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It's mostly about Westerns but would pertain to a lot of films from American Heritage Magazine 1971 enjoy! "IT DON'T HURT MUCH, MAMM" "Then how come they're digging a grave behind the old corral, Luke?" By JAMES S. PACKER "Oh, Sam, what happened?" "Nothing serious, Miss Sally Luke just picked up a little bit of lead." "Oh.no!" "Now Miss Sally, don't you fret. It's just a little ol' hole in his shoulder. He"ll be up and about in no time a-tall." Sure enough, in two or three days good old Luke is up and raring to resume his defense of sweet Miss Sally, the Bar-X spread, and the honor of the old, wild West. And Luke's adventure and miraculous recovery, with slight alterations, occur over and over on the pages of western fiction and on the imaginative screens of Hollywood and television. But what really happened to those gunshot heroes and villains in that tempestuous period of loose laws and fast gunplay? The reality was quite gruesomely different. The disastrous effect of a large-caliber bullet on the human body can hardly be comprehended by those whose knowledge of shooting is limited to movie and television westerns. The favorite guns of the West were the .44 and .45 caliber revolvers. Bullet caliber is measured by the diameter in inches: the lead slugs for these guns were nearly half an inch in diameter. Such a bullet packs a terrific wallop, knocking the victim off his feet if it hits any solid part of the body. He doesn't just drop dead, either. Here is a descriptionof a real gunfight by a man who knew the subject well, Dr. George Goodfellow, the"gunfighte's surgeon" of Tombstone, Arizona: In the Spring of 1881 I was a few feet distant from a couple of individuals who were quarreling. They began shooting. The first shot took effect, as was afterward ascertained, in the left breast of one of them, who, after being shot, and while staggering back some 12 feet, cocked and fired his pistol twice, his second shot going into the air, for by that time he was on his back. It may be remarked that the recipient of the first shot was a tough man indeed to manage two shots himself before going down; but the significant phrase is"while staggering back some 12 feet." Compare this, just for instance, with the climactic scene in the movie Vera Cruz (1954), in which Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper are resolutely facing each other in a frontier street, their hands just above their guns. In a blurred movement they both draw, and two shots ring out; but neither man staggers back one foot, let alone twelve. The logical conclusion is, of course, that they have both missed. Not so; justice has triumphed again. After a long, tantalizing pause, bad-guy Lancaster crumples to the ground, dead. He has not moved an inch otherwise (or even stopped smiling), after being hit by that .45 caliber "express train? an effect totally beyond belief. The U.S. Army, testing the Colt .45 in the Chicago stockyards, found that it would bowl over a 1,000 pound steer with one shot, even if the wound was not fatal. Another sentimental curiosity of western mythology is the hierarchy, so to speak, of wound areas. Good guys are almost invariably lucky and get hit in the arm, the shoulder, or the fleshy part of the leg. Bad guys are much more likely to take it in the chest, abdomen, or back, which means that they are thenceforth dead. And nobody ever gets hit in the face. The explanations are not obscure. Even an audience comfortably deluded about the destructive power of a .44 or .45 slug would hardly believe a face wound that didn't show up as more than a neat little hole. In reality, gunfighters were hit in the face fairly often, and the big lead bullets caused horrendous damage to mouths, teeth, noses, and eyes. You can't show that on the family TV set, no matter how bad the bad guy is. The reason that heroes so often are hit in the shoulder is that this is fondly imagined to be a relatively"safe" area, well removed from the vital organs. One would think that the human shoulder was made of some selfhealing material, rather like a puncture-proof tire. The fact is that except for fat men and weightlifters, you can't penetrate much of the shoulder without striking a complicated arrangement of bones, tendons, blood vessels, and nerves. A shoulder wound from a high-caliber weapon could be not only incapacitating; it could be fatal. Civil war medical records showed that one third of the victims of shoulder-joint wounds died as a result of severe damage, such as severed arteries, or from subsequent infection. Even if the bullet hit the upper arm or forearm, sparing the shoulder joint, the injury was so great that the usual result was amputation. Any meeting between bone and the old high-caliber bullet was likely to be highly traumatic: in 1893 an Army medical report