What Ten Years of Alan Ladd Will Do to Your House

Today is my tenth Alan-iversary!  TENTH!!!!  Wow.

When you have been obsessing over the same actor for ten years, you tend to end up with a lot of stuff about them, all over your house.  At least, that's how it works if you're me :-D  One of these days, I'll do a post with all my John Wayne artwork and signs and posters too.  But today, it's Alan Ladd Day.  I'll give you a bit of a tour of where he shows up in my house.

You can kind of see these posters when you first come in the front door, if you know to look up the staircase to the hallway wall upstairs.  Guy Williams as Zorro, John Wayne on a horse, and Alan Ladd smiling at someone just off-screen.  Oddly enough, all three guys in these posters seem to be looking at something over by my laundry room.  Hmm.

Sorry about how glare-y these photos are.  I snapped them quickly today, and it was pretty sunny.

In our master bedroom, I have a wall that has a couple of half-sized bookcases that contain my unread books (or try to, anyway), and I have a gallery wall above that.  Five of the 11 pictures on it are Alan.  I'll share some closeups down below.

Actually, it's seven out of thirteen, because I have a smaller photo stuck into the frame of each of the bigger photos.  My best friend send me this swoony shot of a very young Alan Ladd.  The smaller photo is just a postcard I bought on RedBubble.

This is a really bad photo because of the reflection -- so sorry!  This is my favorite photo of Alan -- he's smiling his genuine smile in it, not his "I'm supposed to smile now" smile.  I bought it on eBay, and it's a vintage print of a promo photo.  The insert is a little photo of Alan with a horse that I think Eva-Joy sent me a while back.

This is a trio of postcards that were sent to Alan's fan club members at various stages in his career.  They're not actually signed, they just have his signature printed on them, but they ARE authentic fan club cards, so that's pretty cool.

Along another wall in our bedroom, I have a small table that's a combination sewing and writing table.  I have a few photos hung there, and for about ten years, I've been sticking postcards and inspirational writing quotations and such all around those photos.  Kind of an inspiration board for all my writing in general.

It includes a trio of postcards there that I also got from RedBubble when I was writing my first draft of my Hamlet retelling, which I haven't published yet, but do hope to revise and release eventually.  Anyway, I have Joseph Cotten, Alan Ladd, and Victoria Lake all done by the same artist because they're my Horatio, Hamlet, and Ophelia.  It's set in the 1940s, and these are based on their looks from the 1940s, so they're basically perfect!

Down in the living room, I have pictures from two of my favorite Alan Ladd westerns.  (My whole living room has a western movie theme -- I'm sure that comes as a great shock.)  These are from Branded (1950) and Shane (1953), respectively.  They're hanging right above our TV set.

Of course, the living room also contains my collection of Alan Ladd DVDs and Blu-Rays, but those are scattered all over my movie shelves and I simply ran out of time to collect them all up for a photo.

Over in the kitchen, you'll find my two Alan Ladd mugs.  One, you'll notice, has the same artwork as one of my postcards -- again, it's from RedBubble.  The other has a promo image from This Gun for Hire (1942), and I got it on Etsy ten years ago.  One of the first Alan Ladd-related things I bought!

Finally, in the library, you'll find a couple of movie-tie-in books for two of Alan's movies, Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and The Proud Rebel (1958).   I'd love to have the movie tie-in for The Great Gatsby (1949), but those tend to run like $250 each, so... that's out of my league, heh.  Maybe I'll find a deal on one some day.

This concludes our tour of the random Alan Ladd memorabilia that has collected around my house over the past ten years.  I hope you enjoyed it :-)  And, if not, well, the tickets didn't cost much, anyway...

My Ten Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2025

It's that time of year again!  Time to sift through the movies I watched over the past year and figure out just which ones I liked best.

I really like that my list this year has movies spanning 97 years.  It's a pretty fun mix of genres too -- not shocking, as I am an eclectic and omnivorous movie watcher.

Anyway, here's my list!

