CineSage_jr

It's just the opposite; films today are practically all close-ups (something directors learned from watching too much television, or working in it too long). Modern directors, producers and executives don't understand the need for long master shots to set up the spatial and emotional geography of a scene, and that the close-up is their dramatic trump card: use it too soon or too often, and it loses its power.

Ingrid Bergman was nearly six feet tall. She had few leading men who weren't shorter than she was.

> {quote:title=debro52 wrote:}{quote} > hateful Heaven forbid anyone should ever correct anyone about anything, huh?

My point is that Montgomery's resemblance to Gehrig, facially as well as culturally, was striking. And you really can't fake the physique and reflexes of an athlete. Cooper had neither of those. That Cooper and Gehrig were both tall is irrelevant; size on a movie screen is relative. If you have a short leading man, you surround him with even shorter supporting players and shoot him from slightly lower angles. In the late 1940s, Indian athlete Jim Thorpe was in discussions with MGM head of production Dore Schary over a proposed "biopic" of the legendary Olympian and his struggles against racism, alcoholism and fleeting triumphs on the playing fields. Thorpe suggested that he'd like to see himself played by Gregory Peck. Schary replied that Peck wasn't right for it: among other things, he didn't have an athlete's physique, but that he, Schary, knew someone who'd be perfect: an up-and-coming actor who was making a name for himseld in second-leads -- Anthony Quinn. Thorpe's reaction is nearly unprintable: "That Mexican? You might as well get a damn n****r to play the part!" The famous, but by then old and embittered victim of racism had, himself, become a racist. Schary ended the negotiations then and there. The Thorpe biography did eventually get made, of course, at Warner Bros., with Burt Lancaster. Lancaster was an excellent choice, with his acrobat's body and reflexes. If you really want to convince an audience they're looking at an athlete, you've got to give them an athlete.

> {quote:title=finance wrote:}{quote} > But Cooper was a big guy like Gehrig. Montgomery wasn't very big, was he? What difference does it make? How tall was Alan Ladd? How tall was, or is, any movie star? The very fact that you have to ask demonstrates that onscreen an actor is just about as big as the medium will allow him or her to be.

Sam Goldwyn's first choice to play Sky Masterson (I don't know if director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was on board with this) was Gene Kelly; despite MGM's distributing the movie -- the only time that studio released any of Goldwyn's product) -- MGM refused to lend Kelly, and Brando was signed instead, a rather peculiar "Plan B," if ever there was one.

> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote} > Interesting points you make about Pride of the Yankees, CineSage. I'm a big Cooper fan, but I think you're right in that Robert Montgomery could have added something extra to the part that didn't come naturally to Coop. > > As for Here Comes Mr. Jordan, it's always been one of my favorite movies about the afterlife. > > And is it just me, or did there seem to be quite a few of those between the late 30's and the mid-40s? You had On Borrowed Time, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, Between Two Worlds, and A Matter of Life and Death. Would this have been as popular a theme at the time, had it not been for WW2? I wonder. And THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR, THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES, PETER IBBETSON, TOPPER, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, A GUY NAMED JOE, THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, etc., etc. (though the tacked-on "supernatural" ending to WUTHERING HEIGHTS was all Sam Goldwyn's idea, imposed over the strenuous objections of William Wyler). All the really great fantasies deal with death and an afterlife, or the threat or promise of what one may expect there. They're the only ones worth watching, as far as I'm concerned, made as they were before Hollywood decided that fantasy equalled creatures and special effects, with little of anything else to appeal to the heart.

I have an original script from the film, on whose cover the original title, "Heaven Can Wait" is crossed out and replaced by HERE COMES MR JORDAN (both Columbia and Fox were preparing films by that name; titles can't be copyrighted, so they came to the proverbial gentleman's agreement that the latter would get to keep the name for its Ernst Lubitsch-directed Technicolor extravaganza, and Columbia's writers and executives would have to scratch together something new and catchy for theirs). One of the more interesting aspects of MR JORDAN for me is how it demonstrates that Sam Goldwyn really barked up the wrong tree in casting Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. Apart from the obvious fact that, in playing boxer Joe Pendleton, Robert Montgomery demonstrated that he had an athlete's physique (whereas Cooper decidedly didn't), Montgomery and Gehrig were both from New York City (unlike the Montana-born, England-educated Cooper), and could have been brothers, so closely did they resemble each other. Frankly, the floor-scuffingly shy portrait of Gehrig as essayed by Cooper gets a bit cloying and tiresome after a while. Montgomery would've injected the needed dose of street-smarts NYC native Gehrig had, and given the film a more rounded portrait than the caricature Goldwyn ended up with.

One must also look upon the conflict inherent in all drama as (lower-case) war on some level, even if the milieu against which that war takes place has nothing to do with (upper-case) War.

The Marple films are a pleasant enough diversion, in part because of Oscar-winner Rutherford, but mainly because I've always enjoyed films made by MGM's British division at its long-gone Borehamwood studio, which had a markedly different sensibility and look from the product produced at the Culver City.

Today's variable-focal-length lenses weren't available back then, so it was standard practice for "prime" lenses with different set focal lengths to be employed for different camera set-ups, depending on how far from the subject the camera was positioned, how wide a field of vision the director wanted, and the depth of field desired. You couldn't (and wouldn't want to) shoot a wide master shot with the same lens used for a two-shot, and you wouldn't do a two-shot with the lens you'd use for a tight close-up.

