clore

>>I started watching it last night, but fell asleep, since it was on so late. I am about to go finish it now. It does seem to resemble PETRIFIED FOREST...good comparison! Thank you. I almost fell off the couch when Robert Osborne mentioned something similar at the end of the airing. You're right about its stage origins being opened up. Later with films like THE BAD SEED and GYPSY, Leroy was less creative that way. Not that they are bad films, just heavily stage bound. It's amazing how easily he fit into the Warner house style (actually helping to create it with LITTLE CAESAR), and then at MGM quickly converted to that studio's approach.

>>I think I was the only kid in my school who did things like that. I got into trouble with another teacher for something similar. This one had given the class a warning about something, and then she said "And don't make me repeat myself again." I raised my hand this time and when given the nod, I said "But Mrs. Rydell, you didn't repeat yourself in the first place, so how could you repeat yourself again?" The class started laughing and she told me to have my mother come up. When told the situation, my mother said "but he was right. You've obviously taught him proper grammar." Good ol' mom saved the day, even Mrs. Rydell had to agree with that.

>>It is... too bad that teacher didn't have a sense of humor! On the last day of school, the same teacher said to me that she was going to miss my sense of humor. She added however that my next teacher would not appreciate my calling out in class, so I guess she was trying to compliment me and warn me at the same time.

Once a teacher said something to the class about "two wrongs don't make a right." I got punished for yelling out "Yes, but two Wrights once made an airplane."

>>I watched Dr. Cyclops on TCM - great sci-fi flick, with awesome special effects (for its time). I'm surprised it doesn't seem as popular as some of the great sci-fi flicks of the era. That film was like the Holy Grail of my youth. It hardly ever aired, but one day it was listed to appear on The Early Show - usually it had been on at late night. Ironically, it was scheduled opposite THE INVASION OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE on WABC. I ended up watching the latter anyway as some NYC crisis caused the film to be canceled and some official was giving a press conference. It was either a transit strike or a garbage strike, or maybe during the summer of 1965 drought. The next time it showed up was about two years later and the TV Guide said "in color" and my friend Mike, a fellow monster-buff had gotten a color set by then. Alas, it was a black-and-white print. It took me another 20 years to catch it in color on AMC.

So is the subject line of this thread.

Yates also wrote IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, so he has a two-fer going on tonight. He was the nephew of Herbert Yates of Republic.

>>Released just before "Fugitive" is "Hell's Highway" and it concerns the brutal treatment of the chain gangs in the South... One thing that got me is that both films have a shot of the chains being pulled through the shackles of the prisoners. I wrote this user comment a few years ago for the IMDb: This film isn't well known enough, and its reputation pales beside that of "I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang." That being said, it should be noted that this film was released first and actually received fairly good notices. One can even speculate that Mervyn LeRoy may have seen it - there's one shot of chains being pulled through the shackles that is common to both films. Hell's Highway opens with newspaper stories depicting chain gang abuses - and unlike most films, it uses real newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Richard Dix is "Duke" - a hardened criminal, not an innocent victim of injustice, but it's never mentioned if he's committed any crimes worse than bank robbery. Dix is better here than in some other films in which I've seen his over-emoting - such as "Cimarron" which I've found almost unwatchable. Early scenes in the film have Charles Middleton as Matthew - Ming the Merciless - as a character who seems to predate John Carradine's "Casey" in "The Grapes of Wrath" in being a rather touched preacher. He even resembles the lanky Carradine. Duke involves Matthew in a plan to aid his escape, but Duke turns back when he sees his younger brother Johnny (played by Tom Brown) has just arrived in the holding pen. While Duke tries to keep his sibling on the straight and narrow, he receives the wrath of his fellow prisoners who think that he's sold out to the screws. C. Henry Gordon, so memorable in a number of Charlie Chan films, is the primary villain, although Oscar Apfel's "Billings" - a contractor relying on convict labor is really the one setting policy. Although the story may now seem by-the-numbers, it must have been fresh in 1932 being the first film to depict the horrors of the chain gang. Although not as hard hitting as the Warner film, it's hardly as "viewer friendly" as the much later "Cool Hand Luke." RKO's film may not have broken a thousand chains as did the Warner classic, but it makes a great companion piece, and is one of the best examples of a rival studio attempting to tread on Warner territory. There are some quick cuts, which combined with the running time of only 62 minutes, that give the impression that the film may have been longer before release - Dix was too big a property for a programmer.

I love cats, so I want equal time. Give me RHUBARB and THE THREE LIVES OF TOMASINA and throw in GAY PURR-EE. Oh - and SHADOW OF THE CAT also.

>>Was John Litel in every single Warner Brothers film in the 1930's??? He played so many attorneys that he probably could have passed the bar exam.

Is this another thread about how TCM is going to the dogs? Gimme some Rusty movies! John Litel was the perfect father in three different series of films - Rusty, Henry Aldrich and Nancy Drew. The guy had the market cornered.

