Tagged: Donegal tweed
True Detective – Ray Velcoro’s Dark Western-Yoked Jacket
Colin Farrell as Ray Velcoro on the second season of True Detective (after ditching the mustache and bolo tie that defined the character’s early-season look.)
Vitals
Colin Farrell as Ray Velcoro, troubled and crooked Vinci PD detective
Ventura County, California, fall 2014 to spring 2015
Series: True Detective
Season: 2
Air Dates: June 21, 2015 – August 9, 2015
Creator: Nic Pizzolatto
Costume Designer: Alix Friedberg
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
The second season of HBO’s True Detective is, in my opinion, better judged when on its own than against its masterful and delightfully idiosyncratic first season. The second season brought together Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, and Vince Vaughn in an acid neo-noir more in the pulp crime tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s worlds than that of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart.
Even the show’s fictional and corrupt berg of Vinci, California, shares some undeniable similarities with the Bay City of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, though it was indeed based on the rough industrial city of Vernon, where it was partially filmed.
Our self-destructive, repressed, and expendable cop protagonists, portrayed by the Farrell-McAdams-Kitsch triad, practice maverick techniques that border on impropriety but their ideals and values align them with the incorruptible Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade… naturally leading to the straight-out-of-pulp “last stand” holed up in a secluded motel room with seemingly endless bottles of whiskey. Continue reading
Gene Hackman’s Tweed Suit as Buck Barrow
Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons as Buck and Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Vitals
Gene Hackman as “Buck” Barrow, bank robber, ex-convict, and family man
Texas, May 1933
Film: Bonnie & Clyde
Release Date: August 13, 1967
Director: Arthur Penn
Costume Designer: Theadora Van Runkle
Background
Happy birthday to Gene Hackman, who turns 86 years old today!
Bonnie and Clyde marked the first major role for Hackman, who had spent much of the ’60s as a struggling actor who shared rooms with fellow struggling actors Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. 1967 turned out to be a banner year for the friends and roommates, earning Hackman and Hoffman their first Academy Award nominations.
Hackman brings an easygoing charm to the role of the more famous Clyde’s older brother Buck, and the film gets many of the “on paper” details right about Buck. As Clyde’s older brother, he had more experience tangling with the law and spent the first few months of Clyde’s criminal career in the Texas state prison. He had escaped once, but—as Hackman tells Warren Beatty’s Clyde—it was his new wife Blanche that talked him into returning to prison to serve out the rest of his sentence, and he would be pardoned 15 months later. Buck and Blanche journeyed to visit Bonnie and Clyde, ostensibly for a reunion and possibly for Buck to try and talk Clyde into following his good example. Of course, the murder of two Joplin policemen during this reunion meant Buck would be wanted again as well, and the brothers led the motley “Barrow Gang” in a string of small-town stickups and kidnappings over the next three months. Continue reading
Moonraker: James Bond Hunts in Donegal Tweed
Roger Moore goes hunting as James Bond in Moonraker (1979)
Vitals
Roger Moore as James Bond, British “secret” agent who carries a camera with his “secret” code number on it
“California”, Fall 1979
Film: Moonraker
Release Date: June 26, 1979
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Costume Design: Jacques Fonteray
Tailor: Angelo Vitucci
Background
Happy 86th birthday, Roger Moore!
By the time Moonraker rolled around, the realism of earlier James Bond films like From Russia With Love was gone, replaced by near-fantasy adventures of a man who practically introduces himself as a secret agent, is completely irresistible to every woman to every woman in the world, and even goes into outer space. Continue reading
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