CineSage_jr
-
Posts
3,852 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Never
Posts posted by CineSage_jr
-
-
His The Greatest Show on Earth was one of the first Best Pictures that was a big-budget blockbuster with lots of special effects.
Try GONE WITH THE WIND, thirteen years earlier.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH was originally supposed to star Kirk Douglas as circus manager Brad Braden, instead of Charlton Heston. It would have had a lot more focus and energy with Douglas, and been a lot better film all 'round.
? the top backstage musical by co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, Singin' In The Rain, which only received two nominations (for Best Supporting Actress (Jean Hagen) and Best Musical Score (for Lennie Hayton)) - and no awards! (A Best Musical Score award was taken away by perennial Oscar winner Alfred Newman for the competing With a Song in My Heart.) And where were nominations for Gene Kelly (as silent film star Don Lockwood, with his memorable splashing in the rain segment), Debbie Reynolds (as Kelly's love-interest), or the inimitable Donald O'Connor? And why did Jean Hagen's vibrant performance lose? By contrast, in the previous year, MGM's An American in Paris (1951) received critical acclaim, commercial success and six Oscars, with star and choreographer Gene Kelly receiving an Honorary Award
Until the 1960s, when the "prestige" road-show musical held sway, the Academy has seldom looked favorably upon the form: no musical won Best Picture between 1936 (THE GREAT ZIEGFELD and 1951 (AN AMERICAN IN PARIS). In fact, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN's greatness lies not in its musical numbers (whch are good, but not great, and were, in any case, mostly off-the-shelf numbers taken from the Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown catalog) but by virtue of its being one of the best comedies ever made -- and the Academy has been even less recptive to them.
Come to think of it, is there a more undeserving Best Picture winner than 1938's YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (over THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, of all things)?
-
I don't think I've ever seen HUDSON BAY.
Nor will you ever, since there's no film by that name. It's called HUDSON[/u]'S[/u] BAY (and it was originally released by Fox, though I don't think that they now own the rights).
-
I've got a sixty-seven-year-old copy of the script from the film, with the original, printed title, "Heaven Can Wait" crossed out, and "Here Comes Mr Jordan" written in below it in India ink (for those who don't know, two films were in preparation in 1940 with the same title, this and Ernst Lubitsch's film with Don Ameche, Gene Tierney and Laird Cregar at Fox. After some negotiation between the two studios -- perhaps they even flipped a coin -- it was agreed that Columbia would change the name of their movie, which ended up opening more than a year before Lubtisch's. When Warren Beatty remade the JORDAN for Paramount in the late 1970s the original title was no longer an issue and his version's reverted to it).
-
Garner's stroke is reported to be minor (though I recall the same thing being said about Kirk Douglas's about a dozen years ago, and that he'd recover his full powers of speech, but it never happened. Happily, Kirk weathered the stroke's other effects well enough, and is still with us at 91).
Unfortunately, I've heard that Garner is also ill in a way unrelated to the stroke, and that may be more serious.
-
A lovely piece, thank you (and great news about AMOLAD; every time I see Grover Crisp at Columbia Home Video, I ask him about it, and he keeps saying "Soon, soon, soon." Soon is never soon enough).
Two quibbles:
It's Hugh Griffith (no "s" at the end)
and
Martin Scorsese.
-
Big Brown is NOT a quarter horse...
Neither was Eight Belles; if she had been, she'd be alive today.
-
Doesn't surprise me; Bruckheimer's probably paying off someone.
-
You'd think that a stable that calls its horse "Big Brown" would try to underwrite the costs of upkeep by plastering a few UPS logos on his flanks.
-
Everyone Pick A Frank
Okay, I'll take THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK.
-
Hg's very...mercurial.
-
It's obvious what the writer had was just this basic idea, "Ok, ok, so we've got a bunch of old Nazis hiding out in Brazil, and they try to create a new Hitler by selecting certain boys around the world and by trying to give them a similar upbringing as the one Hitler had... uhh, we'll figure out the rest of the plot later."
