CineSage_jr
-
Posts
3,852 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Never
Posts posted by CineSage_jr
-
-
"Vodvil?" Is that the generic form of Advil, or do you mean Vaudeville?
-
Interestingly, both men played the Emperor Nero onscreen. Not only did they mug, they fiddled (or stroked a lyre) while Rome burned.
-
Maybe McQueen's just too cool for TCM.
-
Cinesage,
is that really necessary?
Message was edited by: AvaG92260
It never Rains, but it pours.
-
Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains, Rains
-
Ustinov christened his sailing yacht Nitchevo, the Russian word meaning "nothing."
-
I believe that THE EGYPTIAN is on Fox's schedule for release on DVD sometime this year.
And you're right, apart from the wonderful Alfred Newman-Bernard Herrmann score, Ustinov and, to a lesser extent, Jean Simmons, are the real saving grace of what's an otherwise ill-conceived and pretentious semi-epic. Ustinov gives the film a desperately-needed dose of wry wit (he once wrote that, after he told Michael Wilding, who played Pharaoh Akhenaten, that, in his royal robe and double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, he resembled nothing so much a big salt-shaker, neither actor could approach his role with a straight face all the way to the end of filming), as Ustinov he did to everything he ever did, as actor or playwright (or British Army private, for that matter, which he describes at length in his charming, and essential memoir, Dear Me, one of my equally essential toilet-side companions).
Interestingly, concerned that the film, if good, might drain the public's thirst for "Egyptian epics" before his THE TEN COMMANDMENTS even went before the cameras, Cecil B. DeMille screened it at home one night. After he saw it, he was of two minds: firstly, he hated the film, and knew that it would be no real competition for his planned blockbuster. Second, he liked the work of Fox's art department on the film so much that he asked Paramount to purchase a large quantity of THE EGYPTIAN's props, jewlery and furniture for use in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Fox was happy to comply, since they could further defray some of their film's production costs, and contemplated making no future Egyptian-themed films (little did they know what lay in store for them and the stockholders six years later!).
As a point of interest, I should mention that I own the "Iron" Sword of the Hittites (which is really aircraft-grade aluminum), the prop around which much of the film's second half revolves. It, too, was in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and carried by the Captain of the Sardinian Swordsmen (future DIRTY DOZEN member Clint Walker, whom DeMille actually wanted to cast as Joshua; unfortunately for Walker, the deal that Paramount struck for Fox's loan-out of Debra Paget required them to also take John Derek as a throw-in), personal bodyguard to Ramesses II. If that's why it may have looked doubly familiar, now you know.
PS: CelluloidKid, your assertion of
In 1951, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role of the ?Emperor Nero? in the film "Quo Vadis" (1951)
is incorrect. Ustinov was nominated, but QUO VADIS was shut out of all seven Oscars for which it was nominated. Ustinov won only two Academy Awards (both richly deserved), for SPARTACUS and TOPKAPI.
It's true he was Niven's "batman" during WWII, but for only a brief period. Most of his wartime service was spent writing war-propaganda films with the likes of No?l Coward and Carol Reed. He also spent time in a shack on the coast, protecting England from invasion, his fellow solider a Pole who spoke no English. As Ustinov wrote in Dear Me:
"I suddenly understood why we were being invaded. Hitler, in two minds about whether to try his luck, had received information from a spy that the British position nearest the French coast contained two private soldiers who could only communicate in German. Immediately, the adrenaline began to flow. (Hitler) slammed his fist on a map of the British Isles and shouted to his entourage: 'Meine Herren, Wir fahren gegen England!' ('My sirs, we go against England!')"
-
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (the tracks ahead of it blown up by Lawrence and his men),
HOW THE WEST WAS WON
and
BREAKHEART PASS (the latter half of a real train, but not the whole thing).
More significantly, there have been innumerable films counted as figurative train-wrecks.