1. Conagher (1991)  A rough-mannered cowboy (Sam Elliot) keeps crossing paths with a homesteader (Katherine Ross) and her adopted children, often helping them out of some difficulty or other, all while insisting he's going to be leaving the area any day now, he's totally not sticking around to look after her and figure out if her missing husband is ever coming back, nope, he's totally disinterested...  

2. The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)  A former military intelligence officer (George C. Scott) is asked to investigate a list of people, but before he can, the man who made the list dies mysteriously.  And then people on the list start to die, too.  What can the connection be?  Why do so many of these people have very peculiar faces?  How many ways can you disguise Kirk Douglas?  SO many questions!  Also, I've never found George C. Scott particularly attractive, but maybe I've just been watching the wrong movies...

3. Desperate Journey (1942)  A WWII British bomber crew (Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Alan Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Ronald Sinclair) survive a crash landing behind enemy lines and daringly attempt to sneak their way back to Allied territory.  This movie gallops along, flinging our heroes from one tense and worrisome situation to another, but somehow never feels rushed.  Instead, it feels like an exciting series of adventures, each one making us more and more invested in the characters.

4. Glass Onion (2022)  Quirky and laconic detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) attends a house party thrown by a gazillionaire (Edward Norton) on a private island during the Covid-19 shutdowns.  People die.  Blanc figures out how and why.  There are twists on twists on twists, one of which I loved so much, it bumped this much higher on my list than it would have been otherwise.  This is the first movie I've seen that deliberately included the Covid-19 shutdowns in the storyline, complete with the face masks and the social distancing and the special rules for rich people, which was pretty interesting.  Because I don't have Netflix, I only got to see this because our local theater showed it on the big screen for a couple of days.  So happy that they did!

5. Salty O'Rourke (1945)  A gambler (Alan Ladd) needs to pay off a debt fast, so he buys a race horse and hires a jockey and does some dubious paperwork shuffling and falls in love with a school teacher (Gail Russell) and makes a lot of other bad decisions, but it all works out okay because this is a comedy.  I especially loved the sidekick played by William Demarest, of whom I grow and more fond with every movie I see him in.

6. The Invisible Man (1933)  A scientist (Claude Rains) turns himself invisible and slowly goes mad.  This movie makes no secret of the fact that the special effects are the main star of the film, and I am absolutely here for them.

7. The Pirates of Penzance (1983)  A band of jolly pirates (but are they?) led by a Pirate King (Kevin Kline) bids farewell (but do they?) to their apprentice (Rex Smith) when he comes of age (but does he?) and decides he will stop being a pirate and become a law-abiding citizen (but will he?).  Absolute madcap delightfulness from beginning to end, in the best Gilbert-and-Sullivan-but-make-it-1980s-instead style imaginable.

8. Kim (1950)  A British soldier's orphaned son Kim (Dean Stockwell) passes as a native of India to spy for the British, aided and mentored by the mysterious Mahbub Ali (Errol Flynn).  It's based on the Rudyard Kipling classic, but streamlined, and with a lot more for Errol Flynn to do than his character was granted page time for in the book.

9. Libeled Lady (1936)  A rich young thing (Myrna Loy) is libeled by a newspaper, and the editor (Spencer Tracy) responsible for running the libelous story cooks up a doozy of a plot to convince her not to sue the paper.  It involves his fiancée (Jean Harlow) and a slick-talking writer (William Powell), a sham marriage, and all the screwball hijinks the screenwriters could dream up and toss at the characters.  I will probably enjoy this a lot more the second time I watch it, but I only just watched it for the first time a few days ago and haven't had time for a second viewing.  Still, it wound up on this list, which means I did like it more than most screwball comedies...

10. The Gold Rush (1925)  A hapless but plucky prospector (Charlie Chaplin) tries to find gold in Alaska, but mostly finds problems and trouble and a lot of snow.  We saw this in the theater with my brother and his family, and it was the first silent film my niece and nephew had ever seen.  (My own kids had seen a couple before that, but years ago.)  It took them all about ten minutes to get used to the storytelling style, and then they all had a rollicking good time enjoying all of Chaplin's hijinks.  And, as a bonus, we all went to Alaska about a month later, and my nephew was able to relate historical things we saw regarding the actual Alaskan Gold Rush to things he saw in this movie.  I love it when fiction can bring real history to life for people that way!

