clore

A whole week of "Stars Behind Bars. Seven days, thirty-five movies." And some people complain about one night of Price/Poe films.

There is an ingenuity and irony in the film's ending that I quite admire - if it goes down as I imagine. Cooper's summation to the jury sets up the whole premise of the individual vs the collective quite well. I can imagine each juror going into the jury room thinking "I'm going to be the one individual with an independent mind and I'm going to vote this man innocent." Ironically, that each one casts a paper vote revealing his decision, ends up with the collective finding him innocent.

As much as I love Cagney - he was my first impression at age six and I fell down the stairs twice trying to dance down them. But he could hold a grudge, like the one about not being able to get Frank McHugh into WHITE HEAT. Let's be realistic, where would he fit? When the camera pans down the table as Cody gets the word that Ma is dead, McHugh's puss would have evoked laughter. Yet to his dying day he would not acknowledge the greatness of the film, only referring to it negatively because he could not cast his buddy. Yet the only McHugh to be found in the Cagney production of KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE is brother Matt in an unbilled bit.

Thanks Fred, nice of you to say. I've seen the film at least a dozen times. I read both THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED with feelings of ambivalence. One turns the pages but almost hates himself for doing so, but you have to see what jaw-dropper will come next. How can one not laugh at scenes as ridiculous as the old society dame and her napkins declaring that the Banner must be stopped? Meanwhile her friend fired her cook because she caught her reading the Banner.

It a movie about a newspaper that has two architectural critics, one who is so disgusting that you can't say his name without saying Toohey, like a kid would say when spitting something out. Said critic manages to get a whole city upset about a building being built which ruins the potential for the architect. Happens every day in NYC. The whole thing, like the book, is preposterous, but it's a glorious train wreck that one can't help but watch in fascination. Vidor thought the whole premise was ridiculous. He asked Jack Warner "If I throw the movie into the fire, would the court forgive me?" Warner replied "The court might, but I won't."

*Is it fair to assume that the director Cagney is referring to is someone who did a number of films at Warner Bros? Even though Cagney wasn't in films with that director he could have observed the guy work. Cagney also may have had conversations with fellow Warners actors who were working with the unnamed director.* Exactly, and the reference to the man getting best sellers and top casts doesn't necessarily have to mean at WB only. I know that when I first read that in Cagney's book some 35 years ago, my guess was Mervyn LeRoy. Why? Because quite simply, he did manage to work his way into a fortune, and by marrying a boss' daughter, managed to usurp ANTHONY ADVERSE from William Dieterle. That was a huge best-seller in the 30s and one of the studio's most prestigious projects to date. Then he goes off to MGM, again getting some prestigious properties that show none of the kind of pacing that he displayed at WB and look like any other MGM movie. I guess we could say his talent was in being able to adopt the house style. By the time he came back to WB in the 50s, he took a series of stage plays, made them into films but forgot to add anything to them to open them up for the big screen. He also neglected to tone down some terribly loud performances in the likes of THE BAD SEED, NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS and A MAJORITY OF ONE. But he's got to be one of the few who failed upwards from WB. Wellman and Walsh were established by the time they arrived, Curtiz had his best days there and how many others are left of whom we can figure that they made a fortune? LeRoy was partial owner of a racetrack while Walsh did own some horses, but was more known for his losing wagers than winning races.

For me, the best part of the earlier Poe films was seeing what Floyd Crosby could do with a short schedule and limited funds. He actually managed to make Daniel Haller's cramped studio sets look spacious. To appreciate the work of a master, check out the second-rate TWICE TOLD TALES with its long takes with actors centered on the screen swapping dialogue. It's as if the whole film is done as a master shot, there's very little cross-cutting. But Price's whining ninny in USHER and PIT gets tiring, and when John Kerr was being tortured, I was rooting for the pendulum. TALES OF TERROR works well as it's got three stories, so they're not padding Poe's limited prose to fit feature length. MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH is for me the most polished, but then Corman had a bigger budget and five whole weeks as opposed to the 14-17 day shooting schedules of the earlier films.

Yes, that rule was slowly chipped away. I forget the exact sequence of steps, but it went from five stations, to a cap on the percentage of TV Households they could reach, which meant that you could own more than five if it didn't total X per cent of the country's TV Housdeholds. Then it was changed to allow ownership of so many VHF and so many UHF stations (which given that cable boxes and remotes eliminated the need to use a separate tuner, UHF now has what we called "dial parity"). It used to be that a company couldn't own two stations in the same TV market, that's long gone.

That whole CBS/Viacom/Paramount/Desilu story is incredible, isn't it? It's also a valid indication of just how much has changed through the years as media companies have become smaller in number but greater in potential influence. Group W Productions and King World figure into that melange of mergers also, I sure wish that I had kept that King World stock that I bought as an IPO. Not that I didn't make a few dollars on it, but that was my entry into the stock market. My wife at the time was calling me every time the stock dropped 1/8 of a point, so we sold it, split the profit and from then on no longer invested together. Another interesting media story, but less complicated is that of Disney and ABC. When the three networks were all trying to interest Walt Disney in the early 50s, it was the lowly ranked ABC that managed to secure the deal. The tie-breaker was that ABC fronted Walt the money so that he could realize his dream of an amusement park in Annaheim, CA. It was the park and the ones that followed in its success that kept the company afloat in the lean years after Walt's passing and eventually, Disney bought ABC from Cap Cities.

