Scorpio: Alain Delon’s Black Blazers

Alain Delon as Jean Laurier in Scorpio (1973)

Alain Delon as Jean Laurier in Scorpio (1973)

Vitals

Alain Delon as Jean Laurier, aka “Scorpio”, dangerous freelance assassin, former French paratrooper, and cat lover

Washington, D.C., and Vienna, Spring 1973

Film: Scorpio
Release Date: April 19, 1973
Director: Michael Winner
Wardrobe Master: Philippe Pickford

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Happy 85th birthday to French cinema icon Alain Delon, whose November 8, 1935 birthday makes him a Scorpio and thus a fitting choice for the title role in Michael Winner’s 1973 espionage thriller Scorpio. (Interestingly, Delon was re-teamed with The Leopard co-star Burt Lancaster, whose November 2, 1913 birthday makes him a Scorpio as well!) The astrological overtones sneak into the script as well as a CIA officer suggests to Delon’s character Jean Laurier that his codename “Scorpio” suits him:

We named you well, you’re a perfect Scorpio! You have a penchant for intrigue, violence…

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Devil in a Blue Dress: Denzel Washington’s Gabardine Windbreaker

Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

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Denzel Washington as Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, former aircraft mechanic and World War II veteran

Los Angeles, Summer 1948

Film: Devil in a Blue Dress
Release Date: September 29, 1995
Director: Carl Franklin
Costume Designer: Sharen Davis

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

#Noirvember continues with Devil in a Blue Dress, adapted from Walter Mosley’s excellent 1990 novel of the same name introducing readers to Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, an Army veteran making his way in postwar Los Angeles. Though he would later transform into a full-time private detective, Devil in a Blue Dress establishes Easy as a neo-Hitchockian hero, an everyman who finds himself at the center of a dangerous mystery after losing his job at an aircraft assembly plant.

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James Shigeta in The Crimson Kimono

James Shigeta as Detective Joe Kojaku in The Crimson Kimono (1959)

James Shigeta as Detective Joe Kojaku in The Crimson Kimono (1959)

Vitals

James Shigeta as Joe Kojaku, LAPD homicide detective

Los Angeles, Summer 1959

Film: The Crimson Kimono
Release Date: October 1959
Director: Samuel Fuller
Costume Supervisor: Bernice Pontrelli

Background

Are you among the many movie buffs who observe #Noirvember, the month-long celebration of shadowy cinema often set in worlds populated by gumshoes, gunsels, and femmes fatale. Defining film noir is often as murky as the outlines of the shadows in some of its seminal works, though even applying the infamous Potter Stewart rule yields at least dozens of crime dramas produced within and beyond the United States during the 1940s and ’50s.

Earlier this year, the Criterion Channel again showcased a collection of noir from Columbia Pictures, the erstwhile Poverty Row studio that churned out some of the most quintessential high-talent noir in including Gilda (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and In a Lonely Place (1950) as well as an array of criminally underseen B-movies that balanced their low budgets with high quality. One of my favorites from the collection was The Crimson Kimono (1959), directed by former crime reporter and World War II veteran Samuel Fuller.

Modern audiences may recognize James Shigeta as the patient and ultimately doomed Nakatomi executive in Die Hard. Here, a considerably younger Shigeta plays the charismatic Joe Kojaku, an apple-munching, piano-playing Japanese-American homicide detective called in with his partner Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) to investigate the murder of burlesque dancer Sugar Torch (Gloria Pall) on L.A.’s” Main Street” one brightly lit, jazz-filled night in August 1959. Continue reading →

The Candidate: Robert Redford’s Navy Striped Campaign Suit

Robert Redford as Bill McKay in The Candidate (1972)

Robert Redford as Bill McKay in The Candidate (1972)

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Robert Redford as Bill McKay, charismatic lawyer-turned-senatorial candidate

San Francisco to Los Angeles, Summer through Fall 1972

Film: The Candidate
Release Date: June 29, 1972
Director: Michael Ritchie
Costume Design: Patricia Norris
Costume Supervisor: Bernie Pollack

Background

Tomorrow is Election Day here in the United States… though I doubt anyone has missed the memo given the barrage of emails, texts, social media posts, and more designed to serve as reminders and instructions.

Avoiding any discussion of this year’s contentious political arena, let’s step back nearly 50 years to the early 1970s when Robert Redford was seeking to work again with director Michael Ritchie after their first collaboration in Downhill Racer (1969). The duo reportedly former political writer Jeremy Larner to pen what would become an Academy Award-winning screenplay chronicling “a candidate who sold his soul.” Larner had worked as a speechwriter for Senator Eugene McCarthy during McCarthy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, using this experience to draft the story of Bill McKay, the activist lawyer from California tapped to challenge the popular Republican incumbent in the battle for a U.S. Senate seat.

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George Clooney in From Dusk till Dawn

George Clooney as Seth Gecko in From Dusk till Dawn (1996)

George Clooney as Seth Gecko in From Dusk till Dawn (1996)

Vitals

George Clooney as Seth Gecko, dangerous fugitive bank robber and “real mean motor scooter”

Texas to Mexico, Summer 1995

Film: From Dusk till Dawn
Release Date: January 17, 1996
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Costume Designer: Graciela Mazón

Background

Happy Halloween, BAMF Style readers! Over the last few years, I’ve received a few requests to explore George Clooney’s garb in From Dusk till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez and penned by Quentin Tarantino from a story by Robert Kurtzman.

