CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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KING KONG began its world premiere engagement at both New York's Radio City Music Hall and Roxy Theatre
("Big enough to play the world's two greatest theatres at the same time! 10,000 seats -- 10 shows daily") at 10:30
AM on Thursday, March 2, 1933 (this directly from RKO's one-sixth-page ad on page 21 of the New York Times
on that date).
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Well, Elster's an idiot: his whole plan hinges on his knowledge that Scottie suffers from vertigo, and his expectation that he won't follow "Madeleine" up the stairs of the mission's bell tower.
But he's even stupider than that: he leaves his only accomplice conspicuously alive (despite the fact that, as an accomplice to murder, she has every reason to try to blackmail Elster into paying her off to keep quiet. Elster already has one murder-rap hanging over his head, and the state can only send him to the gas chamber once, so why not just kill her?). He leaves her alive in the same city in which Scottie lives (which, back then, had a population of only about 350,000 in a fairly small geographic area), and lets her keep (or, at least fails to keep track of) Carlotta's necklace[/u].
Either Elster subconsciously wanted to be caught, or he was just the role model to give George W. Bush stupid lessonsl.
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Claude Rains, not "Raines."
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This is silly. I saw this film at least half a dozen times on TV back in the 1950s and it ALWAYS had a piano score.
So where is the piano track?
TCM could get some church lady at any Atlanta church do add a piano track to this film. Or a student, or a piano teacher.
Why is this being shown with no sound track?
The piano player finally succumbed to the gunshot wounds he suffered during the filming of the original robbery. No replacement has been named.
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I don't even bother defending that one, because no one forced that girl to sneak onto his boat for that party and lie about her age....and it was pretty apparent that she saw her proximity to Flynn and his stardom and 'deep pockets' as an opportunity to grab her 5 minutes of fame...and perhaps a stack of money.
What did she say after he was acquitted? "Well (*shrug*), there was no harm done."
A girl who was really raped would have never said that.
The prosecution's case collapsed when Flynn's defense attorney, Jerry Giesler, pointed out that "victim" Peggy laRue Satterlee's testimony that the moon shone through the porthole of Flynn's cabin couldn't have happened, since the yacht, Zaca, was berthed in such a way that the cabin faced away from the moon's position on the night in question.
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We lost both the writer..and the director ...Sad Week in Hollywood!
It should be noted that neither man died of a gunshot wound, or a fall from the Williamsburg Bridge.
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Making up false stories? I was speculating; the word "probably" that started the posting should've been a tip-off in that regard, but those blacked-out spaces often do indicate Blacklisted personnel.
Even if it was (and I don't know if that's the case), if Warner's acquired the rights to show it in the U.S. it would have been subject to whatever modification (or mutilation) the studio deemed necessary to exhibit it on these shores without the sort of controversy and charges of coddling "Reds" that association with such names would've brought down on them. A number of American production people worked on both sides of the Atlantic (especially after the Blacklist began here), so it's entirely plausible that the excised name is of someone who ran afoul of HUAC.
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Today, April 2, marks the 40th anniversary of the premiere of Stanley Kubrick's still-brilliant, landmark 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, in Washington, D.C.
Seems like yesterday that the blood-red scrim went up in the old Loew's Capitol Theatre in Manhattan later that week, and this fourteen-year-old heard the opening rumble of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra for the very first time...
The late Sir Arthur C. Clarke was wrong about one thing, though: shortly after the film's release, he commented that it would be last space movie not shot on location. Unfortunately, modern space movies are "shot" largely in the bellies of computers, something at which HAL would probably have turned up his nose, if he had a nose. The sad fact is that, for all its "primitive" special effects technology, the film's hand-crafted look created what's still the gold-standard in "you-are-there" sense of time and place, visual accuracy and audience's total immersion in the fathomless Cosmos.
By now, both Stanley Kubrick and Sir Arthur surely know whether they got it right or not.
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It was probably the name of someone who was later Blacklisted.
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I met both Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg at a Q&A session following an advance screening of THE KILLING FIELDS at the Motion Picture Academy, shortly before the film's premiere in October, 1984.
I actually spent most of my time in conversation with Dr Haing S. Ngor (Sam Waterston and director Roland Joffe were there as well), who portrayed Dith in the film. I was greatly moved by his performance and felt compelled to relate the story of Harold Russell, a non-actor who walked away with an Oscar (two, actually) for his first screen appearance in William Wyler's THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. I told Dr Ngor that I was absolutely certain that he'd be nominated for his own Oscar, and might very well win.
Dr Ngor discounted that possibility in an understandably and characteristically modest way but, when Oscar time rolled around the following March, my prediction came to pass and he was called up to the podium to accept his Academy Award.
It was particularly hurtful, then, when Ngor was murdered on the streets on Los Angeles eleven years later. Dith's death is unfortunate, of course, but death comes for all of us, and his was from the sort of disease that's always lurking in the shadows, waiting to claim those whose bodies betray them. Ngor, who devoted much of his' income from occasional film roles to the Cambodia expatriate community, was struck down by street thugs in a senseless robbery. It's something that saddens and haunts me to this day.
