From Dusk Till Dong

Happy birthday to Salma Hayek, star of From Dusk Till Dawn, a fun but forgettable vampire movie (with a historically awful acting performance by its screenwriter Quentin Tarantino) made memorable by Ms. Hayek’s turn as a stripper named Santanico Pandemonium. The scene in which she dances with an 11-foot python at a strip club called The Titty Twister inspired Hack to include it on his list of the 10 greatest films ever made.

A Towel for Your Thoughts

Joan Blondell was a wonderful actress who inevitably walked away with films like The Cincinnati Kid, Opening Night and The Blue Veil (for which she received an Oscar nomination). But her most memorable work came as the queen of the Pre-Code Era, that period between 1929 and 1935 when the Production Code was adopted by the big studios that effectively neutered any realistic adult content from their films. But in those glorious six years between the introduction of the talkies and the puritanical dictatorship of first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Will Hays, Joan played countless molls to screen gangsters played by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, guzzling bathtub gin and showing more skin than you ever would have expected to see in the Roaring 30s.

Happy heavenly birthday to the great Joan Blondell!

The Blackest Widow

Hack claims that this novel is based on a real woman he knew who would murder any man after having sex with him once. His publisher John Kane has admitted that he knows the woman and that she’s been married for 30 years to the same man by whom she has three children and that Hack made up the lie to explain why he refused to have sex with her when, in reality, it was she who refused to have sex with him. It’s a pretty good book though, with a nice subplot about a lonely clown.