observed that "if a bone is struck, the destruction is enormous, the wound of exit frightful in size and irregularity." This brings up another important point that TV and movie writers might take more notice of the great difference between the old lead slug and modern steel-jacketed bullets. The speed of today's high-velocity slug in effect sterilizes the outer surface and at the same time usually enables the projectile to drill a rather neat, aseptic hole through tissue and bone alike. The old lead bullet, in contrast, readily lost shape on impact and tore viciously through the victim's body, carrying along unsterile pieces of skin and clothing. It made a large wound and often left a track out of all proportion to the size of the bullet. Extensive bleeding and shock were common, and infection virtually assured. Almost every gunshot wound was highly dangerous, no matter where the bullet hit. If a gunfighter survived a gunfight but was wounded in the process, he still had to survive the medical conditions of the Old West. Doctors were scarce, and some of those available were of doubtful value. In most places there were few if any laws regulating the practice of medicine, and all too often a frontier doctor was anyone who chose to so designate himself. Perhaps a fourth of the "doctors" of the early American West held medical degrees; and even at that it must be remembered that in those days many medical schools would certify an M.D. after just a year or two of study. No nurses were to be found, with the possible exception of a few tender-hearted schoolmarms or"soiled doves" from the dance halls; there were no hospitals worthy of the name, no laboratories, no antibiotics, and few medicines. The universal anesthetic and cure-all was whiskey, which, while it may have raised the morale of both patient and doctor, was not calculated to increase the efficacy of surgery. Very often, incidentally, swift and accurate surgery meant the difference between life and death. Given a gunshot wound of the abdominal cavity with one of the above caliber balls [.44 and .45], Dr. Goodfellow wrote, "if the cavity be not opened within an hour, the patient by reason of hemorrhage is beyond any chance of recovery." It hardly needs saying that blood transfusions were not to be had. Parenthetically, it may be noted also that if there was actually a large percentage of abdominal and body wounds in western gunfights, it was not by accident. The arm, leg, and shoulder wounds so frequently enjoyed ?that seems to be the right word" by heroes and sub heroes on the screen were usually, in real life, the consequences of poor shooting and did not occur any more often than the shooter could help. He went for the broadest and most obvious target, namely the chest and abdomen of his opponent. The opponent was well aware of this, naturally, and did his best to avoid full exposure. The dramatic showdown that has climaxed so many Hollywood and TV westerns, where two stalwarts deliberately stalk down the street toward each other, good guy waiting for bad guy to go for his gun, was certainly a rare occurrence. Far more often a man was shot without ever having had a chance to touch his gun. Jesse James was shot in the back; Virgil Earp was ambushed at night; Morgan Earp got it through a window while he was playing billiards; Billy the Kid died in a darkened room without shooting back; Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind while concentrating on a hand of poker. A whole separate branch of the mythology of western fiction and film has to do with fist fights and barroom brawls. Ferocious encounters featuring multiple knockdowns, repeated haymakers to the lace, kicks to the stomach, thumps on the head with bottles, chairs, and miscellaneous furniture, and other egregious violence ?usually produce nothing more than a temporary daze, with no visible bruises to speak of. Little boys find out better, of course, the first time they are in a real fist fight in the school yard. In the meantime, the gunfight myths of the West live on in books, movies, and on television. Only the other night I watched Escape from Fort Bravo on TV, and 1 kept wondering when William Holden, the star, would acquire his mandatory flesh wound. Sure enough, he gets shot in (what else?) the shoulder, and for a while it looks as if he is done for ?almost as if the screenwriter had been studying up on the real effects of large-caliber bullets. Then, just before the ornery redskins move in to finish him off, the U.S. cavalry thunders to the rescue. Minutes later, there is our hero, sitting straight and tall in the saddle and galloping away at the head of his own cavalry troop as if nothing has happened. Oh yes, he does have his arm in a sling. Mr. Packer is a western history buff who is studying for a doctor’s degree in entomology at Utah State University.

