Category Archives: noir

The Plaid Project Continues — The Keeper of the Flame

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As I wrote in February, I have made it a project of mine to watch every classic film noir that was clipped and used in the montage comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner feature from 1982. This past weekend I finally got back on the train and watched the 1942 film The Keeper of the Flame starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.

MGM

The film started with a terrible thunderstorm and a car hurtling off a bridge, killing its sole occupant Robert Forrest, an idolized and beloved patriot of the United States, driving the entire nation into grief and mourning. The small New England community is quickly overrun with reporters eager to cover the man’s untimely death, eulogize him to the nation, and perhaps impossibly get access to the secretive Forrest estate and elusive and reclusive widow. Among the throng reporters is Stephen O’Malley (Tracy) freshly back from Germany as the Nazis begin their march towards war, already deep in their persecutions of the Jewish population along with everyone else they deem ‘undesirable’ to their deluded notions of national and racial purity. O’Malley, a devoted follower of Forrest and his ideal, intends not to simply cover the tragic accident but to produce a definitive biography of his idol but when he succeeds in infiltrating the estate his reporter’s instincts kick in and his suspicions grow that something is off, that a truth about the crash and about the man is being hidden and O’Malley digs for that secret while becoming enamored with Forrest’s widow, Catherine (Hepburn.)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid used only the car crash at this film’s start for their feature, leaving the rest of this deeply political drama untouched for me to discover in this viewing. The secret that is hidden by the estate and the family I found to be one that was readily apparent but perhaps would not have been so obvious to an audience in 1942 freshly thrown into the global conflict that would see millions dead before it finally ended. Hepburn and Tracy maintain their unique chemistry even as they play, at least initially, characters who harbor a deep distrust of one another. The film was well shot and well written though my suspicion, later confirmed, about the ‘twist’ kept me from fully enjoying this feature. If you wish to see this film unspoiled, and its currently streaming on HBOMax, then stop here. Those unconcerned about spoilers, care read on.

The secret is of course that this beloved ultra-patriot who so perfectly embodied the ideals of the perfect American was in fact a fascist with intent to use his influence, connections, and wealth to seize control of the nation with himself as dictator like the foreign despots he so admired. His widow, seeing that the bridge had failed and knowing he would be taking that route, withheld any warning for her husband leaving him to die a hero in an accident and saving the nation from his plots.

It is charmingly naive that in 1942 the writers and creatives could only conceive of a fascist coming to power in the United States by hiding his true nature and not by blatantly bragging about his desires to be a dictator and openly flaunting his hatred and racism. Hopefully the next film, Johnny Eager, will be far less relevant.

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Detective Hole Can’t Stop Digging So I Will

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Mentioned some weeks ago on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Netflix began streaming a new Nordic noir Detective Hole and, being fans of Nordic noir, my sweetie-wife and I gave the series a go. And, after four out of nine episodes, we have let the show do its merry way unconcerned with its resolution.

Working Title Television

Detective Harry Hole is a haunted alcoholic detective in Norway trying to live down killing his partner in a drunken car crash while in hot pursuit of a murderous bank robber. Now, with a new partner, a new significant other, and trying to stay on the wagon, Hole is presented with a fresh set of crises, his new partner is murdered while trying to locate a low-level drug dealer and a serial killer is stalking the streets of Oslo, pushing Hole back into the bottle and off the force.

That single paragraph synopsis could be for almost a countless number of second-rate, trope-filled, cliche-riddled police procedurals of which Detective Hole is merely a foreign language example.In addition to the stock characters, settings, and situations the series presents with a nearly comical lack of understanding of modern forensic work and evidence.

When Hole’s partner was killed, it was an on-screen scene so we the audience know that the murderer was in actuality fellow detective Waller who was the low-level drug dealer’s upper management. Waller shot the dealer in the stomach, then pursued the partner who had witnessed it, fought with her, put her in a sleeper chokehold, before arranging for the still dying dealer to be holding the pistol that killed the partner. Waller then presented himself as the heroic cop who came in just too late to save her fellow officer, shooting and killing the dealer.

