CineSage_jr

Clift and Schell certainly do walk off with the film. And it's too bad that the original casting for Ernst Janning, Laurence Olivier, wasn't available, because Lancaster just didn't have the range or skill to make the character work. PS: It's Nuremberg, not "Nuremburg."

You're absolutely right about Keyes: the best part the great Edward G. Robinson ever had. But it's him you root for, not Walter and Phyllis, because Keyes is the moral yardstick against whom all the other characters are measured. The dynamic through 99% of the film is Walter Neff's certainty that he's way too smart to get caught by a desk-jockey like Keyes -- symbolized by Walter's constantly striking a match one-handed to light Keyes's cigar. Only at the end, as his life's leaking out through the holes Phyllis put in him, does Walter realize that Keyes -- who now lights Walter's cigarette -- can read him like a book. This is one reason why Wilder discarded his original ending (a sad, somber Keyes watching as the recovered -- and condemned Walter -- is strapped into the San Quentin gas chamber, which Wilder felt was one of the two best scenes he ever shot), feeling that it destroyed the climactic irony of the reversal of those seemingly simple cigar/cigarette-lighting gestures.

The DB5 was first used in GOLDFINGER. It had a few more special modifications, courtesy of "Q": Ejector passenger seat Rotating license plates Video screen designed to track the two different "homer" homing devices given him by "Q." And, yes, the car had spinning "knock-off" hubcaps to chew up villains' tires, much like Messala's Greek chariot in BEN-HUR.

Are you sure you were looking at the right month's schedule? DON JUAN was shown on May 31.

Fortunately, Morgan (born Francis Wupperman) worked fairly often with child actors and ingenues, so a number of them are still around: Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson, Marsha Hunt and Van Johnson.

Obviously, I'm the real showboat around here.

Well, I'm still sending out feelers to Academy members I know, and to friends who have friends who're members. Never say die.

Old movies, no. John Wayne's or Heston's political views didn't influence their movies. They were actors doing their jobs. Wayne bragged at least once about his part in helping blacklist a screenwriter. I doubt that he would've made a jingoistic Red-baiting movie like BIG JIM McCLAIN were it not for his politics. It's sad, really, because Wayne was widely regarded to be a very nice man, kind and generous. Still, like many in his position, his political vews were not fully formed, and he tended to parrot pronouncements made by others he admired, but whose own reasoning he understood incompletely. In a sense, I think that, had he been more politically astute and thoughtful (and hadn't hung around even more clueless thugs like Bond and McLaglen), his views might've been at least a tad more moderate. I believe HUAC was correct. Unions were heavily composed of members of CPUSA - who didn't have the stones to stand up and say so. Utter rubbish. While no one doubts that the Soviet Union had spies in this country, the very idea that rank-and-file members of the Communist Party USA were complicit in any espuionage is laughable. Firstly, the Soviets didn't trust anyone who wasn't a Soviet by birth. Whatever money came through contributions and dues to the CPUSA, they were happy to accept, but that was about it. Secondly, being a member of CPUSA (whose politics were formed by domestic incidents such as the Haymarket riots, the bulldozing of WWI-veteran "Hooverville" camps by federal troops and police, the use of police and federal troops as Big Business's private army to break strikes; and foreign incidents such as Francisco Franco's ruthless, genocidal bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War), especially in Hollywood, generally involved sitting on a folding chair in somebody's living room every couple of weeks, with a cup of fruit punch in one hand, and a sugar cookie in the other, while listening to some speaker extoll the nobility of the working class. Some threat. The fact is that the men who ran HUAC (one of whom, Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New York, ended up in federal prison -- ahead of the "Hollywood Ten" he railroaded on contempt-of-Congress charges -- for evasion of federal income tax. Some patriot) hit upon a perfect scheme: create a "crisis" and then offer up a solution (kind of like the current Congress and White House's concoction of "crises" like imminent Social Security bankruptcy, and threat to marriage and the Republic from gay marriage and flag-burning). By doing so, these men, largely nameless and faceless even to their own constituents guaranteed that they'd be re-elected over and over, and that a path to higher office would be cleared before them (Richard Nixon's strategy). In short, the hunt for Communists, especially in Hollywood, wasn't about threats to the nation, but about career advancement for those in Washington.

As Ed Begley said in Twelve Angry Men " They don't even speak good English" Actually, Begley's character says, "They don't even speak English good" (ironically, your version of it is properly grammatical). To which his fellow juror (played by George Voskovec) replies, "They don't speak English well," a gentle though pointed rebuke because, unlike Begley's character, Voskovec's is foreign-born, and not a native English-speaker.

You say "cinematically anarchic" as if it's a bad thing. You say it as if it's a good thing.