Although I can't list the source( it being so many years ago) I do recall an article about those Western movie and TV shootouts. One point being that those early handguns were so inaccurate that two guys could shoot at each other at very close range and STILL miss each other by a wide margin. Rifle shootouts were more on the mark as those Winchester repeaters were far more accurate than a Colt pistol. And too... The article I read mentioned that the time-honored "cliche" of two men "drawing" on each other had to be myth due to not only the inaccuracy of the pistols, but the added factor that ANY of those guns, from .45 down to .38 fired with so much "kick"( recoil) that one man's bullet might easily strike some unfortunate person as far as ten feet to the right or left of the intended target. OR anything up to ten feet in the air above it. That's IF the pistol wasn't flung from the grip of the shooter's hand, likely fastened to a severely sprained wrist. As far as the "miracle" healing from those gunshot wounds... The only "proof" I can offer is to recant the story of a neighbor of mine in Southwest Detroit who died after being struck by a 9mm slug from a gun fired by some fool at midnight one New Year's. The slug hit him mid thigh, which went through the thigh bone completely and caused the shattered bone to cut into his femoral artery causing internal exsanguination and his death. Poor guy was only 25. And all this also goes for shootouts and gunfights in gangster and other Noir movie gunplay. Sepiatone

So good in 1950's The Cage, 1951's Detective Story and 1955's Interrupted Melody, receiving Best Actress Oscar nods for all three. Also great performances in Scaramouche, The Man with the Golden Arm, The Woman in White, The Voice of the Turtle, Home from the Hill and Above and Beyond. Plus her supporting role as the Baroness in The Sound of Music. Great actress who deserves to be better remembered today.

It Came From Beneath the Sea The Horror of Party Beach The Amazing Colossal Man Beginning of the End

The Great Gatsby 1949 Paramount. Directed by Elliott Nugent.Alan Ladd Betty Field Macdonald Carey Ruth Hussey Barry Sullivan Howard Da Silva Shelley Winters. This is the only film version made under the code. So a lot from the book was removed or seriously toned down. Despite that, it is still very enjoyable,it has great sets,costumes by Edith Head. Very good acting from all the actors.91 minutes 7.25/10

Stanwyck seems to have had a more...dignified later career, avoiding the horror movie train for the most part. There was this one William Castle flick with ex-hubby that probably paid well, however.

Godzilla (1954) King Kong (1933) Frankenstein (1931)

As has been mentioned, Bette did not have many juicy romantic roles. Or maybe when she did, there was just "less heat"? Think about her romances in her mid period WB movies (Skeffington/Dark Victory/Letter and she was cool, distant towards men, her passion was on the drama. You'd never see Bette claw a man's back in an embrace. Babs has none of that scary anger Bette harbors for those who did her wrong-she'd just as soon kill you! Their late career choices fall in line with those developed personas. This is why Babs is better at comedy, she comes across less haughty with a sense of humor & humility about her situation/lot in life. Very simply & well stated.

I'll go with Stanwyck. She could do it all. Bette Davis is among my favorites, too, but she had a great many affectations and could sometimes be over the top. Besides, I cannot imagine Bette on a cattle drive.

To me, Grayson Hall was no beauty -- certainly not sexy. But, that pic you shared, LornaHansonForbes, demonstrates that the "right" clothes, coiffure, photographer, camera angle, and attitude can work miracles. Très étourdissant! Très séduisant! Très . . . sexy!

So true about Lupino, TOTO. Even directing what might be considered more potentially "schlock" material, like in "The Bigamist" and "Hard, Fast and Beautiful", she brings that little zing of hers-- a knowing talent. And on screen herself, wow. She did splendidly, but I wish for her that she had gotten even bigger and more roles...

This Marion Davies mega-hit is now streaming on the TCM hub at HBO Max but it's not listed on TCM's own watch it now service. Interesting. The film is also set to premiere on TCM at midnight on December 26 Silent Sunday Night according to the December schedule. https://www.moviecollectoroh.com/nightly/sched-new.htm

Excellent topic, Lilypond and it certainly got me thinking about why I think Stanwyck absolutely gets the "Better Actress" nod over Davis. To me, Davis is a Star who Acts while Stanwyck is an Actress who is a Star. Barbara Stanwyck always seems to "become" her characters while, particularly from the 1940's on, Bette Davis is generally playing a variation on the Bette Davis character. I also think Barbara Stanwyck is equally gifted in both dramas and comedies while Bette Davis is (for me) not as compelling in comedies. Stanwyck was somewhat of a revelation for me. Prior to TCM, I had only seen her more famous films -- Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve, etc. And, of course, like any good baby boomer, I knew her from The Big Valley. When I discovered more of her early work -- Baby Face, Stella Dallas, Ball of Fire, etc. I was totally hooked. Don't get me wrong, I love Bette Davis but, for me. Stanwyck is, always and ever, #1 on my Best Actress List.

