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The Rocky Horror Picture Show is, of course, shockingly rude, authentically vulgar, and yet, it's astounding!  Susan Sarandon at her very early best, the spooky high comedy of it all, the joyfulness of rock opera at its best!  Yes, it does seem to slide out of control at times, but that's the whole "massage", to lose control, to fall into a time warp of pure absurdity and simply go with the twisted perspective of the human psycho-sexual scene so hilariously laid out for us.  Richard O'Brien, who created the whole show and plays the part of "Riff Raff", he's the real star throughout, even in the very beginning as he sarcastically sings the juxtapositional background lyrics of "Janet" disguised as a kind of "American Gothic" church janitor.  The Rocky Horror Picture Show seems only to improve with age and repetition, a classic of "trash art" currently a new stage production with Joan Jett as Columbia.

The Magician is an experience I could not put in the background.  I had to watch it straight through!  Long ago I had been amazed at it, and am equally impressed now.  It has that familiar dark, brooding look of early black & white Bergman films, but there is a strong undertow of ironic hilarity here that is somewhat uncharacteristic of his work.  A line from Leonard Cohen's poetry is suggestive of the theme, "God is alive, magic is afoot," although in this case, I would paraphrase it this way, "Magic is alive, love is afoot." (1958 010 minutes)

"The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization!" Spencer Tracy's character declares in Judgment at Nuremberg.  This unforgettable dramatization of the post WWII Nuremberg war crime trials is heavy stuff, deeply illuminating and graced with powerful performances by great old-time stars like Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich and Maximilian Schell, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor in his role as a suave, compassionately fascist lawyer for the big time Nazi defendants -- and who now is appearing in the Broadway production of this story.  The most astonishing moment in the movie is when Burt Lancaster, as one of those high-level Nazi defendants, stands up and interrupts the merciless interrogation of a witness (Judy Garland) by Schell, stating to the court, in essence, that, yes, we did know what we were doing and we are responsible! "Where were we," he asks, "when every village had its railway terminal for the transport of men, women and children t the death camps?"  We are guilty, he concludes, because we went along with it.  So much is revealed in this long, but compellingly interesting film about moral compromise and complicity with forces of unspeakable evil. (1961, 178 minutes)

Bad Day at Black Rock is exactly that!  It's a day of reckoning and of confronting the truth.  Everybody in town knows it from the moment Spencer Tracy steps off the train, looking like a man who means business, someone who is intent upon finding out about something the townsfolk would rather just forget.  As with Judgment at Nuremberg, this is a story about complicity with evil and the moral courage required to stand up and speak out when confronted with injustice.  "An outcry against bigotry, the film has also been described as an allegorical indictment of the Hollywood blacklist," according to notes on the video cover. (1954, 78 minutes)