Alpi’s book on Siodmak is terrific if you can find a copy. I wish somebody would pay for another book on him — I’d write it!

I expect I will jump in, but hope that any resulting splash will be less turbulent than this entry into the water proved to be.

(Although it wasn’t an entirely unilluminating turbulence, when all is said and done…).

And you’re welcome to the kind words; frankly, I’m in awe of what you do here — terrifically smart and laugh-out-loud funny, day in and day out.

(And I’ll here single out what you’ve written about Raoul Walsh and Robert Siodmak — your archives on those directors are just unbelievably rich. On the latter, by the way, you significantly complicate the argument made by Thomas Elsaesser — one of the great living film scholars — on the relationship between Weimar cinema and film noir in his Weimar Cinema and After. Best book I know on the subject — but your treatment of Siodmak is more nuanced than his, and undercuts some of his claims.)

An irony: one of the key pieces of writing for me in deciding to pursue film as an academic field of study, which then led to my going on to becoming an actual film academic (I’m assuming it’s pretty obvious that I’m a member of the professoriate, yes?), was the 1978 Film Comment article, “Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative.”

The performers in that jam session? Raymond Durgnat, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and David Ehrenstein.

Great piece.