I have known my friend Geoff for something like forty years. We met at school, were roommates in New York for a while and corresponded when we lived in different cities. Now he lives nearby and comes over every couple of weeks to show me movies. Geoff is a serious film buff whose tastes run to obscure noir and horror, and I believe he sees it as his mission to fill in the gaps in my education. The last film he brought over, The World’s Greatest Sinner, is so obscure it never had a theatrical release, even though it stars and was written and directed by one of my favorite actors, Timothy Carey. A tall, memorably sinister John Turturro type, Carey was usually cast as a secondary thug in obscure crime pictures, but he had small parts in East Of Eden and The Wild One, and larger ones in a couple of classic Stanley Kubrick pictures, The Killing and Paths Of Glory (probably his best performance- one of Carey’s persistent mannerisms was grinding his teeth like a bad Kirk Douglas imitator, but in this one he lays off, possibly because Kirk himself is the star). His distinctive mug almost makes caricature redundant, but here goes:
