MovieMorlocks.com – morlockjeff

morlockjeff

Jeff Stafford blames his parents for his addiction to movies. At the age of five in Memphis, Tennessee, he was allowed to stay up and watch "The Wolf Man" on the Late Night Show. It scared the bejabbers out of him and gave him nightmares but also led to a lifetime fascination with film. His other formative movie experience that same year was seeing Elvis Presley in "Love Me Tender" with his father during a trip to New Orleans and being disturbed over the ending where Elvis's ghost sings the title song. Born in Dalton, Georgia, Jeff has also lived in Memphis; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Athens, Georgia; and Atlanta. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a journalism degree and for a while dabbled in radio, television and newspapers before landing one of his favorite jobs, working as a film programmer at Films Inc., a non-theatrical distributor (no longer in business) that rented 16mm movies to colleges, libraries, film societies, etc. Provided with a 16mm projector and a warehouse full of films, he was able to indulge himself with the Janus and Audio Brandon collections plus the film libraries of 20th-Century-Fox, Paramount, RKO, Warner Bros. and many other studios. When the non-theatrical film market eventually collapsed due to the rising video industry (Blockbuster and their clones), Jeff began working as a freelance writer and started contributing to tcm.com. He is currently the managing editor of the Turner Classic Movies web site and has been since 2000.

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Posts by morlockjeff

Masks Are Powerful

Posted by morlockjeff on February 5, 2012

There is one cinema gimmick that always works for me and can sometimes lift a movie out of the ordinary and take it somewhere unexpected. And this usually occurs when someone either puts on a mask or appears in one. The simple act of doing this immediately brings something theatrical and visually arresting to the [...]

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Jailbirds of a Different Feather

Posted by morlockjeff on January 22, 2012

MILLIONAIRES IN PRISON. Great title and the sort of news headline I’d like to see in an era where Wall Street robber barons and corporate raiders are creating a new society of haves and have-nots.

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Jack Webb, Drill Instructor

Posted by morlockjeff on January 7, 2012

“I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER!” – Sergeant Jim Moore

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The Perfect Mix of Schmaltz, Schmerz and Schmutz

Posted by morlockjeff on December 25, 2011

That was how Preston Sturges described his screenplay for REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940), directed by Mitchell Leisen. Overlooked and underrated for years, this small scale but intimate romantic drama has become a new Yuletide favorite thanks to frequent airings on TCM and its availablity on DVD.

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Things Fall Apart

Posted by morlockjeff on December 11, 2011

On first impressions this may look like just another grade B bank heist thriller but don’t be fooled. This 1957 independent pickup by United Artists is a genuine loose canon and highly peculiar within its own specialized genre. In the best heist thrillers, the robbery is usually ingeniously planned and executed (Rififi) but when it [...]

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Toxic Love a la Milanese

Posted by morlockjeff on November 27, 2011

Milan, Italy is world famous as a mecca for high fashion, design and the AC Milan football club but the statistics also reveal that it is one of Europe’s most polluted cities, if not the worst, due to smoke spewing factories and auto emissions. Against this gray, industrial backdrop, Luigi Comencini has set his rarely [...]

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Nuns, Stepin Fetchit and Philip Glass

Posted by morlockjeff on November 13, 2011

What is the connection between the three? The answer lies in a 1968 documentary that was produced by Kartemquin Films, the non-profit documentary collective that was founded in 1966 in Chicago by Gordon Quinn, Jerry Temaner and Stan Karter and has produced such acclaimed work as Hoop Dreams (1995), Vietnam, Long Time Coming (1998), the [...]

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Scarred by THE HYPNOTIC EYE

Posted by morlockjeff on October 30, 2011

Everybody has probably been haunted or permanently disturbed by some movie they saw as a kid that burned images into their brain they couldn’t process or handle. For me it was a sick little B-movie that popped up on the late show called THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960) which I saw at the age of eight. [...]

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Better Older Than Younger

Posted by morlockjeff on October 16, 2011

As Hollywood’s newest stars get younger and I get older, I find comfort and inspiration in the career arcs of certain actors who might have made a big splash in their youth but stayed the course and became supreme masters of their craft. Some like Dick Powell totally reinvented themselves with an entirely new persona [...]

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Letting It All Hang Out at THE NUDE RESTAURANT

Posted by morlockjeff on October 2, 2011

“I gave up weightlifting because I hate repeating everything.” – Taylor Mead

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