Indeed it is. Stanwyck is not a classic beauty like Gene Tierney, Jeanne Crain or Grace Kelly. She probably would not have made money as a model, for instance. But, her look seems to transcend that "All American Girl" kinda thing... As to the question at hand? I love both of these actors. If forced to pick, I'd have to go with Barbara, mostly because I feel she had more range and more ability to fully inhabit a role and become someone else. Davis, perhaps by dint of her control over her Directors (ahem...) ended up playing "Bette Davis" roles. For instance I love both Dark Victory and Now, Voyager, but sometimes I get them muddled in my head and think one scene from one movie was in the other! Just sayin', that she did a lot of similar stuff.... "It's straight down the line, Walter...."

THEM! TREMORS ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL

Dubliners has been mentioned and is somewhat more accessible (for some at least, and certainly me) than some of the "problem" novels mentioned. The short stories contained in the Dubliner collection gives us "The Dead," probably the most famous of the bunch (and what a bunch!). I read it long ago and didn't seem to do anything for me. More recently it was the subject of a Book Club meeting and this time I was enthralled. I have read that it is considered by many critics perhaps the finest short story in the language. It is beautifully crafted and leaves a palpable ambience. An excellent movie was done in 1986. absolutely stellar. I like Angelica Huston generally, but she is now firmly etched into my personal hall of fame actors. She has an important and difficult scene near the end and on which the movie relies ... and she nails it. If, by chance, you have not read or seen, i recommend the book first. The book will not spoil the movie but the movie will rob you of the reading experience ... IMHO.

You are right in the opening minute of the film we see Gatsby shooting-killing cops.Something not in the 1974 version.I did not like Betty Field she acted like a teenager.Nugent directed the film at the last minute substituting for somebody else I do not remember who right now.Carey is always a reliable actor always dull...

More, Kenneth

Them 1954 Rodan 1956 The Blob 1958 Jaws 1975 Alien 1979 Predator 1987 The Lost World: Jurassic Park 1997

Jean - Rod McKuen - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Nancy Sinatra

Heh.... Better than being known as a LOO! Sepiatone

he did play a human in appearance cylon who crashes a halloween party in an ep of Galactica 1980 and lara parker plays one of the party guests. lara as a vampire in that ep.

Uncle Elizabeth from I Remember Mama (1948) Pumpkin from The Heat (2013)

Yes but I think the Gatsby's background is very Noir with Daisy the Femme Fatale in a way.

I,am doing these mini reviews for my personnal pleasure and I watched them all in the days I posted them.I hope, maybe foolishly , that TCM 's programmers might look at what we watch or want, No purpose for me here to give my small opinion on NBNW. About Gatsby there was a tv movie done in 2000 with Mira Sorvino but I have not seen it.. Now read this: Shortly before releasing The Great Gatsby (1974) in cinemas, Paramount Pictures suppressed the distribution of nitrate prints for The Great Gatsby (1926) and The Great Gatsby (1949) in order to deter theaters from playing those earlier versions instead of their upcoming 1974 version. This decision led to prints for both films being lost. Decades later, in 2012, a print of the 1949 version was rediscovered. The 1926 version, however, is still lost.From IMDB. ADDED Then the 1926 version was found also since it played here in 2004.

According to the moviecollectoroh.com website, "The Rose Tattoo" has only been shown 6 times on TCM (in 27 years). Last time was May, 2014. Prior to that, it was shown in June, 2005. That film was the first time I saw Anna Magnani on screen. It was shown on the CBS Late Show back in the early 1970's (I think). Back then, only ABC and NBC had talk show-type programs like "The Tonight Show" and "The Joey Bishop Show". CBS showed movies at 10:30. After that, the St. Louis affiliate would show one or two classic movies in the wee hours of the morning and would usually go 'off-air' for just 30 to 90 minutes before beginning the next day's programming. I always liked Magnani and her performances. Thanks to TCM, I've been exposed to more of her work. Unfortunately for her and other Italian actresses, they seem to fly under the radar due to the popularity and talent of Sophia Loren. That's not a knock on Loren. I like her work too, but it is a shame that others in her field seem to get overlooked for their performances.

Tuesday, October 12/13 12:15 a.m. Breathless (1961). Belmondo!