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Osborne is in our "neck of the woods" most of the time, except when he flies off to Atlanta to tape segments for TCM, or goes a-wand'rin' through the streets of Manhattan like Don Birnam in search of an open pawn shop.
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I met her about two and a half years ago at the Motion Picture Academy. She's a very sweet and friendly lady.
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You neglect to include the name of the publication that ran the below obituary, or who wrote it, so I can't point a finger at whoever is responsible for calling THE TELL-TALE HEART a "feature film"; it is, in fact, a 20-minute MGM short subject (often run by TCM).
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The child of professional dancers, Kim Darby began her career studying dance with her father as well as Nico Charisse. At fourteen, she was granted special admission to Tony Barr's acting workshop at Desilu Studios on the Paramount Pictures lot.
Desilu wasn't on the Paramount Studios lot, but immediately adjacent to it, occupying the old RKO lot at Melrose Avenue and Gower Street. When Paramount acquited Desilu in the late 1960s (including rights to all its television programming, such as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, later valuable Paramount movie franchises), the two lots merged to become the current 50-acre Paramount Studios. By then, the Desilu talent school was no more.
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am probably an idiot, but what are you trying to say?
I'm not sure; he hung up the phone before he finished speaking.
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I'm not sure how often Widmark gave interviews, but this is from the obituary in the original post of this thread:
"He also vowed he would never appear on a talk show on television, saying, 'When I see people destroying their privacy -- what they think, what they feel -- by beaming it out to millions of viewers, I think it cheapens them as individuals.' "
I'm not sure just how much I agree with that sentiment ( I really like "Private Screenings"), but I wish more people felt that way these days and acted accordingly. Television would certainly be different. We'd see more old movies.
As the above makes obvious, Widmark wasn't averse to speaking to print journalists, and probably was willing to talk to TV reporters within the context of him not being the story. If one examines statements made by him and Paul Scofield -- borh of whom, of course, died in the same week -- I think one finds that their views on the subject of celebrity and the role of the media were strikingly similar.
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FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED and IF I WERE KING (what's taking you so long, TCM? You've got the bloody films! Stop showing all the tired warhorses and take a good close look at the films you've leased!).
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Sounds like Carroll O'Connor!
And the late Peter Boyle, if you remember his chilling performance as racist Joe Curran in JOE (1970).
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The most bizarre look-alike award has to go to Catherine McLeod, as Henreid's love interest. In the early scenes, playing a somewhat repressed woman, she looks remarkably like Preston Foster. She does get better looking as the film progresses.
For such questionable taste in women, Henreid's character probably should have been committed to an institution for the criminally androgynous.
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According to www.newsmeat.com, he supported John Kerry in '04. Rest In Peace, Richard Widmark.
He may have played conservatives, reactionaries and racists with uncommon conviction, but Widmark was a lifelong liberal Democrat.
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With the exception of NINOTCHKA, which featured a script vastly better than any other she ever had, all of Garbo's best work was in her silent films, so, no, GRAND HOTEL wasn't it.
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This photo's for sale on eBay. It claims that Darnell's with Joe Mankiewicz (with whom
she was having an affair), but the man in the pic is definitely not he. Any ideas?
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There are loads of easily recognizable flats and architectural elements that Warner's pulled out of their scene docks and used in various costume pictures: THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER to THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD; ROBIN HOOD toTHE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX to THE SEA HAWK to THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN. Some of the columns from ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (and SEA HAWK and DON JUAN) are still in the Warner's scene docks, where I see them from time to time.
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Dianabat's exactly right; add to that the fact that the two films were made ten years apart. Moreover, IRMA's brilliant art director, the great Alexandre Trauner, was far too much of an original to have consciously copied anything from the earlier film (and it's a given that the desgin of any film goes through countless revisions, all of which have to be approved by the director and/or producer(s)).
Let's just say that each film found its own expression of "Euro-shabby" that each director and art director felt was illustrative of the respective films' characters' situation in life. That they resemble each other probably exists more in your mind than anywhere else, but that's common.
George Clooney - yes or no
in General Discussions
Posted
An interesting question, and one I think I'd like to link to the recent death of Richard Widmark.
Widmark has always been one of my favorite actors, but his career was overshadowed by many, of not most, of his contemporaries, actors who came up, and/or made their biggest mark, from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s, such as Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, William Holden (who actually broke in in 1939), Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster, all of whom competed with each other and Widmark to some extent, both for available roles, and the attention of the moviegoing public.
Unlike the others, Widmark never got a career-defining role (Peck, Atticus Finch; Douglas, Vincent van Gogh, Spartacus; Holden, Joe Gillis, Sefton; Heston, Moses, Ben-Hur; Lancaster, Elmer Gantry), and so we don't have a clear picture of a preferred screen persona (Widmark's most memorable part was, in fact, his first: Tommy Udo in KISS OF DEATH, but it seems clear that he was never particularly fond of the idea that he'd be remembered chiefly for pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs while gleefully cackling at his own infamy).
I think it's safe to say that Clooney has never even come close to playing a career-defining role -- something more and more rare these days -- and we won't be able to take his measure as an actor and screen presence until, and unless, he does.