46. If you can't fight...

...WEAR A BIG HAT.

When I was a boy my father used to say: 'If you can't fight, wear a big hat!'
I have laughed at the cowboys in b/w movies ever since.
Today I read that Jack Palance has died.
It would have been a brave (indeed, downright foolish) man who laughed at him.
Remember when he shot poor little Elisha Cook Jnr.in Shane(1953)?
Remember his award winning - and terrifying - trail boss in City Slickers (1991)?
He exuded menace.
He had a wonderful deadpan humour.
And fellow actors had to be at their very best were he not to effortlessly upstage them.
With his departure goes one more superb screen villain.

ANOTHER CHANGE OF TITLE?

I have been reliably informed that when we changed our Blog from The Oldies to Watching The Detectives we were less than original.
Elvis Costello apparently wrote a song and there is a weekend column in The Guardian called Watching The Detectives.
So to Elvis Costello and to the writer of that weekend column (my daughter in Oxford will know his name, she's a teacher so, unlike me, she reads The Gridauran) my apologies, though I don't know why, neither of them is ever likely to read this.
Time for another change of title then?
Somewhen soon?
Na-a-a-ah - sod it!
[Now then: if you're the sort of NCIS nut who records it then doesn't watch it for ages do not read on because the next bit is a rock solid Spoiler!)

THEY'VE DESPATCHED CAITLIN!

Yep, Caitlin Todd has been written out at the end of the second series of NCIS.
Perhaps the pretty actress who played her, Sasha Alexander, wanted to leave.
Perhaps she could not stand the prospect of a third series alongside the detestable Dinozzo (Michael Weatherley) and Jethro Gibbs's haircut (though that has been acting rather well of late).
Anyway they brought in a shadowy assassin played by a shadowy occasional guest appearance actor.
He was supposed to be attempting to kill Jethro but succeeded in shooting Caitlin right between the eyes and Jethro's end of series speech.
She'll be missed.
They'll need someone else to dampen the detestable Dinozzo