Out From the Shadows: The Film Noir Blogathon is Underway

The Film Noir Blogathon

The Film Noir Blogathon begins in earnest today.  You can post your link here or on the original page.  I will add them here to the main list as I get time.  Keep in mind I'm a working man, so I have to abide by the rules at my job.  I will not be able to start updating anything until I get off work (unless you are one of the early posters...)  Also keep checking back over the next week, as I intend to read every one of these entries at some point and personalize each listing instead of the abrupt link I initially have to use.  A great big "Thanks!" to all those who participated.  (Also, once again, a huge thanks to Connie @ Silver Scenes  for my banners for this blogathon)  Keep an eye out for the next whiz bang (hopefully)  blogathon idea, as this won't be my last.

Please be sure to link your post to this page if you can, to make sure all interested parties can read the other entries in this blogathon.  Thanks.

Seating is Now Available on

The Dark Side of the Theater

Here is the list of the luminaries who have graciously opted in on this blogathon.  Read them one at a time or read them all at once (if you have that many computer screens...)  Enjoy!

One more final note:  You will notice over the weekend that some of these will have a more personal note (indicating I got around to reading it).  I fully intend to oblige all of your entries with this sevice.  If it gets to be the end of August and you notice yours still hasn't been done, feel free to bust my chops about it.

Quiggy

Midnite Drive-In  "Death Wears a Shattered Look" D.O.A. and The Hitch-Hiker

4 Star Films  "The Set-Up (1949)"

"Noir" infiltrates the boxing world, with interesting twists

Angelman's Place "Lovely Rita, Lethal Gilda" Gilda

Even bad, Gilda sounds intriguing, the way Angelman describes her.

Anna, Look!  "Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak 1948)"

A bed-ridden Barbara Stanwyck tries desparately to get someone to believe her.

B Noir Detour  "Noir and the Western: John Sturges"  The Walking Hills and The Capture

John Sturges melds the noir with the western

Caftan Woman "The Film Noir Blogathon :New York Confidential (1955)"

The Syndicate gets more personal in Caftan Woman's review of "New York Confidential".

Champagne for Lunch "The Killers vs. The Killers"

Two very different takes on an Ernest Hemingway story.

Cinema Cities  "Film Noir Double Feature: Kansas City Confidential and 99 River Street"

John Payne is a man on the edge in two nail-biters.

Cinematic Frontier  "Suspicion (1941)"

Cary Grant in "Suspicion".  Bounder? Cad? Or something more sinister?

Cinema Monolith  "Armored Car Robbery"

An intriguing take on an armored car heist.  Charles McGraw and William Talman are the stalwarts.

Cinematic Scribblings  "Shadows Closing In: Shoot the Piano Player (1960)"

You can run from your past, but it's pretty hard to hide from it.

Crítica Retrô  "A Sombra da Guilhotina/The Reign of Terror"

A noir set in the French Revolution.  History lesson, anyone?

Defiant Success  "The Film Noir Blogathon"  In Cold Blood

Chilling portrayal of a robbery.

The Flapper Dame  "Laura (1944)"

The Flapper Dame presents yet another mysterious noir femme.

Great Old Movies  "Treasure of Monte Cristo"

Duplicitous woman gets herself a scapegoat.

Hamlette's Soliloquy  "The Blue Dahlia (1946)"

Who killed Alan Ladd's promiscuous and alcoholic wife?  Hamlette gives us the lowdown.

Hamlette's Soliloquy  "The Glass Key (1942)"

Veronica Lake makes me wish I was a Depression era babe...

It Came from the Man Cave  "Danger! These Girls are Hot!" Jail Bait

Ed Wood (yes, THAT "Ed Wood") does noir in his unique manner.

It Came from the Man Cave  "Durbin in Her Most Dramatic Glory" Christmas Holiday

Christmas in "Noir" land.

LA Explorer  "Spotlight on The Big Heat"

Glenn Ford is a man on a mission.

The Lonely Critic  "M (1931)"

"Proto" noir at its absolute finest.

Moon in Gemini  "The Romantic Noir Protagonist: High Sierra and After Dark, My Sweet"

Two noirs with a romantic twist.

MovieMovieBlogBlog  "Cry of the City"

Gritty drama of a classic noir theme

Musings of a Classic Film Addict  "The Film Noir Blogathon: My Analysis of Criss Cross (1949)"

Who is on whose side?  A very intriguing take on the noir theme of twisted triangles.

