Tag Archives: Movie Morlocks

Pere Ubu Meets X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

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I thought it was some kind of avant-garde prank when I first saw a poster advertising a special showing of Roger Corman’s X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) accompanied by the legendary Cleveland, Ohio band Pere Ubu performing a live score. It sounded too good to be true but how would it work?  Would the audio be turned off so that the movie would essentially be treated as a silent film with a new score? Would the band perform a spontaneous live remix of Les Baxter’s score while riding the volume levels? Would the film’s dialogue be heard at all in this presentation? All of my questions were answered on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at Atlanta’s Plaza Theater when I attended the Pere Ubu show.

*This is an archival reprint of an article that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies (the blog was discontinued in the Fall of 2018 and is no longer available).

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Middle Age Crazy

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original posterIt’s hard to imagine a more unlikely prospect for a film adaptation than John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer, which was first published in The New Yorker. Yet, it was actually adapted into a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Burt Lancaster. Was it a success? Hardly. Even though a handful of critics endorsed it, the public stayed away but for some who were lucky enough to see it, the film resonated for years. Now it is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Grindhouse Releasing and a reassessment is in order. Continue reading →

Soul Survivors

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11311651-lAlthough less well known today than Stanley Kramer’s Oscar-nominated 1967 drama, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and still unavailable on DVD/Blu-Ray, One Potato, Two Potato (1964) was the first serious, non-exploitive attempt to deal with an interracial marriage as its main subject and was independently produced outside Hollywood. Set in the fictional small town of Howard (a stand-in for Painesville, Ohio, where it was actually filmed), the movie is bookended by a courtroom ruling on a child custody case and in between is the sad but all too true story of an interracial couple who become social outcasts in both the white and black communities.    Continue reading →