CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote}
> No it didn't went over my head but you did hit the nail on the head, I *want* my action / war movies to be *kinetic!* But that's me. Now you know why I like "The Battle of the Bulge" better.
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> By the way the next "Patton 360" this Friday at 9:00pm EST topic is the seige at Bastogne.
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> I thought *you* didn't like war movies?
BATTLE OF THE BULGE isn't about people, it's about...stuff. A lot of tactics and strategy, but nothing resembling real human emotion. It's what you get when you want to make a war movie, but have forgotten why, the result being a big roadshow attraction to fill out the studio's yearly release schedule with nothing of much interest to say about why we fight wars, and how we endure them.
BATTLEGROUND is all about those lovable, and not-so-lovable dogfaces in extremis, not knowing whether their next moment will be their last, or where or how they fit in the cosmic, and military, scheme of things. The only World War II combat film that comes close to it in terms of conveying the plight and glory of these guys is 1945's THE STORY OF G.I. JOE, directed by, you guessed it, William Wellman.
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> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote}
> I watched "Battleground" on TCM last night and it was a let down far as war movies go. Over 45 min of it was simply dull. Only saw some action near the end but nothing really good, mostly WWII stock footage. I was thinking that guy under the overturned jeep simply died from boredom.
BATTLEGROUND is a terrific movie. It's not meant to be kinetic, but concerns itself with the effects of the stalemate between U.S. amd German forces during the Battle of the Bulge and seige of Bastogne -- frustration and, yes, boredom. But under the frustration and boredom of the troops is a plapable fear that the German counteroffensive may just be Hitler's salvation, with the GI dogfaces squarely in the Wehrmacht's path. The film, via Robert Pirosh's script and Wellman's direction conveys this tremendous tension perfectly. It's too bad that it all went over your head.
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> {quote:title=Ascotrudgeracer wrote:}{quote}
> Couldn't believe it! L. Malkin hyping this Fritz Lang classic (to sell DVD) wherein Walter Pidgeon happens to be hunting in Bavaria and finds none other that good ol' Adolf Hitler in his gunsights! How I wish TCM would screen this, along with "The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler" and "The Hitler Gang." How about a full night of Nazi madness? There's nothing to fear from those guys anymore. But thanks to this excellent site, I've found a source for these gems.
Thorndyke, Pidgeon's character, doesn't "happen" to find Hitler: he positions himself on a promontory overlooking the Berghof at Berchtesgaden for the specific purpose of lining up a shot at der F?hrer on his balcony just to see if it can be done. He squints into his telescopic sight, pulls the trigger on his high-powered rifle -- click. The chamber's empty, but he's just proved his point: he had Hitler's life in his hands at that moment and could have killed him if he'd wanted to.
But maybe he does want to. He chambers a round and lines up his shot at Hitler again, finger slowly pulling back the trigger, then hesitates. Thorndyke relents; bagging the kill, even one who deserves it as much as the little Austrian Corporal, isn't part of the "sporting stalk" he relishes and has come to Germany to pursue. Little does Thorndyke know that he's soon to be the quarry in a less-than-sporting stalk...
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> {quote:title=markfp2 wrote:}{quote}
> Holly, I know it's a Warner title, but, since TCM was sold to Time-Warner, it has to lease them like anyone else and that sometimes means being outbid by some other channel. Somewhere in the back of my head I seem to remember seeing it scheduled either on a premium movie channel or perhaps a PBS station. If I'm right that would explain why TCM doesn't have it.
Few, if any, of the contracts TimeWarner strikes with cable channels, including TCM, are exclusive. Few, if any, channels would be willing to pay the extra premium exclusivity would cost for films of this vintage.
So, no, your explanation doesn't hold water.
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"How come TCM never airs A Streetcar named Desire?"
Maybe the programmers just dislike the film as much as I do.
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The film is famous for that very reason.
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"So talented right out of the gate" also perfectly describes Roy Rogers's Trigger, and the two horses that played Seabiscuit.
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> {quote:title=casablancalover wrote:}{quote}
> Are you aware, CSj, that you have a following here at the TCM forum who just look up your *Titles* of your posts? You are one of the big reasons I come here.
> Thank you.
And I thank you. Now, finally, I have a reason for living.
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> {quote:title=TikiSoo wrote:}{quote}
> OK, I wrote earlier this is one of my all time fave movies. Believe it or not, I was heavily into meditation Suday pulling weeds and started thinking about the film:
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> How sad that Joe Pendleton will never regain any sort of consciousness of Joe Pendleton. He's going through life thinking he's Murdock. Without consciousness of Joe, he ISN'T Joe anymore isn't he? Corkle realizes Joe is really, completely "gone".
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> So really, Joe _does_ die in the plane crash and Murdock isn't killed by the bullet. Murdock lives, with Joe's spirit, but not with his brain. Not a good trade off, imho.
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> I liked it better when Joe went into Farnsworth's body. He looked liked Farnsworth to everyone else, but his mind & spirit were Joe's.
