CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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In the film, Howard Beale actually exhorts his viewers to shout "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
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The actor who played Noble in Black Orchid is Peter Mark Richman, who is probably best known for his role as Andrew Laird in television's "Dynasty" (Or as it was known in our house: DumbNasty!)
I run into him and his wife on occasion. Very nice people.
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A. That Paul, a Jew himself, could be considered the "Father of modern anti-Semitism" is nonsense.
Oh, yeah? Read some of Paul's inflammatory invective against the Jews sometime.
B. The commandment of Christ to "preach the Gospel" to every creature pre-dates Paul's assertion. Not only so, but the first Church council, held at Jerusalem, the story of which is recounted in Acts 15, indicates that the "door" to preaching to the Gentiles was actually first opened by Peter, again in obedience to a vision given to Him by God. This is recounted in Acts 10 and 11.
C. There is no law in this country prohibiting the preaching of the Gospel. If you don't want to hear it, as I stated earlier, you don't have to.
Sure there is, on public property, in government buildings, and private property where the owner says he or she says he doesn't wish that kind of activity to take place. And funny how it's the religious who're always saying that there are "higher laws" than those enacted by men and women, and that it's their duty to obey them, when convenient, and not what's on the nation's books. Well, there are notions of respect for the beliefs of others that transcend any lack of a specific prohibition that calso constitute a "higher authority."
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One of my best friends developed and produced BEYOND THE SEA, and it wasn't the film he had envisioned and tried to get made over a sixteen-year-period. While the circumstances of Darin's life as depicted in the film are largely accurate, the dramatic construction was re-worked by Spacey into something all-but unrecognizable. I think I probably read every single draft of the script, and it's a shame that my friend's vision didn't reach the screen (I think you'd have been a lot less aggrieved by it than by Spacey's version).
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Most of you have probably seen THE STRATTON STORY on TCM, the inspirational story of a crippled major league baseball player who manages to struggle back to the bigs in spite of his handicap.
When the studio decided to make the film in the late 1940s, they surely had heard about the even more inspirational (and exciting) story of Bert Shepard, who had also lost his leg, but under decidedly heroic circumstances (you may recall that, by contrast, Monty Stratton blew off much of his leg in a hunting accident -- hardly the stuff of legend).
It's too bad that we never got to see Brig. General USAFR Jimmy Stewart as Bert Shepard, war hero, instead of Monty Stratton, inept hunter:
June 20, 2008
Bert Shepard, 87, Who Pitched in Majors After War Amputation, Dies
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN, New york Times
Bert Shepard, a World War II fighter pilot who lost his right leg when he was shot down over Germany but went on to pitch for the 1945 Washington Senators, becoming an inspiration for grievously wounded veterans, died on Monday in Highland, Calif. He was 87.
His death, at a nursing home, was announced by his son Justin.
Shepard pitched in only one major league game, but his impressive relief appearance against the Boston Red Sox at Washington?s Griffith Stadium transcended the world of baseball.
When Shepard entered that game on Aug. 4, 1945, he was still a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, commuting to the ball park from Walter Reed Army Hospital, a major treatment center for wartime amputees. A native of Dana, Ind., Shepard had pitched and played first base in the low minor leagues for the Chicago White Sox organization before becoming a pilot.
In May 1944, Shepard was strafing a truck convoy north of Berlin when his P-38 Lightning fighter was downed by antiaircraft fire. A German military doctor pulled him from the wreckage and, at gunpoint, held back farmers threatening Shepard with pitchforks.
Shepard awoke in a hospital as a prisoner of war, his mangled right leg amputated below the knee. In February 1945, he returned to the United States on a prisoner exchange ship with an artificial leg fashioned by a Canadian at his prisoner of war camp. In March, Robert Patterson, the undersecretary of war, visiting Shepard, learned of his ambitions to play baseball again and arranged for a tryout with the Senators, who were holding spring training at the University of Maryland. Using a new artificial leg he received at Walter Reed, and officially listed as a coach, Shepard pitched effectively in exhibition games against the Norfolk Naval Training Station team and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
On Aug. 4, he was summoned from the bullpen against the Red Sox in the fourth inning with the Senators trailing, 14-2.
?I came in with the bases loaded, and I struck out George Metkovich to get us out of it," Shepard told The International Herald Tribune in 1993. Though the Senators, trailing badly, had little chance of winning, ?there was much more pressure on me than it seemed? Shepard said.
?If I would have failed,? he added, ?then the manager says, ?I knew I shouldn?t have put him in with that leg.? But the leg was not a problem, and I didn?t want anyone saying it was.?
As a left-handed pitcher, Shepard relied on his left leg, the rear one, for balance and for driving off in his delivery.
He pitched five and one-third innings against the Red Sox, giving up only one run and three hits.