Noirish  "Return from the Ashes (1965)"

A woman returns home from the Nazi Death camp to find her world changed on the home front, too.

Old Hollywood Films  "Leave Her to Heaven"

Gene Tierney is a woman who knows what she wants.

The Old Hollywood Garden  "The Big Combo (1955)"

Fog and shadows, that's the essence of noir in this output.

Outspoken and Freckled  "The Black Pools of Noir in Murder, My Sweet 1944"

Marlowe is on the case, and is one of the best in the business.

Phyllis Loves Classic Movies  "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)"

Steve Martin is on the case (with lots of famous guest stars)

Phyllis Loves Classic Movies  "Not Your Typical Noir: Nobody Lives Forever (1946)"

John Garfield falls for his victim in "Nobody Lives Forever".

Radiator Heaven  "The Big Sleep"

Ladies' man Bogie is on the case in a truly twisted story.

Realweegiemidget  "Reviewing John Wick"  John Wick

"Neo-noir" action, (with a puppy).

Shadows and Satin  "The Film Noir Blogathon: The Damned Don't Cry (1950)"

Joan Crawford is a wily woman (as usual)

Silver Scenes  "My Name is Julia Ross (1951)"

Who is Julia Ross? Check out Silver Scenes entry to find out.

Silver Scenes  "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)"

A Fritz Lang noir, how can you go wrong?

Silver Screenings  "John Garfield: Film in a Dangerous Time"  He Ran All the Way

John Garfield is in trouble with the Heat  (and the heat)

Sometimes They Go to Eleven  "Where the Sidewalk Ends"

The cop crosses the line to bring down the gangster.

Straw Cats  "Rewriting the Noir Canon"  Dementia

Combining "horror" and "noir", in what sounds intriguingly bizarre.

Vienna's Classic Hollywood  "The Enforcer (1951)"

Good guy Bogart goes up against the mob.

Wide Screen World "The Naked City"

New York City in a nutshell.

Wolffian Classics Movies Digest  "The Prowler"

 A switch on the classic film noir pattern.

Debacle in the Desert

This is my entry in the "Movie Disasters" section of the Classic Movie History Blogathon being sponsored by Movies Silently, Once Upon a Screen, and Silver Screenings. 

John Wayne plays an Oriental cowboy!

The Conqueror (1956)  

Considered one of the worst movies of all time, and definitely the worst movie in which John Wayne was ever  involved, but John Wayne cannot carry the blame for this movie solely on his shoulders.  Sure, Wayne as a Mongol chieftain {surrounded by such luminous other "Oriental" stars of the day, like Pedro  Armendariz as Jumuga (a blood brother), William Conrad as Kasar (his real brother), Lee Van Cleef as Chepei (his aide-de-camp), and Agnes Moorehead as Hunlun (his mother)} was a horrible miscasting, but probably no more so than Susan Hayward as the Tartar woman for whom he lusts.

The most stupendously horrible mistake of the whole movie however, is the script.  Some guy named Oscar Millard must've channeled William Shakespeare while high on acid.  The language, as written, will make you think of the worst production you ever saw of a Shakespearean play.  Somewhat of a conundrum, if you ask me, since only 5 years earlier Millard had been nominated for an Oscar for his script for The Frogmen.  (Haven't seen that one, nor even heard of it until I was researching this movie.  But surely the Academy saw a different writer then...)  Even the eras most accomplished Shakespearean actors would have had trouble with this script, though.

The film has, to it's credit, some fairly decent music by Victor Young.  And Dick Powell as director pulled off some fairly decent horse battle scenes.  But hardly anyone in front of the camera, Wayne included, measured up to anything even remotely worthy of the spectacle that was attempted.  Rumor has it that Howard Hughes, the financial backer of the film, was so embarrassed by it that he bought up and tried to destroy every print of the film, yet, according to his biographers, during his last days he watched it over and over again.  Wayne was hoping to garner some backing from Hughes for his project to film The Alamo, but that didn't pan out.

It is well known that the movie was filmed in Utah, downwind as it were, from the nuclear testing site in the same state.  An inordinate number of people involved in this movie developed and died of cancer.  (Of course, a number of them, Wayne included, were heavy smokers, but that is sometimes overlooked in the zeal to lay blame on nuclear weapons...)

