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Holly THE MAN was a made-for-TV movie that ended up being released theatrically first. As I recall, you can spot the "joints" where the commercial breaks would have been.

I see that the Robert Taylor tribute includes the 1967 TV movie RETURN OF THE GUNFIGHTER. Following the November Grace Kelly fest that included the airing of several TV dramas, I hereby proclaim this the first "more evidence that TCM is going to hell" prediction of 2010. Personally, I have no problem with some quality TV movies (and the Taylor one isn't bad) making it onto the schedule. Now that the Universal deal is kicking in, if HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, THE DOOMSDAY FLIGHT or FEAR NO EVIL (with Louis Jourdan) makes it to the channel, I'll be a happy person.

That argument has been going on since the film was rediscovered in the 70s. It's almost a half-hour longer but moves much better and isn't as stagebound. It does have a big drawback in not having a lead as charismatic as Lugosi, but otherwise it's a far more obvious pre-Code film. I prefer it vastly.

No wonder he's made so few movies. He must have a McDonald's sign over his bedpost: "Millions served"

Kingrat... Maybe it would have been better if Wilder had eliminated the opening 20 minutes or so and instead used one of the other shot segments. It starts off as if the film should be titled KISS ME, SHERLOCK and even in 1970, it was rather tasteless and certainly not worth more than a couple of minutes. For a man whom a decade earlier could make a riotous feature out of drag sketch with SOME LIKE IT HOT, the opening as it is showed just how much Wilder was losing his touch. From Wilder's handling of that, should we feel relief that the segment "The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners" didn't make the final cut? I would hope the other excised case, "The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room" would have lived up to the title.

I thought that if anything, the fest showed that there have been other valid interpretations and that we're lucky to have many of them. The Cushing / Morell team had a lot going for them, and while it failed to deliver any sequels, Peter Cushing made his mark and would go on to play Holmes quite a few more times for British TV - up until the early 80s. John Neville's relatively youthful Holmes was an excellent portrayal and he would play Holmes again a decade later on the Broadway stage in The Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation of the Gillette play The Watson of A STUDY IN TERROR came a bit too close to Bruce territory. That's not a knock on Bruce, as an actor he was paired well with Rathbone but he's too much the bumbler in some of the films. Arthur Wontner was a good Holmes, although I found THE FATAL HOUR to be a yawner. At times it seemed he was doing Wilfrid Hyde-White playing Holmes, a nice grandfatherly type, but not a man of quick mental reflexes. He was better in THE SIGN OF FOUR and THE TRIUMPH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. For almost 40 years I've been trying to appreciate the Billy Wilder film. While drastically cut, there's enough left for me to wish the actors had a better vehicle.

>>Nope. Who am I, compared to Time-Life? Just think, you're bringing this up on a sister company's website.

Steiger was quite good in the role but I can't say that one actor was superior to the other. PBS aired the show about 25 years ago, along with the TV versions of DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, PATTERNS and REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT. Borgnine said that despite the then contemporary comparisons made by critics, he and Steiger got along quite well while making JUBAL.

>>I forget the story. Did they not want Steiger for the film version? I thought I remembered that he had a conflict, and couldn't do the movie. There are diverse stories on that. Steiger claimed that producer Lancaster wanted to tie him up to a contract, while Lancaster claimed that they went for a different actor so as to distinguish the film from the TV version lest the audience think they saw it already for free. Lancaster already knew Borgnine from having made two films together. Meanwhile, Borgnine claimed that the film was made to lose money. He said Lancaster's company had good fortune with a couple of their previous films and needed a tax write-off. He said that MARTY was meant to be a somewhat prestigious little film, meant more for the critics than the audience. Burt would get his write-off that year with THE KENTUCKIAN. Who knows what to believe?

Grab a copy of CHRISTMAS EVE and you'll see the two Georges get wiped off the screen by Randolph Scott. Their time together is brief though. Raft was actually better before he hit Warners. He shows life in THE BOWERY, SPAWN OF THE NORTH and SOULS AT SEA. While I like MANPOWER, I find it hard to believe there's anything hot going on between Dietrich and Raft as they have one expression between them.

That's funny - the same thing happened when TCM aired THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE about 18 months ago. Both are Neil Simon adaptations. The next airing was the proper one, but there's no way I could be enticed to watch CALIFORNIA SUITE again. They would have to edit the Matthau and Cosby/Pryor segments out completely for me to stand it.

