Hello!

We’re pretty much in awe of the work schedule of friend Alan K. Rode , who very shortly will be opening the 2026 instalment of the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. The Palm Springs festival has been going strong since 2000.

This year’s festival runs from May 7-10 with a great lineup of pictures. New digital restorations of Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet and Blake Edwards’ Gunn, plus an eclectic lineup of moody thrillers — Joan Crawford in The Damned Don’t Cry, Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark in No Way Out, the gritty English productions Hell Drivers and It Always Rains on Sunday, and even a chance to see the explosive Bonnie and Clyde on a big screen.

Allan has the particulars of the festival all mapped out … attendees slip into town to enjoy the show and the town before the summer heat takes over.

Thanks to a nice tip from correspondent Michael McQuarrie, we get to see a YouTube encoding of a documentary by favorite Trailers from Hell guru Brian Trenchard-Smith: a 1974 piece on stunt work in Hong Kong action pictures, circa 1974.

Trenchard-Smith wrote, produced and directed the martial arts movie documentary, which features stuntman Grant Page, but also Carter Wong, Lawrence Lee, June Rhee, Wang Yu — and stars George Lazenby and Stuart Whitman, then in Hong Kong filming Hammer’s Shatter. It’s one of 4 or 5 stunt-related films by Trenchard-Smith, before his directing career took off with The Man from Hong Kong.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson