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- John le Carre, my 2020 and The Looking Glass War
- Parker on the screen #5: Payback Straight Up (2006)
- The long, dark legacy of William Hjorstberg’s supernatural neo noirs
- Projection Booth episode #495 :To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
- Wanda (1970): Barbara Loden’s film as a noir
- The strange history of Mickey Spillane and New Zealand’s “Jukebox Killer”
- Book review: Blacktop Wasteland
- Parker on the screen #4: Slayground (1983)
- Parker on the screen #3: The Outfit (1973)
- “Every headlight’s a police car, every shadow is a cop”: Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)
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Category Archives: Heist films
Parker on the screen #5: Payback Straight Up (2006)

The idea to review every screen iteration of Donald Westlake’s crime character, Parker, originated much earlier in the year, when Melbourne was in deep in winter and the middle of hard Covid lockdown. Melbourne is out of that lockdown now and summer is here, and I am much busier, hence the delay since my last entry.
Anyway, back to it with the next Parker film, Brian Helgeland’s neo noir, Payback Straight Up (2006). This is retelling of the very first Parker novel, The Hunter, published in 1962 and, of course, first filmed by John Boorman as the immortal Point Blank (1967), starring Lee Marvin (and which I wrote about on this site here on the 50th anniversary of the film).
Helgeland, who started out in the movie business as a scriptwriter, is not someone whose work I am particularly across. He did the script for the adaptation of Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential (1997), which I really liked. The same year he also performed wordsmith duty on the script for the simply abysmal post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner vehicle, The Postman. The 1999 film adaptation of The Hunter, titled Payback, was his first outing as a director (he also wrote the script) and by all accounts it was an exceptionally troubled shoot.… Read more
Posted in 60s American crime films, 90s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime film, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Heist films, Neo Noir
Tagged Bill Duke, Brian Helgeland, David Paymar, Deborah Kara Unger, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Gregg Henry, Jack Conley, John Boorman, Maria Bello, Mel Gibson, Parker, Payback (1999), Payback Straight Up (2006), Point Blank (1967)
Projection Booth episode #495 :To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

I am thrilled to be co-hosting another episode of Mike White’s film podcast, The Projection Booth, this one on William Friedkin’s 1985 neo noir, To Live and Die in L.A. The film pits Treasury agent William Petersen as Richard Chance against Willem Dafoe as artist and forger Rick Masters, and is based on the novel of the same name by former US federal agent turned crime writer, Gerald Petievich. Along with my fellow co-host, Jedidiah Ayres, we were joined by the film’s editor, M. Scott Smith, and one of the its stars, Willem Dafoe.
We dive deep into this film, discussing the breathtaking work of To Love and Die in L.A.’s cinematography Robbie Muller and how the Friedkin demands complete suspension of disbelief from his audience in some many respects of the story and gets it.
We we also talk about the Wang Chung soundtrack, Los Angeles on the screen, how the film embodies the deregulated economic and political policies of the Reagan era, and how it relates to Friedkin’s broader ouvre and other America crime cinema, particularly the other film based on a Petievich book, Boiling Point (1993) and the Michael Cimino effort also released in 1985, Year of the Dragon.
The entire episode is online for your listening pleasure here.… Read more
Posted in 80s American crime films, 90s American crime films, Crime fiction, Crime film, Heist films, Neo Noir
Tagged Boiling Point (1993), Gerald Petievich, M. Scott Smith, Michael Cimino, Neo Noir, Robbie Muller, The Projection Booth podcast, To Live and Die in LA (1985), Wang Chung, Willem Dafoe, William Friedkin, Year of the Dragon (1985)
Book review: Blacktop Wasteland

If you spend any time in the social media circles concerned with crime fiction, in all likelihood you will have heard of S. A. Crosby and his book, Blacktop Wasteland. It has been out in the US for ages, during which time I was reading a tonne of positive commentary. Then I stumbled across the little publicised fact that an Australian edition has been released.
Beauregard ‘Bug’ Montage is a hard-working mechanic with a wife and two young sons, who wants a happy marriage, for his kids to get more that he has out of life, and his auto repair business to do well. Unfortunately, said business is just a few weeks from going under financially. On top of this he needs to find a large amount of money to keep his embittered mother in aged care, where she is dying of cancer (seriously, the US health system is a crime story in itself). He also has to somehow also rustle up college tuition fees for his teenage daughter from an earlier relationship.
Beauregard has a previous criminal life he is trying to leave behind. This is hard because he was very good at what he did – driving. The ghosts of his former life also hang around him in the form of his late father, a charismatic criminal in his own right who disappeared to parts unknown when Beauregard was a child, leaving his son with a lifelong love/hate obsession for him.… Read more
Parker on the screen #4: Slayground (1983)

Next in my series on Don Westlake aka Richard Stark’s criminal character of Parker on the screen is the 1983 film, Slayground.
Slayground is based on the 1971 book of the same name, the 14th instalment in the first cycle of Westlake’s Parker series. I am going to put my cards on the table up front and say that while Slayground is among my least favourite of that earlier tranche of Parker novels, I think is film, however, is very good. It has very little to do with the book, but as I said early in this series, I’m not going to get hung up on how much the films adhere to their source material.
The novel depicts what happens after Parker and his criminal associates are forced to to hire a second-rate wheelman for an armoured car heist they are planning. The job goes wrong and Parker narrowly escapes the law with $74,000 from the robbery. He stumbles across an amusement park called Fun Island, closed for the winter, and figures it is as good a place as any to hide until the heat from the job dies down. A major hitch arises when a couple of corrupt cops make Parker entering the park.… Read more
Posted in 70s American crime films, 80s American crime films, British crime cinema, Bryan Brown, Crime film, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Giallo cinema, Heist films, Neo Noir, Parker
Tagged Billie Whitelaw, British giallo, Bryan Brown, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, heist film, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003), Mel Smith, Mike Hodges, Ned Eisenberg, Not the Nine O'clock News, Parker, Parker on the screen, Payback Straight Up (1999), Peter Coyote, Slayground (1983), Terry Bedford, The Omen (1976), Trevor Preston