Well, that's my list!  Have you seen any of these?  Did you make a list of favorite films you watched in 2025 too?  Please share!

I've been collecting my top ten new-to-me movies in posts like this for twelve years now.  You can find all of them at the bottom of this page.

Alan Ladd and My Writing

It's Alan Ladd's birthday today :-D 

This year, to celebrate, I'm going to share about the ways that Alan Ladd has shaped my writing and my books.

When I write fiction, I see and hear the story in my head like a movie.  I can replay scenes, move the camera angles, rewrite lines, and so on -- I see and hear it all in my imagination, and I write it down from there.  Because I love movies, I tend to use actors and actresses as a kind of jumpstart for my imagination, and often "cast" specific stars in different roles.  Eventually, the characters step a bit away from who I have cast as them and come to life in their own ways, but it's a good way to get a book started, for me.

(If you're ever curious about exactly whom I have cast as different characters in my books, I have Pinterest boards for all my books with character choices, pictures of setting and clothing and objects that I have saved as I research, and so on.)

I fell for Alan Ladd hard back in February of 2016.  At that time, I was working on rewrites for my Sleeping Beauty retelling, The Man on the Buckskin Horse, which had won a contest and was to be published in the anthology Five Magic Spindles.  I didn't actually recast any of the characters as him, since they were all very much themselves by that point, but he did help me out with one scene.

One of the changes the editors had me make after I won the contest was to give my "handsome prince" character, the gunfighter Luke Palmer, a backstory.  And I needed to write a scene where Palmer explains his past to Miss Emma, my "fairy godmother" character.  I banged my head against that scene for the longest time because Palmer Did Not Want To Share His Trauma.  At all.  Not a bit.  And I finally threw my hands up in disgust, booted my usual actor for him out the door, and tried running the scene in my head with Alan Ladd in the character instead.

And the character sat down, got a little quiet, and then reeled off this heartfelt speech about how his experiences as a Civil War surgeon had led to his present job as a gunfighter for hire.  One writing session.  Bam.  Whole scene, perfect and complete.  And, when I reread that book (because, yes, I do reread my books -- I write them because I want to read them!), I see and hear Palmer as his tall, dark self... except for that scene, where he flips into quiet and fair Alan Ladd.

Well, I had such a good time working with an imaginary Alan Ladd in my head while rewriting The Man on the Buckskin Horse, I knew I wanted to write him again.  So, when I was casting my Little Red Riding Hood retelling, Cloaked, I put him in as the woodcutter character, Hauer.  And Hauer absolutely stole my heart.  This is Alan Ladd in his 50s, which he never quite reached in real life, and I loved getting to imagine him a bit older and with a lot of life ahead yet, even if only as a fictional character.  (Hauer would obviously be a bit older than in the photo above, but it captures the Hauerness of Hauer too well to use something else.)

I even dedicated Cloaked to Alan's memory, and a tradition of dedicating my Once Upon a Western books to a Classic Hollywood actor or actress was born.

It's pretty easy to know which character I cast Alan Ladd as in my Twelve Dancing Princesses retelling, Dancing and Doughnuts, if you know his full name is Alan Walbridge Ladd.  I gave Sheriff Gideon Walbridge that last name as a placeholder because I didn't have a name for him initially, and it stuck.  Sheriff Walbridge is Alan in his 40s, wise and starting to mellow, but still sharp and ready for trouble if it comes his way.

I was so giddy when I realized that Hauer could show up again in One Bad Apple, my Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs retelling.  It takes place a decade before Cloaked, and I spent a long time scrutinizing the personal history I have for Hauer to make sure he could be there in Missouri in 1873.  I tried not to tell too many people ahead of time that he was going to show up again in it so he would be a fun surprise for initial readers, and the reactions I got to his return were everything I hoped for.  

Because I love Hauer dearly, I am especially pleased that he got to be the first character to show up in more than one Once Upon a Western book.  The little ties and crossovers will keep coming as the series lengthens, I promise!

