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"Curiosity killed the cat...but what it did to this man is more horrorble than a thousand deaths!" Available now from Fantagraphics, The Atlas Artist Edition Vol. 1: Joe Maneely is a gorgeous, oversized edition that features 256 pages of never-before-reprinted stories from the golden age of comics! Just for Daily Dead readers, we have the horror comic book story The Little Black Box that you can read right now!

From the Press Release: "Fantagraphics is celebrating one of Marvel Comics’ top artists of the 1950s, Joe Maneely, with The Atlas Artist Edition Vol. 1: Joe Maneely, a full-color, oversize collector’s volume featuring 38 complete and never-before-reprinted stories, including 11 electric and spine-tingling stories written by Stan Lee. Sadly, Maneely died at the age of 32, but left behind a sprawling and impressive body of work. The book showcases the full range of his artistic chops, with 256 pages of glorious genre storytelling from...

Actor John Wayne was an expert when it came to understanding the hard work that went into movies. He starred in everything from leading roles in major studio feature films to non-speaking parts in B-movies that he despised making. However, some of the most physically demanding parts turned out to be the most rewarding when the pictures fluttered on the silver screen. Here are five of the most physically demanding movies that Wayne starred in.

‘Stagecoach’ (1939) L-r: Claire Trevor as Dallas and John Wayne as Ringo Kid | Getty Images

Stagecoach boosted Wayne to stardom overnight in 1939, creating a whole new world for the actor. He played Ringo Kid in a story that follows a group of unlikely stagecoach passengers whose journey becomes increasingly difficult with the threat of a dangerous man named Geronimo on the loose.

Wayne came from the world of the props department and had a great appreciation for the world of stunts.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” opened in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, to high-end results. Now, United Artists wants to continue the slow burn with single-screening previews in three cities — while the rest of the country must wait until Christmas Day.

Tickets will go on sale this morning for one preview showing Saturday night, December 4, at two Alamo Drafthouse locations: the New Mission in San Francisco and South Lamar in Austin. Tickets are also on sale for a single Saturday-night screening at the Music Box in Chicago. These are anticipated to be 70mm presentations. This remains a work in progress; more previews seem likely, but for now there are no announced plans for further showings.

“The point is to build momentum and word of mouth for the film, while still keeping to the original plan of making it available to most people at Christmas,” says Erik Lomis,...

John Wayne would’ve celebrated his 112th birthday on May 26, 2019. The Oscar-winning actor, better known as “The Duke” to his fans, starred in over 165 movies throughout his career, oftentimes playing the swaggering, macho hero of westerns and war epics. But how many of his titles remain classics? In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

SEEJohn Ford movies: 20 greatest films ranked worst to best

Born in 1907 as Marion Robert Morrison, Wayne worked his way up from bit player to leading man, appearing in a number of poverty row, Z-grade westerns throughout the 1930s. He shot to stardom with his role in John Ford‘s “Stagecoach” (1939), which brought new shades of nuance and artistry to the Cowboys and Indians genre. It also kicked off a lucrative, decades-long partnership between the director and star, who would make over two dozen films together,...

Viewers looking (desperately) for American leaders to admire can’t do better than to reflect on John Ford’s folksy, at least partly authentic honorarium to one of the greats. Henry Fonda is 100% dead-on as a vision of Abe Lincoln to bring tears to our eyes. Imagine . . . there’s such a thing as political integrity, or simply a person that puts the public good ahead of personal advantage. Criterion’s older extras are augmented with a fine new feature commentary by John Ford authority Joseph McBride.

Young Mr. Lincoln

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 320

1939 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 100 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 9, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver, Arleen Whelan, Eddie Collins, Richard Cromwell, Eddie Quillan, Ward Bond, Milburn Stone, Francis Ford, Fred Kohler Jr..

Cinematography: Bert Glennon

Original Music: Alfred Newman

Written by Lamar Trotti

Produced by Kenneth Macgowan, Darryl F. Zanuck

Directed by John...

Jerry Goldsmith was already a veteran film composer with numerous iconic scores under his belt by the time he was enlisted to work on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). He’d worked in radio and television through the 1950s, contributing music to classic shows such as The Twilight Zone (1959) and Perry Mason (1959) before making the move to film, writing scores for films as diverse in subject matter (and sound) as Stagecoach (1966) and Planet of the Apes (1968) in the 1960s and Chinatown (1974) and The Omen (1976) in the 1970s. Goldsmith’s rich orchestral scores for such films, which were informed and influenced by early 20th century modernist composers, are both experimental and economical in their use and development of thematic material. He explained, “What I really try to do is to take one simple motif of the material for the picture, and a broad theme, and construct it so they always can work...

