Hello, my name is Justin the Clueh, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club, and today we're doing a two-fisted director, Phil Carlson.

What a two-fisted name, Phil.

Phil Carlson had a long career in Hollywood, making B movies and generally disreputable popular

entertainment. And first of all, a great deal of his filmography is not very good. Oh, yeah. I was

trying to do like calculations and I was like, oof, almost like maybe one-fifth of his

filmography is good or too great. Well, I mean, I haven't plundered the depths of it.

Maybe some of those Bowery Boys movies are actually great.

He made the first Bowery Boys film for Monogram, so he started the trend.

That was when the Bowery Boys were the Bowery Boys and not the East Side kids.

Anyway, sorry, getting lost in the weeds already.

As we indicated,

he started in Poverty Row in the 1940s, made a lot of Charlie Chan mysteries. He even made a

movie with the Three Stooges. Later on, you might know him as the director of an Elvis movie

called Kid Galahad, or as the director of two of the spy spoofs starring Dean Martin as

the groovy secret agent Matt Helm. Terrible. Just not good. Not a laugh to be at. However, when we

talk about Phil Carlson, what we're really talking about are a wave of tough and gritty film noirs that he made in the 1950s,

as well as the brief resurgence he had towards the end of his life in the 1970s after the blockbuster success of his,

again, to use that phrase, two-fisted action movie Walking Tall.

Going right to the beginning of Phil Carlson's career, he represents like my favorite

kind of old-time filmmakers who started and did everything, fought their way up until they

were finally making the stuff that they wanted to make.

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