Dan McLeod in my Beauty and the Beast retelling My Rock and My Refuge is the kind of friend we all should have.  He's had so many sad things happen in his life, but he never lets them get in the way of being a good friend to those around him.  I love his quiet dignity, his determination to do anything rather than lose another son, and the fact that he is both soft and resilient.  I want to write more characters like that.  

I have loved the last name McLeod since I was a kid and first saw the movie El Dorado (1966), in which John Wayne's character has a frenemy named McLeod.  I only heard it pronounced, I didn't see it spelled, and thought it must be spelled McCloud, which seemed to me like the absolute coolest name ever.  I even gave it to a character in a story I was writing at the time.  I was super disappointed to later learn how it is actually spelled... but I still love the way the name sounds, so I used it here for a character with lofty ideals and a high moral character, who lives high in the mountains.  Like a cloud.

If you look at the Pinterest board for A Noble Companion, my Ugly Duckling retelling, you'll see lots of photos of a young Ewan McGregor, and not one of Alan Ladd.  That's because Alan was my original casting for Javier Moncada, the love interest.  I wrote the first couple of drafts with him in mind, but then switched Javier to Ewan McGregor because he was a better physical fit for what the character as I was writing him.  But I still hear all of Javier's dialog in Alan's voice when I reread the book.  I loved finally getting to write him as a younger character!  

And then I went right back to writing him older in my short story "Safekeeping," which is in the anthology Follow the Lonesome Trail.  He just has a bit part, and barely any lines, as the weary Dr. Masterson who drinks too much.  In a way, that's me kind of addressing Alan Ladd's own struggles with alcohol, which is also something a lot of people I know have dealt with.  It's not a big focus of the story, but it's there, and my own headcanon involves Dr. Masterson eventually moving away from town and getting (and staying) sober with the help of his daughter-in-law.  

Those last two books are not part of my Once Upon a Western series, but the book I'm about to start writing is!  It's a retelling of The Steadfast Tin Soldier, it involves a Civil War veteran amputee, and Alan Ladd is once again playing a supporting character in it.  I think his character is in his late twenties, a bit older than the main character, and again something of a mentor, because I just really love writing him that way, I guess!

Beyond that?  Who knows!  Will I one day write a book without Alan Ladd in it?  I mean, yeah, it could happen.  It probably will, one day.  But for now, you can expect to keep seeing characters show up in my books who look, sound, and behave like characters he often played.  Because my imagination isn't tired of him yet :-)

My Tag Answers for Legends of Western Cinema Week 2025

Time for me to fill out our party tag!  

I'm going to put down the first western movie or TV show that comes to mind for these, and not agonize over whether they are the perfect example or not.  And I'll muse just a little on why each one came to mind for those prompts.

Cliff -- a tense cliffhanger Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024)  The ending of this movie is a series of cliffhangers, and I have been hanging off those cliffs for a year now with NO word on when they are releasing chapter two!  This is so agonizing!

Gulch -- a cool ambush scene The Professionals (1966) A set of professional gunfighters and adventurers are on a mission to rescue a kidnapped woman, only to get ambushed by her captors when they've almost got her back to her husband.  The gunfighters and the woman are stuck in a desert-mountain pass, and the only way to escape is if one of them stays behind to hold off their enemies... who used to actually be friends with a lot of them.  Lots of excitement and emotional impact.

Canyon -- a big gunfight A Fistful of Dollars (1964)  Oh, that finale, with the lone, nameless hero coolly facing down three evil brothers and their henchmen -- it's positively iconic.  Then you add in this brilliant trumpet theme by Ennio Morricone and the music swelling behind it, the dust in the street, the slow walk toward certain death, the quiet courage with a secret smile in front of it... oh my heart, I love the end of this movie so much.

Mountains -- high stakes The War Wagon (1967) An ex-con gathers a team to help him steal an armored wagon full of gold -- and help him get revenge on the man who had him unjustly accused and sentenced and thrown in jail.  High stakes indeed.