>>There's more to it, and even Aldrich's father failed to recognize what the story was truly about. It was not about money and it was not about exaggerating one's own problems in the land of milk and honey. It's not so much as what it's about as how Aldrich's father represented what the average person would see in it. So many aspire to fame and riches, what Palance has in the film is what so many desire. Everyday people who want to tell the boss to go shove it probably figure that a guy in that position can do just that. These are people who wish they had enough in the bank (what Bogart referred to as F.Y. money) to be able to just walk away from their jobs. To them it's a matter of "so he thinks that he has problems."

Robert Aldrich once told an interviewer that he couldn't understand at the time the negative critical and commercial reaction to this film. So, he screened for his father. When it was over, his father said "What's the big problem? The guy has to decide whether to take a million dollars or not. That's not a big problem." Apparently his father wasn't a drama critic, but when Wendell Corey and Wesley Addy turn in the best performances of the actors in a film, you know you've got the wrong guys in the leads. Aldrich expressed that he would have loved to have had John Garfield who played the role on stage, but would it have mattered? I think Odets just doesn't work on screen, his melodramatic plots are unintentionally funny and his dialogue pseudo-intellectually trite, especially when he tries to depict "regular people." His fondness for constant profundities becomes wearing. This may work better on the stage, but up close and 20 feet tall, it doesn't ring true. I'm a big fan of Aldrich, whom I think had the versatility of Howard Hawks, and at times some very similar themes of male bonding in adverse situations. But this is one of my least favorite of his films.

>>But I just don't think of her as a "movie star" and it would never have occurred to me to honor her at the Oscars. True enough, and I tend to agree. The problem is the ambiguous standards of the selection process. I know who Army Archerd was, I even met and talked to him. But he's not a movie star, even if he did play himself in THE OSCAR and numerous other films and TV shows.

Farrah was once billed over this year's Best Actor winner Jeff Bridges in SOMEBODY KILLED HER HUSBAND.

Maybe it will combine elements of a previous Boorman film and be called ZARD-OZ.

It was a profile shot, a publicity still from SONG OF BERNADETTE.

>>Wasnt much of an apology since he defended his decision to exclude her. Like they couldnt have excised one of their stupid production numbers to include more people???? I'm having connection problems so I didn't bother clicking. Did he apologize for putting up a picture of Jennifer Jones at the start of the Jean Simmons acknowledgement?

>>Well, it's understandable. I don't think the actual Oscars offered quite as much entertainment value, but at least it was something new for me. The Elinor Burkett moment made the night for me. I still can't get over her just commandeering the mike and then talking about "the classy thing to do."

>>I think the tribute opened with the shot of Patrick Swayze. MrCutter and I were yelling at the TV for the director to cut away from Taylor and put the focus on the montage. I was doing that last year when they continually cut away from the clips to show Queen Latifah singing. It's a very poor choice for the presentation and it puts too much emphasis on the singer rather than the passing parade of faces. A most inappropriate song this year also, considering the line "some are dead and some are living." It's a memorial - they're all dead.

I saw it. I practically fell out of my chair when Ben used the word "scumbag."

>>Sounds like maybe Cass Warner didn't research that quite thoroughly. I did research in the broadcast industry for 30 years. There's always a way to put a spin on something. It could be that THE JAZZ SINGER had the highest per screen average in first-run houses until GWTW. But given the few theaters wired for sound, and that the curious had to come from miles away to see it, that's not difficult to consider. It's just that we don't get to see the disclaimer. Your mileage may vary.

>>I'm rather disappointed, because the documentary seems to be doing it's best to denigrate and make Silent films appear as irrelevant as possible. Using very poor print material. Except for the 30s and 40s, the print materials were awful. The clips from the James Dean films and CAMELOT were terrible, full-screen and possibly from 16mm dupes. Notice that they also practically jumped a whole decade from the Dean films to VIRGINIA WOOLF. No mention of the late 50s and early 60s stuff that usually just gathered together the contract players from their TV shows - such as THE CROWDED SKY, YELLOWSTONE KELLY, A FEVER IN THE BLOOD, BY LOVE POSSESSED and WALL OF NOISE. The quality of the immediate years of Jack Warner solo was pretty much negligible, except for the musicals translated from Broadway, such as GYPSY and THE MUSIC MAN. Even Jack's lone venture away from the studio, 1776, was a Broadway musical originally.

>>You're right, I apologize, we played the wrong version. We have a beautifully restored version in-house from Criterion but the wrong one was accidentally pulled. Sorry. Thanks for the apology. That actually happened once before with the same film and the next airing WAS the appropriate uncut, letterboxed film. Without trying to come off as a wiseguy, wouldn't it make sense to take the wrong version off the shelf?

You're gonna love HEAT LIGHTNING. It somewhat serves as a precursor to THE PETRIFIED FOREST, except with Aline MacMahon running the place and Preston Foster as the gangster - and some pre-code hanky-panky. Very similar setting and definitely one for keeping.