Swithin
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Posts posted by Swithin
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Andy, I think we had this conversation already, but I think *Frisco Jenny* has one of the great endings: the image of Helen Jerome Eddy burning the clippings. What could have been better? If Ruth Chatterton had been spared the gallows, and free to embrace her son, who finds out she's his mother? That would have been pure Hollywood schlock. In this case, whatever caused that ending to happen, it worked!
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I didn't watch the film. I'd seen it many years ago and didn't like it. I think John Ford is the greatest of the great, but there are one or two of his films that I don't like. The other is The Long Voyage Home. I could never get into that. Tobacco Road was made shortly after The Grapes of Wrath, one of Ford's masterpieces in which he uses some of the same actors to better effect.
But raw turnips? It doesn't surprise me. I have an Irish-American friend who eats raw potatoes, which I don't think I could do. But I did go to a Turkish restaurant in NYC last week. They served something that seemed like raw turnips, possibly slightly marinated.
They eat squirrel brains in rural Kentucky in a dish called burgoo. They have to be careful, because you can get kuru from squirrel brains. Erskine Caldwell was from rural Georgia and knew his people, so don't be too quick to be callin' the Lester clan stereotypes!
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I wish shows like "December Bride" would be shown on television. The 50s shows, instead of all the 70s and later stuff that they show endlessly. I'd like to see the Ann Sothern, Gale Storm, and Bob Cummings shows -- lots of old Hollywood actors on those shows. I was recently of "My Friend Irma." I barely remember it, I was a toddler at the time, but I recently read that Margaret Dumont was on a few times.
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Never mind the cherry trees. I prefer Ms. Byington as Aunt Ettie at Wilfred Glendon's flower show in Werewolf of London, particularly the scene with the venus fly-trap: "A plant just ate a frog!"
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She Demons
Next: song in a zombie movie
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I saw a film about Phil Ochs ( Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune ) down at the IFC cinema in Greenwich Village a couple of years ago. It was pretty good, though not great (I sound like Gertrude Stein talking about Hemingway: "A good novel but not a great one..."). Sean Penn once talked of making a feature film about Ochs; don't know what became of that idea. He would have been perfect as Ochs.
In any case, in addition to his protest songs, Ochs wrote some lovely songs, including "Pleasures of the Harbor," "Rehearsals for Retirement," "Changes," "My Life," and his song set to the text of the poem "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9fWjzYiRUE. As a young teenager, when I fantasized (as any boy might,) about singing and playing the guitar, it was often the latter song, or "Changes" that I was thinking of.
I remember listening to the radio and hearing that Phil Ochs died. What a great, great loss of a talented artist and a superior human being.
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Thanks, correction noted. I had never heard of it and was glad to catch it.
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*Bright Road* is a simple, effective movie. Very good print. The kids are really charming.
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You are right, and your thread.
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The Last of the Red Hot Mamas had a dilemma.
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Puck -- Mickey Rooney in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
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*Hedy Lamarr*. In addition to her great acting, beauty, early nude scene, being a Jewish/Austrian immigrant, work with Max Reinhardt; marriage to a Viennese arms manufacturer; escape from Vienna, patented military invention, great, diverse film career, shoplifting accusations, etc. Andy Warhol did make a short film about Hedy, but a biopic is due!
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The first film (and one of the others) starred Alastair Sim as the headmistress, Miss Fritton, in drag; and also, in the first film, as Miss Fritton's brother Clarence.
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I would love to see the St. Trinian's films, have seen them in ages! But my favorite Terry Thomas film -- though he's part of a terrific ensemble of four -- is *Make Mine Mink* (1960), one of the funniest movies ever made. A rarity in these parts. The Kander/Ebb musical 70, Girls, 70 is based on the same play.
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All About Eve
(Though it's tempting to say Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm)
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I agree with you about the holiday issue. I think it's a question of interpretation. Christmas is a bit different, since so many different genres of movies have some sort of specifically Christmas holiday celebration, so it's possible to show some of those films without presenting programming that is monotonous.
A broader film series on Memorial Day could include films such as Little Women and Gone with the Wind, since both those films clearly honor American soldiers, though they are not specifically war films.
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I don't understand how any classic film lover can not like Murder, He Says. And who dares to call it lowbrow!
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I can't believe I never saw Forrest Gump. Regarding the music, by the mid '60s I had pretty much segued, like the kid in The Wanderers, to the folkies: Dylan, Collins, Baez, and especially my man Phil Ochs, whom I saw on the streets of NYC campaigning -- and singing -- for William Fitts Ryan for Mayor in the 1965 Democratic Primary. Ryan was a good man but lost the primary.
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Krieger, of course there nothing wrong with building a film around songs, it's been done so many times. And Dylan's songs have certainly been used in many movies. Basically, I was just saying that, in the films of the 1970s which looked back and evoked the 1960s, The Wanderers seems to me to be the best, IMHO, taking all the elements into account and working as an integrated whole.
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Very interesting, MP. I remember going to see The Lords of Flatbush, but like American Graffiti, at the time I felt it to be a story thrown together so that the songs could be used -- not much substance. I felt The Wanderers, loosely based on Richard Price's novel, had a better story, albeit a violent one. Those gangs really existed, there was talk of them when I was a youth! The opening shot of Alexander's department store is iconic for any Bronxite of that era. And of course Dion and the Belmonts came from Belmont Avenue in the Bronx. One of the kids in the film transitions (as I did) from an interest in the pop music of the day to the 60s folk scene -- he goes to a Dylan concert and hears Dylan singing, appropriately, "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"
Another (totally different) Bronx gang movie which I liked was The Warriors. Not a music movie or evocative of an earlier era, but a very stylized, beautifully done, underrated film. A neighbor of mine played one of the kids.
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I preferred *The Wanderers* (1979) to American Graffiti. Great songs from the same era, but a better story, I thought. Perhaps I liked it better because it was a local (i.e. NYC) story.
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Tony Randall was in *Island of Love* with Betty Bruce.
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What makes a thread dead? If it's still there, if one can respond to it, IT'S ALIVE! This blog is not like The New York Times, which says comments closed after a certain period of time.
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I don't like *Clash of the Titans* much, although I love the genre and the actors. I think it's probably the director's (Desmond Davis) fault -- something stodgy about it. Davis has some terrific credits as a camera operator, but his directorial credits are kind of dull.
So I would choose *Trog*. I have no problem with a great star choosing a role in an unusual genre; in fact, I resent it when people imply that to act in a horror film is slumming. Ida Lupino's penultimate cinema role was in *Food of the Gods*, where she has one of the great lines: "I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to be eaten by giant rats!"
TOBACCO ROAD Fri. night 6-1-12
in General Discussions
Posted
Ford was not known for "comedy," but he did do some good work in that genre. The Quiet Man, for example. And Steamboat Round the Bend and The Last Hurrah have very comic moments. Even The Grapes of Wrath has that humorous exchange with Tom Joad, when people ask him if he "busted out" of jail. It's a small part of that film, but it's choice, as is some of the comedy in Drums Along the Mohawk, particularly Edna May Oliver in one of her best performances. There are other examples. Ford's film are not comedies, but they have comic moments, as life does.