> {quote:title=Arkadin wrote:}{quote} > One thing I will say is that I find many of Lumet's films interesting visually. In *12 Angry Men* for example, he uses different lenses and shots throughout the film to make the room seem smaller and more claustrophobic It wasn't the lenses or the shots; the jury room actually does get physically smaller during the course of the film. The walls were built "wild," something typically done to merely provide access for the camera in spaces too tight for it to be positioned in an inflexibly "practical" set. In the case of 12 ANGRY MEN, the set's walls were moved together incrementally as the shoot progressed, to make it seem exactly as claustrophobic as the characters would come to view it.

Reed died at 64, not 65 (thireeen days short of her 65th birthday). I posted the New York Times article about this several days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/arts/25donna.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=donna%20reed&st=cse http://forums.tcm.com/jive/tcm/thread.jspa?threadID=143281&tstart=0

> {quote:title=scsu1975 wrote:}{quote} > CineSage, you beat me to it. While I was composing this reply, the TCM boards "bombed out" again. > > Above and Beyond is a film that flies below the radar (no pun intended). I first saw it on TNT in the late 1980s. Having previously done some reading about the bombing of Hiroshima, I was curious what Hollywood would do with the story. > > The filmmakers essentially got the details of the mission correct, right down to the Enola Gay banking to the side after it dropped the bomb. I could have done without the romantic subplot (although Eleanor Parker always looks good), but I realize it makes the viewer feel for Paul Tibbets and the pressure he is undergoing. Robert Taylor, as Tibbets, does a fine job. I especially like the scene near the end of the film, when a reporter says his viewers would like to know how Tibbets felt. "How do they feel about it?" Taylor growls. James Whitmore, as Major Uanna, also stands out. > > Toss in another winning score by Hugo Friedhofer and some good aerial footage, and you have a solid movie. > > MGM had previously told part of the story in 1947, under the title The Beginning or the End. Some of the aerial footage from Above and Beyond is taken from this movie. This film shows up on TCM on occasion, and is worth seeing. However, I prefer Above and Beyond. > > By the way, don't confuse The Beginning or the End with Beginning _of_ the End, in which giant grasshoppers invade Chicago. The latter film is a special kind of bomb. If anything, the bomber group's training for the bomb drop is the major subplot; the strains on the Tibbetses' marriage is really what the film's about, but because of the profound cause-and-effect linkage between the former and the latter, they're so closely intertwined as to be inseparable. The former couldn't be told without the latter, and the latter would be a lot less interesting without the former (as other movies about the subject have been). There was a lot of guesswork done on the part of the MGM art department, as many of the details surrounding the appearance of the bomb and its trigger mechanism was still highly classified as of 1952. The bomb didn't look anything like the "Little Boy" device actually dropped on Hiroshima (the bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later looked different, too), and the arming mechanism inserted into the bomb in flight by Capt. Parsons was utterly fanciful, though accurate historically.

But the restoration, transfer and bonus package have been done. It's only a question of time.

ABOVE AND BEYOND is a favorite of mine (made by, of all people, the comedy-writing and directing team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank), and embodies much of what I really like in a movie: an intimate story set against momentous events. Though I've never been much of a fan of Robert Taylor's (I do like a couple of his historical films -- in spite of his being in them, not because of it), his woodenness is well suited to the bottled-up emotions of Paul Tibbetts that the story requires and centers on. He also bore a striking physical resemblance to the real Tibbetts (who died last year). Then there's the wonderful music by composer Hugo Friedhofer, written very much in the style of his Oscar-winning breakthrough score to William Wyler's THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (one of whose characters also served in the war on bomber planes), that serves to further sharpen the drama and character conflicts. The film does deserve to be better known.

> {quote:title=annelovestcm wrote:}{quote} > yuck a whole weekend of WAR movies To paraphrase Frankenstein's Monster: War: bad. War movies: good.

That wasn't Jerry, it was me. Happens all the time.

> {quote:title=OldRose wrote:}{quote} >The Germans hone in on the radio signal, and he escapes by skiing over the mountain to safe territory. The expression is "home in" (as in homing pigeon) not "hone."

Much better than that: she's a woman.

There's no such thing as anamorphic VistaVision; it was always a flat process. The horizontal-film-transport system employing anamorphic lenses is Technirama. If L'IL ABNER was filmed in standard Academy ratio, then the image was composed to be hard-matted down to a letterbox ratio, with the image at the top and bottom of the Academy frame always meant to be superfluous and hidden by the matting that would be imposed in the optical printer.

Cheetah ran off with all the film prints and buried them. We haven't figured out where.

THE QUIET MAN still has rights problems. Paramount does not control them to the extent that they can release a DVD, so don't hold your breath waiting for one.

> {quote:title=scsu1975 wrote:}{quote} > Movies would be considerably shorter if the people in them acted rationally. This is one of the most succinct and truest comments about mivies I've ever read. The problem is that if characters did act more rationally, you often wouldn't have a story, because that very irrationality provides the end-of-first-act springboard for the characters' predicament, and the twists and turns in the second act that further complicates and deepens their plight. Of course, I'm not defending irrationality. People are often irrational; many seem incapable or unwilling to think things through, and that's real enough. It's when screenwriters hide behind it to pave over the gaps in their stories' logic that it becomes an irritant.

> {quote:title=scsu1975 wrote:}{quote} > +...and Beverly Garland as Beverly Garland. The most self-referential film role since Gig Young (Byron Barr, jr) played...Gig Young in THE GAY SISTERS.