I moved around some of the stuff on my office walls this week - in an in-vain attempt to get noticed by Room Rater on Twitter, and also because some folks (including Mrs. Content Guy) thought it all looked too cluttered.
Because this all shows up in many of my videos, it prompted one MNB reader to write:
KC! Good morning – glad to see you’re staying safe (and wearing a helmet … yikes)! Quick question which has nothing to do with anything. In the most recent FaceTime with the Content Guy segments, you’ve been in your home office. I’m admiring the mini posters of Bullitt and the shamefully underappreciated The Long Goodbye, but I can’t quite make out the third one that’s usually peeking over your right shoulder … inquiring minds – well, my inquiring mind – want to know!
I answered via email:
Good eye!
It actually is a lobby card for “The Big Fix,” the Richard Dreyfuss private eye movie from 1978 - talk about under-appreciated! It is an adaptation of a Roger L. Simon novel about Moses Wine, a Berkeley-era campus activist from the sixties turned LA private detective. Amazing cast - Susan Anspach, Bonnie Bedelia, John Lithgow, Fritz Weaver, F. Murray Abraham, Ron Rifkin, and, in a tiny, tiny role, Mandy Patinkin.
One of my personal favorites … and almost nobody has seen it or remembers it.
The reader responded:
Beautiful! Thank you! – I’ll try to find it! I’m a sucker for the genre, too. In fact, I pulled James Garner’s Marlowe off the shelf a couple weeks ago. Always plays a little bit like a hardboiled warm-up to “The Rockford Files” to me. Harper and The Drowning Pool are on my list to revisit too. Thanks for the info – and the recommendation, KC!
And I wrote:
How do you feel about Night Moves?
And he came back to me:
It’s a crime, but I’ve never seen it! I know it’s 1970s Hackman – that’s about it.
Night Moves, in fact, is one of the best movies ever made in the genre - directed by Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde), and Gene Hackman giving one of his best performances ever in a career full of amazing performances. (It also has a very young Melanie Griffith.)
It is bleak, moody and totally compelling. See it. (Night Moves is on Amazon Prime, FYI.)
