“Big Timers” is a cheaply-made featurette of the “race films” genre that created productions with all-Black casts that were released exclusively to the racially segregated theaters of the Jim Crow era.
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Category Archives: Retro Cinema
Three Loan Wolves (1946)
Pawnshop owners Moe, Larry and Curly share fatherhood duties for 10-year-old Egbert, who returns home from school one afternoon demanding to know the origins of his peculiar family structure. Moe begins a story that launches an extended flashback on how a gangster’s moll “borrowed” her sister’s infant to throw the police off her trail. This hard-boiled dame’s boyfriend runs a shakedown racket that tries to pressure the pawnbrokers into giving him “protection” money. When the pawnbrokers refuse, a fight breaks out in the store between the owners and the hoodlums. The moll flees and never returns for Egbert, who is adopted by the trio. But Egbert rejects this surrogate family and goes off to find his mother, leaving his would-be fathers to abuse each other in frustration.
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Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
It is impossible to make an intentionally campy film. The whole point of camp is that it never realizes that it is camp. For example, “Valley of the Dolls” is genius camp because it is so wonderfully wrong at every imaginable turn, with the gifted cast trying and cluelessly failing to create alchemy with their material. If the actors started winking at the audience or smirking at their material, then it is not camp – it is just plain dumb.
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House on Haunted Hill (1959)
An eccentric millionaire and his steely fourth wife invite five strangers to their spooky mansion of a challenge-party. The guests and their hosts are to be locked in the mansion overnight without telephone access or electricity. Those who survive until morning will each receive $10,000 from their hosts. Those who don’t survive will have the funds forwarded to their heirs. However, the house supposedly comes with a grisly past involving ghosts and murders, and the evening proves to be anything but serene for all involved in this mayhem.
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Hello, Dolly! (2009)
You never know what you can discover just by leisurely scrolling through YouTube. Why, just the other day I discovered something completely under that proverbial radar: a 2009 video record of the Moscow Operetta Theatre’s production of “Hello, Dolly!” And if you thought the Barbra Streisand film took too many liberties with the Broadway show, wait until you see this Russian reimagining of the musical comedy classic!
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Cool Cat (1967)
Notable for introducing the first new characters in the brief (1967-69) era of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts cartoons, “Cool Cat” debuted the eponymous feline and his predator, the bumbling Briton Col. Rimfire, in a variation of the Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd hunting romps. The only difference here is that Cool Cat is blissfully unaware that Col. Rimfire is pursuing him. Even more peculiar, the feline star mistakes the colonel’s vehicle – a metallic pink elephant on wheels – for being a real pachyderm and he has a running one-way conversation with the machine.
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Disneyland Dream (1956)
One of the funkier aspects of the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry is the inclusion of extraordinarily obscure amateur works alongside Hollywood productions. In 2008, a home movie made in Connecticut in 1956 by Robbins Barstow called “Disneyland Dream” was added to the National Film Registry alongside such classics as “Foolish Wives,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Flower Drum Song,” “Deliverance,” and “The Terminator.”
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