Valley -- a beautiful romance Angel and the Badman (1947)  It's like a Beauty and the Beast retelling where the Beast ends up at Beauty's family home instead.  And when I say the ending gives me goosebumps and brings tears to my eyes, I mean that in the best way possible!

Desert -- a suspenseful plot 3:10 to Yuma (1957)  A desperate rancher agrees to ensure a sly outlaw gets on the train headed for the Yuma Territorial Prison, the outlaw spends the next day doing everything in his considerable power to get free.  The tension just ratchets tighter and tighter --it's masterful.

Forest -- themes about renewal The Rare Breed (1966)  This is a movie about second chances.  A widow gets a second chance at love, a father and son get a second chance at understanding each other, a discontented cowhand gets a second chance at career choices... and it's all revolving around a big Hereford bull intended to bring new life and vitality into a Texas herd.

River -- traveling to a new home Buck and the Preacher (1972)  Black pioneers trying to get to Kansas to start new lives as farmers... but a lot of people seem to not want them to get to do that.  It's the only movie I know of that's set during the real-life Exoduster migration, too.

Plains -- characters who are farmers Shane (1953)  Even though the title character is a gunfighter, he befriends a farming family and gets semi-adopted by them.  If they weren't farmers, he wouldn't have to protect them from people trying to push them off their farm, so the whole plot really revolves around the fact that they are trying to raise crops and animals, not graze cattle.

Mesa -- an animal central to the story The Proud Rebel (1958)  A sweet, unassuming sheepdog is the heart inside this sweet story about family, love, and sacrifice.  And the dog doesn't die, which is a total bonus!

Have you seen any of these?

"The Iron Mistress" (1952)

Happy 9th Alaniversary to me :-D  I shall celebrate by reviewing Alan Ladd's biopic about James Bowie, the legendary frontiersman and inventor of the Bowie Knife.  

(Quick aside:  I always thought that a Bowie Knife and an Arkansas Toothpick were the same thing, but it turns out they're slightly different styles of hunting-and-fighting knives... which were both originally made by the same knifemaker in Arkansas.  Huh.)

The movie opens with Jim Bowie (Alan Ladd) leaving his Louisiana backwoods home for the first time to go sell his family's lumber in New Orleans.  In New Orleans, he gets tangled up with the aristocratic de Bornay siblings, Narcisse (Douglas Dick) and Judalon (Virginia Mayo).  He quickly falls for the spoiled and scheming Judalon; Narcisse tries to warn his new friend away from his sister, but of course, Jim Bowie's not thinking with his head at the moment.

Nothing Jim Bowie does convinces Judalon he's worthy of her love.  She doesn't dig poor guys.  Oh, she enjoys kissing him from time to time, and flirting with him, but no, she could never love a poor man.  So, Jim goes home, works hard, and gets rich.  When he encounters Judalon again, he's on an equal economic footing with her... and she's married.  But Judalon claims she's trying to get a divorce.  Jim believes her, of course.  

And then there's this whole thing involving horse races where Jim enters a horse race, and his horse wins, and all the aristocrats refuse to pay their gambling losses unless he can prove he owns the horse.  Insults and challenges ensue, and Jim ends up attending a duel as the second for a friend.  The duel is a set-up, an ambush to kill both Jim and his friend because they just don't belong in the fancy New Orleans world, no matter how rich they get.  

The movie does a reasonably good job recreating the Vidalia Sandbar Fight here -- a real-life event where a duel turned into a brawl.  Jim Bowie gets shot, then stabbed with a sword, but cuts down his opponent with a special knife he had made to his specifications.  Oh, and he still has the other guy's sword sticking out of him when he does it (which is historically accurate). 

Judalon reneges on her promise to leave her husband for Jim Bowie.  He leaves for Texas, hoping to find a new purpose for his life.  But he's ambushed on the way and left lying on the road, presumed dead.  There, he's found by Senorita Ursula de Varamendi (Phyllis Kirk), who takes him to her family's home so he can recover.

It turns out Ursula's father is the Governor of Texas.  She clearly would like to get together with Jim Bowie, but he is still obsessed with Judalon.  He leaves Texas, saying he's going to wrap up his business affairs in New Orleans, but Ursula can see it's really so he can have one final chance to find and woo Judalon.