Mouschi from DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, played by the great feline actor Orangey Cosmic Creepers from BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS FEARLESS FAGAN Lucifer from CINDERELLA Pompon in THE BAKER'S WIFE (1938) Binx in HOCUS POCUS FELIX THE CAT Fluffy in WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

Jinx -- from Meet the Parents (2000), Meet the Fokers (2004), Little Fokers (2010) Pillow Talk (1959) -- that awesome scene with the cat chasing the electric blanket cord then hissing at the newly "decorated" apartment

Rhubarb (1951) General Sterling Price from True Grit (1969) Thomasina from The Three Lives of Thomasina (1963) Jonesy from Alien (1979) The Godfather (1972) -- This was not scripted. Coppola found the stray kitten on the lot and put it in Brando's hands. The purring was so loud that some of Brando's lines had to be redubbed. Ulysses from Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

I really love character actors and I would be interested to see more of them as Star of the Month (or even featured in Summer Under the Stars). Character actors are such familiar faces in our favorite films, but they don't get as much attention. I'd love to learn more about them! Here are a few of my favorites I'd like to see: George Chandler, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, George E Stone, Eric Blore, Aline MacMahon, Mischa Auer, and Joseph Calleia.

You Only Live Twice (1967) -- also appears in other Bond films Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) Leo -- from MGM

Tao -- from The Incredible Journey (1963) To Catch a Thief (1955) MTM Enterprises (1978-1993)

I just watched the The Bad Seed and the discussion with Cantone and Ben Mankiewicz before and after the film. Cantone was spot-on to praise the great performance of Eileen Heckart who played the grief stricken mother of the little boy who was killed. She was so authentic. As Cantone pointed out, she appeared in only a couple of scenes but she is so memorable. He also pointed out the great acting of Patty McCormack (who was the child actress who played the bad seed) and Henry Jones who played Leroy. Have to agree that these were wonderful performances. Cantone mentioned that in the play "The Bad Seed", nothing happens at the end to Rhoda (the bad seed) and the mother dies. I like the ending in the film better. The first time I saw the end with Rhoda being struck by lightening, I got the chills. Great film choice by Cantone. In earlier posts, there was some discussion about the "Now, Now, Now" song in The Birds with some people really not liking it but some (me included) felt that Hitchcock chose this repetitive children's song effectively to contrast with the tension and anticipation of the birds quietly massing right outside the Bodega Bay School. Similarly, I noticed a repetitive children's song played on the piano recurring throughout The Bad Seed. Again, I felt this was a very effective choice of music with the staccato notes punctuating her walk to the dock to get the medal during the rainstorm at the end of the film. Scenes from The Bad Seed

Denise next: Henry, Shirley, Jennifer

SKIPPING Z Ashley, Elizabeth

Smith, Lois

In the interests of genuine honesty ( as opposed to, uh, false honesty), I must confess I have only read Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners. I cannot pretend that I have read Finnegan's Wake - but come on, who has? There are probably 10 people in the entire world at this moment who actually have. I don't even intend to ever read it. However, I do hope someday to read Ulysses, but only for the naughty bits, which I've heard are very salacious. I'll probably skip everything else.

Tennessee Williams wanted Anna Magnani to play Serafina in The Rose Tattoo on Broadway. He was so keen on her, he went to Italy to try to convince her. He was unsuccessful, and Maureen Stapleton played the role, with Eli Wallach as Alvaro. Strangely, both Maureen and Eli won Tony Awards, but in the Featured Actress and Actor categories.

My top 4 favorites are Davis, Stanwyck, DeHaviland and then Arthur.

I loved MOVIN' WITH NANCY! It was like watching one long music video. 😄 Nancy was adorable in it. I like her easy-going style of singing (I wonder where she got that from 😉). She clearly had a good relationship with her father's contemporaries. I like when she speaks some of her lines during her songs. My favorite scene in the special was with her and Sammy Davis, Jr as a photographer. What a fun scene! The RC Cola commercials were fun, as well.

Oh, glad you mentioned "The Letter" , FILMNOIRGUY. I can't think of a more 'ideal' performance out of Bette. Great support from the direction and from peerless Herbert Marshall, and let's see, was it James Stephenson (not sure of his name, but he was so good). But Bette was pitch-perfect, divine. One of the things I like about Stanwyck is that unforced, everywoman quality. It elevates even her 'slighter' roles, like in "Witness to Murder", with George Sanders and Gary Merrill. What a nifty little thriller that is. Hey, here we meet the true cross-pollination of Davis and Stanwyck-- in "Witness to Murder", Stanwyck's love interest is Bette's real-life ex, Merrill....

Anna Magnani, great actress. I love The RoseTattoo. She deserved that Oscar for Best Actress as Serafina. I don't think TCM has shown the film in awhile, wish they would.

But only her left side.