None of the physical evidence supports such an outlandish lie. The dealer has a gunshot to the stomach which bled for several minutes into his abdominal cavity before being killed by a shot to the head. He also would present with no bruising, scratches, or any other signs of a life and death struggle which the dead partner does, or at least would, have.

I grumbled and, not happily, let them have that however that bit of silliness, but it got far, far worse.

Investigating the serial killer, Hole asks the forensic team if the same pistol was used to kill both women and he is told that it is ‘very difficult’ to determine if the same gun fired both rounds.

What the actual fork? Are the writers so ignorant of modern police procedures that they are unaware of rifling? That the grooves of a gun barrel are like a firearm’s fingerprints?

Unwilling to let their absurdity rest there the creatives, in addition to the serial killer sub-plot, the crooked cop sub-plot, and the cliched drunk cop plot, added yet another layer, a secret society of cops and politicians flooding the streets with weapons, provoking gangland warfare so that regulations would be changed allowing police to go about armed.

That was too much for me and my sweetie-wife, there are far better shows to watch.

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Film Review: Blood on the Moon (1948)

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After visiting the San Diego Zoo with my sweetie-wife and a very quick lunch of a turkey sandwich to stay within my diet, I hurried to downtown San Diego and the Digital Gym theater for San Diego Film Geeks monthly western for 2026, Blood on the Moon.

RKO Pictures

The western genre is not one that generally calls out to me. Growing up in the 60s the TV was filled with western programming, both original series and films released for broadcast and I guess that the overexposure and my own natural inclination towards more fantastic stories made that part of cinema unappealing to me. There are a few scattered westerns in my library of film, but the genre is decidedly underrepresented there. That said when I saw that this month’s selection is considered a noir and that it was directed by Robert Wise very early in his illustrious career, well that made it just too damned intriguing for me to miss on the big screen. The screening was well attended, and a film historian gave a nice 10 minutes or so talk before the film.

Blood on the Moon, adapted from the novel Gunman’s Chance by Luke Short, stars Robert Mitchum as Jim Garry, a cowboy down on his luck, his herd of cattle having died of disease, answering a call for employment by an old friend Tate Riling (Robert Preston). When Garry arrives he discovers that Tate has brought him into a range war between small farm ranchers organized by Tate against John Lufton, whose large herd usually sells to the Indian Services for the local reservation, but now must be driven from the native territory or be seized by the government leaving the only grazing land for Lufton that claimed by the small ranchers. Things become morally complicated for Garry when he learns that conflict has been engineered from the start by Tate and a corrupt official as a way to force Lufton to sell his herd to Tate at fire-sale prices, ruining Lufton and enriching Tate and the official.

Photographed by Nicholas Musuraca who also shot the fabulous Out of the Past — which also starred Mitchum — this western has the dark moody atmosphere of a film noir, making use of deep shadows to present a frame where far from everything is visible to either the characters or the audience. With morally grey characters, betrayals, and corruption this more than qualifies as a noir in my book and presented in a realistic and gritty manner, the film avoids the grand mythological themes that so often bedevils the western. When the characters fight, they tire and become injured, showing them as ‘real’ people and not idealized versions of American Knights dispensing justice in a lawless land.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and it was well worth an afternoon downtown.

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Scheduling Conflicts

Warner Brothers Studios

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From the moment I laid eyes on the trailer for The Bride! (one must not skip the exclamation mark) I knew that this was a film I wanted to see. A mash-up of classic Warner Brothers’ 30s gangsters with Frankenstein? That is an idea so wild, so unconventional that to wait for streaming struck me as a crime against cinema. It was a natural for me. I have several WB classic gangster films on Blu-Ray disc and while no direct adaptation of Frankenstein exists in my library of films, it is a property I have seen many movie versions of thus seeing The Bride! became a requirement. It opens this weekend.

