clore
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Posts posted by clore
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Perhaps it's A BULLET FOR JOEY, although I would think that a film with Edward G. Robinson and George Raft might linger in one's memory.
Then again, this one is so slow and uninvolving that I've managed to forget most of it. But Raft plays an American gangster who gets hooked up with Commies, Robinson is on his trail and the audience starts thinking about how much better it was when they appeared together in MANPOWER.
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>>"They make you run faster, and jump higher."
Ah, someone remembers. "The shoes with the built-in magic wedge."
I was surprised to learn recently that they are still being sold.
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The Mets were such underdogs that I had to like them. As a kid, I was the one that owned American Flyer trains instead of Lionel and wore P.F. Flyers instead of Keds.
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>>That WAS the most forgettable segment of a fine film.
And that's why you forgot it!
I can understand their perhaps wanting a segment with some levity in it, but the trouble I have with the segment is that I don't care which one gets "the prize" and I can't understand why she would want either of them.
It's the "get up and get a snack" segment for me.
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At first I thought it was easy - one of the Maugham movies, either QUARTET or TRIO. Then when that didn't pan out I had to uncover the title, it was a quest because I knew that I saw it fairly recently.
But if it was aired in 2007, it wouldn't have been on my list. Glad to be able to help.
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I've had three copies of THE PROUD REBEL and they all looked terrible. That's a pity as Ted McCord's cinematography is every bit as good as SHANE. While Ladd does appear conderably older, working with his son seems to have energized him somewhat more than he had been of late. As his biographer Beverly Linet notes, it's really the last classy Alan Ladd starrer.
Olivia DeHavilland is just fine and she is quoted as saying that she was surprised that Curtiz insisted on her for the role as she thought in previous collaborations he didn't consider her to be more than decoration.
What was it with Curtiz and mute characters in 1958? His only other film that year, KING CREOLE also has a mute who tries to speak at just the right moment to save the hero.
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Sounds like a segment of DEAD OF NIGHT - generally considered to be the least interesting one. For years it was deleted from the American print. If it's the right film, the golfers were played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, the cricket fanciers from THE LADY VANISHES and NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH.
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I have been keeping a list on the IMDb of every movie that I've seen since January 1, 2008. I was getting worried as I got down to the bottom of the list, but I finally found it for you. The film is TONIGHT AT 830.
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I went to the Whitestone drive-in a few times, I think that the last time was to see SUPERMAN II. Usually we went to the Sunrise or Westbury drive-ins.
Another reason I'm hesitant to go to a theater now is because we have a bedbug epidemic in NYC and I've already been through that when my son was still living here. Even though the things were confined to his room, we had to get the whole place fumigated and every piece of cloth had to be washed and bagged and sealed while this was going on. What couldn't be washed had to be thrown in the dryer for 45 minutes.
It also cost me a small fortune and many man hours to get this done and I'm in no mood to go through this all over again. Theaters are among the likeliest places to pick up the pests.
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After FMC canceled the Chan festival, they did try again a few months later to have a Chan night bumpered by a round table discussion. There was one Asian man who was an actor and he would not accept the observation that despite being played by a Caucasian, Chan was a positive role model and one of the few that was being presented at the time.
The man then fell back on his childhood, saying that the other kids in his neighborhood would pull back the skin around their eyes, point to him and say "you Charlie Chan, you Charlie Chan." I guess he had to go back that far to find another grudge, but didn't we all suffer indignities from other children? I know that I would not want to repeat childhood again.
While they tried to offer a balanced panel, the attempt to place the films in a context must not have been successful as FMC only tried it once.
But I guess the Gay Activist Alliance has been quiet as FMC continues to run ZORRO THE GAY BLADE and STAIRCASE.
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You may be right, deferential may be a better word but the error in judgment was mine, I was paraphrasing Keye Luke. I'll have to dig the book up again.
Regardless, "humble" was a word that Chan himself used quite a bit to describe himself. Perhaps not as much as Uriah Heep did, but often enough to give the impression that he wanted. In that way, Chan was much like Columbo who was certainly not the character he appeared to be and who was underestimated each week.
