clore

I'll go with "THE WILD BUNCH" among American films and "Z" as best foreign film.

>>I sat down to watch SCANDAL SHEET. After the opening credits, I could feel myself nodding off. Next thing I knew, the movie was over. I'll have to start watching these movies while sitting in a less comfortable chair. It's on again Monday afternoon. I hadn't seen it before, reminded me somewhat of THE BIG CLOCK. They have a similar setting and premise, and even Harry Morgan in common.

You're welcome. It's my favorite of the Scott westerns that came before the Boetticher bunch. In one way, it anticipates them as a nearly deserted way station is one of the settings. These were common in Boetticher's classics.

>>If you liked him in those films, try "Hangman's Knot" again with Lee Marvin. It airs on Monday at 315pm Eastern time, so if anyone is interested...

I had it on for a bit, but got distracted and then remembered that I bought the DVD a couple of months ago. A real steal too at only seven bucks.

Patterson himself was quite the segregationist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Malcolm_Patterson

>>It mostly seems (to me) they really spared no expense in the production of the film. It couldn't have been cheap to build or hire all those wagons and then to go out filming to those remote areas - and with special cameras, also. Keep in mind that the standard-ratio edition was shot by a different cinematographer, so that means even more cameras. Add to that that there were also different crews shooting foreign versions for the French, German and Spanish markets. Somewhere in this forum is a thread with a picture of John Wayne standing beside his foreign counterparts.

This has long been one of my favorites, and it's even better in the widescreen edition on a big screen. The panoramas shot by Walsh are still breathtaking, the action appears to go on for miles. This and THE SHOOTIST are also quite poignant as not only do they bookend Wayne's career, but the first one shows us the opening of the west and the later film depicts the encroachment of modern civilization, with automobiles, telephones and dry cleaning.

>>It isn't this topic that has turned many posters away from posting here. The log-in and posting problems of the last five months (coupled with other problems) have done a better job of keeping the majority of posters from actively engaging with the community than all the threads on this topic from the last five years. Bravo, you're absolutely right. I'm just fed up with the utter antiquity of the site. I've got a new PC, a cable connection and yet this place functions as if I'm running Windows 3.0 on a 386 PC, with a 14K modem on a phone line. If I was into watching the hourglass, this would be a fun site. Others seem to have other problems such as posts that come out with one line of text as wide as the screen and the next one contains only one or two words in the line. It hurts my eyes and when there are a bunch of such posts in one thread I just lose interest into reading something that takes so much effort to follow.

>>And the beat goes on. It seems that FMC has lately been cleaning TCM's clock during the day. FMC did have a good morning. But that's about the only time you'll find them running something made prior to 1970. In the last two years I've seen only two black-and-white films air in prime time, GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT and HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY as part of their "Legacy" series. Friday and Saturday nights they run the same title three times in a row, which is fine if you're dying to see DIE HARD or REVENGE OF THE NERDS over and over. Meanwhile, the gutless wonders at FMC refuse to air Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto films, but they have no problem with ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE.

>>Good luck with that if you go ahead and re-write it, especially if you do submit it for publication. Oh thank you. I see that tonight I get to add SEALED CARGO to my list of viewed Andrews films. I saw only a portion of it years ago. From the same director as THREE HOURS TO KILL.

About 15 years ago, a neighbor dropped by to ask me if I knew of anything her niece could read on the career of Dana Andrews. The niece was a college student who had seen LAURA and BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES in the same week and was now a big fan, only she could not find anything on him in the book store. That was enough for me, so since I was a long standing fan, and had already compiled my own film list through the years, I typed up a career overview. It only took a couple of hours, and I thought it was a nice gesture to make for someone discovering the classics. I got back a very nice thank-you letter and a bottle of vodka from my neighbor who thought that I should have submitted my piece for publication. I wish I still had it, but that was several computers ago and I'll have to start from scratch again. I do still have the hand-compiled list of films - I'm a pack-rat and find it hard to throw away something that I started almost 40 years ago.

