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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M.R. James Times Two

Montague Rhodes James, better known as M.R. James (1862-1936), was a celebrated author and medievalist scholar from the U.K. who is best known today for his many ghost stories. Horror film buffs in the U.S. were first exposed to his work when director Jacques Tourneur adapted his short story “Casting the Runes” for the 1957 film Curse of the Demon (it was titled Night of the Demon in the U.K.). To date, that still reminds the most famous M.R. James theatrical feature but that doesn’t mean the author’s work hasn’t been adapted in other memorable renditions, most of them as made-for-television productions from England. One of the most famous is James’s short story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” from 1904, which has been filmed twice by the BBC, one in 1968 entitled Whistle and I’ll Come to You starring Michael Horden and a remake from 2010 with the same title that featured John Hurt.

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