Yet no one takes his characterization as a negative depiction of Italian-Americans.
Keye Luke also went out of his way to describe Warner Oland's total immersion into the role and his love of Chinese art which he collected as well as Oland's trip to China where he was well-received. Had he gone there while playing Fu Manchu, I'm sure that the reaction would have been quite different. In an age when "the yellow peril" was quite common on the screen, Charlie Chan was that rare positive image.
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>>I am sure actor Keye Luke who appeared in both the Moto programmers and the Chan series would say that it guaranteed him employment in Hollywood for many years and that they were a sign of the times in which they were produced.
In Ken Hanke's book on the Chan films, Keye Luke comes off quite saddened by the reaction of contemporary activists. Not only he, but many other Asian performers were featured in these films and he thought that their collective contributions to cinema were in danger of being overlooked. He also thought that the character of Chan was a positive role model and despite his often subservient manner, he was usually the smartest guy in the room.
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>>Getting back more to the topic of the thread, I think it is perfectly within rights for a cable channel to schedule films in such a way that screenings may function as advertising to promote DVD or Blu-ray sales.
I couldn't agree more. TCM never claimed to be commercial free, only that the movies they air are uninterrupted and commercial free.
I was actually surprised that Fox did release the Chan and Moto films on DVD after they canceled them on the station. Of course part of the promotion for the intended retrospective was that they had spent a lot of time and money in restoring the films, so I can see their wanting to get some of that money back, especially when the protest also revealed just how much of a market there was for the films.
I just wish that the prices on the Moto films would come down. I didn't spend more than 25 bucks for any of the Chan sets, the Moto films are still more than 40.
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>>Hats off to TCM for the recent airing of SMOKY. That is a perfect example of the channel providing something that folks are clamoring to see and can't find anywhere else, not even on FMC (and it's a Zanuck picture).
FMC has run SMOKY many times. In fact, they have aired it back-to-back with the Fess Parker remake that uses tons of footage from the 1946 version. They haven't though aired the Will Rogers version.
I doubt that you will ever see a Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto film again on FMC. Not after what happened in 2003 when they canceled a summer Chan retrospective owning to activist pressure.
I've seen a couple of Brian Donlevy B films on FMC and a nice little crime film titled ISLAND IN THE SKY. Still, they do tend to ignore their B catalogue and only once in a while does a good pre-Code film such as BLOOD MONEY or CALL HER SAVAGE sneak in there.
But you sure get a lot of airings of PORKY'S and the sequels as well as REVENGE OF THE NERDS and its sequels.
The channel went to a pay-channel on my Time-Warner system about a year ago. I miss it somewhat, but it's not worth paying for it and some other channels that I don't want when I've already seen most of what they are willing to offer.
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The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent
Krakatoa: East of Java (it's actually west of Java)
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I'm not sure about the exclamation points, but THE BLOB, THE 4D MAN and DINOSAURUS, all produced by Jack H. Harris, end with a question mark.
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>>Question I like to ask about the plots on 2 of these movies. Why after seeing Godzilla being turned into a skeleton in the Raymond Burr movie by an oxygen destroyer weapon and Rodan being cremated along with his mate at the volcano in the "Rodan" movie, these monsters suddenly reappear in the next sequels with no explanation in the movie how they did so?
It's been almost 50 years since I've seen it, but it's explained in the second of the series, the film released as GIGANTIS THE FIRE MONSTER here in the U.S. In that film he was referred to as another beast of the same species.
The film was titled GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN in Japan but not having seen it, I'm not sure if they just consider the monster another Godzilla-type or the actual revival of the original beast.
As for Rodan, I don't recall any explanation but if we go back to the Universal monsters of the 30s and 40s, they kept reappearing with as little explanation as possible.
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>>When I first saw Kong throw that poor woman out the window, I had nightmares as a kid. There is a lot of "casual" sadism in the movie.
She landed OK, right on top of Gary Cooper. That was his widow Veronica Balfe (aka Sandra Shaw).
