CineSage_jr

I have always found it a little amusing about some of the racism in the early classic movies No Way Out with Sydney Pottier comes to mind - that famous N word, there were so many early movies that had African Americans as butlers, big eyed , or resembling a 300 pound Mrs Butterworth syrup lady in the Kennel Murder Case , William Powell refers to the Chinese cook as speaking pigeon English (me no speak English) & the 1942 Batman serial that was so anti Japanese (it was during WW2)...Chapter titles & movie lines used were along the lines of "****" and "Nip". The Fu Manchu movies had Karloff and Lee playing the Asian archenemy. Even on MST the Robert Lippert movies portrayed white people superior to not just race, but even the better sex... Joel and the bots used to always make great jokes and skits on that.. I thought I would bring up this topic for something to talk about, hopefully not to cause hatred, just some racist scenes that you can think of or just talk about in general. Hmm, let's see: It's Sidney Poitier. The fictional character of Mrs Butterworth is white. The expression is pidgin English. It seems to me that the one speaking or, in this case, writing, pidgin English, is you. And you're obviously in the enviable position of finding "amusing" the films in which minorities were marginalized and ridiculed for no reason other than that the films' makers could since nature, circumstance and blind luck just happened to drop your sorry consciousness into a body that, through no effort or virtue of yours, belongs to the majority of people in this country, i.w. white and, most probably, male. Many of us like to think thast we, as a society, have come to a point where we can look back at the films and literature of an earlier era and glean from their off-handed depictions of "inferiors" a sense of where that society was, and how far we've come since then. Still, there're always a few that constitute lumps in the pudding, that keep it from going down as smoothly as the rest of us might like it to.

As the Faulkner sisters said in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town:" "They're all pixilated. Yes, pixilated." "Except us, of course."

Thanks; now all we need is Jimmy Stewart to fly them out of this desert.

Joe E. Ross (aka Office Gunther Toody from Car 54) was a caveman in the series. To quote the late, great Mr Ross: "Oooh! Oooh!"

And I just saw Sidney Lumet's current BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD. Its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman (last year's Best Actor winner for CAPOTE), is the star, and certainly works hard for the effect he achieves (it's amost certain he'll be nominated for the Oscar again), but it's the sort of "busy," "modern" acting that tries to hew to too fine a line for my taste. By contrast, Albert Finney, whose character spends much of the film walking, or sitting, around shell-shocked by the events that have unfolded in this non-linear storyline, carries the sort of profound, tragic grandeur that few actors can convey, nowadays. He steals the movie, and certainly deserves a nomination, himself. Apart from him and Peter O'Toole (and, perhaps, Terence Stamp), that whole generation of roistering British actors who came of age in the mid-1950s-late 1960s is gone (Richard Harris, Peter Finch, Oliver Reed) are gone. I hope that the full appreciation of what Finney has brought, and continues to bring, to motion pictures will be acknowledged before it's too late for him to bask in it.

To which the obvious answer is, Why not you?

I can think of a lot of college students who'd probably gladly mummify Mr Wilson's body in Charmin as a fit send-off into the afterlife.

One accidental extra keystroke on "aluminum" (a different extra keytroke might;ve given me the British spelling, "aluminium"); "fit metaphor" means "worthy" or "appropriate." As you may imagine, there are far more unfit metaphors out there than there are fit ones.

It's About Time, a sitcom produced by Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, was nothing but a thinly-veiled re-working of that concept, with the Stone Age substituting for a desert island: a rag-tag mix of modern, "civilized" types thrown in amongst monsyllabic savages in bearskins, with eternal -- albeit, unrealstic -- hopes of somehow returning "home." Frankly, Schwartz began to run out of stories by the end of Gilligan's first season; by spreading those stories across two separate series with the same premise, he hastened both shows' demise. For that, at least, we can all be thankful.

Captain Nice, with William Daniels, was better than Steve Strimpell in Mr Terrific (hard to see both, since NBC and CBS scheduled the two short-lived sitcoms opposite each other in those days before VCRs). The two shows had the same concept, one in which audiences were simply not terribly interested back in 1967.