My sweetie-wife let me know that she wants to see this new film as well and that means we watch it at our usual time and convenience: the earliest available Sunday morning matinee. She is not a late-night person as I am and so these showings not only fit her circadian rhythm but if it’s early enough also provide an excellence chance for a lunch out.

So far all is well and good, but then San Diego Film Geeks had to go and get into the picture.

San Diego Film Geeks is a local organization, club, association, a something, that hosts cinema screenings throughout the calendar year. In addition to their Secret Morgue, a six-film marathon each September where the titles are kept secret and only a theme is announced, they also host a year-long film festival at a micro theater, the Digital Gym, screening one film, or sometimes a double feature, a month for that year’s theme. Previous festivals have been ‘Get Hammered,’ celebrating Hammer Horror, and ‘Noir on the Boulevard’ for film noir. In the past, I have purchased the year-long pass giving them the maximum support, but this year’s theme is Westerns, a genre that, with a few exceptions, I have never particularly taken to.

March’s western is Blood on the Moon and is described as a film noir western.

Damn, if that one doesn’t interest me. Of course it is screening Sunday at noon. If I want to see the San Diego Film Geeks presentation, I will have to push the trippy gangster/monster movie off for another week.

As if starting a diet this week was painful enough.

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The ‘Dead Men’ Project: Film, 1 The Bribe

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Having acquired the DVD from San Diego City Library my quest to watch every movie in the compilation comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid begins with the lowest scoring movie, 1949’s The Bribe, starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and Vincent Price.

MGM

Federal Agent Rigby (Taylor) is sent far from any US jurisdiction to a small island off Central America and the fishing hamlet of Carlotta to investigate a criminal ring smuggling war surplus aircraft engines onto the international black market. Had the feature opened this way it might have been a better movie, instead it begins with the most tired of film noir tropes, particularly when done badly, the voice-over. To make this overused technique even less appealing the voice-over is spoken in second person. So, everything we see Rigby narrating that he did he describes ‘you’ did. I myself have never found a piece of fiction where the second person works, it always keeps me at a distance, unable to submerge myself in the story being told, either in prose or in cinema.

Anyway, Rigby finds the married couple that the fed believe are running the smuggling operation, Elizabeth (Gardner) a nightclub singer and Hinton (John Hodiak) her drunkard of a husband. Naturally, Rigby falls for Elizabeth and she for him though the production code keeps their mutual feelings chaste. Rigby’s cover as someone simply looking for sport fishing had apparently the half-life of one of James Bond’s covers and he is approached by Bealer (Laughton) who offers him a bribe of 10,000 dollars to simply leave the island. The real bribe of the title however, is the threat to drag Elizabeth down with the criminals when she had actually been ignorant of it all unless Rigby ‘plays ball.’

At one point the movie makes extensive use of rear-screen projection so performers on a boat set might appear to be out on the open sea, marlin fishing. While this technique may have been acceptable to audiences of the 40s and 50s to modern eyes it screams its tricks like a poor stage magician. Which is a shame as the sequence boasts what in better handled hands could have been a tense and dynamic scene of attempted assassination.

There are no real surprises, or twisty plot reveals and if The Bribe didn’t boast a cast of well-established stars by 1949’s reckoning, it would be an adequate ‘B-Picture.’ The only real standout moment in the movie is the final chase when Rigby pursues the ringleader Carwood (Price) through a festival and into a massive ground-level firework display. Some shots are clearly the leads, Taylor and Price, dashing through exploding fireworks and others are stunt performers with their features well hidden. Elements of this climax were used in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and are what intrigued me the most, igniting my curiosity to see just how and why such a scene occurred.

The DVD is going back to the library and while The Bribe made for a passable lunch time viewing it is not a noir that is going to live for very long in my head or my heart.