Actually, I think it's just the opposite Edgecliff; as of Monday (according to a source I have at the Academy) there were still seats available for members (obviously, a substantial block of tickets were reserved for members, but that's appropriate). When I got to the Academy on the afternoon of the first, there was already a stack of received mail on the ticket desk with requests for tickets that were going to have to be returned to the obviously disappointed senders. No, I think that the availability of up to four tickets to the general public was the problem. It's frankly the dumbest thing I've encountered in a long time. The Los Angeles County Museum's conversation with DeHavilland prior to screeing THE HEIRESS is now sold out, too, but the Museum didn't set an arbitrary first-day-of-sale date that created a rush for tickets; consequently, buying tickets was easy, even though there was no maximum number one could purchase. The Academy geniuses could learn a few lessons from the folks a couple of miles east on Wilshire Boulevard. I must confess that the whole debacle irritates me about as much as something that's obviously not a personal, intentional slight can. A paraphrase of one of George C. Scott's lines from PATTON keeps running through my mind: The woman may be making her last trip to Los Angeles, and the man who owns Errol Flynn's ROBIN HOOD sword is to be left out of it?? God will not allow this to happen!

And a good morning to you, Susan (am I in time for your fall and rise-and-shine?).

Oh, they'll show it all right, but you won't know when. The best solution is to record a whole day's worth of TCM programming every day on a TiVo hard drive, then scan through it to see if the short's been run. After TCM institutes its West Coast feed, those in the Pacific and Mountain time zones will also have the option of asking friends in the East to alert them ahead of time of interstitial programming.

It may be that THE GUNFIGHTER (a terrific film) is so darn short at 85 minutes that Fox may be looking for some extra content to put on the disc to make it more attractive to potential buyers. Ironically, the same year (1950) Fox made another, very different, film with the same underlying story of an established "talent" threatened by an unscrupulous, young up-and-comer bent on taking the "talent's" place: ALL ABOUT EVE.

Ziegfeld ("i" before "e").

Rockwell did a lot of work for Hollywood, ranging from THE RAZOR'S EDGE (1946) to STAGECOACH (1966). The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stickbridge, Mass., was unaware of his immense painting of Victor Mature in SAMSON AND DELILAH until it was offered for auction a few years ago. I have a set of 20th Century-Fox studio key-set proofs of his paintings the cast of STAGECOACH in my collection, and they're quite lovely.

WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953). Whoops, there goes the power, again (how come the police cars are still running?).

CLEOPATRA: wrong studio, wrong year. THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE was an MGM film. The other big dud on its 1962 schedule was, indeed, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY.

I've seen it. Dreadful movie, quite typical of the incoherent mess that so many film were in the cinematically anarchic '70s.

The fewer magicians you had to credit, the more money you saved. Titles back then were often created by hand and typeset by hand. Common titles were painted on glass, an art that disappeared for good about 10-12 years ago. For certain specialized main title sequences (we've all seen them), calligraphy was applied to paper or parchment -- whatever effect the titles called for. As for the paucity of credits in the old days, versus the copious down-to-the-last-on-set-caterer today, very little has changed, actually. By the mid-1930s, credits were determined contractually. If an individual, or the union the worker belonged, to had negotiated a contract calling for the artist to get screen credit, then they got it. As the decades passed, unions got stronger, more artists got credit (the same formula applied and applies to films' print advertising). In many cases, credit is now assigned in place of additional monetary compensation, a trade-off the studios and signatory producers are more than willing to agree to.

In two consecutive years, which crystallizes the magnitude of Rainer's achievement (interestingly, she'd been merely understudy to Rose Stradner at the Vienna State Theatre. Stradner came to the U.S. after being signed to a contract by MGM, who cast her in several not-well-remembered films, such as THE LAST GANGSTER [1935], opposite Edward G. Robinson and James Stewart. She retired from acting, reluctantly, after marrying producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1939, and committed suicide by drug overdose in 1958). I envy everyone who can go to the Olivia de Havilland tribute. I just hope they are smart enough to perserve it on tape. It really is an event to remember. I would go in a minute if possible. I think [de Havilland] is the last STAR from the 1930s, not counting child stars Shirley Temple & Mickey Rooney. I think that the still hale-and-hearty Maureen O'Hara might dispute that conclusion.

It can't be Columbia, because both men made films there. Astaire never made films at Universal, and he didn't appear in any Fox films until the 1950s. So I'd have to venture that it was during the time Astaire was making HOLIDAY INN (1942) at Paramount.

There was a Chinese-language film from Hong Kong (LANG ZI) whose title translated loosely as "The Prodigal"; that was the only film made in 1969 with that title.

I hadn't realized that there was a means for conveying private messages here. Thanks for the compliment!

If these robots can't deal with simple tasks such as these, how can we expect them to be able to do important things, like synthesize genuine Ancient Rocket bourbon, isotope 217, or diamonds, emeralds and star sapphires??