On a positive note, whether or not it was a result of this adventure, John Wayne teamed up with John Ford for his next project, which many deem the greatest Western of all time, The Searchers.

The movie begins with a caravan crossing the desert.  In the caravan are Targutai (Lesley Bradley) and Bortai (Susan Hayward).  Bortai is the daughter of Kumlek (Ted de Corsia), a rival clan leader and the wedding of Bortai and Targutai will serve as a unity point for the two tribes.  Temujin (John Wayne), clan leader of the Mongols,  and a cohort ride up to confront Targutai, who is crossing Mongol territory.  Temujin is smitten (thats S-M-I-T-T-E-N) by Bortai.

He goes back to his camp and rounds up a raiding party to go descend upon the infiltrating caravan.  He and his clansmen overrun the caravan and Temujin takes Bortai prisoner, intending to make her his wife.  When Hunlun (Agnes Moorehead) , Temujin's mother, hears that her son has taken the daughter of a hated rival clan leader, one who incidentally had killed Temujin's father, she expresses her outrage.

Temujin will not be swayed, even when Bortai, who is not exactly pleased with her new predicament tries to kill him.  She even tries to enlist the help of Temujin's blood brother, Jamuga (Pedro Armendariz).  Jamuga is tempted but he proclaims his undying love and respect for his blood brother.
Temujin makes plans to try to take over the clan of his rival, Kumlek, ad tries to enlist the help of a fellow rival Wang Khan (Thomas Gomez).  But Wang Khan does not entirely trust Temujin (as well he shouldn't) and sends his shaman (John Hoyt) to try to divulge the truth.  This being a movie about clan rivalry, in addition to the love story, there is much skullduggery involved and you may not know who is really on whose side.

Eventually Bortai is recaptured by her father, as is Temujin.  Conveniently for the movie, Bortai has fallen in love with Temujin and helps him escape.  The two clans end up in a epic battle, in which, finally, Temujin exacts his revenge upon Kumlek.

OK this is not entirely a horrible movie as I would have expected.  In fact, if you turn off the sound and just watch it as a silent movie, its not really that bad.  (You could make up your on dialogue if you want, and it might even be an improvement.)  The final battle of two horse armies is worth a watch at any rate.

Quiggy

How to Build an Icon (the Hard Way)

This is my entry in the Classic Movie History Project Blogathon co-hosted by Movies Silently,   Silver Screenings  and Once Upon a Screen.  There are a whole raft of topics for this blogathon.  Today's entry is for the "Before They Were Stars" category.

I recently read Scott Eyman's opus on John Wayne, John Wayne: The Life and Legend.  A great biography, if you like Wayne, but it had a tendency to be tedious on occasion. Still, it served as a good reference for this post, since my prior knowledge of the Duke was limited to only what movies I had seen, and the occasional tidbit of information (like the fact that his real name was "Marion"). I am currently reading American Titan: Searching for John Wayne by Marc Eliot.  Both of these were referred to extensively for this post.

For purposes of this blog entry I chose to delineate the "before stardom" portion of his life as everything that occurred before his role in Stagecoach.  While it is true he had a career in the movies before this film (Eliot sets the number at 81, but he is including anything in which Wayne can be identified as an actor, which would include some 20 or so walk-on parts which may or may not have included any dialogue), I personally consider his coming in to true stardom and recognition as "The Ringo Kid" in Stagecoach.  Feel free to argue this point, but it is where I stand on it.

Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa as Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907.  That's the name he was given at birth.  The "Robert"  was changed to either "Michael" or "Mitchell" (sources vary), after the birth of his brother, whom the folks wanted to name "Robert".  (A note:  I didn't know you could do that after the fact, but apparently you could, maybe still can for all I know).  Morrison was named after his paternal great-grandfather, Robert, a political refugee from Ireland, and his grandfather Marion.  "Marion" was not always a female name in olden times; it had been considered a valid male name since medieval times.

Morrison's father, Clyde, was at various times a diligent laborer and at other times a gallavant.  His mother, Mary, at various times, loved Clyde unconditionally, and  became exasperated with him and separated from him several times.   At one of those times, Mary sent Morrison to live with his father.  As a result of this, Morrison became a daddy's boy while his brother Robert ended up a mama's boy.  During the years with Clyde, Morrison learned several things that would help him later in life.  One was how to fight.  (With a name like "Marion", fights were bound to happen.)