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Spider Noir

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse introduced to the silver screen a number of Spider-Man variants with its central protagonist being the young Miles Morales but one of the favorites to emerge from the strange, animated team up was Spider-Man Noir, a 40s styled, film noir, detective enhanced with spider-like abilities, and voiced with manic perfection by internet favorite Nicolas Cage.

Last night I stumbled across the trailer for a new television series premiering on Amazon Prime in May 2026, Spider Noir, a live action continuation of the adventures of Spider-Man Noir, starring Nicolas Cage.

Much as my love of Warner Brothers’ gangsters movies and classic Universal monsters is making it impossible for me to sidestep The Bride! this mash-up of film noir tropes with the over-the-top manic style of Cage makes Spider Noir equally irresistible.

Just as the trailer was reaching its end, I thought to myself, it is a bloody shame that the series is not in glorious black-and-white. One of the more amusing aspects of the Spider-Man Noir character in the animated film was his puzzlement over things with color as he continued to be rendered in a stark greyscale. Then the trailer’s image suddenly shifted to black-and-white accompanied by text indicating the program could be watched in either format.

Man, I hope they pull that off well.

A few films in the last decade have released black-and-white versions to home video going for that vintage film noir aesthetic, three notable ones were Logan, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Nightmare Alley. I have seen all of these movies, which are each exceptional examples of the cinematic arts, but honestly only one of them really worked in Black-And-White.

Both Logan and Mad Max: Fury Road looked simply like the film’s color data had been deleted, the greyscale nature of the image had none of the life or vibrancy of a shot composed and production designed for Black-and-White cinematography. del Toro’s remake of the film noir classic Nightmare Alley on the other hand, looked better in its Black-and-White version than it did in the full color rendering. I do not know this for a fact, but I would bet dollars to donuts that del Toro guided every aspect of production design and photography with a monochrome sensibility in mind, but, aware that the studio would balk at releasing it solely in that format. Nightmare Alley, though dragged down by a bit of casting, in both color and in Black-and-White looks fantastic, just better in the monochrome that evokes both the pre-war period of the story and the associations with classic cinema.

Monochrome cinematography is not just shooting with B&W film, or digitally removing the color data, it is understanding that color itself registers differently when photographed in Black-and-White. It is knowing that blood looks too pale and something dark brown is more ‘realistic’ than photographing a crimson liquid or knowing that colors that may garishly clash when seen in their full hues can be very complimentary in greyscale. There lies the real challenge of making a production for both color and Black-and-White, resolving those conflicts between the different requirements.

Did the production team of Spider Noir design from the ground up for both color images and Black-and-White? I do not know but man, oh, man I really hope that they did.

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The ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ Project

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When I went to the theater with my friend Ray in 1982 to see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it was not because I was a deep fan of detective movies or film noir. Steve Martin and Carl Reiner were enough of a selling point to motivate me to see this comedy, and it’s something I never regretted.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is both a satire and a salute to the detective and film noir films of the 1940s and 1950s, with Steve Martin as Rigby Reardon hired by Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) to investigate the mysterious death of her father, a famous scientist. Rigby’s investigation brings him into contact with numerous shady and dangerous characters before leading him to a cadre of Nazis in South America bent on continuing the war with America.

What makes this film special is that it’s a collage project with most of the shady and dangerous characters that Martin interacts with as Rigby carefully edited scenes from classic movies of the period. By careful use of over-the-shoulder shots, sets and costumes crafted to duplicate those seen in the archival footage, and sometimes the use of doubles photographed without their faces visible, the illusion that Martin is actually in these scenes is delivered with a degree of sophistication that’s impressive.

A few years after seeing and thoroughly enjoying this movie in my Introduction to Cinematography course I was exposed to some of the more important films that Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid used in its collages and my fascination with film noir began.

Last month I got the idea it might be fun to make it a challenge to watch every one of the 19 classic movies that this film borrowed clips from. By my own count, I’ve seen eight, leaving eleven yet to be experienced. I made a list, organized it by IMDB ratings, and decided to start from the lowest rated and work my way to the highest, skipping none—making this a mix of films new to me and old favorites.

