasons’ remake, ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ (photo: Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur) (See previous post: “Charlton Heston: Moses Minus Staff Plus Chariot Equals Ben-Hur.”) I’ve yet to watch Irving Rapper’s melo Bad for Each Other (1954), co-starring the sultry Lizabeth Scott — always a good enough reason to check out any movie, regardless of plot or leading man. A major curiosity is the 1988 made-for-tv version of A Man for All Seasons, with Charlton Heston in the Oscar-winning Paul Scofield role (Sir Thomas More) and on Fred Zinnemann’s director’s chair. Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Thomas More’s wife in the TV movie (Wendy Hiller in the original) had a cameo as Anne Boleyn in the 1966 film. According to the IMDb, Robert Bolt, who wrote the Oscar-winning 1966 movie (and the original play), is credited for the 1988 version’s screenplay as well. Also of note,...

Commercial Failure: Bernbaum’s Debut Doa

What sounds good on paper doesn’t always translate well on screen, and Zack Bernbaum’s directorial debut, And Now a Word from Our Sponsor, exemplifies the delirious dangers of gimmicky filmmaking. A cutesy idea that doesn’t seem far removed from something that could have easily been a wooden studio feature top lining Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler, sinks like a lead balloon within its establishing frames. Instead of making any attempt to redirect from the predictable trajectory outlined by its feeble premise, Bernbaum, together with Michael Hamilton-Wright’s naggingly insistent screenplay, instead plunge head long into its flat concept, a stubborn perseverance that makes its slight running time a grueling test of patience.

Opening with a montage of famous commercials, we find the collapsed body of Adan Kundle (Bruce Greenwood), unconscious in a white room filled with static television sets. It turns...

Bastards Of Hitch at 92YTribeca

Alfred Hitchcock. First, his name became synonymous with suspense. Then, his carefully cultivated and marketed brand of storytelling grew into its own veritable sub-genre of psycho-sexual thrillers. Today, his uniquely recognizable personal style and tone continues to influence generations of filmmakers’ tendencies as well as filmgoers’ expectations.

For this coming August, I programmed six movies influenced by the Master of Suspense to be screened at 92YTribeca (all on 35mm film): Jonathan Demme’s early exercise in paranoia amidst a world of double-crossing special agents; Richard Attenborough’s distorted reimagining of Psycho with a terrifying ventriloquist’s dummy sitting in for Norman Bates’ mother; Saul Bass’ sole directorial outing about a killer swarm (ants, not birds); an eminently elegant and dryly sardonic neo-noir mindgame from David Fincher; Nicolas Roeg’s own take on a story by frequent Hitchcock inspiration Daphne du Maurier; and a mid-career...

Article by Dana Jung

The 1970s was a time of many cinematic styles and fads, and one of the most entertaining phases of the era was the Hitchcock-inspired movie. Through the popular writings of people such as Francois Truffaut and Richard Shickel in the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock had rightfully and rather suddenly been elevated from mere shockmeister to Master Artist of the Cinema. Either intentionally or by cinematic osmosis, Hitchcock’s style became the fashion of the day throughout the 70s. From low budget exploitation such as Wicked, Wicked (covered in a previous Not Available on DVD), to arguably its peak in the work of Brian De Palma (Sisters and especially Obsession), several filmmakers basically ripped off one of the greatest directors in history throughout the 70s. Long camera tracking/dolly shots, first person perspective, and rapid editing started showing up in loads of films, even non-thrillers. But by the end of the 70s,...

Article by Dana Jung

Decades before there was ‘J-Lo’. or ‘LiLo’, we had ‘La Lollo’,. one of the most beautiful actresses ever to grace movie screens, Gina Lollobrigida. Along with Sophia Loren, Elsa Martinelli, Monica Vitti, and others during the new wave. of Italian and European cinema, she gained fame as an international sex star in the 1950’s and 60s in low-budget Italian films with racy titles such as Fast & Sexy and Go Naked In The World. But when Loren won her Oscar for Two Women, Lollobrigida was already 35 years old, way beyond starlet status. In 1968 (ironically the same year her compatriot actresses Claudia Cardinale & Luciana Paluzzi respectively starred in the cult classics Once Upon A Time In The West and The Green Slime), Gina made probably her best Hollywood film, Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, which is sadly not available on DVD.

A pleasant mash-up of Hollywood screwball comedy and Italian sex farce,...