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The Maltese Falcon (Sydney Greenstreet is The Fat Man) Alan and Robin Thicke

If you're a fan of Claude Rains then Daughters Courageous allows him his best opportunity of these Lane Sisters films, in my opinion. He has the opportunity to bring charm with a hint of vulnerability to his wanderlust father who returns home and wants to settle down. I always found his characterization as the cuddly music loving Papa in the other films a bit too cutesy for my liking. Somewhere I read that Flynn had been under consideration for Four Daughters. I'm glad they didn't waste his talents in this film. Sure, they would have built his part up if it had been him instead of Jeffrey Lynn but that might have been at the expense of John Garfield's outsider. By the way, unlike Flynn, Garfield regarded Michael Curtiz as a favourite director and when you look at their four films together you can understand why: Four Daughters, which made him a star with an Oscar nomination, Daughters Courageous, The Sea Wolf and The Breaking Point, the latter being a particular favourite of the actor. Curtiz was a tough director but he and Garfield got along well.

Thank you for posting a link to this in the General Comments/I Just Watched section. There are so many threads it's hard to know where to look for things sometimes. I found the Hemingway documentary engrossing and was able to watch all three episodes on pbs.org. Part I especially made me want to go back and read some of his early novels and short stories. He packed so much into one life, good and bad, and as the series progressed my feelings about him changed depending on the era. The romanticized Hemingway: His early years as an ex-pat writer in Paris. The brutal Hemingway: His love of bullfighting; The big game hunting which was underscored by the mindboggling list of animals he killed while on his first trip to Africa. The tragic end: After countless concussions combined with his drinking, he was in steady decline. The NBC interview was painful to watch. You can see and hear the toll of those concussions and head traumas. I can understand how he would reach the conclusion that living like that was ultimately unbearable. It was rather chilling to hear the details at the end, the photo of the spot where he committed suicide, and that his wife left the keys to the gun cabinet out and available. I think the show was fairly objective showing the best and worst of him. He could be jealous of other writers, believed in his own myth, embellished his war stories and exploits, replaced wives while still married to the previous one. He seemed to want his wives to devote their lives to him but ended up being bored and resenting them for doing so. I agree that biographies that like this are good way to study a slice of history. I think you're right that more time could have been spent on his family, especially his sons and wives but I enjoyed it overall. Hemingway's life reminded me of that John Ford quote: When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.

SAMSON AND DELILAH (1949) More Hedy Lamarr. Next: BLAZING SADDLES (1974) with Harvey Korman as Hedley Lamarr.

A thread should be done on Hemingway the Ken Burns documentary was very good as usual.I was a bit disappointed that it all ended with a bang....more info on the family or on his exes would have been interesting.His son Gregory got operated to become a woman in 1995 and everything got complicated. Mary Welsh was the best looking wife of the 4 imo.She had a firm trim body all her life,i find her very attractive and sexy.Hemingway should have considered himself very lucky to have such a quality woman as a wife.He was too drunk most of the time to appreciate her i guess..Hemingway pursued Slim Keith while she was married to Howard Hawks.

Sorry, but every time I hear this thought expressed about method acting changing the whole craft of film acting and so often how method actors weren't as "broad" in their performances as their predecessors, I think of two performances done by two of what many people say were two of the earliest actors to make a big slash in the film industry by use of "The Method". These two... Uh-huh, suuuure. There's nothin' "broad" goin' on HERE, huh! (...point being, some of the greatest film acting existed back when Spencer Tracy, Fredric March and Bogart were plying their craft, AND even after the two pictured above with their "method" had come on the scene)

Thanks for researching this Dargo! I am a little less disturbed by the salt shaker now. I will focus more on the pepper going forward, and... I'm more disturbed by the implications for Al Pacino. Although I haven't had Musso & Frank's French Onion Soup, I've had it at many other places and generally, it consists of an intensely flavored broth, an intensely buttery and charred crouton, and one or two intensely flavored cheeses (generally salty ones like Parmigiana Reggiano and Gruyère). A lot of flavor intensity. If Pacino is adding salt to this he may have lost his sense of taste and I worry if he has COVID. Which he may be in denial of, because COVID would not be period-correct for the character. 😰

thick and thin duos: Laurel and Hardy Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton going from thick to thin in Thinner (1996)

THICKER THAN WATER THE THICK WALLED ROOM THROUGH THICK AND THIN THIN ICE

The Thin Blue Line (1988) A Thin Line Between Love and Hate (1996) The Thin White Duke = David Bowie

