CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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No, it's just David Letterman getting his "strike beard" removed on tonight's show.
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It's Colleen Moore, not "Colleene."
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You can save yourself some money here:
http://www.deepdiscount.com/viewproduct.htm?productId=6415623
Five dollars less, with no shipping charge (though delivery is slow).
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gene hersholt sweating '''1927 silent film
Jean Hersholt.
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Tracey, Cascabel, Primadonna...very well written. I think hindsight is 20-20 vision with some folks. That McDaniel was able to flourish in a career during that time period is amazing and wonderful. I also think producers actively sought her out for what she'd bring to a role that was constricted by what the era would allow her to play. Just think...it was inconceivable for her to play a clerk or a secretary or a nurse or a girl reporter or a saleswoman or just any ol' nondescript character.
Remember Rhett's line, "Mammy's a wise old soul." And she truly is, but her character doesn't even have a proper name to call her own ("mammy" is a function, and not something that many free women of any color would want forced on them). Hattie McDaniel took the most adsmirable character in the story and made it her own, investing it with a warmth and dignity no other character has, with the possible exception of Melanie. Still, Mammy is a victim of the times and circumstances in which she lived, and there's no way that McDaniel, or any other actress, could or can transcend that.
There is something unspoken in McDaniel's performance, however, that communicates the distinct message that it's the slaveholders, and not the enslaved, who bear the shame in this tawdry business, but surely the actress longed to play, or see her people play, the same kind of role models and authority figures in which white actors were routinely cast. While black people were always needed in certain (very restricted) types of roles, those parts were characters who were every bit as marginalized as the actors who played them, and that's something that surely eats at one's gut every moment of every day that such a compartmentalized and stratified system continues to exist.
One need look no further than McDaniel's Oscar-acceptance speech, in which she expresses her gratitude by saying (among other thins), "I shall always hope to be a credit to my race." There you have a picture of a person beaten into acceptance and submission by a lifetime of living in a society whose fair-haired and skinned masters set the rules and call the tune. It would be another generation and a half until the black people in this country could, and would, stop thinking of themselves as a "race" within the larger society, and start seeing themselves as deserving of being equal partners in management of the world, and the benefits that can confer.
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I did read that, I believe it was Marion Francis, who said that they bought some reproduction furniture suites, which she said looked rather middle-class to be in such a nice house.
I think you mean screenwriter Frances Marion.
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I'm CineSage (jr), not CineMaven, and am the source of the below compliment.
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To his credit, David Selznick met with the black actors cast in the film, sounding them out as to what they found offensive in the script, and made what changes he could to address their concerns.
As for
I've always liked the line when Oscar Polk says "we's house workers." To me, it is some small acknowledgment of Mitchell's. See, everybody wasn't trained to do everything and that works against things...working. In the 50's maids & butlers were "allowed" to speak standard English in films; (watch"Written on the Wind"). I still say if it weren't for the McDaniels, McQueens, Fetchits...we don't know where actors like Charles Dutton would be today.(PS, what's he done of note lately?)
Rough field hands like Big Sam weren't about to be drafted for duties in the Main House any more than the O'Haras would allow the "houseworkers" who'd been instructed in the finer points of dealing with the family to be "spoiled" by toiling in those chores in which blacks were treated as draft animals (albeit ones who could follow spoken commands and had opposable thumbs with which to grasp tools).
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Just goes to show that those rotter Nazis never played cricket.
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At first, I thought you were speaking Spanish.
?D?nde este DONDI?
The character's name actually comes from what the boy mutters in Italian (Donde? -- "Where?") as he wanders through the rubble of his destroyed town.
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I have a shelf-ful of Ray Faiola's Chelsea Rialto CD releases, and they're treasures (which doesn't stop me from out bidding him on eBay now and then for a choice piece of film memorabilia)!
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"Your gardener taught it to me, it's called Shiatsu...and when I'm done, you're going to feel soooo much better..."
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If you read the Los Angeles Times's piece on the matter, you surely noticed that the writer, John Spano, asserts that Pickfair was built by Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, JR (she wasn't even junior's mother); that "their legendary mansion, "Pickfair," is still a Beverly Hills landmark" (the home was torn down after Turkish businessman Meshulam Ricklis and his pseudo-pop singer wife, Pia Zadora bought it in 1988; virtually nothing remains of the original structure), and that the Oscar statuette is composed of "brittania" metal (it's Britannia).
As for the controversy, itself, the Academy doen't have much, if any, legal claim to Pickford's original Oscar. They love to throw their weight around, but generally lose battles concerning ownership of Oscars awarded prior to 1950.
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No, Peter Graves (and movie wife Andrea King) reap a world of troubles when they receive (possibly fake) radio signals from space in the anti-Communist fantasy THE RED PLANET, MARS (1952), and Ann Robinson has her hands full with real Martians in WAR OF THE WORLDS the next year.
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"They're not 'tattoos' -- they're skin illustrations!" (Boy, has real-life left old Rod in the dust.)
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It wasn't crickets, it was a Geiger counter.
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Trivia quiz: What do Ann Robinson and Peter Graves have in common (no, only the latter spied on his camp-mates in Stalag 17)?
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If you think about the end of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, David Bowman's transformation into the Star Child presages the end of life-on-Earth-as-we-know-it, for good or ill.
2001 is, therefore, the greatest end-of-the-world movie ever made.