Bowie encounters Judalon and her husband Phillipe (Alf Kjellin) on a riverboat.  Phillipe is a terrible gambler and desperate for money.  When he loses a huge sum of money to some card sharps, Jim saves the day by exposing the cheaters and getting Phillipe's money back.  Judalon tells her husband she's leaving him for Jim.  Phillipe decides to ambush Jim in his cabin on the boat.  There's another guy called Black Jack Sturdevant (Anthony Caruso) aboard the boat and planning to kill Jim too because of reasons.  (I kind of left out his whole part of the plot, but he's been after Jim Bowie for a while now -- and he stole Jim's knife.)  

Now, we all know that Jim Bowie died during the siege of the Alamo, not on a riverboat, so obviously, he survives the ambush.  And he finally realizes that Judalon has never and will never love him, that she's a scheming opportunist and liar.  He is through with her at last, and heads back to Texas to marry Ursula (also historically accurate!) and start a new life there.  And he tosses his special knife in the river on his way out for symbolic emphasis.

While the main plot of this whole movie is made up (everything involving Judalon, basically), it does at least hit some facts here and there.  It's one of those "well, this COULD have happened" sorts of movies.  And it's a good time -- lots of knife fights and duels and brawls, Alan Ladd looks gorgeous throughout, and he even gets to do some stunts.  The two things that you would think most likely to stretch your credulity -- that fight where he kills a guy while he's got a sword is sticking out of his chest, and the fact that he married the governor of Texas's daughter --  are totally true.  

Is this movie family friendly?  Basically.  There's a lot of hand-to-hand violence and some gunplay, but it's all very '50s-style and non-gory, non-scary stuff.  Judalon clearly is untrue to her husband, and even kisses Jim after she's married to Phillipe, but it's very tastefully handled and could even be a good talking point for parents and children about what marital infidelity is.

You can easily find The Iron Mistress on DVD, but I don't know that it's streaming anywhere.

Double the Summer Sunshine Awards

Both Taking Up Room and Nitrate Glow have nominated me for a Sunshine Award!  Thank you, lovely movie mavens!  I'm going to answer ALL their questions in this post :-D  ::flexes fingers::

Zee usual Sunshine Award Rules:

• Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog
• Thank the person who nominated you
• Provide a link to your nominator’s blog
• Answer your nominator’s questions
• Nominate up to 11 bloggers
• Ask your nominees 11 questions
• Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts

Here are my answers to Taking Up Room's questions:

1. Which movie of 2024 has been your favorite so far? Your least favorite? 

If we're saying strictly movies released in 2024, my favorite has definitely been Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024), and my least-favorite has been The Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024), and that is entirely misleading and horrible to say, because I enjoyed Ungentlemanly Warfare enough to buy a DVD copy for my shelves -- but those are the ONLY new movies made in 2024 I have seen this year.  It has been a sucky year for movies, yo.  There have been a few others I wouldn't mind seeing at some point, but I didn't want to see them enough to get me in the theater.

Now, if you want me to pick from all the movies I have watched for the first time in 2024, that's more interesting.  Then my favorite is probably The Train (1964), which is spellbinding, and my least-favorite has absolutely been Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1991), which was so abysmal I couldn't even finish it, not even for Christopher Lee's sake.

2. Do you like superhero movies or are you over them? 

I love them.  I'm so excited that my kids are getting old enough to really dig them!  But, at the same time, I am no longer watching the new MCU movies and shows because the first couple that came after Avengers: Endgame (2019) soured me deeply on where they were taking the franchise, so I am simply choosing to end the MCU there in my headcanon.

3. You have the chance to visit any movie studio or any movie production at the height of the studio era. Which studio or movie do you pick and why? 

I pick the production of The Blue Dahlia (1946) because it gives me the best shot at meeting both my favorite author, Raymond Chandler, and my dearly beloved Alan Ladd.  Plus his best friend, William Bendix

4. What do you like best about your favorite film genre? 

I love westerns because they make me happy.  I simply can't be uncheered by a cowboy!

