Titus Techera, who hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation on which he and his guests discuss important films of the past and present, invited me back earlier this week for the latest in a series of conversations about film noir. In the latest episode, we discuss André DeToth’s Pitfall, starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, and Raymond Burr and originally released in 1948. Our hour-long chat is now available on line.

Here’s Titus’ summary of our conversation:

Titus and Terry Teachout discuss Pitfall, the fine 1948 noir starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, & Raymond Burr as the heavy! It’s a story about post-war America, men dissatisfied with suburban happiness, and the dangers middle-class life is facing. You get the insurance business & people whose lives are tied up with fraud. You get two attitudes to danger, risk, and getting what you want.

To listen to or download this episode, go here.

*  *  *

The theatrical trailer for Pitfall:

“Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against ‘freedom of print,’ it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Prize lecture

Harry Reasoner interviews Harold Lloyd on Calendar, the morning news program that he co-hosted with Mary Fickett. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on April 16, 1962:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Zealotry is when the letter of religion is mistaken for its spirit.”

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (trans. Peter Heath)

From 2009:

I didn’t have to drive anywhere to hear Paul Harvey News and Comment. I heard it every weekday morning on the kitchen radio as I wolfed down breakfast and prepared to go to school. It was my five-minute morning paper—the Daily Smalltown Standard came out in the afternoon—though even then I sensed that Harvey’s program was a lot more like Reader’s Digest than The Wall Street Journal. In fact Harvey was more quaint than I knew, for he was the last survivor of old-time radio, a voice from and of the past. The long, stagy pauses, the cornpone humor, the I-use-it-and-you’ll-like-it commercials: all were the stuff radio was made of in the days when people like Arthur Godfrey and Bill Stern ruled the airwaves….

Read the whole thing here.

“The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

A scene from Targets, written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Bogdanovich and Boris Karloff. In this scene, Karloff delivers a monologue interpolated by Bogdanovich from Sheppey, a 1933 play by W. Somerset Maugham. (The same monologue supplied John O’Hara with the title of his first novel, Appointment in Samarra.)

Karloff is speaking from memory, which explains his deviations from Maugham’s original text:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Only those who doubt really believe, and those who do not doubt are neither tempted against their faith nor do they truly believe.”

Miguel de Unamuno, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (trans. Anthony Kerrigan)