One last post of favorite actors & actresses

Here's the last of four posts, featuring my very favorite actors and actresses. Turns out there are twenty of each-- total coincidence, but it worked out pretty well. In the first post, I mentioned that they all had great acting chops, a lot of presence, and an over-abundance of sex appeal. Anyway, thanks for indulging me. I'm curious about YOUR picks, readers. Feel free to share.


Lauren Bacall. Must see movies: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage.

Gene Tierney. Must see movies: Laura, Leave Her to Heaven.

Natalie Portman. Old school beauty, talent, and class. Must see movies: Leon: The Profesional, Closer, Black Swan.

Michael Shannon. Must see movies: Take Shelter, The Missing Person, Boardwalk Empire.

Paul Newman. Must see movies: Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Cool Hand Luke,The Hustler, Hombre.

Steve McQueen. Just cool, man. That's all. Must see movies: Bullitt, The Getaway, Tom Horn.

Richard Widmark. No one did "psycho" better, but he also had amazing diversity. Must see movies: Kiss of Death, Night & the City, Pick-up on South Street.

Robert Mitchum. The epitome of film noir cool, no matter what role he played. Must see movies: Out of the Past, Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear, Crossfire.

Toshiro Mifune. Bad-ass, with a quiet intensity few could match. Must see movies: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomon.

Madeline Kahn. The funniest woman who ever lived. And sexy as hell. Must see movies: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety.

That's it. Here's some quick links to the first three posts:

Favorite Actors & Actresses

More Actors & Actresses

Yet More Actors & Actresses

Yet More Actors & Actresses

The third set of ten.

Ava Gardner. Must see movies: The Killers, Mogambo, Night of the Iguana

Richard Burton. Must see movies: Night of the Iguana, Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Where Eagles Dare

Michelle Rodriguez. Must see movies: Girlfight, Resident Evil, Machete

Helena Bonham-Carter. Must see movies: Fight Club, A Room with a View, Howard's End

Michael Caine. Must see movies: Alfie, The Ipcress File, The Man Who Would Be King, Get Carter, Sleuth, oh he's really my all time favorite so I could go on and on...

 Joan Blondell. Must see movies: Night Nurses, Gold Diggers of 1933, Public Enemy

Burt Lancaster. Must see movies: The Killers, Brute Force, Criss Cross, Sweet Smell of Success

Christopher Lee. Must see movies: The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Devil Rides Out, The Wicker Man

Marcello Mastroianni. Must see movies: 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, La Notte, Big Deal on Madonna Street

Myrna Loy. Must see movies: The Thin Man, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Bachelor & the Bobby Soxer.

More actors and actresses...

...and still, just because. The second of four sets of ten.

Dan Duryea. Must see movies: Criss Cross, Scarlet Street, Black Angel

 Linda Darnell. Must see movies: The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand.

 Daniel Day-Lewis. Must see movies: Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood

 James Coburn. Must see movies: Duck, You Sucker, The Magnificent Seven, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

 Hedy Lamarr. Must see movies: Algiers, Dishonored Lady, Samson and Delilah.

 Humphrey Bogart. Must see movies: The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, African Queen, Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

 Elizabeth Taylor.  Must see movies: Cleopatra, Butterfield 8, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Place in the Sun.

 Giulietta Masina. Must see movies: La Strada, Nights of Cabiria.

 Gloria Grahame. Must see movies: In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, Odds Against Tomorrow.

 Lee Marvin. Must see movies: Point Blank, The Big Red One, The Dirty Dozen, Emperor of the North Pole.

More to come...

Favorite actors & actresses...

... because why not.

All my favorite actors and actresses have three things in common: solid acting chops, major presence, and serious sex appeal. Most of them are from the by-gone days of cinema, but a handful are modern and still working. I picked 20 males and 20 females. Here's the first set of them, in no particular order:


Clint Eastwood. Must see movies: DIRTY HARRY, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, UNFORGIVEN, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

Clara Bow. The It Girl. Must see movie: IT

Anna Faris, the best comedic actress working today. Must see movies: HOUSE BUNNY, SMILEY FACE

Anne Hathaway, all the allure and glamour of Old Hollywood. Must see movie: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, DARK KNIGHT RISES

Marilyn Monroe. A much finer actress than she is generally given credit for. Must see movies: NIAGARA, SEVEN YEAR ITCH, SOME LIKE IT HOT

Joan Bennett, the fragile queen of noir. Must see movies: WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, SCARLET STREET

Buster Keaton. The greatest comedy genius of all time. Must see movies: THE CAMERAMAN, THE GENERAL, SHERLOCK JR, COPS

Casey Affleck. Must see movies: GONE BABY GONE, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Charles Bronson. Must see movies: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, MR. MAJESTYK, HARD TIMES, DEATH WISH

Claudia Cardinale. Must see movies: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, THE LEOPARD, THE PROFESSIONALS

My favorite writers

I meant to do this some time ago, but the hospital stay and all sorts of other stuff delayed it long enough that I forgot all about it until now. A few months ago I did a series of posts all about my favorite writers in various genres, writers who influenced, educated or just entertained me significantly over the years. I'd meant to put all the post links in one spot after that; well, here they are:

Horror writers

Speculative Fiction writers

"Literary" writers

Espionage writers

Adventure writers

Western writers

Hard-boiled writers

Noir writers

CORROSION, by Jon Bassoff

It's not too often a new novel comes along that you can call "psycho-noir" and not be wildly inaccurate. True psycho-noir is a rare and darkly beautiful thing; well-done psycho-noir even more so.

CORROSION, by Jon Bassoff, is a well-done psycho-noir. No, it's more than that-- it's a bit of a masterpiece, really, probably the best I've read since Allan Guthrie's SLAMMER. It's devious and disturbing, with an underlying sense of dread that keeps your guts in an uproar and absolutely refuses to let you stop reading.

Bassoff tells a sort of a duel story here, first with the horribly disfigured Joseph Downs, an obviously disturbed veteran of the war in Iraq. Joseph gets involved with the wrong woman (a tried-and-true standard starting point for noir stories) and it inevitably leads to violence and depravity. But Bassoff takes a left turn after that, subverting the old noir tropes and focusing on Joseph's fragile psyche after being betrayed.

The second part of CORROSION skips backwards a few years and tells the first-person story of Benton Faulks, a lonely, messed-up kid dealing with his dying mother, a father going slowly insane, and his insatiable lust (love?) for an older woman who wants nothing to do with him. Reading Benton's slow descent into a kind of madness that makes even his father look sane is hard; when Benton begins acting out his fantasies of being a sort of super-hero soldier, it's horrifying.

Savvy readers will probably guess the connection between these two narratives early on. But it's still fascinating to see the way Bassoff plays it out, to see the way he ties the threads together and allows his tale to loop around on itself. Some reviewers have compared his style and his themes to Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner and Jim Thompson, and I suppose that's all true. But Bassoff has a style of his own, obsessions deeper and darker than those three brilliant influences would probably have dared to go.

For true modern psycho-noir, you can't do much better than this one.

Hawthorne: Tales of a Weirder West

HAWTHORNE: TALES OF A WEIRDER WEST is available now on Createspace for SIX BUCKS. Why so cheap? We want a copy of this book in as many hands as possible, that's why. That's also the reason it's going to be on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords as well, pretty soon.

UPDATE: Now available for Kindle on Amazon, right here, and doing remarkably well. We've hit #3 on the Western Horror chart, right behind Robert E. Howard (which is only right, since REH's Solomon Kane was an enormous influence for Hawthorne).