Although the Senators did not use Shepard again, he was back in the public eye on Aug. 31 when Secretary Patterson, accompanied by General Omar Bradley, awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross in a ceremony at Griffith Stadium.
?Bert was pretty damn good,? his former teammate, outfielder George Case, once recalled. ?It was amazing. Walter Reed was just up the road from Griffith Stadium. Bert was constantly going up there to show what he?d done. And we?d have a couple of amputees at every game. They?d see Bert throw batting practice.?
In the winter of 1946, Shepard made a national tour of centers for the treatment of war amputees.
Shepard pitched in the minor leagues for several years after the war but underwent a series of operations on what remained of his right leg and never got another chance at the major leagues. He later worked as a salesman for IBM and a safety engineer and a specialist in employing the handicapped for Hughes Aircraft. He won the national amputee golf championship in 1968 and 1971.
In addition to his son Justin, of Hesperia, Calif., Shepard is survived by his wife, Betty, of Los Angeles; his son Preston, of Hesperia; his daughters Penny Shepard, of Oklahoma City, and Karen Shepard, of Los Angeles; his brothers Martin, Gene and John, all of Indiana, and nine grandchildren.
Shepard remained intrigued by how he came to survive his fighter-plane crash. In 1992, he learned that the German military doctor who had saved him was an Austrian named Ladislaus Loidl. ?This Week in Baseball,? produced by Major League Baseball Productions, arranged for Shepard to meet Loidl at his home in Vienna, and it brought along tapes of Shepard?s pitching days.
In interviews, Shepard always discounted his handicap. ?I was the type of person who never overrated my opponents,? he told The Associated Press in 1990. ?They?ve got two legs and two hands, the same as me.?
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I remember it pretty clearly, as it used to play often on WNBC 4 in the middle of the night about 30-35 years ago.
Like most of those Italian sex-comedies, L'IDEA FISSA (literally, "Fixed Idea," the equivalent of the French l'idee fixe,") wasn't very good, but I'd like to see it again, anyway.
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The whole idea of evangelism is not, as you say, to force Christianity down people's throats due to a feeling of superiority on the part of believers, but it is a genuine attempt to convert people, something which any religion (or political viewpoint) has the right to do.
You seem to find this offensive, but to Christians, it is merely being faithful to what is called the Great Commission, found in Matthew 28:18-20 and, in a different form, in Acts 1:8, in which followers of Christ are commanded by Him to "teach all nations" and to be "witnesses for Him." The fact that evangelistic effort is commanded by Christ renders what other religions do in this regard irrelevant.
It actually goes back to the assertion by Paul (the father of modern anti-Semitism) that the Gospel should be preached not just to Jews, but to the Gentiles. But, what legal standard upholds your assertion that a religion has a "right" to preach to those who don't care to be preached to?
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Please don't pick on CineSage. He's the sweetest, kindest, most humble person I know.
Just remember that we have two political conventions coming up this summer.
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"Melancholy" generally connotes a pensiveness that "sad" does not. When Joe walks out of the palazzo after Ann's press conference, he is clearly reflecting on his time with her and what it means to love someone enough to let go. A "sad" ending would suggest a merely dispirited, and shallow, regret, with little or nothing learned. The movie's whole intention is that Joe (and, one hopes, the audience) has learned something important.
I actually think Gregory Peck was perfectly cast! He was so good as the reporter. I agree that Holden could have done it well, but it would have changed the whole movie...and I don't think for the better.
Apart from the moral ambiguity I think was critically necessary in the Joe Bradley character, Peck displayed time and again that he had little talent for comedy. The very fact that Willy Wyler's first choice to play Joe was Cary Grant should suggest that Peck was a less-than-ideal fit for the role.
Peck didn't ALWAYS play a good guy. Just look at "Duel In The Sun".
Which was an aberration; you may as well cite his role as Josef Mengele in THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL to try to prove your point, but it would also be unconvincing.
Please understand that Peck has always been one of my favorite actors, but he (like just about every other actor) was always best when cast in parts that best suited his talents.
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Well, it was an escape, and it was great, so it must be a GREAT ESCAPE.
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Enough already with this undue reverence about Tim Russert who (at best) was a corporate shill who wallowed in gross servitude to the empty suits that paid his salary...
And what is it, exactly, that you do for a living, nodg, old man? How many steps-removed are you in your job from some corporate wrongdoing somewhere?
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LOL, Cine, you do that all the time, ever day, in very rude ways, as you constantly bore people with your rants about your atheism and political leftism. You pontificate, lecture, rant, rave, and try to embarrass people if they simply misspell a word.
Fine, but at no point to do offer any rebuttal to what I've asserted.
Welcome to the board, Brother rohanaka. We are pleased to have you here. You will find most of our people very kind and considerate of everyone's beliefs. In general, this is a very fine group of people.
