There are two Carolinas in the USA. North and South. Phil is exploring both of them. So, this week’s show was pre-recorded quite a few days earlier than usual. In it, Dean and Phil discuss The Actor’s Gang, a well-respected theater company and training ground for talented performers (like their pal, Steve Benaquist). Dean and Phil continue to talk about the late, great artist David Hockney, his love of smoking, and the ways in which he taught the world to think of Los Angeles, namely as it pertains to light. Light and its interplay with shadows is absolutely top of mind for your friends in podcasting and they go deep into film noir, talking about such great actors as George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Edmond O’Brien, and Edward G. Robinson, and such great directors of noir as Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak. The movies They Drive by Night, The Killers and Scarlet Street all get appraised. Finally, Phil holds court about the 1980 neo-noir The First Deadly Sin, which was the final motion picture produced by Frank Sinatra, and the final lead performance for Sinatra as an actor. It was supposed to have been directed by Roman Polanski, which has Phil asking, “What if it had been?” He also suggests another young director (at the time) who would have been a better choice than the film’s eventual director, Brian G. Hutton. Nevertheless, Hutton did director a couple of Dean’s favorite movies, so Phil shares the quite interesting details of Hutton’s career.

Even we are impressed at the ground covered in only 74 minutes this week by your friends in podcasting! They start by going deep into the improvisational jazz of Sun Ra and dissecting comments Sonny Rollins made in a podcast about jazz being “ a music of freedom”. The Coen Brothers’ 1991 masterpiece Barton Fink gets revisited at 35 and is found to be better than ever. The film genre of neo-noir gets analyzed, and the all-too-overlooked Hickey & Boggs (directed by Robert Culp and co-starring Culp and Bill Cosby) gets championed as an outstanding exemplar of that genre. The death of certain kinds of horror tropes are foremost on Dean’s mind after seeing Scream 7, whereas Phil is intrigued by the new generation of horror exemplified by the current box office sensations Backrooms and Obsession. Then, Dean and Phil switch genres yet again, and examine cinematic comedy through two documentaries (Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and Marty, Life is Short), one all-time classic (Some Like it Hot) and two current releases in theaters (I Love Boosters and The Sheep Detectives).