Yesterday watched two Sandra Bullock Films - Sequel to Miss Congeniality (innocuous) and then Practical Magic (based on Alice Hoffman books). It is cute. This a.m., watched Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny discussing their new book plus Billy Porter on CBS Sunday Morning. I just received new Louise Penny book (separate from one with Hillary Clinton). Watched (all except final season) Pose and like Billy Porter. Did not know that he was HIV positive in real life. There are so many great stories on that show. One thing that really angered me was a clip on the Sunday version of the Today Show: It showed Kim Kardashian (no comment) making a horrible joke about her ex Kanye West. He has mental health issues as many people do (myself included). SNL is not the show it once was - much more mean spirited and unfunny (also anti-Semitic). Tonight, ME TV runs Dick Van Dyke show. Didn't know (found out reading last week's Parade Magazine) that Morey Amsterdam was responsible for theme song. Always like reading these undiscovered film gems (for me) that other people are watching. Excuse typos.

I personally think Barry Lyndon is fantastic, one of the greatest of all American movies. But don't take my word for it. Read Geoffrey O'Brien's essay for the Criterion edition: In the wake of Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick assumed the figure of a futurologist, at least for his most ardent devotees. Many of these (abounding at the younger end of the cinephile spectrum) saw him as someone endowed with a privileged instinct for what lay ahead and a genius for making his intuitions visible. The four-year wait preceding the release of Barry Lyndon in 1975—no one could know then that such intervals would grow ever longer—allowed ample time to speculate about the fact that he was venturing not deeper into the future but into the past. Kubrick being Kubrick, even the prospect of a historical film took on a science-fiction aura, as if we were now to be taken by time machine into the eighteenth century, much like the astronaut at the end of 2001 who found himself an old man dying in a Louis XVI bedroom somewhere beyond the outer rim of ordinary space-time. Originally, there was to have been an epic Napoleon, for which, after years of preparation, the financing collapsed. After that major disappointment, Kubrick had turned to a fairly obscure novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, published in 1844 as The Luck of Barry Lyndon and reissued in revised form in 1856 as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.—certainly a more downbeat narrative than the imperial saga Kubrick had envisioned, even if, as the French critic Michel Ciment has suggested, it might be taken as a mirror of Napoleon’s tale: “the story of a young islander, thirsting after power, who crosses oceans, fights a continental war, rises in society, then, defeated, returns to his island.” In any case, one of the many mysterious things about Barry Lyndon is why Kubrick chose to film that particular work—a mystery that deepens on comparing book and film. In broad terms, Kubrick made a faithful adaptation, preserving the arc of the story of how an Irish lad of humble origins passes through a series of picaresque scrapes—as hotheaded young lover, fugitive, British soldier, deserter forced into the Prussian military, police spy, professional gambler—until he succeeds in marrying a wealthy countess, only to lose everything in the end. Production designer Ken Adam even stated that, in preparing the film, “basically, we used the novel . . . The original text served as continuity, and we worked with it.” A reading of the book, however, reveals how utterly Kubrick bent it to his purposes. It is not simply that Thackeray tells a more rambling and digressive story, replete with melodramatic incident and unlikely coincidences. Kubrick, while drawing freely from the book’s dialogue, narration, incidents, and physical details, transforms his material alchemically. Thackeray offers the rough comedy of a rogue’s life, recounted in the manner of a shameless and entertaining braggart; the novelist once referred to the Irish as “a nation of liars,” and here he sets out to demonstrate that opinion, as his hero, the most unreliable of narrators, spins a self-aggrandizing memoir that utterly fails to disguise what is transparently the career of a drunken and often brutal cardsharp and confidence man. When he mounts a defense against slander, it is along the lines of: “For the first three years I never struck my wife but when I was in liquor.” Thackeray’s Barry essentially blackmails Lady Lyndon into marriage by threatening lethal violence against her other suitors, and afterward not only despoils her estate but keeps her a virtual prisoner in her own home. The novel’s literary effectiveness, such as it is, resides in the ironic contrast between Barry’s alternately boastful and self-pitying grandiloquence and the sordid realities the reader so easily discerns. Lest the point be missed, Thackeray also makes use of a supposed editor of Barry’s manuscript, who on occasion spells out the obvious contradictions. Such heavy-handed counterpoint is far from the tone that Kubrick develops—a tone more complex and subtly suggestive than Thackeray’s, allowing room for ambiguities and nuances that make the film’s Barry a very different figure. Whether he is finally a particularly sympathetic one—and how much our sense of