>>I am NOT going to watch it with commercials. It would be one thing if it were just commercial intrusions. But add to that the ever-present AMC logo and the every five minutes intrusion of those animated crawls promoting shows such as MAD MEN. And just who does AMC think is watching the channel in the overnight slot? Male enhancement products (two brands), **** pumps and fingertip vibrators for women are the only ads you'll see there at 3am.

I'm lucky enough to live in NYC, so it's not as if I have to travel far to see revivals regularly on a big screen. And I don't have to worry about getting a seat as they don't oversell. I think Zero Mostel from THE PRODUCERS must be behind this festival.

I'm not going to look up the links, but I noticed the "seating not guaranteed" thing, then looked at the promo for the event and there it claimed that a pass "guarantees access to all screenings..." Combining the two, I interpreted that as meaning, yes you get access to the films but you may have to stand during the presentation. I'll take a pass, but not the kind that they want me to purchase.

I honestly think that the reason they don't provide a weekly grid anymore, or a monthly list as does TCM is because the redundancy would be all the more apparent and they might lose subscribers. Is it me, or does it just seem that THE BLACK SWAN airs every other day? Also THE PLEASURE SEEKERS.

Wellman disowned the film, wouldn't even discuss it it later life. It's got an A-level cast and a B-level running time to attest to the massive editing the film went through. Keel's narration was an afterthought intended to cover up the holes that resulted from the butchery. Very pretty to look at though.

>>No disrespect to Humphrey Bogart, but if anyone else would have played Fred C Dobbs, you couldn't do better than Richard Widmark. He also would have made a great Capt. Quegg. In a book that I have on Bogart by Ezra Goodman, Stanley Kramer mentions that he took a lot of heat at the time for casting Bogart instead of Widmark as Queeg. Widmark did get a chance at a similar role in THE BEDFORD INCIDENT. The posters for that film even stated "from Columbia, the studio that gave you THE CAINE MUTINY." One would think that they might have cited the more recent DR. STRANGELOVE or FAIL-SAFE.

Their website has gone from bad to worse. Don't bother searching for titles anymore - they don't give upcoming air times when the title finally appears. I had to examine the schedule one day at a time but did find a day next month when RIO CONCHOS and THE COMANCHEROS are airing back-to-back. It took them long enough to schedule those two together - not only do they share a very similar story, but both have Stuart Whitman in the cast. It occurs December 2.

>>Overall, I'd much rather watch The Narrow Margin. I think I'd even prefer to watch MANDINGO.

SOMNAMBULANT SATURDAY would be more like it. I thought that maybe I wasn't in the right mood when I saw it about two years ago, but it didn't get any better a second time. It's an OK film if one picks it up at the 50-minute mark but Fleischer's cheaper RKO films have it all over this one. I'm surprised that a small town bank would even be open on a Saturday back in the 50s. In his outro, Robert Osborne missed a Marvin/Borgnine collaboration, the first TV movie sequel to THE DIRTY DOZEN.

>>I met him once, in the mid-1980s. If there was something special about him, it's that for four years he was able to work alongside the universally-despised Bob Crane during the making of Cummings's TV series Love That Bob! without killing him (that happy chore was, of course, left to others). Granted that I haven't seen the show in some 40 years, but I can't recall Bob Crane being associated with LOVE THAT BOB at all.

I haven't seen the film at all since 1963. The ending bugged me, as did the similar one for ON BORROWED TIME. I wish that Gerald Mohr had mohr to do, the bit with the matches was a nice touch but the film needed a better confrontation between he and Cummings. Claude Rains, Henry Travers, Jack Benny, Cary Grant, Robert Cummings - there sure were a lot of angels back in 40s films.

>>It's a no-brainer! Leslie Caron in October? Well, *Chandler* was quite a horror. Even worse than I remembered from when it was released.

>>Hmmm, that's strange. I always thought the briefcase contained outtakes from Kiss Me Deadly. Plus a copy of REPO MAN which used a similar gimmick.

>>I never realized that. Guess it wasn't something he could have sued them about? I imagine he was helpless, being a director for hire. The producer Walter Wanger, with whom Lang had a production company in the 1940s (along with Wanger's wife Joan Bennett) apparently just made the deal without any consideration to Lang. Lang claimed that he was told by a friend that there was a similar scene in DILLINGER and when he went to see it, he realized it wasn't similar, it was the real thing.