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The Stranger brought together a triumvirate of stellar pre-war Hollywood actors. Edward G. Robinson gained fame as Rico in the movie Little Caesar. So famous was this movie and Robinson’s performance that the authors of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act purposely made the title read RICO in reference to the character Robinson portrayed. Robinson, a man with a great career is known to most people today for his last movie, Soylent Green, which is better forgotten.

Loretta Young was lovely, but not in a “bombshell” manner. She was a competent actress with a great fashion sense that kept her forever in work and allowed a successful transition to television.

It is the story of four schoolboys, who come upon evidence of skullduggery and work together to stop a murder. The lads are a mischievous gang who are always cooking up some scheme. Dion Pride, yup, son of country music legend Charlie Pride, is Specks. Vincent Spano plays Foster. Diminutive Greg Hodges is Homer and Jeff Nicholson plays Billy Ray, always in cowboy hat.

Occasionally, I come across a movie I want to love even before I see it. Tom Naughton’s Fat Head is one of those. As a gourmand, it is certain that a movie that says you can eat all you want of what you like will be watched with fervor by those of us seeking justification for our love of meat in quantity.

The film is most instructive in a sociological sense. In that era, there were commercials with taglines such as Is it true blonds have more fun? and If I have one life, let me live it as a blond. Three Blondes in His Life certainly deconstructs that thesis. Being blond led only to problems.

You’ve probably heard the old cliché like question, “Did the people who lived in the Dark Ages know they lived in the Dark Ages? It is not a bad interrogative. Heck, what will they call the age we live in? Don’t know myself, I’m still trying to answer the musical question, “Who wrote the book of love?”

But I digress. The point is, in the movie, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, all seems positive and hardly the dark ages. Fifth Century Gaul appears a pastoral paradise. Not like the historical accounts of a society breaking apart due to barbarian invasions. So what’s going on?

For all the characters in the movie, Life and Nothing But (La Vie et rien d’autre), the baggage of war is carried years after. Life and Nothing But is the story of a French Major assigned the happy task of retrieving and identifying the dead in a tunnel that had been mined by the retreating “Huns.” They blew it up as a train had been passing through.

Fairly straightforward plot lines. Major Dellaplane not only has to deal with the bodies, but with the military bureaucracy above him. He is competent in his work of matching names to corpses. The brass wants him to find one that can be the French “Unknown Soldier” to fulfill a patriotic ritual.

Okay, the French Revolution has its problems on film. The White Orchid wants to give us the lost civilization. Don’t get me wrong. The genre, a B movie staple is absurd, but one of my favorites. In the White Orchid, a Pre Columbian Civilization has retreated to the Jungle and survived.

William Lundigan stars as archaeologist Robert Burton. Lundigan is one of those actors you’ve seen but probably don’t remember his name. He never got the big break but he did have a long career in B movies.

Dahmer (2002) is, at first glance, a fairly run-of-the-mill bad guy biopic, tracing the exploits of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer from late teenagerhood to just before his arrest, for a smorgasbord of crimes, at age 31. Jumping back and forth between the past and the present, the film fills in Dahmer’s personal history through frequent flashbacks, and paints a picture of him that turns out to be surprisingly—almost uncomfortably—compassionate. However, the flashbacks give the film a disjointed quality that makes it less effective as a thriller (or a horror film) than many of the more infamous serial-killer epics, such as those comprising the Silence of the Lambs oeuvre.

Ah, poor Juliette Binoche. Ten years after her triumph as the nurse in the English Patient. Six years after her signature role in Chocolat. Still lovely in her forties. What could be wrong? Well, I suspect that she must be horribly upset that she was cast as Sarah Palin in a movie that came out two years before anyone knew, probably least of all Juliette, who the heck Sarah Palin is. The physical resemblance would be uncanny, but Mademoiselle Binoche tops it off with glasses and makes it even more eerie. Her voice doesn’t carry the Western twang of La Palin, but other than that, sounds like her, Of course, it is surreal in that Juliette gets to play with guns, just like the pistol packin mama from Alaska.

The most interesting performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much was given by Peter Lorre. Lorre had just escaped Nazi Germany and did not speak English at the time. He learned his lines phonetically and was able to display his trademark sinister persona in a language he did not know.