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As of Friday, Patrick’s Roadhouse was still closed. Plates and pitchers were stacked inside. The old-style coffee maker seemed ready to go, and there were even some bright green lights shining along the roof. But the place looked like a radioactive version of the Spanish Kitchen, frozen in time, plus dinosaurs, leprechauns and the Statue of Liberty on top.

Anyway, the eviction notice plastered among the stickers and shamrocks told the tale: Another stop on Hollywood’s erstwhile schmooze circuit has been gone since late April, and will stay gone unless the proprietor can come up with back rent and renegotiate the lease on a diner that’s marked the seaside end of Santa Monica Canyon since 1973. (There’s a GoFundMe campaign to help.)

Maybe it’s just part of the general Restaurant Apocalypse. Within a hundred yards of Patrick’s, Tallula’s, Mason and The Hungry Cat are all closed and empty.

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“Our Town With Unions”

By Raymond Benson

This is a little-known gem of a film from producer Louis de Rochemont, the man best known for introducing The March of Time documentary newsreels to cinemas that ran from the 1930s until the early 1950s. He also produced several mainstream pictures, and one of these from 1951, The Whistle at Eaton Falls, is an underdog-battles-severe-odds tale of the highest caliber.

Directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Lloyd Bridges, Whistle might be described as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, only with unions. Yes, this is a union drama along the lines of On the Waterfront or, much later, Norma Rae.

In a tight 96 minutes, Siodmak brings us a riveting story—the kind that gets an audience riled up against the injustices thrown at a protagonist. The suspense builds to a breaking point as we wonder how it...

TCM premiered a welcome restoration of this honorable Louis de Rochemont drama last year, and now it’s on a pristine-quality Blu-ray. Almost an ‘anti- film noir,’ the story of a labor conflict in a tiny New England hamlet is a docu-drama that actually has a positive, if not Utopian, ending. Fine direction by Robert Siodmak breathes life into the thesis that Yankee ingenuity and ethical fair play can still save the day. A superb underdog cast — Lloyd Bridges, Carleton Carpenter, Murray Hamilton, James Westerfield, Lenore Lonergan, Russell Hardie, Helen Shields, Doro Merande, Diana Douglas, Anne Francis, Ernest Borgnine, Arthur O’Connell and even Dorothy Gish — bring this odd ‘Pepperidge Farms’ neo-realist tale to life.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls

Blu-ray

Flicker Fusion

1951 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / Street Date March 15, 2022 / Richer Than the Earth / Available from Flicker Alley / 24.95

Starring: Lloyd Bridges, Dorothy Gish, Carleton Carpenter, Murray Hamilton, James Westerfield, Lenore Lonergan,...

Powerhouse Indicator moves forward to their fourth fancy box of noirs from the studio of Harry Cohn, six pictures stretching from the postwar boom to the end of the original classic noir era. This time around we have some notable directors, and a nice selection of stars — Dennis O’Keefe, George Murphy, Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak, Jean Simmons, Rory Calhoun and Richard Conte. Kim Novak makes her starring debut as a femme fatale; noir icon Richard Conte shines in a movie that marks a turn into a new kind of existential, paranoid thriller. And speaking of paranoid, we again get to lighten up with another selection of theme-appropriate Three Stooges shorts.

Columbia Noir #4

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1948-1957 / B&w + Color / 1:85 widescreen, 1:37 Academy / Street Date September 27, 2021 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / 49.99

Starring: Louis Hayward, Dennis O’Keefe; George Murphy; Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak; Jean Simmons, Rory Calhoun; Dennis O’Keefe,...

It’s another CineSavant Revival Screening Review of a show not presently available on disc: not an old favorite, but something we admittedly never heard of … a marvelous 1951 film that’s seemingly been hiding under the carpet for sixty years, despite being directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Lloyd Bridges, Dorothy Gish, Carleton Carpenter, Murray Hamilton, Diana Douglas, Anne Francis, Ernest Borgnine and Arthur O’Connell. At first we fear it will be another angry midcentury indictment of free enterprise … but it becomes something else entirely. The unusual near- neorealist picture was filmed on location in a New Hampshire mill town; it is newly restored and hopefully destined for Blu-ray soon.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls

CineSavant Revival Screening Review

Not on Home Video

1951 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / Richer Than the Earth / Not Yet On Home Video

Starring: Lloyd Bridges, Dorothy Gish, Carleton Carpenter, Murray Hamilton, James Westerfield, Lenore Lonergan, Russell Hardie,...

This show has everything going for it, in fact, it has Too much going for it: tragic drama, silly comedy, bland heart-tugs and saucy romance. Everybody’s working across purposes, with ‘stunt’ guest star Bobby Darin preening for awards attention. Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis and Eddie Albert are terrific but are acting in different movies; and Gregory Peck seems out of his depth altogether. Does it keep our attention? You bet. Does it work? I’m not so sure.

Captain Newman, M.D.

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1963 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 126 min. / Street Date January 5, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Gregory Peck, Tony Curtis, Angie Dickinson, Bobby Darin, Eddie Albert, Robert Duvall, Bethel Leslie, Dick Sargent, James Gregory, Larry Storch, Jane Withers, Vito Scotti, Gregory Walcott, Ann Doran, Martin West, David Winters.

Cinematography: Russell Metty

Film Editor: Alma Macrorie

Music: Frank Skinner

Written by Richard L. Breen, Phoebe & Henry Ephron from...

"In 1976," notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, "the year that Marilyn Monroe would have turned 50, Larry McMurtry wrote that she 'is right in there with our major ghosts: Hemingway, the Kennedy brothers — people who finished with American life before America had time to finish with them.' Almost a half-century after her death, the world, or at least its necrophiliac fantasists, still haven't finished with Monroe and try to resurrect her again and again in movies, books, songs and glamour layouts featuring dewy and ruined ingénues. Maybe it's because it's so difficult to imagine her as Old Marilyn that she has become a Ghost of Hollywood Past, a phantom that periodically materializes to show us things that have been. The latest attempt at resurrection occurs in My Week With Marilyn, with Michelle Williams as the Ghost."

"The 'my' is Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a wet-eared assistant director on...

A novel based on the records of Monroe's analysis is grimly fascinating

It is hard to know by what standards the author of this book can claim it to be a novel. Certainly it does not have the shape, tone or atmosphere of a crafted piece of fiction. What it most resembles is one of those immensely long Vanity Fair articles which start off with screaming headlines and lurid cross-heads, but which after a short distance one has to pursue into the ad-less wastes of the magazine's back pages. One keeps reading in the hope of finding shocking revelations, scurrilous imputations or at least good low-grade gossip, all the while suspecting that one is wasting one's time, which would probably be better spent watching Some Like It Hot on DVD.

This is not to say that Marilyn's Last Sessions is a bad book, but it is such a strange hybrid...

David Baddiel's story of a Muslim man who discovers he is Jewish unfolds in a series of inventive, often very funny encounters, says Philip French

Ethnic identity and the troubling competition between religious groups have been perennial subjects for both tragedy and comedy, and for the melodramatic and sentimental spaces in between. Now with The Infidel, the author and Jewish stand-up David Baddiel, one of the sharpest and funniest men in Britain, has thrown himself into the fray at a time when the stakes are perhaps higher than ever before. Will he succeed where others have failed and how would his success be measured?

One of the most popular plays of the 1920s, Abie's Irish Rose, about the love affair between young Jewish and Irish New Yorkers, is now remembered largely for a couplet in Rogers and Hart's "Manhattan" ("Our future babies we'll take to Abie's Irish Rose/ I...