clore

Somewhere around the time of his death, I read that Balestrero did get some kind of settlement and that Frank O'Connor represented him there also. I'm just hazy on the details as to whether it was a suit against the city or the insurance company - maybe it was both. But the settlement plus the rights to his story were what enabled him to pay his wife's medical expenses and move to Florida. Come to think of it, it may have been something I read around the time of Frank O'Connor's death. I do recall reading that he expressed some annoyance that he, a man whose parents were born in Ireland, was portrayed by an English actor.

TCM has aired MAD DOG COLL (which is simply awful mostly for reasons of John Davis Chandler's lack of charisma) and KING OF THE ROARING 20s. They've also run THE PURPLE GANG, AL CAPONE and THE RISE AND FALL OF LEGS DIAMOND. I haven't seen PORTRAIT OF A MOBSTER since it aired on CBS in the 60s and it's been equally as long since I've seen BABY FACE NELSON which I believe is tied up in legal limbo. MACHINE GUN KELLY was the last film that I ever watched on AMC and that was five years ago. I swore that I'd never subject myself to such abuse again.

Yes, TOO LATE FOR TEARS is in the works. I was hoping that Muller and company could manage a DVD-rights scheme out of it all, but this is even better - if TCM can air it. Yes, I enjoyed Mr. Muller's down-to-Earth comments here last Spring.

At the Saturday night screening of "Noir City" in San Francisco, Eddie Muller revealed that he will be joining Turner Classic Movies as an on-air host. Muller appeared on TCM last January to present a four-film "Night in Noir City," which was so successful that he was invited back in June to host TCM's "Friday Night Spotlight" showcasing 16 films by such noir writers as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/turner-classic-movies-adds-film-noir-programmer-eddie-muller-as-on-air-host-exclusive

>Just think about much bigger a MOVIE star Selleck might have become if his "Magnum P.I." contract hadn't kept him from starring in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", clore. Well, it's not as if they'll be holding any benefits for Selleck. I wonder though if he would have held the big screen as a character other than Indy. His biggest success was in THREE MEN AND A BABY which also had Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg, and it's not as if either of them is pulling folks into seats these days. Danson at least has had several TV shows, for a guy who had a few hits in the 80s, Guttenberg is MIA. But most of his theatrical successes were ensemble pieces and if he's had success on TV, I'm unaware as I spend too much time these days watching some channel that shows movies all day.

>Have you ever seen THE MOVIE MURDERER? The stars were Warren Oates and Arthur Kennedy. Here, Tom Selleck was so young that he didn't have his mustache yet. He was good, but I didn't guess he'd become a star. I saw it way back in 1971 on WOR-TV, NYC. Aren't Russell Johnson and Jeff Corey also in there? I remember that I watched it for the vets who were in it and if I noticed Selleck at all, I might have connected him to MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. But he hadn't found himself yet, and the lip hair really helped.

Tom Selleck. I was watching an episode of THE ROCKFORD FILES in which he guested and I said to the ex "This guy is going to be a star." "What makes you so sure?" "He's stealing scenes from James Garner and Garner's the best leading man that TV has ever had."

> I stand by my assertion that a programmerr was an A budget movie, if at the lower.end.of the range,.without the expectations or, the.promotional push of a studio's more prestigious or important items. I agree there. The term goes back to the days of block booking. So taking WB for example, the package of films would be led by the handful of films that would today be called Oscar bait. The prestige films from Warners in the 30s would be the likes of a Paul Muni biopic or Bette Davis in JEZEBEL or THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX. A programmer was something intended to fill the bill in the weeks between those A+ titles. This would be the likes of THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, BROTHER ORCHID or EACH DAWN I DIE. Perfectly acceptable and exploitable fare in terms of stars, but while hardly prestigious they were still higher on the totem pole than SWING YOUR LADY or a Torchy Blaine film. Time may have given the programmers an added patina and they do represent the studio perhaps better than the prestige films do, but at the time of production, they were closer to commerce than art.

I grew up on horror films, gangster films and westerns, all of which can contain some pretty scary villains. Yet the only character that ever caused me a nightmare was Victor Jory's Injun Joe from THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER.