This is obviously aimed at me. At no time have I ever started a thread, or written a posting in debunking the insupportible notion of a supreme being; everything I write on the subject is in response to thinkly disguised attempts at proselytizing, and there's nothing ruder than someone forcing his or her religion down others' throats.
Yeah, many of their people "marry out". Many of them marry outside their own race/ethnic group/religion, and, thereafter, many of them don't carry on their old traditions, and in another generation or two their descendants don't call themselves "Jewish" anymore. I've got a Jewish friend who married a Chinese lady. Their kid is half-American and half-Chinese. My friend hasn't been to a synagogue in nearly 40 years. I've got another Jewish friend who married an Italian. Such marrying out constantly takes numbers from their overall population when the resulting mixed kids are not trained in the old traditions.
The above is nonsense. The fears among Jews of "assimilation" is a relatively new phenomenon in the 6000-year history of Judaism (not counting those times when Jews were given the choice of conversion or death by the likes of the Inquisition and Spanish Inquisition, two wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Roman Catholic Church). Judaism survives only because Jews have been, traditionally, extremely resistant to attempts to convert them. They tend to see Christianity as a religion that operates on the principle of the carrot-and-the-stick, with the carrot being promises that Christianity has never been able to deliver.
Stop being such a bigot.
Bigotry was invented Christianity. The need to feel superior is, sadly, a trait found in the adherents of most religions, but Christians have elevated it to an art.
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How could anyone play Jekyll and Hyde without make-up ? the picture would have made no sense if they both looked alike...and I don't think that is why Mr. Tracy drank..he had some personal demons involving his son...
What utter rubbish. Remember the episode of the original Star Trek in which a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into two Kirks, the sweet, meek one, and the ruthless, sexually rapacious one (one of two "Jekyll & Hyde" episodes the show did)? There was no visual distinction between the two, except that the latter was lit in such a way as to make him seem more sinister. To imagine that an actor of Spencer Tracy's calibre couldn't have carried off the differences between his Jekyll and Hyde without make-up to turn the story into a freak show is ludicrous.
I maintain that the most faithful adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to film remains the Jerry Lewis version of THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, precisely because it concentrates on the psychological, and not the physical.
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Also, how did "Roman Holiday" ,make it so high on the list? That is not what I consider a Comedy! It ends rather sadly! (I can say that because I count it as one of my all-time favorite films!)
ROMAN HOLIDAY is a romantic comedy; there's simply no other way to characterize it. And the ending isn't sad, merely melancholy, but the point the film tries to make is that love is only proved through sacrifice. That said, for all its pleasures (and they are many) the film certainly isn't perfect: it's perhaps ten of fifteen minutes too long, and Gregory Peck is terribly miscast. The very fact that he is Gregory Peck means that he'll always do the right thing (when Ann asks that Joe remain in his car and not follow her as she returns to her country's embassy, the audience knows that Joe will comply because he's, well, Gregory Peck. That tied director William Wyer's hands dramatically, since it placed the entire dramatic burden of keeping the audience guessing on Audrey Hepburn's shoulders. Had William Holden, and actor who excelled at morally ambiguous roles, played Joe, it would have allowed for greater dramatic choices on Wyler's part, and resulted in a better movie).
Then there's the matter of the scene at the fountain where Joe tries to talk the schoolgirl (Judy Wyler, Willy Wyler's younger daughter) out of her camera. If it had been Holden lifting the camera strap off her neck as she protests meekly, it might've worked if conducted as a con-job you can imagine Holden trying to pull off; with Peck doing it it's as though he were trying to put his hand up the girl's skirt, and is just plain creepy).
While I consider Back To The Future a nice comedy, I think it is first and foremost a Fantasy film. But Miracle On 34th Street isn't all that much of a Fantasy to me. (I also think Here Comes Mr. Jordan is a better Fantasy film than either of the two mentioned.)
And THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR and Powell & Pressburger's A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH are better fantasies than any of them. The latter also qualifies as a courtroom drama (even if the trial takes place in Heaven's celestial courtroom). And where was Lubitsch's HEAVEN CAN WAIT (not to be confused with the Warren Beatty film, which is a re-make of HERE COMES MR JORDAN.
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After the film was shot, MGM took apart the town of "Black Rock" and carted it back to the studio in Culver City. The heavy tar-paper that was laid down below the flooring was left behind, however, and is still lying on the ground there up in the desert fifty-four years later. Also, the line of "telephone poles" that runs along the rairway tracks was erected just for the film. When they were finished, the poles, instead of being uprooted in their entirety, were just sawed off a couple of feet above ground level and removed; the poles' stumps are still there.
Another classic Tracy moment is after the Monkee Trials he carrys both the Science Book and The Bible out of the courtroom with him.
