CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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Barb(a)ra Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity".
How do we know this? Because her Phyllis Dietrichsen is the only one to actually refer to herself (along with conspirator Walter Neff) as "rotten to the core" in the movie.
A modicum of self-awareness is a virtue, I guess.
PS: It's Anthony Quinn in CITY FOR CONQUEST, and Edmond O'Brien.
Of course, you're leaving out the rottenest, most irredeemable character in the history of motion pictures: Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), the heel of heels, who prolongs the rescue effort to extricate a man from a cave-in, insuring his death, in order to milk a news story in Billy Wilder, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels's bleak and black ACE IN THE HOLE.
An incomparable work of genius, that.
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We do?
Have you taken a poll, including of those who have not yet joined the message board, and gotten a reponse of 100% as to their knowing to whom the poster was referring?
The simple fact is, if Joe Pesce's worth writing about, then he's also deserving of having his name spelled correctly. Anything else is merely making excuses for someone else's laziness.
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BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (hate the movie, have always loved the title).
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Why even bother to reply to an original posting that's utterly incoherent to begin with?
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It's spelled Joe Pesce (Italian for "fish," pural).
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I have never been that big a film lover of Burton. He and that Taylor woman made a mockery of marriage which we do not look kindly upon from where I reside.
Sounds like you live in one of those places where marrying one's sister is the societal norm.
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Couldn't agree with you more. Thirty-five years ago, as a freshman or sophomore at NYU (depends on what month the screening was held), we were given free passes to see this film, and I remember finding it utterly stultifying (for which a nineteen-year-old could be forgiven, I guess).
As a fifty-three-year-old it's still a mystery as to why anyone, then or now, would find interesting or compelling this self-indulgently-written and -directed drama that seems to revel in its own blandness (not to mention the protagonist's own inexcusable self-pity, as though that were the remotest justification for his actions. Oddly enough, Harry Stoner's situation and his relationship with pliant employee, Phil Green [Jack Gilford] reminded of nothing so much as that between Oskar Schindler and Itzhak Stern in SCHINDLER'S LIST, the obvious absence of Nazis notwithstanding).
I suppose that the filmmakers probably thought this was part of the point they were trying to make: that Stoner's unremarkable life should be the springboard for an act of desperate criminality (or criminal desperation, take your pick as to characterization), serving as metaphor for a malaise gripping society as a whole.
If so, then they miscalculated wildly; even the surname they chose for their protagonist, Stoner, had taken on a new meaning by the early 1970s, and that may have been part of their "plan," too. In the end, the film is a tiresome exercise in the filmmakers' belife in their own misguided profundity. I'd like to say that they don't make 'em like this anymore but, the sad fact is, they make 'em more than ever.
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I don't think it was a question of losing money. Beyond the obvious fact that, by the early 1940s, there were no Asian actors who were box-office draws (unlike the 1920s and '30s, in which Wong and the likes of Sessue Hayakawa were certainly marquee names), if one were to put real Asians beside heavily made-up Caucasians like Hepburn, Walter Huston, Akim Tamiroff (and, five seven years earlier, Paul Muni and Luise Rainer), the latter would all too obviously look like what they were: fake Chinese with stretched-out eyelids.
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And guess who the ?bad guys? are:
Old Lodge Skins: ?But the white men,... they believe everything is dead... stone, earth, animals... ...and people... even their own people. If things keep trying to live, white men will rub them out.?
When you unearth evidence that those who came to be known as Indians sailed to Europe, seized lands from, and embarked on a campaign to exterminate and marginalize, the indigenous population, then we'll listen to your own campaign to excuse the effect on the Indians of white colonization and westward expansion.
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Joan Collins's character is called Nellifer.
Isn't there footage of Joan,in a screen test,for Cleopatra?
Some of it is on the bonus disc in the CLEOPATRA 3-DVD set (now out of print, but not too hard to find).
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Favorite prison movies?
Do you mean movies about people in prison, or favorite movies of people who happen to be in prison?
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CAVALCADE also won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1933 (though it probably didn't deserve to).
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If you're interested in learning more about the vastly underrated and under-appreciated Finlay, you can catch the bio I wrote of him (and many of the films' other actors) in the Anchor Bay edition of the THREE/FOUR MUSKETEERS DVDs bonus features.
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I have tired at least 10 times to watch this film and never get beyond a half hour.
What am I missing?
A substantial part of your cerebral cortex, it would seem.
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Randall stated that DR LAO was, by far, the finest work he ever did on film. I remember my first trip to L.A. in 1978, sneaking onto the then MGM Studios Culver City lot, and finding a looping (dubbing) script from the film in an old filing cabinet under what seemed like an even older-looking banana peel. I always wanted to get it autographed by Randall (the script, not the banana peel), but it was not to be.
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Anyone who'd want to make a film about Peg Entwhistle can take a flying leap off the Hollywood sign, as far as I'm concerned.
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I much prefer holding women, thank you very much.
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Phooey on slow- motion...
I could kissya for that comment. Boy, do I hate slow-motion, an almost sure sign that a director has limited or no faith in the quality of his/her material. Sam Peckinpah should rot in hell for making this sort of rubbish "fashionable."
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There's no such thing as a co-production between countries; film production is a business venture, nothing more; the deals made are between companies, not nations.
Using your example of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, it was American insofar as the the source of the production funds and releasing entity (Columbia Pictures), and producer (Sam Spiegel), but he and British director David Lean chose whatever personnel they wanted. The story dictated that most of the important actors would be British (with two important Americans, Anthony Quinn and Arthur Kennedy), and the director was comfortable with his British crews. The so-called "international film" that evolved after the demise of the Big Studio era cannot be accurately and reliably determined by the nationalities of the creators and personnel; in the end, it's who put up the money and owns the finished product. In LAWRENCE's case, it's Columbia, so it's an American film.
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So many lines were lost from carryover laughter.
Nothing was lost, Ray. A good comedy (there's no such thing anymore, of course) makes allowances for where the audience laughs (a process begun in the writing, carried on when shooting, and fine-tuned during test screenings) by following the big gag or funny line with what's called "throw-away" dialogue, which is meant to keep the characters talking, giving a semblance of their continuing to interact, but contains exactly no exposition or anything else of the least importance (by contrast, the actors in TV situation comedies filmed or taped in front of the so-called "live" audience essentially stand around after a big audience reaction, waiting for the laughs to die down or out before resuming their dialogue. This contributes to sitcoms' rather annoying theatricality, a tradition films were able to move past during the mid-1930s -- coincidentally the exact time of the rise of the "screwball" comedy).
Rotten to the Core
in Films and Filmmakers
Posted
P.S.: It's ensure.
Most dictionaries consider the intransitive verbs insure and ensure to be interchangeable.