>>I'm going to record it for later, don't recall watching Dana Andrews in a western before. I'm sure it's just slipped your mind that Dana Andrews was in THE WESTERNER and THE OX BOW INCIDENT. Plus TULSA and later several A.C. Lyles westerns in the 60s. THREE HOURS TO KILL was the first of four that he made in a row, the others are SMOKE SIGNAL, STRANGE LADY IN TOWN (as a doctor) and COMANCHE. The latter has played on TCM but the other two I've not seen in decades. I did watch THREE HOURS TO KILL and found it worthwhile. I needed it to complete my Andrews westerns viewings. No real surprises, except to see Stephen Elliott with hair. At 77 minutes, it moved quickly. Apparently though it was not enough for Donna Reed. This was typical of the kind of roles Columbia gave her after winning her Oscar and she begged out of her contract after three westerns in a row. Harry Cohn was nice enough to comply.

>>I agree that it would be nice if the prices were lower, but this was basically an experiment by Warner into a new method of release. Part of the experiment also seems to be to sell titles on the TCM site for 18 bucks and on Amazon for 28 dollars. Woe to everyone if Amazon manages a fair amount of sales. Personally, I refuse to pay 20 dollars, or even just 18 for a film unless it's a gift for someone else.

"Sequoia" aired about a year ago on TCM. I wish that I had taped it so that my granddaughters could see it. Very well made for its kind. Try requesting it at the TCM "request-a-movie" page.

The Last Hunt

It's new relative to the film, one of those "newly commissioned" ones. It was better than listening to a Gaylord Carter organ score. Didn't mean to confuse anyone.

I sure hope that Vivek Maddala kicked back some of his earnings for the new score given to ACE OF HEARTS to Harry Lubin. Some of it was a direct swipe of Lubin's old ONE STEP BEYOND theme, I kept expecting John Newland to step out and tell us the story is based on fact. It was really quite distracting.

Or it could be Karel Zeman's 1961 film that was released here as "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" probably to cash in on the success of Zeman's earlier "The Fabulous World of Jules Verne." Not that I got past the first three lines of the OP's post. Was it me, or was that all one sentence up until a question mark way down the post?

>>"Nick Castle warns you:... Make that William Castle. Ironically, a company called Dark Castle has announced plans for a remake. I hope the girls remember to turn off the caller ID feature. Silver mines horror classic Dark Castle to remake 'I Saw What You Did' By MICHAEL FLEMING Variety Posted: Mon., May 11, 2009 Joel Silver's Dark Castle has set "I Saw What You Did," a remake of the 1965 William Castle-directed "I Saw What You Did and I Know Who You Are!" Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer will write and Lussier will direct. The original Castle pic, which starred Joan Crawford, was based on the Ursula Curtis novel "Out of the Dark" and revolved around two girls who innocently pass the time making prank phone calls to unsuspecting people until they call the wrong guy. Pic will be produced by Silver, Andrew Rona and Steve Richards. Dark Castle will finance and distribute through Warner Bros. Lussier has a long relationship with Dark Castle prexy Rona, which goes back to his editing the first "Scream," when Rona was co-president of Dimension. Dark Castle's first film was a remake of William Castle's 1959 pic "House on Haunted Hill." Lussier and Farmer teamed on "My Bloody Valentine 3D," which Lussier directed and Farmer co-wrote. Message was edited by: clore

>>Nobody knows more Hollywood gossip from the '50s and '60s than Curtis, and he's never been shy about sharing it. The trouble is his keeping the story straight. We've gone from "kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler" to his supposedly being the father of the baby she miscarried while making SOME LIKE IT HOT. He also did not tell the full story on Mitchum turning down THE DEFIANT ONES. He said "Mitchum didn't want to work with a black man" and then rolled his eyes in disapproval. Mitchum didn't want to do it because he thought that the story line of a white man being chained to a black was contrived as that would not have happened in the deep south. I find Curtis about as believable as his hair. I like him on-screen though and probably give him more credit than many for his body of work.