Morrison and his father lived in Glendale, where his father attempted once more to be a productive citizen.  Morrison went to school where he excelled especially in sports. According to Eliot, in 1925, Morrison's high school won the state championship, not only going undefeated, but no opponent in the regular season even scored a point.

Morrison also happened to have a dog that accompanied him around this time, which was named "Duke".  People took to calling them "Big Duke" and "Little Duke".  (Now you know from whence came  the moniker of "Duke")

Morrison graduated high school and garnered a football scholarship at USC.  But it wasn't a full scholarship, so he took on various part time jobs.  Some of the jobs he did were working as a muscleman doing various odd jobs on the movie lots in nearby Hollywood.  He also got, as a result of his USC football team exposure, a few on camera appearances as an extra, mainly as one of the football team in such movies as Brown of Harvard, The Drop-Kick, and The Draw-Back.  His first appearance in a John Ford film, Mother Machree, brought him to the attention of Ford, who saw in Morrison something that needed to be drawn out.

Over the next couple of years, Morrison got various bit parts, which helped him earn some money, usually enough to struggle by on, but not much better.  His first real break came in 1931 when, not John Ford, but Raoul Walsh, gave him his first big break and cast him in the lead role of The Big Trail.  Only one problem.  Morrison couldn't act.

The producers objected to Walsh's choice, but he was adamant that Morrison was the one to play "Breck Coleman".  One attempt to dissuade Walsh was that Morrison's name was too long for the marquee, so they hashed out a name change and eventually came up with "John Wayne".  (Some histories suggest that Morrison himself came up with the "John" as a tribute to his friend and mentor, John Ford).

As for the fact that he could not act, a trainer was hired for Morrison, (hereafter referred to as as John Wayne).  He was also to be given training on how to do some stunts and such, for which they hired stunt man "Yakima" Canutt, the beginning of another lifelong friendship, and who was an occasional fellow actor.  Despite all the help Wayne received, the film was a failure at the box office, and Wayne was sent back to the "B" picture studios.

Wayne continued on in this mode for the next 8 years, producing movie after movie which could easily be replaced by one or the other in plot and pacing, many of them less than an hour in length.  On one occasion, Wayne was actually cast as a singing cowboy.  He couldn't sing.  Or play guitar... He was filmed with one person off camera doing the singing and one playing the guitar, while Wayne just went through the motions on camera.  He never had to do it again.  The studio found an amiable fellow to take the singing cowboy roles, Gene Autry.

Over that 8 year span, Wayne made some 60 or so cheapies, mostly westerns, and did garner a name for himself.  But he struggled to get out of that rut.  During this run of his life he made, variously, several remakes of Tom Mix silent movies (Tom Mix being one of his childhood heroes), several in a series known as "The Three Mequiteers" (in which he starred as Stony Brooke, alongside Ray Corrigan and Max Terhune), and a few non-westerns.

About "The Three Mesquiteers":  This was an ongoing series, one in which Wayne filled the role that had been played, and was later played, by other actors over the course of it's run, from 1936-1943 (51 movies in all, Wayne was in only 8 of them).  The plots were fairly interchangeable, and Wayne probably did most of them just to help make ends meet.  Sometimes the movies weren't entirely westerns, as can be seen in the above photo, which shows them using much more modern equipment than would have been available in the Old West.  (A few later entries, post-Wayne, even had them fighting the Nazis...)

Stardom loomed on the horizon when his friend, director John Ford, decided to cast him in his new production of an Ernest Haycox short story "Stage to Lordsburg", the film adaptation of which was to be eventually called Stagecoach.  Ford has been quoted as saying he preferred short stories for adaptation as opposed to novels and in this respect he seems to have found the perfect story.

Wayne was tapped to play "The Ringo Kid", a character who became sort of the gold standard of the future Wayne output, a man with standards and a sense of justice, but who may or may not be on the side of the law.  "The Ringo Kid", in this case was an escapee from jail, one who, as it turns out, had been framed for murder, and was out to take his revenge upon the men who had framed him.

I intend to do a review of Stagecoach in the near future, so I won't go into it in detail for this entry, but suffice to say that Wayne had used the experience he garnered toiling away in the B-movie circuit to garner a name for himself with this movie.  Admittedly, he still had a few more years before he could transform that into true stardom, but this proved to be the launching pad for what later became the icon we all know and love.