I just attended a focus-group screening of an as-yet-unsold TV pilot from Warner Bros., called (at least tentatively) The Eleventh Hour, about some semi-mystical Brit called Jacob Hood (Rufus Sewell) the Feds bring in at the last minute when they can't solve a crime or, more specifically, string of apparently related crimes. This guy is paired with a hot (as in sexually) young female FBI agent whose assignment is to protect him from all the bad guys who don't want him figuring out their schemes (though you can guess why she's really there for dramatic purposes).
Anyway, on the evaluation form we were given afterward, I wrote that this is just a watered-down X-Files clone (a word chosen with exacting care, as you shall soon see), and that the pilot borrows the child-cloning plot from BOYS FROM BRAZIL, only in this case it's fomented by merely some millionaire (who lives in a gorgeous Seattle house inexplicably furnished at IKEA; go figure) that's lost his son and wants a replacement, which requires numerous cloned embryos implanted in unsuspecting young women who think they're merely acting as ordinary surrogate mothers. Of course, the folks the millionaire's employed to carry out this scheme are far more ruthless than he counted on, and they're leaving a trail of corpses behind as they try to cultivate the perfect clone baby.
Yikes. As soon as the end title came on and I saw that it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, purveyor of endless, mindless crap, I had the ultimate answer aqs to why what I'd just seen was so bad -- something not even "Jabob Hood" could figure out on his own.
But how are you going to make one of them the leader of Germany? Will France surrender this time, considering it has atomic weapons now? England also has atomic weapons. So does Israel. And what about Israel? It's not going to sit around this time and just wait for things to happen.
No, I think that the cloned Hitlers would just be put to work as emcees at South American Nazi weddings and kiddie birthday parties.
A brief note on the soundtrack album (1978), for anyone interested:
It contains four pieces.
Side 1 is "Suite from "The Boys From Brazil" ", which runs 19:45.
Side 2 contains "We're Home Again," "Frau Doring," and "The Dogs & Finale."
A very, very rare CD (the old LP is quite common). If you want one, be prepared to pay somewhere between $200-$300.
-
I remember her well enough to recall that her name's spelled Susann.
-
I've got to take issue with a lot of what Sullivan's written:
The music for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," which turned 50 this week, is widely regarded as the cinema's greatest score.
"Widely regarded?" There's no consensus saying any such thing. A great score it may be, but among those who actually know and appreciate classic film scores you'll probably find more support for Mikl?s R?zsa's music to BEN-HUR being the greatest of all time (obviously, this is all endlessly debatable).
Indeed, it is difficult to recall any movie more dependent on the seductiveness of its score. From the moment that Herrmann's three-note motif begins spiraling in the main title, plunging the listener into the cinema's most elegant nightmare, Scottie's obsession becomes ours.
It's a six-note figure, Mr Sullivan, not three.
It always told the truth, and was uniquely able, as Hitchcock said in a 1932 interview, to "express the unspoken." In eight films, the longest run he had with any composer (including fellow ?migr?s Franz Waxman and Miklos Rozsa)
A "1932 interview?" None of Hitchock's films -- or anyone else's -- had ever had an underscore at that point, and he'd never worked with a composer. Max Steiner's music to KING KONG would change all that forever.
As for R?zsa, he scored only one film for Hitchcock (SPELLBOUND), and and found it a thoroughly unpleasant experience, in spite of winning his first Oscar for the music. Regarding Waxman, it can be argued that his "run" with Hitchcock was longer than Bernard Herrmann's: though he scored fewer films for Hitch, it's an on-and-off association that laster from 1940 (REBECCA to REAR WINDOW (1954), whereas Herrmann's ran from 1955 (THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY) to 1966 (TORN CURTAIN); Hitchcock rejection of the music severed their relationship.
As with many risky masterpieces, this score almost didn't happen. Herrmann was given 10 weeks to complete this epic masterwork, which has enough musical ideas for three movies.