An old Tom Lehrer song; Gather ?round while I sing you of Werner von Braun, A man whose allegiance Is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won?t even frown. ?Ha, Nazi Schmazi,? says Werner von Braun. Don?t say that he?s hypocritical, Say rather that he?s apolitical. ?Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That?s not my department,? says Werner von Braun. Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun. You too may be a big hero, Once you?ve learned to count backwards to zero. ?In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I?m learning Chinese,? says Werner von Braun.

Thank you very much. Ansara had the potential to be a great villain. He certainly was villainous - the tortures he came up with (the horses dragging the victims, the bodies buried to the necks in the dirt) were strong stuff. When we needed was a confrontation scene, what I call the James Bond dinner scene, where the good guy and the bad guy face off against each other, or at least size each other up. Kennedy and Ansara may have had the chance to do that when the former was checking out the fortress, but he was using a ruse and thus Ansara didn't know he was the enemy. Although the dialogue did reveal that he suspected it. I was most disappointed that I had the old schedule and thus BARQUERO was listed as the final film of the night. I can't claim to have been fond of the SABATA films though I love spaghetti westerns. I was reminded of my dislike of that series and decided to go to sleep about 30 minutes in. I was ready to shoot the banjo player. Interesting that Van Cleef got the old Brynner role as Chris while Brynner, through the dubbing, became the Sabata of ADIOS, SABATA. All dressed in black again, Yul looked like Chris in that film (as he did in WESTWORLD), but both Kennedy and Van Cleef abandoned the black wardrobe.

Some comments on the series, all of which I saw theatrically, although it was the first time for me to have seen the sequels on TV. I'm not as high on the first one as many other western fans appear to be, so the decline of the series is of less importance. The first sequel has its moments, but as with all of the follow-ups, the villain is way less interesting than Eli Wallach in the first film. In the first sequel, Emilio Fern?ndez has none of the menace or presence that he has in THE WILD BUNCH. He doesn't even look as if he can get up on a horse, much less ride one. I recall that Wallach was asked to come back for the role but he turned it down. He had a much better role coming in the short future anyway, one that was also shot in Spain. Robert Fuller was OK as Vin, while some complain he wasn't McQueen, that was what endeared him to Yul Brynner. Oates and Akins were good, nice to see that one of them made it to the end although the dialogue made it predictable as to which one of them it would be. The George Kennedy film could have been much worse, but the cast lifted it up a bit and the cinematography was better than the previous film. Frank Silvera (and his gang) was wasted, but the bit with the stolen horse was amusing and the exchanges between Joe Don Baker (in Elvis mode) and Bernie Hamilton made the film somewhat contemporary (for 1969). The addition of a young Zapata as a character was interesting. I couldn't help but noticing that Osborne, for all of his detailing Fernando Rey's career, didn't mention that he was in the second and third films of the series in a different role. Lee Van Cleef in the last one shared a problem with George Kennedy, but perhaps it's just me. After inheriting a role made famous by a bald man, why was it that both men had on the most unconvincing hairpieces in the history of cinema? Van Cleef looked as if a pigeon died on his head and he let it stay there. But this one looked like a TV movie, and a low-budget one at that. If the previous two films gave the short end to the head villain, in this one he was practically non-existent. Just a bunch of guys shooting at a bunch of other guys. Way too much unnecessary story leading up to the gathering of the five criminals, it's like bringing in the Dirty Dozen when half the film has passed. Who cared about which ones were killed, we never got to know them anyway. Lee Van Cleef sure got over his grief quickly in the end, all ready to settle down once again just a few days after his wife was killed.

>>That little area around Mulberry Street/Elizabeth Street is used a LOT in films, especially Old St. Patrick's. The MEAN STREETS crew was shooting while I was working in the area, but all I got to see that time were the "street closed" signs. It didn't have the official security of the other productions, but there were some "guards" keeping the block secure. I wasn't about to argue with them. I only found out a day or two later about what was being filmed there, I doubt that they had gotten the proper permits and thus no official security.