The action horror thriller marked a significant departure for Clooney— then popular as the charismatic pediatrician Doug Ross on ER, playing against type as the ruthless, Caesar-cut baddie terrorizing the southern plains with his psychotic brother on the road to El Rey.

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Targets: Boris Karloff in Tweed

Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok in Targets (1968)

Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok in Targets (1968)

Vitals

Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok, aging horror actor

Los Angeles, Summer 1967

Film: Targets
Release Date: August 15, 1968
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Production and Costume Design: Polly Platt

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

“Everybody’s dead… I feel like a dinosaur,” former horror icon Byron Orlok describes himself in a candid moment with Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich), an ambitious director and screenwriter played by Targets‘ own director and co-writer himself. Bogdanovich had written Orlok as a thinly disguised version of Boris Karloff, the elder statesman of horror cinema who was pushing 80 at the time of the film’s production. An embittered Byron shares with Sammy that his old-fashioned cinematic monsters—i.e. Frankenstein’s monster—are hardly the stuff to scare contemporary audiences as the local news horrifying enough with tales of senseless murder and random violence.

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Dracula A.D. 1972: Peter Cushing’s Striped Suit

Peter Cushing as Lorrimer Van Helsing in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Peter Cushing as Lorrimer Van Helsing in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Vitals

Peter Cushing as Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing, occult researcher and descendant of the famous vampire hunter

London, Fall 1972… A.D. 1972, that is

Film: Dracula A.D. 1972
Release Date: September 28, 1972
Director: Alan Gibson
Wardrobe Supervisor: Rosemary Burrows

Background

Just days away from Halloween, today’s post responds to a request received earlier this year from BAMF Style reader Alan, who suggested the “extremely cheesy and, at times, ridiculous” Hammer production Dracula A.D. 1972, starring horror maestros and real-life pals Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing reprising their usual roles as Count Dracula and Van Helsing, respectively.

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Brad Pitt’s Green Needlecord Shirt in World War Z

Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane in World War Z (2013)

Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane in World War Z (2013)

Vitals

Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, former United Nations investigator-turned-zombie fighter

Cardiff, Wales, Fall 2012

Film: World War Z
Release Date: June 21, 2013
Director: Marc Forster
Costume Designer: Mayes C. Rubeo

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

With the world under siege by a rapidly spreading virus, the need for a vaccine grows more desperate each day… and only Brad Pitt can save us.

Until that last line, you may have thought I was beginning an essay on life in 2020 (and who knows, maybe the star somehow will become a crucial figure in discovering a vaccine!) World War Z may be the perfect movie to watch during the Halloween season this year, tapping into this year’s zeitgiest of viruses and vaccines dominating headlines.

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Death on the Nile: Peter Ustinov’s Tropical Norfolk Suit as Poirot

Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (1978)

Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (1978)

Vitals

Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot, eccentric Belgian detective

Egypt, September 1937

Film: Death on the Nile
Release Date: September 29, 1978
Director: John Guillermin
Costume Designer: Anthony Powell

Background

In his adaptation of perhaps the best-known Hercule Poirot mystery from Agatha Christie’s prolific canon, Kenneth Branagh all but confirmed at the end of Murder on the Orient Express that his follow-up film would find the fussy Belgian detective solving a murder “right on the bloody Nile!”

Indeed, just weeks after Murder on the Orient Express was released in November 2017, it was officially announced that Death on the Nile would be entering production as the third major adaptation of Christie’s 1937 novel. Even after the intended December 2019 release was postponed to October 9, 2020, Death on the Nile joined the ranks of films like The Many Saints of Newark, No Time to Die, and Tenet whose release dates were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. The October date was optimistically shifted forward two weeks to October 23 (today!) before the perhaps more realistic release date of December 18 was announced.

Of course, Christie fans looking to get their Nile fix have long had a very watchable solution available with the 1978 adaptation of Death on the Nile, the first of six films to star two-time Academy Award winner Peter Ustinov as the detail-oriented detective.

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Death Wish: Charles Bronson’s Herringbone Sport Jacket

Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974)

Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974)

Vitals

Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, architect and soon-to-be vigilante

Tucson, Arizona, and New York City, Winter 1974

Film: Death Wish
Release Date: July 24, 1974
Director: Michael Winner
Costume Designer: Joseph G. Aulisi

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

After a wave of films celebrating outlaws during the counterculture era of the late ’60s (i.e. Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), an opposing wave crashed through American cinema at the start of the following decade, centered around a philosophy of vigilantism. The trend arguably kicked into high gear with Clint Eastwood’s renegade detective in Dirty Harry who despised the proverbial red tape preventing him from bringing deadly criminals to justice with his famed .44 Magnum. Within five years, Martin Scorsese had already evolved the focus from an endorsement of vigilantism into a cautionary tale with the release of Taxi Driver. Before the troubled Travis Bickle took it upon himself to “wash all this scum off the streets” of New York City, there was Paul Kersey.

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