It's just the opposite, really: VERTIGO's musical ideas and motivs are actually quite simple, with most of the effects achieved through inventive orchestration (at Herrmann was a master), and not compositional, thematic complexity.
I suspect that Mr Sullivan wrote this nonsense only because Rupert Murdoch ordered him to.
-
The score IS the best part of the film. I was disappointed with Peck's performance. I kept seeing Atticus Finch peeking out from under that dreadful black wig.
It wasn't a wig, it was Peck's own hair, with the hairline shaved back (something he also did when he played Gen. Douglas MacArthur). The problem with Peck's performance is that it's rather too over-the-top. Oddly (perhaps a bit frighteningly), about ten years ago some long-lost transcription discs turned up of the noted Hungarian-American Rabbi, Stephen Wise (1874-1949), a highly regarded orator of his day.
An excerpt from one of the discs was played on the news and, as I was listening to its deliberate speechifying (a style long since discredited and abandoned), I remember thinking to myself that I'd heard the voice before somewhere (which I couldn't, of course, since the transcription discs had just surfaced), when it finally dawned on me: it sounded just like Gregory Peck as Mengele in THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL! The deep baritone and florid sentence constructions could very easily have been Peck. It's obviously too ironic even for something as preposterous as THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL: the movie Nazi doctor and the distinguished Rabbi, I can't watch the film without thinking of that moment.
-
Apart from Max von Sydow's being the only actor to ever play both Jesus (THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD), and the Devil (NEEDFUL THINGS), has any actor ever played such an alpha-and-omega spread of roles as Peck with King David at one end (DAVID AND BATHSHEBA), and Josef Mengele at the other (THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL)?
-
I wonder if the extended warranties on electronics sold by the likes of Best Buy and Circuit City cover loss due to Marabunta (the "Leiningen clause").
-
The most recent Warner DVD contains both versions.
-
I am a gigantic, gigantic Frank Sinatra fan
As opposed to being a fan of the regular-sized Frank Sinatra (he was exceptionally skinny, you know).
-
"He betrayed you, he betrayed me, he betrayed...the Aryan race!"
-
The determination of when Easter begins is based on when Passover does. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is obviously about the Ten Plagues and the Hebrews' subsequent Exodus from Egypt, so the telecast of DeMille's film is simply ABC's attempt to make it coincide with the broadest section of religious observances.
Interestingly, on the night of the Motion Picture Academy's commemmoration of the 40th anniversary of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Tom Hanks, who delivered the opening remarks, then had to run off to church and miss the rest of the program. He explained that the Greek Orthodox Church, to which he belongs, celebrates Easter later than do Western churches, and that the April 25 service was dictated by when Passover was to fall this year.
-
If TCM has the broadcast rights to Two Rode Together, then that film wouldn't be available to other movie channels such AMC or Encore Westerns or etc.
Many, if not most, of the contracts TCM has with other distributors are surely non-exclusive. TCM needs films to fill 720 hours a month, and they can't demand exclusivity, even if the distributors could abrogate existing contracts with other channels to meet the demands of any one service. Even in the case where TCM leases films which aren't being leased by any other channel, exclusivity would cost them more, as it would preclude the distributor's being able to maximize its income on a title, or package of films, and TCM simply doesn't have the kind of budgetary flexibility to pay for that kind of exclusivity.
-
Thr guy in the Vader costume missed the point, and a great opportunity, namely that the Jediists are the perfect weapon in the war against Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard was obviously a Sith Lord, and his minions need to succumb to the power of the Force.
-
I heard Bette Midler say on a talk show that her mother named her after Bette Davis. She said her mother thought it was pronounced "Bet" instead of "Betty" so that is how she became "Bette" Midler.
Those who knew Davis well did, indeed, call her "Bet."
-
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
and
VON RYAN'S EXPRESS.
Barbara Billingsley Sightings
in General Discussions
Posted
True. Jim Backus has a small role in Above and Beyond, as General Curtis LeMay.
Mr Magoo bombs the North Vietnamese into the stone age.