Tag Archives: Kenneth Fearing

“The Big Clock” & “She-Devils on Wheels”: Do flicks get any better?

Leave it to  Arrow Video US and Arrow Academy US to release flicks you just got to have. Two of the best DVDs coming . . .

Have you ever heard the saying “it’s a man’s world”? Well don’t dare repeat that to The Man-Eaters – a raucous, rowdy and randy gang of female bikers who ride their men just as viciously as they do their motorcycles. When they’re not racing each other to get first pick of the “stud line-up”, these female hellcats are busy terrorizing the town and clashing with the rival male gangs.
Adapted by acclaimed screenwriter Jonathan Latimer from a novel by the equally renowned crime author Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (available May 14) is a superior suspense film which brilliantly combines screwball comedy with heady thrills. Overworked true crime magazine editor George Stroud (played by Ray Milland) has been planning a vacation for months. However, when his boss, the tyrannical media tycoon Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), insists he skips his holiday, Stroud resigns in disgust before embarking on an impromptu drunken night out with his boss’s mistress, Pauline York (Rita Johnson).

When Janoth kills Pauline in a fit of rage, Stroud finds himself to have been the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time: his staff have been tasked with finding a suspect with an all too familiar description . . .  Stroud’s very own!
Directed with panache by John Farrow (yes, his daughter is Mia, whose mother, the film’s Maureen O’Sullivan, is her mother and his wife), who stylishly renders the film’s towering central set, the Janoth Building, The Big Clock benefits from exuberant performances who make hay with the script’s snappy dialogue. A huge success on its release, it is no wonder this fast-moving noir was remade years later as the Kevin Costner vehicle No Way Out.
Wild! Vicious! With motorcycles as their lovers! Experience sights and sounds beyond your very imagining as “Godfather of Gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis tackles the biker chick sub-sub-genre with She-Devils on Wheels! (May 21). Have you ever heard the saying “it’s a man’s world”? Well don’t dare repeat that to The Man-Eaters, a raucous, rowdy and randy gang of female bikers who ride their men just as viciously as they do their motorcycles.
When they’re not racing each other to get first pick of the “stud line-up”, these female hellcats are busy terrorizing the town and clashing with the rival male gangs. Billed as “by far the most exciting picture of its type ever filmed”, She-Devils on Wheels sees splatter pioneer H.G. Lewis going full throttle with the most shocking biker flick of its kind – now accompanied by his other vicious gang opus Just for the Hell of It for a thrilling, pulse-racing double-bill!