Murder By The Clock (1931) Paramount released this old house thriller between Universal's releases of Dracula and Frankenstein. Today, with the film's Gothic look thanks to Karl Struss's striking black and white photography, many would be inclined to emphasize a horror element to be found in the production, as well as the mystery. The story may seem familiar but it has some good touches. A wealthy crotchety old lady, fearful of being buried alive in her crypt, has a siren installed in it that can only be operated from the inside. She also has the usual collection of heirs hoping to get her estate. Among them is a lumbering half wit (Irving Pichel), as mentally feeble as he is physically strong, who likes to talk of his desire to kill someone. Naturally he will be the number one suspect if anything happens to anybody. But there is also the fashionable, sleek, conniving wife (Lilyan Tashman) of the old lady's son, despised by the old lady herself, but able to twist her weakling son around her greedy fingers. Those used to the slow pace of early talkies (particularly if you can endure Dracula) will have an easier time enjoying this film than some others. There is also the deliberate measured unnatural delivery of dialogue, a curse of many early talkies, to be found here, though no worse than in other films of the time. But the film also has its pay off moments, the eerie siren in the crypt that we just know we are going to hear sooner or later (more than once in the film actually), along with the over the top performances of both Pichel and Tashman. Tashman's manipulative villainess, while not be be taken seriously because of her somewhat tongue-in-cheek portrayal, is a schemer out for the estate who will commit no murders in the film herself but is ready to twist various weak willed males in the film into committing the crimes for her, all the while trying to maintain an air of innocence to the investigating detective (William "Stage" Boyd in an effectively hard boiled performance) who, incredibly, she also tries to seduce. There is just no stopping this woman. Tashman's blonde seductress can be seen as a forerunner to the femme fatales of '40s noirs. While her performance lacks subtlety she still remains a primary focus of interest in the film. There is also one memorable moment in which an off screen murder takes place, with the camera remaining on Tashman's face throughout it. The expression on her face in reaction to the crime, with her hand motions emulating the strangulation she is watching, can best be described as one of o r g a s m i c glee. Tashman, one of Hollywood's fashion plates at the time who was married to actor Edmund Lowe, would die of cancer three years after this film's release. An old fashioned "fun" thriller, Murder By The Clock has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever had a DVD release. There is, however, a soft looking print of it currently available on You Tube. 2.5 out of 4

Nolan, Jeanette

Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971) Next: What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968) more titles that ask a question

I remember when Geoff Chaucer used to post here. He once told me, "Yf ye are here on a smartphone, thanne scrollyng down to the genre forums ys troublesome."

Not a bad thought, but at this point I think those of us who are interested have said all we have to say. Since this doc wasn't as well-promoted as some of Burns' previous films, there may be more interest after the repeat airings and a little word-of-mouth advertising. And I'm a big believer in the niche boards. Replies are fewer and farther between, but they usually come.

Where the Boys Are 1960 next: Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor and John Kerr

O'Malley, Steven -- Spencer Tracy in Keeper of the Flame (1942)

Come Fly with Me (1963) Next: Dolores Hart, George Hamilton, Paula Prentiss

I was going to post a similar sentiment. Some of their performances go way over the top. Perhaps I've never known someone IRL that was so dramatic, but their choices seem out of kilter to me. The only one of Dean's performances I cared for (not that there are a lot to sample, unfortunately) was in Giant. I give actors in the 30s and early 40s some breaks, as they were still learning what worked and what didn't work on screen, with sound, during that time. The old style from silent pictures didn't work in that medium, and stage acting tends to be broader by nature since you have to play to the balcony, so that style can come across as too big on film. There was a TCM interstitial a few years back on Katharine Hepburn, narrated by Anthony Hopkins, and he quoted Kate from their filming The Lion In Winter. His quote on the video is a bit different from this one, which I copied from IMDb, but it had the same spirit (though this one comes off as more arrogant than his quote in the video): Don't act. Leave that to me; I act all over the place. You don't need to act. You've got a good face, you've got a good voice, you've got a big body. Watch Spencer Tracy, watch the real American actors that never act, they just do it. Just show up and speak the lines. Hopkins later regarded this as the best acting advice he had ever been given. Of course, Spencer Tracy was the model of understatement in most of his roles, and he was famous for stealing scenes without saying word. His performances, to me, are some of the most natural looking acting on screen, especially from the "Golden Era.," though he had a few clinkers over the years as well.