>Hi clore- Thanks for the heads up on the episodes, definitely will watch the Stanwyck one tonight. How's it going? Stanwyck should also be in another episode a week from tonight. She played the same character twice in the 8th and 13th episodes of the final season of THE UNTOUCHABLES. Fortunately, Me-TV tends to show its series in the proper sequence with the exceptions of holiday-themes. Peggy Ann Garner is also in tonight's show, so it's definitely worth a look for fans of 30s and 40s films.

Dane Clark will return to THE UNTOUCHABLES in the same role, along with John Gabriel. Figure it on being in two weeks as they were the 4th and 16th episodes of the 4th season. I figure they were trying for another series, sensing that Stack wanted out. The one with Barbara Stanwyck that airs Friday night also smelled of being a pilot for a possible series.

The Starr Theater was a third-run theater in Brooklyn that was only a few blocks away from where we were living. They would change the bill every three days, sometimes films only played for a day or two. But in 1960 I got to see a double-bill of LITTLE CAESAR and THE PUBLIC ENEMY and they also showed numerous other WB oldies which may have helped to spur my affection for that particular studio. They even ran silent films, such as KING OF KINGS while the remake was playing on Broadway. I saw numerous old Gable and Cooper films there, this being shortly after each man passed away. The manager was just jumping on public sentiment and as he told me years later, he was getting these things for peanuts. Some were only costing him 25-50 dollars to book so they would book matinees only and fill the 1,000 seats with Abbott and Costello for the kids. Even at the 25 cents it cost to get in, that's a nice profit.

>But there are probably several million viewers who like to watch the old movies but who do not study them or learn the names of the directors and the character actors and who don't pay much attention to the titles of the films or even know the years they were made. My sister and brother grew up watching most of the same films with me, but while they can remember the primary players and even some of the character actors, they just don't "read" a film as I do. Case in point - I saw THE WOLF MAN on TV for the first time when I was not quite ten years old. When the credit for director George Waggner came on, I said "He's the producer of 77 SUNSET STRIP." I didn't know what a director or producer did, but I was always a reader - I read the ingredients on cereal boxes and canned foods. But we used to love to watch shows and movies and point out "that's the guy who was in such-and-such" and eventually we'd find out the names. There's a TCM promo where the person's retrospective has him noting that he didn't know many people who knew the actor Leonid Kinskey. We would see him and recognize him, but usually he didn't have billing. Then we saw him on a TV show with Jackie Cooper called THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE where he had a recurring role and billing. Dave Willock was another one who usually wasn't billed in movies, but we knew him from a show called MARGIE (based on the Jeanne Crain movie) where he played the father.

>Millions of people watched those old movies on TV in the 50s and 60s, but they didn't know much about the actors names or the directors or studios. They knew only the main stars, but not the names of most of the character actors, writers, directors, etc. And I'm willing to bet that on a percentage basis, that figure hasn't changed much. It's just that those who are interested have such a venue as TCM because technology has enabled narrow-casting as opposed to broadcasting and the internet has enabled us to speak to one another in an almost instantaneous format. All they had to do years ago was pay attention to the credits. Besides, even with spoon feeding via TCM and the wealth of info on the web, there's still plenty that don't know because they're just not that curious or they're just that lazy. But many of then will be way ahead of me when it comes to knowing how to make Campbell's Soup. How did people such as Osborne, Halliwell, Everson, Maltin pick up on these things? Those who were that interested such as those mentioned found a way, just as many of us had. We movie nerds had our ways, our own discussions and our own network to share this stuff. And 40 years ago, we even had the Nostalgia Book Club to feed our curiosity, so even then someone was capitalizing on the movement. Sure, millions didn't know much about film history any more than they know about world history or current events. You can put on 24-hour news stations and they still won't learn anything. Not that most of what's called "news" is actually news and I'm being completely non-partisan here. There are plenty out there now who still don't know such things, but they manage to be able to turn on a computer and come here and to many other sites to ask. Some even manage to use Google to look things up themselves. It all depends on one's initiative no matter whether we're talking now or in the "BC" (before computers) days. I'm probably luckier than most in that in my adolescence, I had the Lincoln Center Library for my own personal studies and I met a number of similarly-minded people there. I'm still in touch with a number of them. >I gradually began to love most of the old 1930s and 40s movies, and I began to dislike most new movies that were being made in the late 50s, 60s, 70s, etc and most of the new actors. I can't assign a cut-off point for myself as there's still gems to be found. People say "They don't make as many good movies as they used to" but that's mostly because they just don't make as many movies as they used to. Compare how many films are released by a studio per year now and in any given year in the 30s and 40s and there's a considerable decline.