  1. Double Indemnity (1944) – 8.3
    2. White Heat (1949) – 8.1
    3. Suspicion (1941) – 8.1
    4. The Killers (1946) – 8.0
    5. The Lost Weekend (1945) – 8.0
    6. In a Lonely Place (1950) – 8.0
    7. Notorious (1946) – 7.9
    8. The Big Sleep (1946) – 7.8
    9. Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) – 7.7
    10. Dark Passage (1947) – 7.6
    11. The Glass Key (1942) – 7.6
    12. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – 7.6
    13. I Walk Alone (1947) – 7.4
    14. This Gun for Hire (1942) – 7.3
    15. Humoresque (1946) – 7.3
    16. Deception (1946) – 7.2
    17. Johnny Eager (1941) – 7.1
    18. Keeper of the Flame (1942) – 6.9
    19. The Bribe (1949) – 6.8

My project ran into immediate trouble.

The Bribe, which fascinated me most from the clips utilized by Reiner and Martin, was not streaming anywhere, nor was it available even as a video-on-demand (VOD) rental. There had been a single release on DVD 16 years ago in 2010 and long out of print.

I didn’t want to abandon this project—it seemed fun to me—but I also hated the idea of skipping some of the films that violated the very essence of the endeavor. Surrender seemed to be the only option until I remembered one tiny little fact: the San Diego Library System has DVDs.

A quick search of the catalog revealed that they had two copies of The Bribe on disc, and so soon, my friends, I will begin the climb up that list as my 2026 cinematic venture.

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Movie Review: Three Strangers (1946)

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Counted among Warner Brothers’ film noir catalog, Three Strangers shares a thematic aspect with The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in that it is a noir with a strong atmosphere of the supernatural about it.

Warner Brothers Studios

A mysterious woman wordlessly lures a man to her apartment in London. Once inside another man, obviously intoxicated, rises from the sofa. The woman explains that she also invited this gentleman, again without knowing anything about him, even his name. She speedily explains that at least for the moment, they must not reveal their names or anything about themselves to each other. In her apartment she has a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin and at midnight as the new year begins, it is said that the goddess will open her eyes and grant a wish to three strangers, provided that they wish for the same thing. They agree to wish for money via a lottery ticket for the national horse race. They sign the ticket, making it a contract amongst themselves, using a blotter to obscure their names as they sign so no one sees another’s name.

They wait for midnight, gazing at the candle-lit statuette. The hour is struck, and a wind extinguishes the flame, plunging the room into darkness. By the time the candle is relit, the hour has passed. Then Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who can now safely reveal her name, insists that she saw the statuette’s eyes open, as the myth insisted. The first man, Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) insists he saw no such thing, with the third person, Johnny West (Peter Lorre) taking no serious part in the debate if the eye opened or not. The three go their separate ways, Arbutny cynical that anything serious has transpired, West willing to believe but more interested in more drink to fuel his alcoholism, and Shackleford devout in her faith that this idol will bring about fortune for them all.

The rest of the film follows the three through their troubled lives. Arbutny has embezzled funds from a trust he manages for an eccentric widowed peer, the discovery of which will ruin him financially and reputationally. West, in a drunken stupor, was shanghaied into being a lookout for a burglary that went badly and ended with the murder of a police officer. Shackleford instigated the entire affair in hope of winning back her husband who, after unspecified marital difficulties, has taken an extended business trip to Canada. Each person’s life spirals more and more out of control. Arbutny finds no source of funds to cover his theft and his client is now suspicious. West ends up taking the fall for the murder one of his compatriots committed, and Shackleford’s husband returns, demanding a divorce so he may marry his new love. When the lottery ticket turns out to have drawn not only the name of a horse in the race but one favored to win, the film turns to its final act without ever addressing if it had been mere chance or supernatural forces at work as the characters suffer the consequences of their choices.