-
Come to find out it is Chaplin's son Michael Chaplin. He was also in "Limelight" with his dad. He is now 63.
As of last month, he was actually 62.
-
LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING - Sylvia Stoddard, Michael Lonzo and Jon Burlingame. They combined to present info on historic Hong Kong and the book/author the film was based on; the cinematography; and Alfred Newman. It was fascinating, and I learned a great deal.
I have the disc, but haven't listened to the commentary (yet). Do the particpants go into how much William Holden and Jennifer Jones detested each other. forcing themselves to find someway to give a performance depicting a deathless love for the other? If not, then the commentary is sadly incomplete.
-
I'm more interested in the worst commentary I've ever heard. I nominate that does by some moron called T. Gene Hatcher on the 4-disc set to BEN-HUR, which is so full of misinformation about the film, and history, in general, that Mr Hatcher deserves to refund all buyers' money out of his own pocket.
-
Years ago, back in the early or mid-'50s, Disney made a short theatrical film about Ollie's backyard railroad:
http://www.sci.fi/~animato/rail/ollie.html
I'll bet it was probably a good career move to make sure that his backyard railraod was always a wee bit less grand than Walt Disney's backyard railroad.
-
Stop spamming other people's threads. Start your own threads. Stop being so rude to people.
"Spamming?" "Rude?" Stop mischaracterizing.
-
This is not a Barry Lyndon thread. This is a thread in which I wanted to teach some TCM viewers some information about photography techniques used in "The Professionals".
If you want to start a Barry Lyndon tread, start your own thread.
As though THE PROFESSIONALS' cinematography (or any other aspect of the film) exists in some kind of vacuum. If I want to compare it to BARRY LYNDON here, or anywhere else, I will.
-
The photography seems to be wonderful in this flick.
CS, as far as Ridley goes, good luck duping "Lyndon". It might not be an exciting film, but the camera work is exquisite. I'd dare to say Kubricks best.
While I quibble to this day with the casting of Ryan O'Neal in the title role (though I met him at a Motion Picture Academy screening of the film a couple of summers ago, and quite liked him), and didn't care for the film when I first saw it in New York a couple of weeks before it opened, it's really grown on me over the years. While no one would ever call BARRY LYNDON an exciting film, few, if any, films have managed to capture a sense of time and place the way it does. It really is an extraordinay achievement, which probably no other director could have made, then or now.
And, yes, Fred, Bill Dolworth's (Lancaster's) forgoing the $10,000 as a matter of principle certainly is a very liberal thing to do.
-
...THEY SHOULD'VE CALLED IT "TUNNEL TO TOMORROW"
The problem with building such a tunnel is that it would have to pass under the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two of the Earth's major tectonic plates meet -- a region of great seismic activity that would eventually, and inevitably, tear such a tunnel to shreds, probably with lots of travelers in it.
Beyond that, what the makers of the old film didn't take into account is the length of time it would take to traverse a 3500-5000-mile tunnel at ordinary railway speeds (about 2 1/2 days for the longer distance), with ventilation and power transmission a real problem. Moreover, if a train broke down, or if a there was fire (or a sick passenger), help would take at least 30 hours to arrive).
That doesn't mean that scientists and engineers haven't formulated designs for a modern concept of such a tunnel: two-way, with an emergency safety tunnel in between (like the English Channel Chunnel), it would be an evacuated environment from which most of the air had been removed, allowing magnetic-levitation trains to roar from Europe to North America at supersonic speeds, reducing travel time to under three hours (again, the threat of a sesimic disturbance makes this infeasible, as even a slight misalignment of tunnel and rails at Mach 2-3 would be catastrophic).
Obviously, transAtlantic air travel made the concept of an ocean-spanning tunnel obsolete, especially during those years when the Concorde could carry passengers across in 2 1/2 hours (albeit only about a hundred at a time, for thousands of dollars per seat), and the promise of suborbital hypersonic scramjet passenger aircraft sometime in the next 20-30 years will probably kill any notions for a tunnel still in some dreamers' minds.
