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.
Posts by morlockjeff

Although Luis Bunuel never made a straight up horror film in the traditional sense, many of his movies contained elements of the horrific and the fantastical such as the “mother meat” nightmare sequence in Los Olvidados (1950), the severed, crawling hand in The Exterminating Angel (1962) or the Devil in his many disguises in the [...]

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“Why can’t they use top class killers? Guys who know their business. When one of the big boys gets caught, it’s the real panic and then they really get scared.” – Rudy (Eddie Constantine) in HAIL, MAFIA (1965, AKA Je vous salue, mafia!)

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Could there have been a more ideally matched couple from the Warner Bros. stock company than this pair of New York natives with their streetsmart ways and attitudes to match? It seems strange that James Cagney and Joan Blondell aren’t usually included in that rarified group of Gable & Harlow or Tracy & Hepburn or [...]

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Although released in 2001 and greatly admired by many prominent film critics, DELBARAN, directed by Iranian filmmaker Abolfazl Jalili, is not nearly as well known as other Iranian prize winners such as Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) or Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (2001) but deserves to be. The story of Kaim, a fourteen-year-old [...]

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There are certain movie titles that make you pause and consider the mystery, allure or absurdity of their meaning. They can promise so much and deliver so little like BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966) or SHE GODS OF TIGER REEF (1958). Or they can overdeliver on their promise to an astonished but grateful audience [...]

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WE WANT YOU SALLY….WE WANT YOU….COME TO US!        

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One of the more ambitious and offbeat Westerns of the early sixties, THE LAST SUNSET (1961) is an odd duck that has its admirers and detractors with several participants of the film – director Robert Aldrich, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and star Kirk Douglas – the most vocal about its flaws and unrealized potential. But for [...]

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Last Thursday the Atlanta film community lost one of their most gifted and committed champions in bringing diverse and multicultural cinema to the city….and I lost a dear friend.      

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Angel Baby posterAfter the critical and boxoffice success of ELMER GANTRY in 1960, another film, much smaller in scale and budget, came along that mirrored the latter film both thematically and in some of the plot details. It might have been merely a coincidence that ANGEL BABY appeared shortly after ELMER GANTRY in 1961 but it certainly beats the Burt Lancaster Oscar winner when it comes to curiosity value.

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“When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.” – Orson Welles       

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