Convoy is to Smokey & The Bandit as Torque is to The Fast and the Furious. Landing someone like Peckinpah to direct was a bit like hiring Scorsese for a Go-Bots film – it just didn’t make sense to anyone. Garner Simmon’s bio claims that Sam’s friends were on that same wavelength and thought he was nuts to pick up something so shallow and commercial.

The Internet Movie Database is filled to the brim with reviews of the film that would have you believe that Bass is an unheralded visionary of science fiction, and that Phase IV is an overlooked classic of the genre. I’ll chalk that up to zeal for the artists other works, because Phase IV really is quite a bad film.

The connection between Airport and Miracle on 34th Street may be tenuous at best, though both films are the career highights from the oeuvre of director George Seaton. The film has become relatively obscure with age, though it may be best recognized by the popular spoof from directors Jim Abrahams and David Zucker spawned nearly a decade later, Airplane!

As you well know, there are more than a “fistful” of Westerns out there, and attempting to whittle down the selections for this months “See Also” articles was well, a bit tough.

It can be challenging to point to the true “birth” of the Western genre. Westerns have existed since the very first baby steps of the film industry, in one form or another, and grew up right alongside film as an artform.

It may seem counter-intuitive that film — a rising technology which in part heralded the death of the romantic period of cowboys, high plains drifters, lawmen and lawlessnes at the turn of the century — would so strongly embrace the very culture it helped to destroy.

But consider the concerns of the first examples of moving pictures.

We here at TFL usually refrain from talking about movies put out as recently as 2007. But in contemplating what other Westerns we could write about this month, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford kept popping into my mind. As a modern Western, it gains a lot of ground by refusing to even attempt to retread the usual visual terrain. Instead, the film builds on several visual influences removed from the Western genre itself but still linked to it thematically.

The trick of Black Rose Mansion is that the film operates quite honestly in spite of featuring a drag queen in a prominent role. Akihiro is afforded the same idolization as any femme fatale from genre films. Ryuko is portrayed as the haunting beauty, infecting men through her very being. She walks into the room and men find themselves slack-jawed.

As a first time director, Kenta’s efforts work out about as well as David S. Goyer’s when he switched from writing Batman films to directing Blade III (read: not well). It’s easy to blame the grief Kenta must have been enduring on set or his relative inexperience behind the camera, but at the end of the day all we have is the film itself… which just isn’t very good.

What makes Message from Space a standout in the Fukasaku catalogue is simply the sheer joy to be had watching it. While Space is not an impressive technical achievement on the level that Lucas’ film was, the film has the “whiz-bang” aspect down pat. As strange as it sounds, Fukasaku wisely replaced the “suspension of disbelief” (aka big budget) aspect of Star Wars, with something a bit more showy and fun.

Every prolific directors oeuvre seems to include a cinematic dud. For the lucky few, it’s a film that’s well received critically that underperforms at the box office. A film that just never finds its audience no matter how much praise is heaped on it. If you’re Martin Scorsese it’s more than one film and if you’re Tim Burton, it’s just Ed Wood.

It’s been a long month of paying tribute to one of cinemas all time greats. The Third Man has stimulated the minds of viewers for many decades now. Our hope is that at the very least, a trip to Harry Lime’s Vienna will incite a passion to take in other unheralded film noir greats.

There are truly too many great noirs to do justice to in one post. Here we suggest to you just a few of our all-time favorites.

Like all good film genres, noir had its share of low-budget drecks, put out by smaller studios to cash in on the trend. But, again, like all good genres, some of these “poverty row” noirs are actually terrific and totally worth your time. But if you’re going to check out just one, make that one is 1945′s Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.