Somebody around here finally figured it out: the story's resolution made the whole movie pointless. A case of a dog chasing its tail and ultimately going nowhere, unless one sees it as the writer saying that the gods will have their little jokes.
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AVANTI! is an uncharacteristically sweet (for Wilder) film, and unjustly neglected (though, at two hours and forty-four minutes, and with an overly shrill and strident performance by Jack Lemmon, also terribly self-indulgent and bloated), but it can't hold a candle to THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, probably Wilder's most personal and autobiographical film and, arguably, his masterpiece.
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The remains of the town of "Black Rock" from BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK are still on the desert floor down below Lone Pine, if you go looking for them (who knows; you may even find the remains of Berney Komoko).
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> {quote:title=RainingViolets101 wrote:}{quote}
> I am finally back on line, now for the poster who said Bette Davis over-acts, Bette Davis is famous for underplaying all her characters, she could do more with a razed eyebrow or a soft word than any other "Movie Star", she was very intense and got buried in the charactor. If you want to see a performance of hers that I regard as her best, watch her play the Empress Carlotta in the film :Juarez" She begins the film as an innocent, and as the film progresses we realize she is loosing her mind, as one scene follows the other she is fading away, at first dressed in white
> then gradually in various shades of grey, and finally her last scene she is all in black. Her performance is nuanced and spellbinding and she has perfect control over the character to the very end when she says her lines in a whisper... I regard Miss Davis as the finest actress of the twentieth century....
Davis's best moment in JUAREZ is one in which she was barely required to act: the Empress Carlotta, now separated from her imprisoned and condemned husband, Maximilian von Habsburg, and quite mad, stands in a dusty shaft of light in Vienna's Hofburg Palast on the day of Maximilian's execution in Mexico half a world away. The film's composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, infuses his score with the Mexican song "la Paloma," which had been a favorite of the royal couple during their time together on the throne of Mexico. Korngold had earlier associated the melody with a speech by Maximilian about Austrian grape vines, and how they always blossomed at the same time of year, even when transplanted to distant Mexican soil.
As the song begins to play during Maximilian's execution, it carries over to the scene in which the mad Empress waits in Vienna, as far from her husband as the grape vines from their native soil. Just like the vines know mysteriously when to blossom, she knows instinctively that her husband is dead. A wonderful moment, thanks to Korngiold, screenwriters John Huston, Wolfgang Reinhardt and Aeneas MacKenzie, of the sort that no one does, or can do, any more, because this kind of unified approach to drama is a lost art, especially as applies to film-scoring.
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> {quote:title=lzcutter wrote:}{quote}
> Erich Wolfgang Korngold was hired to be the composer for the film. He backed out when he didn't feel he had enough time to score the film properly. Stevens hired Alfred Newman, who finished the rousing score in three weeks.
After seeing the film over and over, it occurred to me several years ago that Newman, sly old dog, wrote the main "Gunga Din" theme to the meter of Kipling's poem. Since that musical epiphany I've wondered whether Stevens, Sr ever appreciated, or even realized, that the composer went to the time and trouble (it also begs the question as to whether the film's finale, in which Montagu Love's Colonel reads the poem over Gunga's body, was meant to segue into a choral treatment of the poem, which would've been lovely. We'll probably never know).
It should also be noted that Newman also scored THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK and THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD for Stevens. On the latter, director drove composer batty with his notes, suggestions, demands, endless, brutal hectoring and cuts in the music (at one point, Stevens actually tried to justify his removal of Newman's own "Hallelujah" chorus in favor of the one from G.F. H?ndel's totally inappropriate Messiah by saying "You just don't understand! This film will immortalize H?ndel!" Newman was appalled at Stevens's utter, arrogant nerve, as well he should have been.
Newman later said that it was the worst professional experience of his life (recounted in the fascinating "Hollywood Holyland," a detailed book-length account of the making of GREATEST STORY, wonderfully written by Newman's longtime assciate, Ken Darby). By contrast, he said the best was as a free-lancer after leaving his Music Director duties at Fox, working at MGM on HOW THE WEST WAS WON. Newman's commitment to Stevens to work on the film necessitated his dropping out of scoring CLEOPATRA, for his old friend, Joe Mankiewicz. It seems clear that, for the rest of his life, he wished he'd said to Stevens, "Thanks, but no thanks."
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> {quote:title=JesseLee wrote:}{quote}
> I really enjoyed this film, I think black and white would've added a more classic feel to it.
So would a lot of scratches and splices in the film, but most snesible people would object to them if they could be avoided.
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> {quote:title=Poinciana wrote:}{quote}
> Re The Moon's a Balloon: Did you ever notice that Niven uses the word "trubshaw" in Bachelor Mother, Trubshaw being David's great army friend. He says it as a "Swedish" word in the hilarious New Years Eve dinner scene where he's supposedly speaking Swedish to his Swedish dinner companion, Ginger.
