The View From The Mountain

I first saw actress Florence Pugh as part of an unplanned double feature with the movies Fighting With My Family and Malevolent . Fighting was a biography based on the life of British-born wrestler Saraya Bevis, better known as Paige in the ring. Malevolent was a horror movie about a brother and sister team of con artists who pretend to be ghost hunters so they can bilk their clients--until they run into some real life terrors. Both movies were very good, and I was really impressed with how completely different Pugh was from one film to the next. And so I followed her career, which wasn’t hard to do, seeing how Pugh kept popping up in just about everything since then, including Dune: Part Two , and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pugh debuted in the MCU as Yelena Belova, the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the enjoyable Black Widow . Pugh also reprised Yelena later that year in the shitty Disney+ series Hawkeye (Pugh imbued her scenes with some mu...

Since exploding onto the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2016’s Doctor Strange , the eponymous hero--also known as the Sorcerer Supreme--has been a trusted ally in the fight against evil in several of the MCU films. But the 2016 movie was not the very first time that the mystical adventures of Doctor Strange was caught on film. Forty five years ago this year, a TV movie starring Peter Hooten as the heroic sorcerer was released. In the 1978 TV movie, Hooten’s Stephen Strange was a psychiatrist on staff at a hospital in NYC, when he comes across an interesting case. A young woman (Eddie Benton) shows up in bad shape. Suffering from amnesia, she’s very disoriented and unsure of who or where she is. Yet the viewer has already seen what has happened to this woman, who turns out to be a college student named Clea Lake. Clea had been used as a pawn in a battle between sorcerers Lindmer (John Mills) and Morgan le Fay (Jessica Walter). The evil Morgan le Fay had used...