And this scene is followed up with Fred walking through the fields of junked airplanes, reliving his war nightmares ... quite a powerful bit of filmmaking, and the musical score and camerawork here almost convince you the airplane Fred has entered is actually airborne. After Fred climbs into the gutted bomber, stares out through the its pitted, clouded nose-cone and begins to sink into a painful reverie of his bombing missions over German-occupied territory (all to the throbbing insistence of Hugo Friedhofer's Oscar-winning score), he's again with his comrade, Kodarski, whose violent death beside him tormented his dreams earlier in the film. It's at this moment that Fred realizes that he's been given a chance to make something of his life, vis-a-vis his love for Peggy, that Kodarski never had. It serves as his final motivation to ask the junkyard foreman for a job, and Peggy for her hand in marriage. As the foreman explains to Fred that the planes aren't being "junked," but are to be recycled for post-war housing, so Fred begins to understand that they are like steel and aluminuml phoenixes, rising from the ashes of war -- a fit metaphor for the lives of the servicemen lucky enough to have made it back home.

It's almost certainly the apex of Garner's career. As for Coburn, he was in so many wonderful films, and left such an indelible impression with that trademark Cheshire Cat grin of his, that it'd be hard to pin down when his career eventually turned downward (if ever). After all, most directors and producers probably never gave much thought to casting Coburn in a heavy dramatic role; when he finally got one, AFFLICTION, in 1997, he aced it, winning his first (and, sadly, only, Oscar).

Universal's holdings are of the pre-1949 Paramount films, not 1948, and it'd be nice if they were to try to wring every penny out of those, too.

And who can forget Tucker's rough-and-ready portrayal of Wild Bill Hickok in 1953's PONY EXPRESS, opposite Charlton Heston?

Watch for Errol Flynn in a small but important role in The Case of the Curious Bride. He's not too hard to spot, in that he doesn't do a lot of moving around in this one...

Thank you sharing that profound philosophical observation with us.

I don't mind a couple of these series, such as Andy Hardy, or the Falcon, or, heaven help us, Maisie, back-to-back, but to devote a whole day to one series essentially freeezes out all of us who don't care to see them, making TCM a "lost" channel for that whole day. It's different when TCM decides to devote a day to the work of a single director or actor, as long as his/her work covers a sufficiently wide type of subject matter that there's something for everyone. This has got to stop. PS: "The Masie Parade," cute, but I'm in charge of funny puns around here.

You are right Metz -Many have been thrown off --I don't know what his problem is--could it be he is posting from prison ? he is so mean...And now he cut his original criticisim in half and took out all the rude and degrading things he said , to make my post look ridiculous..... what a loser.. I'd be interested in knowing exactly where I'm supposed to have "cut my original critcism in half," since I have no regrets about anything I write. I might add to them to further eviscerate someone like you, but pull my punches? Never.

GHOST STORY was also the title of a 1981 feature film with a similar milieu that also starred Melvyn Douglas.

The Jazz Singer is the first talkie even though little talking was done. The important thing to know is that Vitaphone could be used in any theatre or auditorium. It was up to the projectionist to sync it right. Its drawback was phonograph records getting broke during shipment. No, Vitaphone's real problem was that editing sound to picture was all but impossible with sound-on-disc. By contrast, sound-on-film was infinitely flexible, and allowed for the mixing of multiple tracks into a single composite (dialogue-music-effects) soundtrack with an acceptable amount of degradation from multiple film generations.

Cheyenne Brando. Yes, she was.

It was an indoctrination to Marxist theory. You didn't miss anything.

Because war creates an upheaval in all society, touching all levels and classes; in the case of World War II, it was a struggle for survival for all of Western Civilization, with millions of men under arms sent to every corner of the Earth, and their families knowing that they very well might never return. Yes, firefighters are heroes, no question about it, but fires, unlike wars, are localized, eventually burning themselves out. War too often, if sadly, requires the ultimate sacrifice of men for a cause, while the standing order among firefighting organizations is that no suppression of a fire, or saving of property, is worth the cost of a firefighter's life. That's a vast difference.

It's an import. If you want something to run on your Region 1 player, you'll have to record it from Fox Movie Channel.

Both are bad movies; ALWAYS is a really, really bad movie (did it not occur to Spielberg that fire-fighting pilots are simply not, and can never be, as compelling protagonists as soldiers and airmen in wartime?). A GUY NAMED JOE was a hastily-conceived, and badly-cobbled together piece of heavy-handed wartime propaganda masquerading as a romantic fantasy.