George Harrison meets President Gerald Ford 1974

ANother silent movie star, Anna Q Nilsson, better known to most movie fans as one of Norma Desmond's waxworks, wore some cool hats in her silent movie days:

I rather like the screen acting of old (pre-Method), and I don't often find it over the top, I find it rather natural, even if the people seem bigger than life. Then you have those middle periods (from the 50s to I'd say the 90s, maybe early 00s) where it was more empasized to be invested in the character and more low-key, to still have a strong personality though. It lead to plenty of chameleon -like performers. Nowadays though, i feel that some younger actors and actresses are a bit too low-key. I really can't get too excited about many of the ones born past the late 70s. Only a few have that real spark about them....

Episode 2, "The Avatar" was painful to watch. So much to dislike about Hemingway is revealed. It begins in the early 30s and discusses his fascination with bullfighting, and Death in the Afternoon. Images of the picadors come. I'm with Max Eastman. I don't get it. It is not beautiful. It is ritualized cruelty. (But then I've never been to Spain.) The focus shifts with the times and the rise of socialism. Here, I found his anti-communism refreshing to learn of. To the leftist critics who complained he was not supportive of their cause, he said, "There is no left or right in writing. There is only good and bad writing." But it was short-lived, and probably no more deeply felt than his love for any of his wives. He took the first opportunity to pander to the communists in New Masses by taking advantage of a natural disaster, a hurricane, that left 259 veterans dead, and laying if at the feet of Roosevelt. He didn't want to fight the Nazis, but he went to Spain where he saw first-hand the Stalinist executions and agreed to say nothing. When John Dos Passos complained, Hemingway claimed that to do otherwise would run afoul of the left wing literary establishment in New York. Well, yes it would, of course. So much for the rugged individualist. He went to China to report on the war there with Japan, and oh yeah, he secretly agreed to supply information to Stalin, but as Geoffrey Ward's narrative is quick to point out, he didn't actually tell them anything. My guess is the Chinese weren't stupid enough to give him anything. He actually got Roosevelt to let him play soldier off the Florida coast, hunting Nazi subs with all the equipment he asked for, including unlimited gasoline, though everyone else's was rationed. Then he traded in a loyal, supportive wife for a slightly prettier and more adventurous one that he found he had to compete with. And he played dirty. When his bullying didn't keep her in line, he tried sulking. When that didn't get any better results, he got off his a$$ and weaseled his way ahead of her in Colliers by-lines. Nobody is perfect, God knows, but he seems to have been, as Paul Johnson concluded, a shallow, self-indulgent opportunist.

I recently viewed one of the most touching and intense films about an adolescent on TCM, "The 400 Blows", directed by Francois Truffaut. It is the story of a boy growing up in Paris who is surrounded by neglectful adults and is eventually drawn into a life of crime. This film is inspired by Truffaut's own personal life. The acting of the children feels so authentic and the black and white photography give a real - almost documentary - feeling to the film. There are both tragic and humorous events in the story. How different this film is than what had been the usual "Hollywood" style of depicting adolescents with very idealized behavior and unbelievable dialogue. If you have ever hesitated to try a foreign or black and white film, give "The 400 Blows" a try. I promise you will be rewarded with an amazing film.

I thank you for your kind words. I tend to run off at the mouth like a physicked woodpecker. My grandmother would not let me tell her a story and would instead ask me pertinent questions and then tell me when I was done. I often try to present things to her standard. I must admit also that I had my little fuzzy check it for coherence and grammar and followed his few begrudging comments. Hats and caps from the world at large:

Stage Door next--egghead

Youngfellow, Barrie

To me, the big feature that was removed and as far as I can tell has still not been restored, is being able to go to a specific movie page and seeing "upcoming airings" at the top. I had many movies bookmarked hoping they would air in the future, and this is the only way to easily find that information. I continue to hope they restore this important feature.

The Bride of the Colorado (1928)

Vogel, Mitch

Xanadu

Thomas Mitchell

CAN’T HELP SINGING (1944)

Eve Arden

"Mank," "Tenet," "Da 5 Bloods" and "Soul" won the top film prizes Saturday night at The Art Directors Guild's 25th Annual Excellence in Production Design Awards. The presentation featured 2020-21 contenders from theatrical motion pictures, television, commercials and music videos. "Mank" and "Tenet" are nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Production Design category. Here is the complete list of winners: FEATURE FILMS: PERIOD FILM MANK Production Designer: DONALD GRAHAM BURT FANTASY FILM TENET Production Designer: NATHAN CROWLEY CONTEMPORARY FILM DA 5 BLOODS Production Designer: WYNN THOMAS ANIMATED FILM SOUL Production Designer: STEVE PILCHER

Robert Wagner Next: FASCINATING YOUTH (1926)

Morris, Chester

The Voice of Bugle Ann (1936)

Those are some really beautiful magazine covers, particularly the drawn ones. At first, I thought this one was Frances Dee. She could be Nilsson's twin!