Three Strangers is an fascionating sort of film noir. Produced in 1946, it is early in that genre’s formation, so the dipping into the supernatural is not an attempt to revitalize a form but one that rose organically when John Huston conceived the story. It is a film I have heard of for quite some time and this week finally got around to watching. In terms of film noir, there are better movies that I will revisit much more often than this one, but it is also interesting enough to warrant watching and with a collection of characters that are entertaining with all their faults; Icy the woman who loves West despite his drinking, Gabby their accomplice in the robbery who is a brute but one with a code and the clerks working in Arbunty’s office all give the film charm and depth. . I really like how the supernatural—not only Kwan Yin but the spirits of the dead visiting their loved ones—is handled so deftly that it can be mere coincidence or actual evidence that there is much more to the world than what we can see, hear, and touch. Three Strangers is a gritty crime noir that suggests perhaps the world is not as material as it appears.

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Nordic Noir Review: Freezing Embrace (Hautalehto)

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Having finished Arctic Circle and Reindeer Mafia my sweetie-wife and I turned to a series new to us on the streaming service MHz Choice, Freezing Embrace (Hautalehto in Finland).

Solar Films

Adapted from a novel by Christian Ronnbacka, Freezing Embrace follows Chief Inspecter Annti Hautalehto (Mikko Leppilampi) as he deals with a number of issues, the finalized divorce from his wife, his police chief’s potential slide into alcoholism, his best friend’s potentially unstable son joining the police force while a serial killer who targets and murders young men by drowning them in the icy river. As bodies pile up, the evidence more and more begins pointing to his best friend’s son, a skilled diver, as the murderer.

While I found Freezing Embrace less engaging than either of the other two series I mentioned at the start of the post, and despite in many ways it being a by-the-numbers drama of serving on a police force, the disrupted personal life, the troublesome superiors, the seemingly willful blindness of the national forces, the characters and performance kept the show from feeling routine. I was particularly impressed by Leppilampi in the series. He had been a supporting player in Arctic Circlewith a very different character and quickly with this series I wholly accepted Antti as a distinct person with nothing that overlapped with the character from the other show.

I did find it amusing that when the entire mystery has been resolved and everything about the murderer’s motivation laid bare that the plot for this season was, in fact, a serious, dramatic rendition of the plot of the original Friday the 13th.

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ESL or Bad Acting?

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My sweetie-wife introduced me to the joys of Nordic Noir, films and programs from the Scandinavian nations dealing with murder and investigations. One of our favorite shows is Arctic Circle, following the career of a police officer, Nina Kautsalo (Lina Kuustonen) in the far north of Finland as over the season she climbs from a patrol officer, through detective, to Chief of Police for the small town of Ivalo.

The current season we are watching, season 3, deals with a billionaire’s self-driving automobile being tested in the harsh Lapland winter, corporate espionage and murder, along with Nina’s continuing familial dramas. A key character in the corporate evildoers’ plot is Walter Blakeney, an American ex-special forces man who has done security work across Europe and has a quiet, heated temper.

There is not a lot of dimension to Walter’s character for any actor to play. We learn nothing about his life outside of his security work and the fact that he’s perfectly willing to do anything to achieve success. He does curse quite a lot when angry, and that has been the most jarring moment of his performance. Cursing, particularly when it’s a string of curses, is a lot like singing. There is a beat and a rhythm to it. It is pure emotion spilling out of a character unguarded and unconstrained.

But not for Walter.

His always came out with a closed, stilted cadence lacking a naturalistic flow or meter. I wondered if the actor was perhaps not a native English speaker and as such found the fast flow of angry cursing difficult to perform. It’s more common in British television to find Brits putting on an accent and trying, to varying degrees, to pass as American, and certainly this could have been the case here. It wasn’t. The actor was born and raised in America, moving to Finland in 2000. He just can’t pull off naturalistic cursing.

What a shame.

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