Swithin
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Posts posted by Swithin
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Right, Lavender, your thread. Some great character performances in that film -- Gladys Cooper, Edmund Gwenn, Frank Morgan, and Dame May Whitty.
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Thanks Lavender.
Smart sea denizen, decorated for St. Patrick's Day, has a road named after him.
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Loved her as Laura-Louise, one of the aged devil worshipers in Rosemary's Baby. And as Billie Burke's Maid in Topper Returns.
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Heaven's Above ?
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Beautiful photo, TopBilled.
My favorite Frank Morgan lines, from Tortilla Flat, spoken to his dogs, who've just had a religious vision: "Did you see him, it was St. Francis! Did you see him? Did you see him? What good boys you must be to see blessed St. Francis!"
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Well, maybe not the whole cast, but the five wonderful ladies in *Tom Jones* (1963) are dead: Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood, Susannah York, and, most recently, the great Joyce Redman. Cilento, York, and Redman left us within the last year or so.
Of the gentlemen, Albert Finney and David Warner are still with us; Hugh Griffith and George Devine are not.
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*This Island Earth vs. the Flying Saucers*
Next: Venus
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Thanks, Kathan, for your charming and sweet story. I actually met a great actress and a great lady named Sian Phillips a couple of times. Sian was married to Peter O'Toole for twenty years, including the period that LOA would have been filmed, I think. She's lovely -- so genuine to talk to, so un-grand and un-theatrical. Hard to believe that one of her greatest roles was as the evil Livia in "I Claudius"!
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Ernest Thesiger is one of the great characters, from The Old Dark House to Bride of Frankenstein, to Last Holiday to The Man in the White Suit, and so forth. And there's plenty of Mary Boland to go around, major roles in Pride and Prejudice, etc., to films I never heard of. All the character people mentioned are worthy, rather than yet another tribute to some "star." And the stars would come in on the coattails of the characters.
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A friend just sent me an article called Deadline London (an article about "Downton Abbey" season 3), don't know this site, but I noticed the following caveat in the comments section:
*Comments On Deadline Hollywood are monitored. So don't go off topic, don't impersonate anyone, don't get your facts wrong, and don't bore me.*
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I love *Zorba the Greek*, I remember seeing it for the first time at the Ridgeway Theater in Stamford, CT. So glad Lila Kedrova won, in fact I just watched her acceptance speech on YouTube, very moving. Some great ladies nominated along with her, although -- who the heck is Grayson Hall?
But Best Actor that year, I think, was one of Oscar's worst mistakes. The worst man won! Quinn should have won, but if not Quinn, then Sellers, Burton, or O'Toole. But who won? Rex Harrison, who walked through the role of Henry Higgins!
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Devote the whole year -- all SOTM slots -- to character people. The "big stars" will be included by default.
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I saw LOA at the Ziegfield Theater in NYC, probably in the 1990s, so it must have been the restored print. I had seen it before on television, it's an impressive and gorgeous movie, but I have to confess -- and I'm SO in the minority here -- I like it, but I'm not mad about it. I love parts of the story, the acting, the images, but in terms of the greatness of director David Lean, I think his A Passage to India, which I also saw at the Ziegfeld, is a better film, in fact a brilliant one, IMHO.
I did visit T.E. Lawrence's house, though, on a beautiful summer's day about ten years ago. Some friends drove me down to Dorset where, on the way to visit Thomas Hardy's cottage, we stopped at Cloud's Hill to pay homage to T.E. Lawrence. His little cottage was very sweet. Evidently it had no electricity, even when he lived there. It was along those country lanes that he was killed on his motorcycle, swerving to avoid two boys on their bicycles.
The release of the Blu-Ray is a cause for celebration.
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Don Luis -- Claude Rains in *Anthony Adverse*
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Nice group, thanks for that info. I worked on a project with Makarova once. Nice person, so talented, though quite a character.
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White Cargo's great, though kinky for its time! Tondelayo (Hedy Lamarr) to Langford (Richard Carlson): "You beat me, then we make love, then you give me much bangles..."
(Or something to that effect, meaning rough sex followed by gifts of jewelry).
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Here's some good advice:
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Just look at his Broadway credits -- he was part of the Group Theater and appeared in many of its important productions:
http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=67585
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The scene with Frank Morgan telling the dogs the story of St. Francis, and the dogs having a vision (amazing!) is one of the most beautiful scenes in any movie. Spencer Tracy's witnessing the first part of that scene leads to his repentance, and to his decision to help John Garfield.
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I think there are several issues involved here. The Admin's OP dealt with civility; not so much with the frustrating, wildly-off topic posts that seem to have occurred. The off-topic threads don't have to lead to nastiness, though they sometimes do; but the OP's concerns had more to do with not being nasty more than not being off-topic.
Although I don't encourage off-topic conversations (though I may have been guilty of them, ever so slightly, from time to time), I think it's possible to wander a little but still not be rude. Of course if you wander too much, that's rude in itself, but still, not the flagrant, explicit nastiness that seems to be the OP's concern.
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On of my favorite John Garfield films is *Tortilla Flat*. He is one of many stars in that film, but he gives a great performance. He and Hedy Lamarr have a lovely wedding scene. Frank Morgan, also in the film, had recently worked with Tortilla Flat's director, Victor Fleming, on The Wizard of Oz. In Tortilla Flat, Morgan gives one of my favorite supporting performances of all time. One of the dogs in Tortilla Flat played Toto in The Wizard of Oz.
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The music is "Funeral March of a Marionette," written in 1882 by Charles Gounod.
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What can I say, but that *Sunrise* , which was on TCM tonight, is one of the great works of cinematic art. The movie has always reminded me of a piece of orchestral music by one of my favorite composers, Granville Bantock, whose composition, Fifine at the Fair, is in turn based on Browning's poem, and which has a similar theme to Sunrise.
Interesting fact which is not widely known: George O'Brien, the male lead in Sunrise, and his wife, the actress Marguerite Churchill, had a daughter, Orin O'Brien. Orin, a double bassist, was the first female member of the New York Philharmonic, joining in 1966. She is still an active member of the orchestra.
http://nyphil.org/about-us/ArtistDetail?artistname=orin-o-brien
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Clive made some great films and some I'd never heard of -- a Colin Clive festival would be nice. I'd particularly like to see him as Mr. Rochester in the early version of Jane Eyre. It doesn't seem to be highly rated, but I enjoy many of those early Hollywood Dickens adaptations, and it also has Ethel Griffies as Grace Poole.
Films that TCM has yet to show.
in General Discussions
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Alot of those films are way too new, I wouldn't want TCM to show them quite yet. But I would love to see the S. Ray films again, they may be "ready" for TCM. But some of those foreign "greats" don't necessarily hold up well. A Godard film was shown in NYC recently and was re-reviewed, not favorably. What looked imaginative in the '60s can look dated now.