him has to do with the opacity of Ryan O’Neal’s performance—is something even multiple viewings leave open, but he is not Thackeray’s Irish stereotype. With an altered conception of Barry, everything retained from the novel changes character too; what was raffish comedy becomes a richer and stranger mix of scenes that is almost an exemplary catalog of life experiences, with all their variety and all their oppressive limitations. The form of that catalog is elaborate and very deliberately laid out. There are frames, and frames within frames: chapter titles, spoken narration, stately landscape views, frozen compositions of social rituals seen from a distance. Barry Lyndon’s very first shot fully announces that here nothing will be left to chance. It is a richly colored painterly tableau in which the somber foreground is taken up with a tree branch looming over the left side of the frame and a dilapidated stone wall winding toward another dark tree on the right. At the same time, we make out a pair of duelists framed in brighter light, in the rear of the image, against a view of mountains. We can just about hear the words being spoken as the duel begins, but they are drowned out right away by the measured, cultivated tones of Michael Hordern, whom we will hear as intermittent narrator throughout the film. He is as much a character as anyone—he certainly has more to say than most of them—but is not otherwise identified: he is simply the one who knows what is coming, the historian who understands the world in which these things occur, the ironist who perhaps comprehends the sense of it all. He mentions the death of Barry’s father, and as we try to figure out which of the duelists he is, the question is answered as the one on the left falls dead just as the narrator informs us with dry solemnity that the duel was fought because of a disagreement over a purchase of horses. There is no time to absorb all the visual and narrative information in this astonishingly dense shot, because the narration is already pushing forward, telling us about Barry’s mother as we see her at medium distance—an establishing shot whose bald directness is straight out of a silent movie, except that instead of a title card we have Hordern’s irresistibly mellow voice characterizing her motives and behavior. The voice assures us we will not have to work too hard to make sense of what goes on; the narrator will explain everything, even before it happens. We are being given a guided tour of something that is already done with. But such relief is illusory, however serenely untroubled the narrator may be. Being told in advance that disasters await doesn’t alleviate their impact, any more than does the optical beauty with which we are to be lavished for three hours. There is musical beauty too, an inescapable sonic flow incorporating Handel, Vivaldi, Schubert, and (in the first half) the traditional Irish music of the Chieftains. The music moves with its own sense of purpose, sometimes underscoring, sometimes contradicting what we see. The plaintive “Women of Ireland” theme suffuses the film’s first half with a mood of romantic longing that nothing that actually occurs on-screen comes close to fulfilling. There is in Barry Lyndon a parallel film made up of music, landscape, color, and compositional harmony that unfolds concurrently with the narrative of Barry’s life, evoking the many possibilities that might be imagined by the characters themselves but that have little chance of ever being realized. ***** The film manages to be airy, spacious, sensually gratifying, without ever offering more than curtailed glimpses of anything like human happiness or generosity of spirit or even enduring satisfaction. The pleasures on offer are almost enough to make us overlook all that is lacking: real gaiety, authentic freedom, true faith in any of the social orders in which Barry and the rest are enmeshed. There is, for instance, a thrilling scene early on, in which Barry and his cousin gallop through green countryside as they ride away from a duel in which Barry falsely believes he has killed a rival. For that one exultant moment, we can enjoy the excitement and unfulfillable promise of an adventurous future. Kubrick finds ways to film not only what his characters do but what they think they are doing. The paradox of Barry Lyndon is that it brings us ever nearer to a reality that is made to seem further and further away. Everything on-screen has a palpability that, in 1975, seemed eerie by comparison with earlier historical films. Kubrick used lenses sensitive enough to allow filming interior scenes by candlelight (developed for NASA, no less), paid unparalleled attention to material detail (clothes, wigs, guns, musical instruments), to the compositional effects of Gainsborough, Hogarth, and other painters of the period, to the protocol of the rituals of which we see so many: duels, battles, card games, formal entertainments, the administration of corporal punishment. Yet the more intimately present this reality becomes, the more ephemeral and ghostly the people in it seem. The past never stops being the past; the images freeze and recede into a frame, beyond our reach. That effect of doubleness is compounded by Kubrick’s recurrent visual trope of slow zooms moving back from the action to reveal the indifferent landscape within which it is taking place. Those reverse zooms signal an incursion from the future, a telescope traveling through time