You mean when Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz were tried for sneaking messages about evolution into their '60s sitcom?
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The biggest problem with these lists (apart from the obvious fact that they're popularity contests, and not chosen according to any even remotely objective criteria) is that many of the genres selected are mis-characterized. Sometimes this is because a film can clearly belong to two or more genres (in which case one must step back and decide to which it most strongly conforms), but in others it's just sloppiness (i.e. STAR WARS is a fantasy film; just because characters fly around in spaceships doesn't make it science fiction, whose definition has always been that it mae at least some kind of nods to actual scientific principles. By contrast, Star Trek is science fiction).
Other misplaced films:
FIELD OF DREAMS. Yes, it certainly is a fantasy, but it really belongs with sports movies.
E.T.. Fantasy, not SF.
BLADE RUNNER. Definitely belongs in Mysteries category. A futuristic mystery is still a mystery.
ALIEN and THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS are, first and foremost, horror films.
BACK TO THE FUTURE is a comedy (and an especially odd choice, since the general consensus is that BTtF II is the best film in the trilogy).
CAT BALLOU is a comedy (and a decidedly dated, stale, forced and unfunny one, at that. Of all the films on these lists, it's the most undeserving entry of all).
SCHINDLER'S LIST is a hard film to classify, but it certainly doesn't belong among the Epics.
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Juror #4, the man who never perspires...until he realizes that he may have picked the wrong horse in that courtroom.
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The problem with your religion, and any other, is not their specific tenets, but the utterly irresistible urge of some to proselytize, which is what you've been doing throughout this thread.
To cite an example, while I think Tom Cruise, John Travolta and their L. Ron Hubberdian Scientology are absolutely wacky (though the idea that the modern human psyche burdened by atavistic memories of some 70-million-year-old galactic warlord called "Xenu" is no more preposterous than the notion that a carpenter walked on water, cured the sick and rose from the dead), the Scientologists have an absolute right to believe what they like, but their "church" has borrowed the most offensive aspect of Christianity: an instatiable, relentless and repugnant campaign to convert their fellows.
Have you ever given any thought to why, after nearly 6000 years, there're only about twenty-million Jews in the world, since they had about a four-thousand-year head-start on their nearest competitor (Christianity)? The answer is simple: Jews don't proselytize. They don't convert. Their deepest belief is that if there's a Supreme Truth to be found in this Universe, people will find it and come to it in their own good time, and that they won't be damned for eternity if they don't.
If you had any real faith in this religion of yours, you'd give it a rest because, like the Jews, you'd believe that this god of yours has its own time-table for the clockwork mechanism of Creation. But you don't, so you feel you've got to cheat around the margins. Well, I have news for you: it won't work. Never has; never will.
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The movie's called TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, not "How to" (it's not a Hunting-for-Dummies primer).
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To the best of my knowledge, the cast of BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK won more total Oscars during their careers (8) than those in any other film but one (HOW THE WEST WAS WON, in which the actors won a total of ten). All the more surprising because BAD DAY is a small movie, and one would expect that only big epics would have a cast big enough, and prominent enough, to supply so many total wins):
Walter Brennan 3
Spencer Tracy 2
Ernest Borgnine 1
Dean Jagger 1
Lee Marvin 1
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THE OSCAR was shot FLAT. It is was not photographed with anamorphic lenses. It was not wide screen. The print shown on TCM was not Pan-and-Scan. You didn't miss a thing.
It may have been shot flat, but it was surely hard-matted for widescreen theatrical exhibition. The compositions in the 1.33: 1 print telecast last night didn't make much sense, or impression, visually.
As for the title of this thread, THE OSCAR isn't a bad movie...it's an awful movie, but one of those fascinating train-wrecks that'll always draw gawkers and cult-camp-followers like flies to fertilizer.
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I'd often see her and Tony Martin at film music concerts at UCLA's Royce Hall. Fifty years past her heyday, and she was still turning heads.
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I just watched it too, after not having seen it in many years.
Frankly, I think Gable's mugging 1930s acting style was, well, gone with the wind by 1958 (admittedly, he's much better in RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP). Embrassing.
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And I don?t personally know anyone of faith...and I know many...who would describe mankind in the terms you choose (as empty vessels awaiting Divine direction.) I do however believe that God can and does direct the affairs of man according to his own purposes. And that he plays an active and transforming role in the lives of his believers. And I think the film portrays that message in the clearest light possible.
Well, you're trying to have it both ways here, which hardly surprises me.
And the ideal casting for Alvin York would've been Henry Fonda (even if he was only five years younger than Cooper. He played "younger," and was a true Everyman, which Cooper never was).
Anyone know the title of this 1960's/70's drama?
in Information, Please!
Posted
RAGE (1972) involved the killing of a rancher's son and livestock by the accidental release of chemical warfare agents by the Army.