-
This is also known as a ?graduated filter? because it gradually goes from dark to clear, so that a band across it at the top is dark, and the rest of the filter below is clear. There is no sharp dividing line between the dark and light areas, and that is why it is called a ?graduated? filter. The clear part lets enough light into the lens to light up the faces and the horses, but the dark top part of the filter turns the sky dark, to make it look like the film was shot at night. This can be done in the camera with a filter over the lens, or it can be done in the printer, with a filter inside the printer.
Ridley Scott used graduated filters in practically every shot of the otherwise interesting THE DUELISTS in attempt to make it look like BARRY LYNDON, only on the cheap.
He failed.
-
And Heston's other Hawai'ian excursion, DIAMOND HEAD.
-
The bad news is that Doug has esophageal cancer. It is treatable, but -- and here's the worse news -- like one-sixth all Americans and most freelance writers, he doesn't have health insurance.
According to George Bush, he need only go to the nearest emergency room, where they'll fix him right up.
-
Heston didn't die yesterday; he died on Sunday, April 6.
-
This current film ?The Ambassador?s Daughter? is another woman?s film from 1956. But this one is for older women. The ?daughter? in this film is 40 year old Olivia de Havilland. She looks very good, but the entire film is shot with a wide-angle lens, with no close-ups, I suppose so we won?t notice how old the actors are.
That has nothing to do with the film's star's appearance, and everything to do with the feeling during the first part of the widescreen era that began in 1953, that films would need far fewer close-ups, since the CinemaScope frame in master-shot could contain all that was needed to tell a story, requiring much less "coverage" in medium-shot and close-up (as such, 'Scope was seen as a boon that would cut production costs -- despite the fact that sets had to be built bigger -- by reducing films' shooting schedules).
There was also the matter of early CinemaScope's lamentable tendency to distort images shot in close-up, making actors' faces look like the characters in George Pal movies right after the rocket has blasted off.
Within a few years it became apparent that cinematic narrative and "language" required the same techniques it always did, irrespective of the shape of the screen, and directors went back to doing things the way they always had -- and for that, we may all be thankful.
-
And I doubt very seriously that the United States Navy will name a ship in honor of Charlton Heston.
I think you're right about that, if only because, in GRAY LADY DOWN, the only film in which Heston played a U.S. Naval officer, his bad decision sends his nuclear submarine to the bottom of the ocean and nearly kills everyone on board.
A pretty bad precedent would be set.
-
Hey Ya'all
What the heck is TCM playing Clash of the Titans for? It has absolultly no basis to be in TCMS lineup ever.......i thought that TCM would not be like AMC...Who picked that movie..UGH...Not only does ....PERIOD....im very dissapointed in TCM amd honestly a little worried..i hope this is NOT a look in to the future of TCM....yikes
anyway had to get that out i am sure im not alone on this one....
ty yaall
AvaG (worried)
It's an MGM owned by Warner Bros. and, consequently, readily available to TCM. It's also part of the Ray Harryhausen canon and, while it can't hold a proverbial candle to the best of his films, it is his professional swan song and therefore holds a certain significance.
The film is also to be re-made by Warner's in the near future.
-
Aside: Much has been made of CH's bass voice, well, we saw him in a play LA's Ahmanson Theater. It was some Sherlock Holmes thing. It co-starred Jeremy Brett as Watson. The fact was Brett could be heard in the rafters but we could barely hear CH. And the play was miked.
The play is called The Crucifer of Blood, by Paul Giovanni, which ran for 236 performances and 16 previews on Broadway between 9/14/1978 and 4/22/1979.
Search function not working? I cannot search or see my past posts?
in General Discussions
Posted
The search function on this board has always been kind of hit-or-miss. Beyond that, when they updated the board several months ago, a lot of old postings seem to have been destroyed or, at least, somehow gotten beyond the search function's ability to locate them.