A brief listing of some of the movie titles prior to Stagecoach:

(various bit parts, walk-ons and stunt work until 1930)

The Big Trail (1930)
The Shadow of the Eagle (a 12-part serial from 1931)
 Ride 'em, Cowboy (1932)
The Big Stampede (1932)
The Hurricane Express (another 12-part serial from 1932)
The Telegraph Trail (1933)
The Three Musketeers (yet another 12-part serial from 1933.  This one also featured Lon Chaney, Jr.  still being billed under hia real name od "Creighton Chaney".)
Sagebrush Trail (1933)
Riders of Destiny (1933: the infamous singing John Wayne...)
The Trail Beyond (1934)
The Lawless Frontier (1934)
Paradise Canyon (1935)
King of the Pecos (1936)
Pals of the Saddle (1938)
Red River Range (1938: the last movie made before the iconic Stagecoach role)

Obviously, this list is incomplete.  As stated earlier, Wayne was in some 81 movies before he hit the heights with Stagecoach.


References:

Eliot, Marc, American Titan: Searching for John Wayne, New York, Harper-Collins, 2014

Eyman, Scott, John Wayne: The Life and Legend, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2014


Hope you enjoyed this brief biographical interlude.  Be sure to tune in on Tuesday for a second entry in this blogathon in which I will discuss John Wayne's most regrettable role, that of Temujin in The Conqueror.



Quiggy

Quiggy Does Musicals?

This is my entry in the British Invaders Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts

Dateline:  July 30, 2016  (just prior to watching tonight's double feature)


One warm summer's evening in 1987, several of us guys were out having fun, celebrating a new-found life being drug-free and care-free.  With nothing else to do, since we weren't out getting wasted, we decided to do a sober jaunt to a midnight movie.  At the theater we chose, we had two options that evening:  either Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Pink Floyd-The Wall.  We chose the latter.

I have never been a real fan of the imagery inherent in Pink Floyd's music.  Not that I don't appreciate a Pink Floyd song, mind you.  I could list a dozen or so songs that Pink Floyd does that I will turn up the volume on my radio and jam on.  (Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Wish You Were Here, and from the album that inspired this movie, Comfortably Numb, to name a few).  It's just that the words never clicked with me.  Whatever Roger Waters and company were trying to say about life or the arts sailed over my head.

For years I have wished we had chosen Rocky Horror Picture Show, even though I didn't actually get to watch that one until I got a DVD player and saw it in my own home many many years later.  I still have yet to experience seeing it in a venue where the aficionados dress up and perform the movie in conjunction with the actual film.  But I still recall the disaster (for me) of seeing Pink Floyd-The Wall.  I thought it was totally incomprehensible and an utter bore (although I did enjoy hearing the music in surround sound.) It could have been that I needed to be drunk or stoned to have gotten it, since I'm pretty sure the album at least was written under the influence.

So, when I first signed up for Terence's blogathon, I initially chose Rocky Horror, but was going to review The Who's Tommy as my second feature.  The more I thought about it, however, it seemed unfair that, given the circumstances, I shouldn't give The Wall  a second shot after all these years.  So going in, I am still not going to see the movie stoned (being 7 years clean and sober this round), so it may not make any more sense the second time around, but at least I will have given it a fair shake.

                                                                                                                                         -Quiggy

























The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974)

As stated above, I have never had the chance, as thousands (or millions) have, to watch this as a performance piece in a movie theater, but I would definitely go if given the opportunity.

The movie started out life as a play in the West End of London. After a slow start at three different theatres, it finally became a long-running play at King's Road Theatre where it ran for some 7 years.  Lou Adler brought it to America, first to Los Angeles, then to New York and then San Francisco.  Surprisingly, it lasted for a longer run in L.A. than either NY or Frisco...(At least it's surprising to me...)

Adler was trying to get backing for an eventual film version.  This took a bit longer than he expected.  It seems to me that, in retrospect, he was trying to reach the wrong people by pushing the stage production to promote an eventual movie.  The cult fanaticism that follows it today can do that for you I guess.  I also, it probably goes without saying, have never seen the stage production.

The movie begins with a wedding.  Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) are in attendance to their individual best friends' getting married.   After the wedding, (including the first song "Damn It, Janet"), Brad and Janet take off in a rainstorm to visit the professor in whose class they first met.  But, fate decrees they have a blowout, and as "The Criminologist" (Charles Grey) informs us, the spare is flat.  So they decide to hike back down the road to inquire at a castle for a phone.  (A "castle"?  In Middle America???  Try to keep up, that's only the least of the peculiarities you will encounter.)

