Alan Vanneman is a writer living in Washington, DC. He is the author of two dead-tree novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara, both published by Penzler Press. Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara is available as an audiobook from Blackstone/Downpour. He is also the author of three new Nero Wolfe novellas recreating Rex Stout’s famous fat detective, a FREE ebook, and Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, a collection of two short stories and a novella, available both as an ebook and print on demand. All of his fiction can be accessed here at his blog Literature R Us. Portions of his article "Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone," which originally appeared online in Bright Lights, have been included in a textbook anthology by Allison Smith, Trixie Smith, and Stacia Watkins. Okay, American Beauty is shallow, pretentious, smug, condescending, and parochial. It radiates the traditional show-biz contempt for the talent-free slobs who inhabit American small towns and suburbia, cut off from[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
This 1934 musical mystery has girls, grins, guns, and Duke Ellington, too “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” That was the legend above the entrance[…]
Hot licks and high kicks in a rare early musical The King of Jazz is a time machine. This 1929 musical, filmed in Technicolor, preserves a part of America’s musical[…]
Documentaries · Writers & Critics
Yesteryear’s brilliant wags are apparently this year’s terminal bores Film historians and social anthropologists will applaud Kino Video’s recent release of Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin. Viewers[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
The crazy careers of the King of Pop and his Queenly Sister – or is it the other way around? For more than a decade, starting in 1986 when she[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Are Rock and Doris Hollywood’s strangest romantic team? How about Rock and Tony Randall? These things happened: Tony Randall picked Rock Hudson up in a bar with the line “Need[…]
Forgotten biopic offers a baker’s dozen of delights Is Words and Music, MGM’s 1948 “and then they wrote” biopic of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a masterpiece? Although long[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
“All Singing! All Dancing! All Color! All Racist!” Whoopee is a find, a treasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Most of all it is a chunk of Flo[…]
