Dr. D (exNASA) and I watched another noir last night: Murder Inc. (1960), wherein Robert Falk, soon to reincarnate as Columbo, the detective, is here a believable villain.
The film itself is surprisingly choppy in how it shifts voice to documentary narration, pushing its “true to life” mystique. We the spectators feel we’re being made privy to the gangland badlands of the times (1930s-40s).
Not unlike now. Prohibition continues, throughout the Union, ensuring a criminal under-culture profitable to prisons.
This was one more in a series of noirs I’ve been renting from Movie Madness.
Two of the noirs, one a Bogart-Becall, had the trope of a villain falling to their death, by accident, at the height of exposure for their crimes (making the death fall cathartic).
Two had the pattern wherein the male fuckup, caught by police, tells the girl to forget about him, she’s still young and can start over. Murder Inc. was one of those.
These films are informative on several levels, in part simply for their windows on history. My earliest memories dovetail with some of those old Chevies they show us.
“This is about where I came in” I’m thinking, “just a few years later”.
Building more consensus around lifestyles worth prototyping (the EPCOT mission) stays in focus here in Cascadia.
Another theme is how scaredy-cat the academics are being, as more GST-informed thinking continues reforming the cyber talk, the often cryptic hubbub on the various channels and meetup networks, where various influencers have juice.
We continue to look back on the Alaska Accords as another step forward for our World Game grid.
Of course the term “Murder, Inc.” takes me back to the Fletcher Prouty corpus, wherein he quotes LBJ regarding what it’s like around a president. We’re a gangland after all. Bodies happen. Very noir.
The grisly business of packing young men off to war came across as gratuitous violence (mostly self inflicted) to a younger so-called "flower child" generation, folks with an intuitive sense of why outward war was becoming obsolete and therefore farcical going forward.