They take time to sing the second song ("Over at Frankenstein's Place") while getting soaked in a downpour.  Upon arriving at the door they are met by Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien), who along with Magenta (Patricia Quinn), invites them in to a party being held by the master of the castle.  The weird batch of eccentric guests introduce Brad and Janet to the strangest night of their lives with a dance they call the "Time Warp" (included here for your enjoyment)

Afterwards comes the entry of the most peculiar character you have ever seen or will see in a musical, Dr. Frank N. Furter, (Tim Curry) the "Sweet Transvestite".  Frank invites them up to his lab, "to see what's on the slab".  It turns out that the doctor has been trying to make a man (although not for the reasons traditional mad scientists have tried to build a man...)  He introduces his creation, Rocky (Peter Hinwood), but the celebration is broken up by the arrival of "Eddie" (Meat Loaf) who was apparently a mistake from a previous attempt by Frank at creation.  Eddie does what is my favorite song of the movie "Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?"

Frank chases after Eddie with an ax and (apparently) kills him.  He then declares an end to the festivities and has Brad and Janet ushered to separate bedrooms.  During the night, alternately, Brad and Janet are seduced by someone they initially think is the other, but it turns out that it is the mad doctor himself.  Throughout the night several different events occur, one of which is that Janet, through a chance encounter, has intimate relations with Frank's creation, Rocky.  When Frank discovers this, he is furious.

By strange coincidence, an old rival, Dr. Everett Scott (Johnathan Adams), chooses that point to come knocking.  By another strange coincidence, it turns out that Eddie was Dr. Scott's nephew.  It turns out that Eddie was a pizza delivery boy who showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time.  Frank invites them all to dinner (do I need to tell you what's on the menu?).

The madcap end to this movie is one that must be seen to be believed.  There are many, many references to older science fiction movies throughout this film.  Some are obvious, while others take a rather esoteric knowledge of the lore of the sci-fi world to discern.  But that shouldn't deter from your enjoyment of the movie.  Be forewarned to not have the little ones in the room if you are not ready to explain things to them just yet.  Nothing pornographic, but it could cause some flustered moments.

Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982)

Once again, this movie turned out to be just as confusing as the first time.  I did get that it was about a singer named "Pink" who was slowly going mad.  (It seems to pick up somewhere just before he is to go onstage for a concert, after he has already gone mad.) The transition from his childhood, and the events that lead to his building an insular "wall" around himself are the ammunition, in song, which drive this movie forward.

From the beginning, Pink's dad was killed in WWII.  (A lot of this movie is either autobiographical about the life of Roger Waters, or, in some cases, referring to his friend and former bandmate, Syd Barrett, who did indeed go mad for a period of time, which precipitated his ouster from the band after the first album.  I'll interject here that, for years, I thought Barrett had overdosed and died, but I found a Rolling Stone article in the mid 80's that corrected my thinking.)

The movie transitions, somewhat disconcertingly for me, from the present to the past and back to the present.  Pink's mother is an over-protective, oppressive woman who also figures into the the isolating wall. And unless you've been in an isolation booth for the past 35 years or so you've heard the song "Another Brick in the Wall Part II", which describes the abuse Pink received at the hands of his schoolteachers.

Growing up, as an adult, Pink becomes a rock star.  Through use (and abuse) of drugs, he experiences various stages of violent temper, (including one phenomenal trashing of a hotel room scene).  He is also cuckolded by his wife (girlfriend?).  Towards the end of the movie Pink becomes convinced he is some kind of fascist leader of a political group and his concerts are really rallies to promote his racist beliefs.

The art of Gerald Scarfe intermittently appears throughout the film to illustrate some of the scenes, including the final scenes which involve a self-induced "trial" of Pink, in which he as the judge declares that "Pink" the rocker has to tear down his "wall"

This is basically what I perceive as the gist of the movie.  I still didn't like it all that much.  But my opinion of Pink Floyd has not diminished as a result.  I still enjoy the music.  I just now have a copy of a movie that I am probably going to use in some future giveaway...(I ended up having to actually buy a copy since I couldn't find one to borrow or rent)

So, to sum up. definitely see Rocky Horror Picture Show, but only get Pink Floyd-The Wall if you like your movies dense and incomprehensible (or if you just happen to like 1½ hour long music videos).  Have a safe drive home.

Quiggy