Don’t Stop for Strangers!

Is there anybody meaner than Lawrence Tierney on the screen? Sure, James Cagney was a bad-ass, shoving a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy or knocking Virginia Mayo off a chair in White Heat. And Bogart could be equally cold-blooded in films like The Petrified Forest and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But Tierney is like a rabid dog in comparison, sparing no one, not even himself, from violent death, and The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) is a perfect example of his menacing screen persona.

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City Unplugged

The film poster for the Estonian crime caper film CITY UNPLUGGED (1993).

Movies about an ingenious heist or an elaborately staged robbery always come with set expectations from genre enthusiasts. Can they meet or surpass the gold bar standard set by earlier classics such as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), or Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) for example? Tallinn Pimeduses (English title: City Unplugged, aka Darkness in Tallinn 1993), directed by Estonian filmmaker IIkka Jarvi-Laturi, might not ever attain the iconic status of those efforts but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthy addition to the genre. If anything, it is quirky and original enough to earn a cult following and probably would have if it had ever been distributed and marketed by a major Hollywood studio.

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