When I first saw the film on WOR-TV, the scenes where Kong grinds natives into the dirt and chomps on them were missing from the print. It took a decade and a trip to The Museum of Modern Art for me to see the complete film.
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"I wondered if I, a 20th century man, could ever hope to die as well."
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>>Are you prepared to state Ken Cutis does not appear in this movie?
Since your earlier reference was to Curtis being the hero of THE KILLER SHREWS, I am prepared to state that he is not the hero of the film. It is he in his drunken stupor that sets the creatures loose. I don't want to give any more of it away, but it will be apparent once viewed that he's not the good guy.
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>>Be happy you don't have young kids, who want to see every latest movie, which are now all 3D for which you pay 15 bucks a trow.
I tease my older son about that. He and his wife have two sets of twins. One pair is seven years old (identical girls) and the other pair are 18 months and one of each sex. We all went to see TOY STORY 3 last year (I wanted to see it with the youngsters) and I remarked that when they are old enough to attend, bringing four kids to a movie will require a bank loan. He said it was a good thing that he has a babysitter in the family otherwise he would have needed to go for the loan that night.
We didn't see the 3D version, not because of the money, but it would have meant waiting another hour and the girls weren't up to that.
And there's no drive-ins around here anymore. They didn't charge for kids under 12 so a night out was only a few dollars.
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I have not been to a Mets game since 2005. Forced into a very early retirement through "restructuring," every little item now has to be weighed on the budgetary scale. Even if I were working, the price would still be a consideration.
Going to the movies is the same thing, it costs 12 bucks to see a film at the minimum - there are no bargain matinees near me. Since I have to use public transportation, that's another 5 dollars. Now we're looking at an amount equal to what the DVD would cost me. Sure, I'm missing the big screen experience, but most of what I want to see is not reliant on the effects. NETWORK is the perfect example of the kind of film that would have my curiosity these days and it's not necessary to see it on the large screen.
I paid 16 bucks a few years ago to see SHINE A LIGHT, the Scorsese/Rolling Stones film, my first film in the IMAX format. Since when do we have to pay by the square foot of the screen size to see a movie? It's especially annoying as the screen wasn't any bigger than that of the local Loew's or RKO theater when I was a kid, long before they chopped them up into multiplexes. Only because I love the Stones did I pay that much, a few months later I got the DVD for a dollar less.
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>.How can someone go to a ballpark named after a bank??
I'm in walking distance of that ballpark but I've yet to visit it and I still find myself calling it Shea. That may be old fashioned, but I know some who refer to it verbally in what is best described as a combination of Shea and CitiField if you get my drift.
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Thank you. I put up with a lot being the son and grandson of multiple bigamists. I made a vow before I was ten that my children would never lie awake at night wondering why their father left them. I'm still an insomniac to this day and I hit 60 on my next b-day.
But the ex counted on my putting up with it all, but once the youngest turned 18, I refused to be a victim any longer. She went off with her boyfriend, and most of the bank account but I have the co-op apartment and most of all I have my peace of mind. She's tried to come back numerous times but I won't go through that again. There weren't enough "good old days" to inspire me to a reconciliation.
So I can sympathize with Bart Allison, there are some things one has a hard time accepting and even once you do, then you have a hard time dealing with the information. These are tough wounds to heal because you not only feel bad that someone let you down, but you feel that you let yourself down by being blind to the truth. He manages to heal a town but will he find the strength to heal his own wounds?
Scott is rarely the superhuman westerner of the John Wayne type, but here he's more human than ever. Not resolving his conflict at the end makes this a very unusual film for its time.
Yet another boo-boo from Osborne
in General Discussions
Posted
It was also mistakenly claimed that this was the last film to use the services of Willis O'Brien.
Wrong!
It looks that way if one just goes to the IMDb page and doesn't scroll down past the listings under "special effects." Meanwhile, TCM will air THE GIANT BEHEMOTH on the 23rd and even that one is not his last credit but it did come after THE BLACK SCORPION.