>I was intersted to hear him say that while he was interested, during the '50s and '60s, in films of the '30s and '40s, virtually nobody else was. I assume he is also excluding Fred C. Dobbs. I thought that it was a strange thing to say considering that in the 50s and 60s, local TV stations were using 30s and 40s movies to fill up their movie slots. Somebody must have been watching them as they only proliferated and TV stations only give people more of what works. In my case, when I'm asked if I ever studied film history, I would tell people "Yes, on The Million Dollar Movie, The Late Show and The Late, Late Show and the books authored by William K. Everson."

I've seen SPORTING BLOOD which is sort of a cross between BLACK BEAUTY and your standard film about horse racing. Only in 1932, it was forming what were to be cliches, not following them.

As THE DIRTY DOZEN was still in production in Summer of 1966, that's not likely. It was the production delays and the NFL threatening Jim Brown if he missed training that had him retire from football. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/sports/year_in_sports/07.13.html

>Some posters do make things up. They know that most people won't take the time to research their false statement. Sometimes it appears that the research staff does the same thing when preparing the intros. I just checked in to watch THE DIRTY DOZEN and there's Ben M. telling us that it was Lee Marvin's first movie since winning the Oscar for CAT BALLOU. No, that would be THE PROFESSIONALS which came out in the Fall of 1966. Marvin won his Oscar in April 1966 and THE DIRTY DOZEN was released in June 1967. C'mon, this stuff is too easy to check out even if one doesn't have the life span to be able to recall it.

She did it after OUT OF THE PAST? She was talking about Lucy after THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Isn't there anything that could have been said about dressing Jane Greer, Rhonda Fleming and Virginia Huston? Or maybe about Stevenson not dressing Maureen O'Hara in LADY GODIVA OF COVENTRY.

*I've already laid out my case for Angi Vera back on the first page of this thread, but if I'd want to see any movie called Law and Order, it'd be this:* That was the third time that Universal filmed the Burnett novel "Saint Jackson." That one I've seen, I found it mediocre.

The 1932 western LAW AND ORDER. It stars Walter Huston, one of the greatest character stars of the first half-century of film. The adaptation of the source novel by W.R. Burnett would be by John Huston. These two would be associated again for HIGH SIERRA and THE ASPHALT JUNGLE giving us reason alone to want to view their first collaboration. The Burnett novel "Saint Johnson" is the basis for this retelling of the OK Corral story using fictional names instead of the familiar Earps and Clantons. I shouldn't say "retelling" because as far as I know, this was the first of many takes on the OK Corral event. The legendary cowboy star Harry Carey gets the role of the Doc Holliday counterpart and unbilled is Walter Brennan who would later be seen in Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (perhaps the most celebrated version of the Earps vs. the Clantons) as Ike Clanton. The film was directed by Edward L. Cahn, who like Edgar G. Ulmer (with THE BLACK CAT), made a highly acclaimed film for Universal and then faded into relative obscurity making "B" movies for the next 30 years. One of them is one of the most influential sci-fi films of the 50s - IT - THE TERROR FROM OUTER SPACE. Hailed by the likes of William K. Everson and by Phil Hardy in his Encyclopedia of Western Films, LAW AND ORDER is rarely screened. It deserves the opportunity to be seen by those who only know of it by reputation. I'm one of them.

There was a German TV mini-series that was released as a feature film in a dubbed edition: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059986/combined

I like it very much and even recorded it. I had just enough time left on the disc on which I recorded MIDNIGHT the previous evening.

If you missed THE GOLDEN MASK, then you can consider Friday the 13th your lucky day. What a snoozer.

So, there was a Turner adding color to movies over a hundred years ago.