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The film is Albert Zugsmith's production of DONDI (1961), based on a long-running New York Daily News (and sydicated elsewhere) comic strip (1955-1986!) about an Italian war orphan and his relationship with U.S. troops. I remember it from local TV broadcasts when I was a kid and, even then, it was an undeniable stinker.
Leonard Maltin summed up the film best: "Watch this film and you'll know why (David) Janssen became a fugitive!?
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So I'm surfing the Web last night and am updating some Lugosi information. I came upon this tidbit:
According to his son, Bela Jr., his father's favorite actor was Marlon Brando.
"I coulda been a contender, instead of a vampire, which is what I am, let's face it."
Message was edited by: Bronxgirl48
Don' ya unnerstan', Charlie? I coulda had a cape; I coulda had fangs. I coulda been some bloody.
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OK, CineSage Jr., I admit that consulting three different sources to verify film background info may be overkill on my part, but it helps to make me more self-confident that the information that I'm including in my spoken intro or written program notes is accurate and reliable....but you're right, if enough research and verification is done at a single source (such as checking out the bibliography), then that can be sufficient....but even THAT takes extra time and effort.
Just playing devil's advocate here......Perhaps it's a case of TCM having to crank out SO many intro and closing segments for SO many different movies that they find it difficult or impossible to research and verify their info the way that they would if they were only preparing comments for a single film or a few different films. Just a thought.
It's just that there really is no shortage of those who have an encylopedic knowledge of the vast subject that is film and filmmaking, who can look over copy and say "that's good...but that isn't," or, "wait a minute, this doesn't sound quite right; let's take a closer look and research it a little bit more before putting it on-air," and who can say, (as someone should have to Bob Dorian on numerous occasions) "The director's name is pronounced Delmer Daves" (rhymes with saves), not "Delmahr Davies," or to Bob Osborne, "Mikl?s R?zsa is said, "ROE-zha," not "ROWT-sa," or "Rossa" (just remember that other famous Hollywood Hungarian, Zsa Zsa Gabor: Mikl?s has only one "zsa" in his name, but it's pronounced identically to Zsa Zsa's "zsa").
As for BijanC's
There are other hosts on occasion- Josh Mankiewicz introduces the odd animated short or Western, and there's a guest host series that features Osborne as a sort of facilitator. The man does an outstanding job (my only qualm, which may be a casualty of several clothing changes per day, is that his suit pants and trousers never fit, and the jackets are "boxy"- a minor issue)
Josh Mankiewicz is a correspondent on Dateline NBC; it's Ben Mankiewicz who is on TCM. Both are the sons of longtime political consultant Frank Mankiewicz (who is, in turn, the son of Herman Mankiewicz, co-author of CITIZEN KANE, and brother of Don Mankiewicz, Oscar-nominated writer of Robert wise's I WANT TO LIVE!. Confused, yet?).
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She just wrote that the film she's thinking of isn't THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER, and that whatever the film's title, its leads aren't as illustrious as those in the Grant film.
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As for "pointless" introductions, please keep in mind that accurate and reliable background info on classic films can be very difficult to come by....even stars, directors, writers and others who were there and DIRECTLY involved in the making of the films can have fuzzy memories and relate exaggerated or inaccurate historical information.
I have quite a bit of experience in preparing and delivering onstage introductions for public screenings of classic films at various film conventions and revival theatres and trust me, it isn't easy. There are SO many urban legends and false stories around that make for "fun and juicy copy", but I want no part of that nonsense in my intros. My information research on a specific historical background story includes a minimum of three different and reliable sources. Once I'm comfortable with the truthfulness and authenticity of a particular story or piece of information, THEN I'll include that info in my comments and share it with my audience....but again, it takes a LOT of time and effort to do it right.
There're plenty of authoritative writings on all kinds of Hollywood history; one needn't be a Rhodes scholar to know that if those writings contain bibliographies that indicate authors' reliance on primary sources, they may be trusted as to their veracity. If those resources aren't tapped by those who write copy for Bob Osborne and Ben Mankiewicz, it's for no reason other than sheer laziness.
As for
Paramount sold the bulk of its pre-1949 film library to MCA-Universal back in the early 1960s. Paramount was smart enough to hang on to its silent film library but the folks in Paramount Home Video are fairly clueless about what to do with that library.
this had nothing to do with any brilliance on the part of Paramount, who would've sold the silents in a heartbeat. The truth is much simpler: because they were purchasing Paramount's library for television syndication, MCA didn't want the silent films.
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It's memoriam.
The Trouble With Remakes
in Hot Topics
Posted
Yes, we've been through this discussion of remaking THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL elsewhere on the site.
The problem is not remakes, per se, but that most studios and producers have the bad sense to want to remake good-to-great films that don't need to be remade, and whose quality they can't equal or surpass, anyway (and if you can't surpass the original, then you've eliminated the very reason for undertaking the remake -- except for making money, of course, but very few remakes actually do well at the boxoffice. Audiences, mainly comprised of young people, don't recognize that it is a remake; while that may prevent them from comparing the remake with the original, it doesn't serve to entice them into the cinemas in the first place).
While good-to-great films may not need remaking, the Hollywood landscape is littered with the wreckage of good stories that were made into bad-to-mediocre films that are crying out to be revisited. But that takes courage on the part of studios and producers, because these stories don't have same kind of built-in identification factor and cachet that earlier successes do (even if that factor and cachet, as explained above, is largely in the producers' minds, insofar as they actually have minds).
And, as we all, know, real courage has been in short supply in Hollywood since the mid-1960s, or so.