{"id":37838,"date":"2022-12-22T14:53:37","date_gmt":"2022-12-22T20:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=37838"},"modified":"2022-12-22T14:53:37","modified_gmt":"2022-12-22T20:53:37","slug":"belated-movie-reviews-781","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2022\/12\/22\/belated-movie-reviews-781\/","title":{"rendered":"Belated Movie Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Beneath his pretty exterior lurked … Cthulhu! Wait, that can’t be right, the Big C didn’t like that brand of cigarette. Must be some other Elderly God.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Force of Evil<\/strong><\/em><\/a> (1948) looks into the moral dilemmas of a pair of brothers, the younger brother, Joe Morse, a lawyer working for the mob, a mob looking to take over the bookie trade, and the older brother, Leo, runs, of course, a bookie operation.<\/p>\n

The former is angling for a piece of the action, while the latter is simply trying to offer an honest service. Indeed, some of his employees are what we today call challenged<\/em>, working for Leo despite their various handicaps, and sometimes Leo makes sure they get home after work.<\/p>\n

But the mob is not interested in honesty, and Joe discovers that the weight he swings is insufficient to his ends of financial wealth and familial integrity.<\/p>\n

And don’t forget Leo’s assistant, Doris, to whom Joe takes a shine. Can she possibly survive the association?<\/p>\n

Yep, this is noir<\/em><\/a>, a story of bad decisions, of poor lifestyle practices, of shabby desire taking precedence over the duties of adulthood – and the arrogance that goes along with it all. This may not be the darkest of noir<\/em>, but it’s definitely in the genre: Joe finding the organization considers him a tail, not the body, a hammer rather than the brain directing it.<\/p>\n

And all brought on by his desire for financial rewards rather than the societal rewards that Leo seeks. And that’s where there’s a crack in this plot, because bookie operations are commonly criminal, ugly operations; that decent Leo would get involved is a little hard to credit. Maybe I’m prejudiced against bookies, or maybe I don’t understand the history of bookies, but I found it a little disturbing that the good guy was actually just another criminal.<\/p>\n

But this may be a minor blemish, depending on the audience member. It’s not a bad 1940s movie at all, with excellent acting and cinematography; in fact, there’s nothing wrong with the technical aspects.<\/p>\n

It’s down, dirty, and discouraging as humanity tussles with itself. And, maybe, loses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Force of Evil (1948) looks into the moral dilemmas of a pair of brothers, the younger brother, Joe Morse, a lawyer working for the mob, a mob looking to take over the bookie trade, and the older brother, Leo, runs, of course, a bookie operation. The former is angling for \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37838"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37995,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37838\/revisions\/37995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}