as much as through space. Throughout the film, Kubrick cuts into the midst of things, as if selecting from an unbroken stream of surveillance footage just those moments he finds pertinent, whether it’s a Prussian recruit stripped to the waist and submitting to a gauntlet of punishment, or a magician demonstrating his tricks at a lavish birthday celebration while the newly prosperous Barry looks on under the summer sun, or the king of England shaking hands perfunctorily in a reception line, or Barry, stiff as a stone statue, sleeping off a drunken revel. But what is it about, finally? In simple terms, Barry Lyndon is about Barry Lyndon: a nobody who wants to be somebody. In part one—the tale of his wanderings from rural Ireland through central Europe during the Seven Years’ War and back to the British Isles again—he rises finally to the top by marrying the beautiful and moneyed widow Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson); in part two, having come close to forcing his way into the aristocracy, he abuses his success, runs afoul of his resentful, mother-fixated stepson Lord Bullingdon (an indelible performance by Leon Vitali), and drops into oblivion, a maimed and pensioned-off exile. O’Neal as Barry is at the center of the film from first to last; all other characters are there only because they contribute in some way to determining his destiny. Many of those characters, no matter how important to the narrative, are given little more than a scene or two to express themselves in words; some, notably Berenson as Lady Lyndon, have scarcely any dialogue at all. Yet the impressions those seeming cameo roles leave behind are fully developed: Barry’s flirtatious and fickle cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton), his calculating and fiercely devoted mother (Marie Kean), the cowardly Captain Quin who steals Nora away (Leonard Rossiter), the feckless but generous Captain Grogan (Godfrey Quigley), the deadbeat aristocratic gambler Lord Ludd (Steven Berkoff), the suavely self-serving high-society intermediary Lord Wendover (André Morell). There are many more, and there is scarcely one who does not register a decisive portrait, sometimes in a matter of seconds. For all its strange silences, it is a remarkably populous film. As for O’Neal, he stands somehow apart, almost abashed, in the film of which he is the center. At the start, he has the naive candor of the adolescent he is playing, and he never quite loses that fresh-faced quality even as we see him evolving into an accomplished gambler, a cynical seducer, a dissolute orgiast, a cunning social climber. He remains the same person, fundamentally simple, almost uninflected; following his instincts, he passes through experiences without learning from them. That he has some measure of sincerity is indicated when he bursts into tears: at the battlefield death of his friend and protector Captain Grogan, at his first encounter in exile with a fellow Irishman (the cardsharp Chevalier de Balibari), and upon the accidental death of his son, Bryan, a scene all the more affecting for how closely it skirts the maudlin. Barry’s greatest naïveté is not, as it turns out, to trust in his cousin Nora but to persuade himself that he can breach social barriers and become an English aristocrat. O’Neal’s performance has been criticized as inexpressive, but without his solidity and directness, the film could have been lost in a whirl of dazzling impressions. He must be the center that gives proportion to that mass of accumulated detail and historical observation, focusing attention on the easily graspable through line: what Barry did. What he does may at last seem like not very much. Much of it is done under compulsion; and when at last seemingly free to act, he invariably does the wrong things. Barry’s most unimpeded violent action takes place not in the early battle scenes, where soldiers advance in strict formation while being cut down by enemy fire, but when, infuriated by Lord Bullingdon’s contemptuous behavior during a sedate music recital, he tackles him savagely in the midst of the astonished guests. The handheld camera moves in close to the action as if at the edge of a boxing ring. It is in fact the moment when he destroys himself, earning him permanent exclusion from the aristocracy he has tried to penetrate. The one uncontestably right thing he does—honorably firing his pistol into the ground in his final confrontation with Lord Bullingdon—proves his undoing, as Bullingdon takes advantage of this reprieve and fires the shot that causes the amputation of Barry’s leg. The last we see of Barry is from the rear, caught in freeze-frame as he hobbles on crutches aboard the carriage leading him ignominiously back to Ireland.

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yes, it's about 500 pages and thoroughly researched, but not super super dishy... ALTHOUGH OF COURSE THEY GO ALL IN ON ROGER DAVIS.

Gosh, that must have been an anxious period for her, TOPBILLED. Imagine, for any performer, to have a noticeable skin condition could be devastating. You're right, she does look fine in "The Blue Gardenia". Before hearing about her illness, I was speculating that maybe it was her last film there b/c she was playing such a "non-Ann Sothern" character in this film. It's nice that she got to shatter expectations in it. Your wealth of background info, generously shared and so illuminating, is much appreciated!

Anthony Adverse (1936)