It's actually Trubshawe, Michael Trubshawe, to be precise. When Niven became a star, he found acting work for his old British Army buddy, and there are characters called Trubshawe in several of his later films (from at least A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH onward).
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Oh, boy:
11:00 PM I Aim at the Stars (1960)
Rocket scientist Werner von Braun faces controversy when he emigrates to the U.S. to work in the space program. Cast: Curt Jurgens, Victoria Shaw, Herbert Lom. Dir: J. Lee Thompson. BW-107 mins.
Or, as comic Mort Sahl quipped, re Herr Doktor von Braun's pre-NASA track record: "I aim at the stars...but sometimes I hit London."
I'm glad to see they;re going to be showing Sam Fuller's really interesting PARK ROW again, which they haven't run since they honored the director about three years ago.
And Joe Mankiewicz's FIVE FINGERS (yayyyy!). I'd just about given up hope that the Fox Movie Channel will ever show it again (put this gem on DVD, Fox!).
And ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT...!
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> {quote:title=The_Wolf wrote:}{quote}
> Wages of Fear is the alternate title for Sorceror (1977) starring Roy Scheider. I hope that is it, but phantomone seems to have ruled it out. Incidentally, the Tangerine Dream's score for that film is incredible. Director Friedkin changed the film to fit the music that was delivered during shooting.
THE WAGES OF FEAR (LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, 1953), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and SORCERER (1977), directed by William Friedkin, are two entirely separate movies, the latter being the far less successful remake of the former.
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> {quote:title=konway87 wrote:}{quote}
> "And John Howard's performance is ghastly, nothing less."
>
> Its really a matter of opinion. Some People say "Citizen Kane is greatest film ever made." Other People says "Citizen Kane is one of the most overrated films."
The first statement is probably right.
The second statement is undoubtedly wrong.
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> {quote:title=GeorgeBailey1951 wrote:}{quote}
> All the characters in the story fit in the mold and do what you would expect, except Shaughnessy, the part played by Mary Astor. She's the lose cannon, the killer disguised as a pretty face. But there is a delightful irony to the story of Mary Astor in this role. I learned about it when I read David Niven's book, "Bring On The Empty Horses."
>
> By the way ... I highly recommend Niven's book. It is one of the funniest things I have ever read. Niven was such a great story teller.
"Bring on the Empty Horses" (an allusion to one of the more memorable malapropisms uttered by director Michael Curtiz on the set of CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, as he ordered a herd of riderless horses to gallop across the frame on cue) is the second of Niven's memoirs. The first, and equally charming "The Moon's a Balloon," should really be read before "Empty Horses."
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Time was when the only appropriate film to screen there was PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK.
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> {quote:title=konway87 wrote:}{quote}
> I thought John Howard was al[l] right. Capra and Riskin changed the character Mallory (in the novel) to George Conway. John Hilton (who wrote the novel "The Lost Horizon) was very happy with the film version by Capra.
Book and movie are titled simply "Lost Horizon," no article "the."
And John Howard's performance is ghastly, nothing less.
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> {quote:title=RayFaiola wrote:}{quote}
> When we were doing our series of Fox soundtracks, the biggest request was for Alfred Newman's THE MARK OF ZORRO. Unfortunately, the tracks no longer survive. A dirty shame.
Or, maybe, Hugo Friedhofer's THE MARK OF ZORRO, with main theme by Newman...
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> {quote:title=konway87 wrote:}{quote}
> SPOILERS
>
> I think...Lost Horizon has some of the best camera shots in the cinema history. The casting was great too. Like Hitchcock, Frank Capra knows the right person for the role. I cannot see anyone other than Ronald Colman for the role "Robert Colman."
If that were true, Capra never would have cast the shrill, shallow and inept John Howard as George Conway (had he never heard of David Niven?). He practically destroys the film, single-handedly.
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The Five Angry Women paired off with some of the Twelve Angry Men, leaving behind seven very, very, Angry Men.
?Double Indemnity? and ?Sunset Boulevard? late TONIGHT!
in Hot Topics
Posted
> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> What about his reputation?
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> In my opinion, a wimpy actor would have been terrible in the film and would have focused the whole theme on the wimpy actor, instead of on Norma Desmond.
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> What made this film great was that Norma Desmond, with her powerful personality, wound up conquering a strong independent man, who was not a wimp.
I have news for you: "wimpy" actors or no, SUNSET BOULEVARD's protagonist is Joe Gillis, not Norma Desmond. And she didn't "conquer" him; in a sense, they conquered each other, to their mutual detriment and destruction.
As I've stated elsewhere, Gillis makes his figurative, Faustian pact with a devil whose instrument is Norma, but she is decidely not the film's focus. (As I've also said, since SUNSET is, in its way, a double Faustian tale, Norma also made her own pact with the devil long ago, resulting in her gaining stardom at the cost of being enfolded by self-absorbed madness. This certainly deepens her into a fully-fleshed being, one that can hardly be dismissed as a simple deus ex machina that complicates life for the protagonist; though that doesn't mean she's not the film's most memorable character, it's still not her story.