5. Who are your favorite film critics? 

My blogging friends.  I pay basically no attention to "real" movie critics.  If they agree with me, it doesn't change anything, and if I disagree with them, I often get mad at their wrongness, and who needs more anger in their life?  Not me.

6. Are there any movies you regret reviewing? 

Ugh, yes.  I made a list nineteen years ago of my bottom 10 movies, and I really wish I could go back in time and stop myself from watching them.

7. Have you ever changed your opinion of a movie and if so, which movie was it? 

Goodness, yes!  Many times.  Especially as I gradually revisit movies I disliked when I was a teen.  3:10 to Yuma (1957), Hour of the Gun (1967), and The Proud Rebel (1958) are all movies I disliked or found boring as a teen, but dearly love now.

8. What are some of the other things you like doing besides blogging? 

I homeschool my kids, I read a lot of books, I write and publish books, I teach literature, I grow flowers and bake yummy snacks and take pretty pictures of books for Bookstagram.  I crochet.  I write a monthly newspaper column on Old West history.

9. Are there any movies that you think might make good video games? If you have any interest in video games, that is. 

I do enjoy video games now and then, particularly if they are movie-related.  I get a big kick out of the Lego Hobbit game, for instance.  It would be really fun to have a sort of film noir mash-up game where you get to choose what classic noir detective you want to be, and then you go around solving cases inspired by noir films.

10. If you could write about any celeb or other film-related topic, what or who do you write about? 

You mean, if I could write, like, a newspaper column on movies?  I could write about western movies and shows for months/years.  Or, if you mean, who or what could I write a nonfiction, film-related book about, again, westerns!  Maybe Alan Ladd's westerns, specifically.  Or Hamlet adaptations.  I keep watching more of those, and I could totally write a book reviewing a few dozen of them.  Which doesn't sound like a bad idea for a book, actually...

11. Who do you most enjoy seeing movies with?

I enjoy watching movies with people who are ready to enjoy them.  If I'm in a theater, give me a crowd that is going to laugh aloud at funny things, maybe clap at something awesome.  If I'm at home, give me companions who are NOT going to talk over the dialog all the time, but who are ready to laugh and maybe clap, maybe gasp, maybe quick share a "that's so cool!" kind of reaction.

Here are my answers to Nitrate Glow's questions:

1. What is the best theatrical experience you have ever had? 

When I was fifteen, we went to see Apollo 13 (1995) in the theater.  At the end, when the big, happy, wonderful reveal happens, the stoic Iowa farmers in that theater around us stood up and clapped.  I get tears in my eyes just remembering it.

2. Any opinions on the future of movie theaters?

I think theaters that are showing classic films alongside new ones will stay strong.  Theaters that only show new releases are going to struggle.  This is entirely based on my personal experience, in that I have gone to see two new releases this year, but by the end of this month, I'll have been to 9 re-releases of older films.

3. Is there a universally despised movie you think isn’t so bad? 

Well, The Lone Ranger (2013) is in my top five for all-time favorites...

4. Name a movie you enjoy from a genre you don’t usually like. 

I don't watch horror much at all, but I really like Dracula Untold (2014).  They put a very unique spin on his origins that I very much dig, as a writer.  Also, Luke Evans.  ::insert heart-eyes emoji here::

5. What do you think your best post to date is? 

I've been blogging for 22 years.  One best post?  Ouch.  Hmm.

Here are three I'm very proud of:

• My fake review of Murder Most Foul (1943)
• My poetic analysis of the song "Hurt" melded with Hamlet
• My post about finally figuring out why I love Hamlet so much

6. What is your favorite film from 1939? 

Destry Rides Again.  So quotable!

7. What are some classic film related books you would recommend? 

I really loved Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western by Will Wright.  Film Noir: Light and Shadow by Alain Silver and James Ursini is a delight.  I learned a lot from We'll Always Have Casablanca by Noah Isenberg.