Janis Paige was in "Silk Stockings" with Cyd Charisse.

Essential: TOMORROW AT TEN (1963) TopBilled: Not long ago I found an interesting British ‘B’ film on YouTube. Film historians consider it one of the top 15 B films to have ever been made . To be honest, I didn’t expect much from it. But within minutes I was thoroughly engrossed in the story, and I can see why it has found favor with critics as well as audiences. One reason I wanted to see the film is because it features an early performance by Robert Shaw. He is third-billed. After lead star John Gregson, he actually has the second most important role. Shaw plays a criminal mind named Marlow. Marlow poses as a chauffeur and kidnaps a wealthy man’s son on the way to school one morning. I guess it all reminds me of MGM’S RANSOM!, made a few years earlier with Glenn Ford and Donna Reed. But this telling is more about social class distinctions and what criminals feel they must do in order to live the good life. After Shaw’s character abducts the boy, they end up at a rented room in a country house where there are few other people around. Initially the little boy does not realize he’s been kidnapped. After all, this has been presented as a day of having fun. And any day you don’t have to attend school, that’s fun! Marlow's devious plan becomes even more sinister when he leaves a golliwog doll with the boy, before he locks the boy in the room and takes off. The doll has a bomb inside, and it is going to blow up at 10:00 a.m. the following morning. Hence the title. Of course the boy does not realize the golliwog contains a bomb. I sort of wondered if this might have worked better if the child was a girl, since girls are more apt to play with dolls. I would think a boy would quickly grow tired of such a toy and set it aside. Marlow returns to the wealthy family’s estate and tells the boy’s father (Alec Clunes) that he took the child. The child will die tomorrow if the ransom demands are not met. At this point, Inspector Parnell (John Gregson) takes center stage, because he is sent to the house to try and reason with Marlow. But Marlow refuses to divulge the boy’s whereabouts. Of course we know the child probably won’t be killed. But the negotiation scenes are still tense, especially when the boy’s father– in a fit of rage– shoves Marlow against the fireplace, causing him to sustain a severe head injury. Some of the action shifts to the hospital, as doctors attempt to keep Marlow from dying. Marlow slips into a coma and does die, which makes Parnell and his team that much more frantic to locate the boy. They are now running out of time and cannot pull any more clues out of the kidnapper. I won’t tell you how the boy’s life is saved. This is for you to watch and find out. All of the performances are uniformly excellent. I especially liked a subplot involving Parnell's superior, an ineffective chief who seemed more interested in hobnobbing with city politicians instead of adequately assisting the men under his command.

Paradine Case was OK, but it had several things I disliked about it. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Gregory Peck instantly salivating over his new client. Then she just dispassionately gives it up on the stand after that long elaborate story of innocence - yep, I did it. And Charles Laughton playing it over the top evil. Just too obvious all around. Not exactly Witness For the Prosecution, which, when I first saw it over 40 years ago I thought was a Hitchcock film. I was surprised to see Billy Wilder directed that one.

THE KETTLES IN THE OZARKS (1956)

From April 10-13, 1921, the Poli ran Forbidden Fruit¸ directed by Cecil B. DeMille, and starring Agnes Ayres as Mary Maddock and Forrest Stanley as Nelson Rogers. The film was released in January of 1921, and is available on YouTube, running just under 90 minutes. Brief Plot: Mary Maddock is a poor seamstress who works for the wealthy Mrs. Mallory. Mr. Mallory attempts to make a business deal with Nelson Rogers. To entice the young man, Mrs. Mallory invites him to a dinner party, promising him that his partner will be the prettiest girl in town. But when his partner us unable to attend, Mrs. Mallory enlists Mary in the role. Mrs. Mallory and her servants transform Mary into a desirable woman. Rogers falls for her, unaware that Mary is married to a louse. Mary’s husband conspires with Giuseppe, the Mallory’s butler, to steal some jewels from the Mallory home. During the theft, Mary’s husband discovers Mary sleeping at the Mallory’s home and assumes she is selling herself. Can Mary extricate herself from this mess? Review: This is an odd film. I’m sure DeMille was going for melodrama (the title cards are rife with morality). There are some references to Adam and Eve (“forbidden fruit” … get it? get it?), but also scenes with Cinderella fantasies (which were pretty bad). But several scenes are comic and the movie borders on farce. Theodore Roberts, as Mr. Mallory, plays his usual cigar-chomping character, and provides some of the comic relief. Rogers makes a pleasant leading man, although his outfit in the Cinderella scenes is way too much. Ayres is quite beautiful, even before she is “transformed.” In what might be an “in” joke, one scene involves the Mallorys, along with Mary and Rogers, watching a play in a theater. The actors onstage are Conrad Nagel and Margaret Loomis, and the play is entitled “Forbidden Fruit.”

