Discover Top Posts Tagged with #thomas gomez

Phantom Lady (1944) – Robert Siodmak

Thomas Gomez would have celebrated a birthday today #botd

Have you seen Force of Evil (1948)?

Yes

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Voting ended onJun 4, 2025

#polls #movies #force of evil #force of evil 1948 #force of evil movie #40s movies #old hollywood #abraham polonsky #john garfield #thomas gomez #marie windsor #howland chamberlain #roy roberts #have you seen this movie poll

Thomas Gomez / Sebastian Cabot / Burgess Meredith / Julie Newmar

I've always thought it was interesting that these personifications of the devil in The Twilight Zone are all portrayed as some kind of salesperson.

In Escape Clause (s1,ep5), the devil Cadwallader uses classic salesman tactics while bartering for our victim Mr. Bedecker's soul. Bedecker asks what he is asked to give up in this bargain, Cadwallader stresses the insignificance of this item, yet does not reveal what he wants in return. He then immediately goes into selling immortality to Bedecker, stressing that it would not be difficult to allow him to live hundreds or thousands of years. When Bedecker pressures him to reveal what he wants in return, Cadwallader skirts around directly telling him "I want your soul" until Bedecker presses more. Cadwallader allows Bedecker to create his own terms for their agreement, like remaining physically ageless, in order to make him feel like he is in charge of this deal. The objective of getting a sale, of course, is to make the customer think they are getting a better deal out of it than you.

In A Nice Place to Visit (s1,ep28), the devil, or more likely demon of some kind, Mr. Pip, is more of a servant or guide than a salesman directly selling something. This is due to our main character, Mr. Valentine, already being damned to hell. Mr. Pip has no need to convince Valentine to enter some shady deal, his motivations are simply to toy with Valentine as long as he can.

In Printer's Devil (s4,ep9), the devil Mr. Smith is more of a freelancer, a salesman of his own service. When Mr. Smith talks our victim Doug down from the bridge he was poised to jump from, it is only out of his own desire for carnage, and eventually, to harvest Doug's soul. Assuming that in this world suicide is a sin damning the perpetrator to hell anyways, Mr. Smith only talks him out of it knowing that he will be able to cause the death of many others by (temporarily) saving an individual. It's like the trolley problem, in which Mr. Smith pulls the lever to run over multiple innocents, then somehow reverses the trolley to back over the individual who thought he was safe initially.

In Of Late I Think of Cliffordville (s4,e14), the devil, aptly named Ms. Devlin, is a travel agent, promising our victim Mr. Feathersmith a satisfying trip back to 'the good ol' days'. Similarly to Escape Clause, Ms. Devlin describes Mr. Feathersmith's problem to him to make him feel understood and provides a solution, yet he is still skeptical of the deal. She hears out his terms and concerns, yet does not mention any other pitfalls that could occur. In this case, though, Mr. Feathersmith has already soul his soul, so Ms. Devlin takes the object that has replaced it: money. An interesting little theory is to assume that Mr. Feathersmith is already in hell from the beginning of his return to Cliffordville, and his time there is his own form of torture.

I would love input on this! As someone who learned some of these sales tactics in school, I think it's facinating that four out of the five episodes of The Twilight Zone feature the devil as a salesperson.

#the twilight zone #rod serling #thomas gomez #sebastian cabot #burgess meredith #julie newmar #devil personification #nostalgic tv #the howling man didnt really fit into this category but i acknowledge and love that episode as well

Force of Evil (1948) Abraham Polonsky

February 19th 2026

#force of evil #1948 #Abraham Polonsky #john garfield #Beatrice Pearson #Thomas Gomez #Howland Chamberlain #marie windsor #Roy Roberts #1950 #the numbers racket #The Story of Tucker's People #Tucker's People

The Woman on Pier 13

Given the American public’s indifference to anti-Communist films in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, you may wonder why the industry even bothered with a blacklist. Of course, the blacklist was mainly a means of getting rid of the more aggressive union members, and if anybody else got hurt, too bad. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Communist villain played by Thomas Gomez in Robert Stevenson’s THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 (1951, TCM, Max, Hulu) — aka I MARRIED A COMMUNIST — was modeled on a leading light in San Francisco’s longshoreman’s union. The main difference is that Gomez was guilty of worse crimes than his model was ever falsely accused of, so he never ends up one of the city’s most respected civic leaders. In the mind of anti-commie, anti-union Howard Hughes, the man was the devil incarnate. This production was Hughes’ ill-advised passion project as soon as he took over RKO, but it ended up losing over $600,000, and why do I get the feeling history is repeating itself on a much grander scale.

Robert Ryan plays a man who started out as a stevedore and is now vice president of a major shipping company. But he has a secret in his past. As an angry young man, he joined the Communist Party while having an affair with a sexy party member (Janis Carter). Now he has a new name and a new wife (Laraine Day). Then Gomez shows up with proof that he not only was in the party but also killed a man for them. Gomez blackmails Ryan into sabotaging union negotiations to trigger a strike and has Carter seduce Ryan’s young brother-in-law (John Agar) to bring him into the Party as well.

Working with the great cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, Stevenson shoots this as a film noir. The high-contrast black and white images look great. But they can’t hide the fact that this is basically a gangster film with anti-Communist trappings. In fact, it would have made more sense as a gangster film, with the mob infiltrating the union in order to get kickbacks from management. How the Communists benefit from a stroke is anybody’s guess. It’s just a device to generate tension. And it’s also there to threaten 1940s gender norms. Ryan never shares his past with Day. When she expresses concern about his acting strangely, he just brushes her questions aside. And when she finally sets out to find out on her own, the poor little thing puts herself in danger. The ending reasserts the status quo in the most patriarchal way possible, underlining the fact that she isn’t a human being, just some man’s possession.

This is the rare film that casts Ryan at a disadvantage, and he only did it for fear of losing his job. You don’t really want to see him under anybody’s thumb, and he never gets to play any sense of having to do things that go against his principles. As the good girl wife, Day is rather boring and general until she decides to find out what’s happening by coming on to the party’s hired killer (William Talman, in his film debut). Until then, she also has precious little to do. Giving the lie to the I MARRIED A COMMUNIST title, there’s not a lot of “I” in the movie, and she doesn’t find out about Ryan until almost the end. By contrast, Carter is stylish, nuanced and a lot of fun. She was borrowed from Columbia, where she was rather wasted, so it’s nice to see what she could accomplish even in this mess even if she, like Day, has to be punished for trying to act on her own initiative. Gomez does everything but kick a dog as the evil cell leader, and Agar is charming as the young innocent. The other standout character is Talman as an overdressed womanizer who just happens to kill people. There’s also a fun bit by Iris Adrian as a waitress at Talman’s favorite cheap dive. In a few minutes she etches a more compelling character than does Day.