8. What movie has the best cinematography you’ve ever seen? 

Well, this is tricky, because what does "best" mean?  Most-sweeping visuals?  Best composition?  Most striking use of color?  Gotta say, the best one I have seen in a long time is Midway (2019) -- they don't waste anything in their frames, and their shots showing what it was like to actually be in a dive bomber, diving on an enemy ship -- they're spectacular.

9. Name an underrated filmmaker/performer/creative in the industry you always champion. 

Have you heard me natter on for pages on end about Alan Ladd and how under-loved he is these days, how really good he was in serious roles even though the critics usually dismissed him as just a tough guy, how sweet and kind he was as a person?  If not, you must have not been reading my blog much for the past eight years...

10. Favorite movie soundtrack? 

I love a lot of soundtracks, so I'm just gonna go with Bruce Rowland's score for The Man from Snowy River (1982) because that's my favorite movie.  And the soundtrack is the first CD I ever bought.  And all three of my kids were born while that soundtrack was playing in the birthing room.

11. What movie are you itching to write about but haven’t yet?

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) -- but I'll be reviewing it this weekend for the Barbarians at the Gate blogathon I'm co-hosting!

And now, the nominees are...

Nobody.  I just got nominated with a third Sunshine Blogger Award a couple days ago, so I'm going to save my tagging for when I answer that one...

Ranking Alan Ladd's Movies by Favorite

(This is from Lucky Jordan)

Since I just reviewed one of Alan Ladd's movies very recently, I decided to do something a little different to celebrate his birthday today.  I'm arranging all 32 of Alan's movies that I have seen in order of how well I like them.  I've reviewed 29 of those here, but have watched three others only once each -- I want to watch them a second time before I review them, as is my wont.

Like my Ten Favorite Lists, this is arranged by my own personal preference, not by which of his movies I think is objectively the best.

You might notice that my top ten list is slightly different from the list of my Ten Favorite Alan Ladd Movies that I shared back in 2017.  Part of that is because I simply hadn't yet seen some of these movies when I made that list.  And part of it is because my affections have shifted a little after many rewatches.  I should probably make an updated Ten Favorites list for him!

1. Branded (1950)

2. Shane (1953)

3. And Now Tomorrow (1944)

4. The Blue Dahlia (1946)

5. The Great Gatsby (1949)

6. Whispering Smith (1948)

7. China (1943)

8. Calcutta (1946)

9. Red Mountain (1951)

10. This Gun for Hire (1942)

(On the set of Shane)

Movies 11-20 are all extremely rewatchable, I simply haven't felt pulled to rewatch them quite as often as I have my top ten picks.  But they're all solidly enjoyable, and Alan is lovely in them.

11. Captain Carey, USA (1949)

12. Saigon (1947)

13. The Proud Rebel (1958)

14. Appointment with Danger (1950)

15. Saskatchewan (1954)

16. The Glass Key (1942)

17. Drum Beat (1954)

18. O.S.S. (1946)

19. Santiago (1956)

20. Hell on Frisco Bay (1955)

(With his son David Ladd on the set of Saskatchewan)

Movies 21-25 are all really good too.  I'd say the top twenty-five of my favorites are films that can be enjoyed by basically anyone, whether they're an Alan Ladd fan or not.  They're all-around good stuff.  Movies 26-32 might be a little less so... but I've seen two of those only once, so they might move up on this list after another watching.

21. Chicago Deadline (1949)

22. The Iron Mistress (1952)

23. The Big Land (1957)

24. Two Years Before the Mast (1946)

25. Lucky Jordan (1942)

26. Botany Bay (1952)

27. Guns of the Timberland (1960)

28. Wild Harvest (1947)

29. The Light of Western Stars (1940)

30. Her First Romance (1940)

Alan has minor roles in The Light of Western Stars, Her First Romance, and Paper Bullets, so it's not shocking that I don't put them high on this list.  He's undeniably the star of One Foot in Hell, but if you read my review of it from a week or so ago, you'll see that it's an unpleasant movie.  I can appreciate it, but I don't like it, so it goes at the bottom.

31. Paper Bullets (Gangs, Inc.) (1941)

32. One Foot in Hell (1960)

(This is from Her First Romance)

Happy birthday, Alan Ladd!  <3