Episode 3, "The Blank Page" begins with Hemingway's adventure as a war correspondent who also, despite the Geneva Convention's proscriptions, participated in the conflict as a combatant. He followed the 22nd Infantry Regiment, whose commander, Buck Lanham, would become a lifelong friend. During this time he suffered two more concussions before returning to help liberate Paris, where he was joined by Mary Welsh, who would become, however reluctantly due to his drinking and quick temper, his fourth and last wife. He would also witness scenes of wartime horror in the Hürtgen Forest. We learn more detail of his marital bedroom proclivities involving gender reversal. Maybe he enjoyed being the passive partner, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be anything he took great care to hide. We also learn of his son Gregory's proclivity for cross dressing. Gregory would later be arrested in a Los Angeles ladies room dressed as a female, and still later would undergo a sex change operation, though this is not mentioned. The word schizophrenia is mentioned when his son Patrick is diagnosed, and treated with shock therapy, foreshadowing Hemingway's own medical treatment in the years prior to his death. After his marriage to Mary, the familiar pattern of spousal abuse appears, only with a new physical component. His tales become taller and his sexual adventures involve a teenage prostitute, and the company of a young woman he met in Venice, Adriana Ivancich, an 18 year-old he asked to call him, at 50, Papa. He would ask her to marry him, he told her, if he weren't certain she would say no. He would suffer yet another concussion (I lost count, but he rivals Howard Hughes in this area) when he had a fall on his boat. Throughout this episode we see him drinking more and more, later taking pills, and we are often reminded of his father's suicide. Mary said she felt she was watching him disintegrate. His long awaited war novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, was published to unkind reviews, and critics suggested his best writing was behind him. Around that time, his publisher sent him a galley of From Here to Eternity, with a request that he provide a blurb. Instead, Hemingway responded with a particularly vicious diatribe that scholar Marc Dudley suggests he must have known would be widely read one day. In it, he called the author a coward who possessed the psychotic's urge to kill himself. We learn of a little game he would play in front of friends that involved putting a shotgun to his mouth and pulling the trigger, only to make a clicking sound. When Adriana and her mother visited Hemingway at his home in Cuba, he was inspired by her, energized someone said, as if she were a muse, and in the space of eight weeks, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. It was widely praised by critics. Indeed Mario Vargas Llosa tells us it his his favorite Hemingway novel, while Edna O'Brien, who up to this point has spoken highly, dismisses it impatiently as "schoolboy writing." Hemingway returned to Africa where he would survive two airplane crashes in two days. The first of which prompted headlines around the world announcing his death, while the second resulted in still another head injury, after he butted it repeatedly and with enough force to open a door to escape a burning plane. His head injuries by then, compounded with his drinking, were taking their toll. After he won the Nobel, he agreed to a television interview on the condition the questions would be submitted beforehand, and his answers could be read off cue cards. The film is shown of him reading aloud in a grade schooler's cadence, even pronouncing audibly the words "comma" and "period." It is difficult to watch. Thereafter, Hemingway began but did not finish A Moveable Feast, where he wrote harshly of former friends Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, and he continued to work on The Garden of Eden, even while knowing it would be too sexually frank to publish, at least in his lifetime. Of the revolution in Cuba, he said he was convinced of its "historical necessity," not foreseeing perhaps that it might cost him his Cuban home and everything in it, which after the Bay of Pigs, it did. Still, he'd had the foresight to buy a home in Ketchum, Idaho, where he spent his final days. Treatments at the Mayo, ostensibly for his blood pressure but actually for his depression, followed and then, in the midst of alcohol abuse, over-medication with pills, and ever-increasing paranoia, the inevitable and pitiable end came. The room, or vestibule as it is described, where he pulled the trigger is shown, followed by the newscast of Edwin Newman delivering the news that Hemingway had "killed himself, the sheriff says, accidentally." Even knowing it was coming, I found it tragic and, like all suicides, pathetic. I believe he knew he was losing the abilities to do the things he wanted to do with his life, and when it became clear that he no longer could live it on his terms, he ended it in the manner he had rehearsed. This was not I think one of Burns' more compelling or entertaining works, but I found it worthwhile, even if I'm not, as I expected I would be, eager to read more Hemingway.

Or as they say in Oklahoma... Dayyyummmmmmmmmm

"Intolerance"