He wrecked hundreds of cars, fell from tall buildings, got blown up and was dragged by horses. As a stuntman, he broke 56 bones, including his back twice! Memphis-born Hal Needham revolutionized the art of the stuntman in films such as How The West Was Won, Stagecoach (1966), Hellfighters, Little Big Man, and hundreds of TV shows. He was a regular stunt double for Burt Reynolds and began his movie directing career with Burt as his lead in Smokey And The Bandit, the second highest-grossing film of 1977 next to Star Wars. He would direct Reynolds in four more films including Stroker Ace, Cannonball Run, and Hooper, which was not a tribute to just stuntmen in general, but to Needham’s hero Jock Mahoney , considered the greatest stuntman in Hollywood (and the stepfather of Hooper co-star Sally Field). Needham’s Megaforce (1982) is an ‘80s time capsule kitsch masterpiece and the delirious The Villain...

Michael York dashes onto the cinematic scene as the blundering but very enthusiastic D'Artagnan in Richard Lester's hugely enjoyable period comic romp. The late great Roy Kinnear is the long-suffering vassal of aristocratic swordsmen Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay, whilst Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway shine as heroine and villainess, respectively. Producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind filmed the following year's sequel back-to-back with this more successful first part, which approach they would revisit shortly for Superman and Superman II. Dumas with wit, energy and integrity.

Notable Quotable: "That man in his time has insulted me, broken my father's sword, had me clubbed to the ground, laid violent hands on the woman I love! He is inconvenient. "

Martin Anderson

Mike Nichols and Buck Henry achieve what seemed impossible, at least on the evidence of an earlier attempt: to transliterate the pitch-dark war humour of Joseph Heller into a cohesive,...

Norman Rockwell, America’s most beloved illustrator, purveyor of sentimental, small-town kitsch, preserver of American pieties, is undergoing something of a renaissance. Though Robert Hughes said in his 1978 Time obituary that “Rockwell's reputation was not made by museums and could not have been,” it is museums, starting with an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC in 1999, that are fuelling his reassessment. A superb draftsman and a canny anecdotalist, Rockwell’s work definitely repays serious attention, but I’m not sure his reputation will be greatly altered by his newest exhibition, at the Smithsonian, of works from the private collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two of the world’s most prominent Rockwell collectors. Spielberg and Lucas are obvious kindred spirits, sharing both Rockwell’s virtues as well as his limitations. Had this been an exhibition of Rockwell works from the collections of, say, Jean-Luc Godard and George Romero,...

Press release:

“The Wizard of Oz,” “Citizen Kane” and “Casablanca” will be among the 80 Best Picture nominees represented in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ new exhibition “The More the Merrier: Posters from the Ten Best Picture Nominees, 1936 – 1943,” opening on Saturday, January 23, in the Academy’s Grand Lobby Gallery in Beverly Hills. Admission is free.

Focusing on the eight consecutive years during which there were annually ten Best Picture nominees, the exhibition will showcase what are arguably some of the most striking movie posters ever created, including artwork for “Romeo and Juliet” (1936), “A Star Is Born” (1937), “Jezebel” (1938), “Stagecoach” (1939), “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), “The Pride of the Yankees” (1942) and “Heaven Can Wait” (1943). Key artists and illustrators whose work will be featured include Norman Rockwell, Al Hirschfeld, Jacques Kapralik, France’s Boris Grinsson and Pierre Pigeot, and Italy’s Ercole Brini.

The exhibition also will present the...

We keep getting letters from readers around the world that add interesting insights into the fact that Fox reused portions of Jerry Goldsmith's previous scores for the 1976 western The Last Hard Men. Now comes this informative letter:

My name is Gergely Hubai. I'm a Hungarian film music author.

I feel that I must clarify this particular story. This is what happened: Jerry Goldsmith never worked on The Last Hard Men (he was working on The Omen at that time). What happened was that Andrew. McLaglen requested an avantgarde score from composer Leonard Rosenman, which was eventually thrown out because it turned out it wasn't what he was looking for. Apparently he wanted to reflect the early 20th century setting by having contemporary avantgarde music playing in the picture or something to that effect. Eventually the studio pulled out a number of cues from previous Goldsmith Westerns, including 100 Rifles and Stagecoach.

The plot thickens: we're now told that Jerry Goldsmith's score for The Last Hard Men also incorporated some of his work from the 1965 spy movie Morituri! Graham Rye's letter regarding Jerry Goldsmith's score for 100 Rifles which was recycled for The Last Hard Men, has drawn a number of comments from readers, some of whom have shed some light on the mystery of why such a revered composer might want to use a previous score in a new movie:

Hi Lee

Well Graham is both correct and incorrect about the soundtrack for the above. The story of The Last Hard Men score is that a score by Leonard Rosenman was rejected and, whether due to time constraints or cost, Fox simply chose to track the movie with cues from three Jerry Goldsmith Fox westerns (100 Rifles, Rio Conchos and the remake of Stagecoach) and also his score for the thriller Morituri.