>>In the wake of the decision, the studios had to divest themselves of their exhibition venues. Affected by the decision were Paramount, RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., Loew's, 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Universal-International and Warner Bros. While they were affected, it should be noted that neither Columbia nor Universal owned a theater chain. In this way, the change for them was beneficial as it was a more equal playing field when it came to bookings.

The real horror was two films in a row from "The National Film Museum." I'm surprised that TCM still does business with them after the debacle of that print of VAMPIRE BAT that had footage from Hitchcock's THE LODGER in there to pad the running time. http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/reply/30200/THE-VAMPIRE-BAT#reply-30200 How they can get away with calling their product line "restored" is beyond me.

Other than mentioning that Cagney was Tracy's replacement, no mention of any favors being done. As the book was more hagiography than biography, I found it interesting that Tracy's alcoholic bouts were mentioned. Some other thing that I read years ago, I think it was in Films in Review, mentioned that Tracy had left the set several times in a temper which gave him an excuse to get loaded and that he was warned. Having done a disappearing act yet again after the warning, he left Metro no choice but to stick to its threat.

I have a bio of Tracy that I bought back in 1970, it's by Larry Swindell. There the story goes that MGM decided to sack Tracy after one of his "disappearances" keyed to his alcohol consumption. The MGM of the mid-50s was a different studio from a decade earlier, and as with the other majors, it was a studio that was trimming down overhead by getting rid of senior players with lush contracts and ebbing appeal.

Maybe, as far as members are concerned, they're just putting the emphasis on the Felix Ungar part of the acronym. I haven't been there in ages. I became so frustrated between what we were supposed to be able to do, and what there was, that there seemed to be little sense in going there. It may have improved, but I've learned to live without it.

I'm pretty satisfied with it as is, only I would sub Lew Ayres for Leslie Howard.

Try both the SD (channel 82) and HD (285) channels. Sometimes the problems only affect one feed.

>Did Lon Chaney or Peter Lorre Make a western? Lon Chaney was the villain in RIDDLE GAWNE with William S. Hart.

$12.99 for the DVD? I've got it in my Amazon cart for $8.49, and I'll add it to a BluRay of "M" and get them both for a total of $32.70 and free shipping.

Bill Hader just announced that we're getting the full 95-minute version. It would sure be nice if the right hand spoke to the left hand. Damn, now I guess I won't get to see the Land of Lakes short. Well, who knows, maybe Dana Andrews will jump on the train and there will be an upcut of the ending and we'll land in Ontario. EDITED TO ADD: Nope, sorry Bill - TCM made a liar out of you. This was the short version. Were it the longer one, I'd still be watching instead of typing at 1:56am. Edited by: clore on Oct 19, 2013 1:56 AM

It is rather incongruous, isn't it? It's not as if it fits in with the locale of the preceding or the following film on the schedule. Maybe it's a commercial

So, what film did Bill Hader just say would be airing in a few hours? NIGHT OF THE DEMON!

Thanks for the info Kid, much appreciated.

What was the date of that article? I knew Joe from the IMDb Message Boards, we hooked up because we came from the same neighborhood. But he left the boards after getting into a feud with someone in a dispute that I avoided as I knew the two involved and didn't wish to take sides since it was more of a clash of ego than of ideals. Joe was quite ill even then, this was a decade ago. He found a new home on another web site, but disappeared from there. It was presumed that he passed away, hence my curiosity about the date.

The heck with it, I'll just get the DVD then, it's cheap enough at $8.50. The lucky owners of a Blu Ray player that accepts Region 2 discs will be able to get a Blu Ray of the film as of November 27 from a company called Wild Side Video.

I look at it this way - no matter which title one goes by, we're told there is a demon involved. Otherwise, they should have called it NIGHT OF YOUR IMAGINATION. I admit that a couple of shots of the thing don't come off well, but that close-up of that thing is one incredible sight. This was one of the first horror films that I saw in a theater, it was double-billed with REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN and we came in at nearly the end of it. My sister was so scared of the beast that my mother decided we'd leave the theater when the FRANKENSTEIN film was over. This was the summer of 1958, I wasn't quite seven yet, but as I had already seen a few of the Universal FRANKENSTEIN films on TV, we all expected something along those lines. So, not until 1965 did I see DEMON on TV and I hadn't connected it to the film we abandoned years earlier. Then, once we get to the train sequence, it clicked immediately and I was so pleased to finally see the whole thing. By this point I had read in Famous Monsters that the demon was a last minute addition, but I'm convinced that it does work better this way. Has there not been the cat transformation, or the footsteps scene, OK, we could chalk it up to the power of suggestion. I'll grant that the storm scene could have been a coincidence, but then again, Doppler Radar isn't that accurate as to the exact moment of such an event. But all along, the only one who doesn't believe what's there in front of him is Dana Andrews. It is probably to the actor's credit that we don't lose interest because he is so myopic and a rather dumb protagonist. Andrews also sided with Tourneur regarding the beast and could be seen in some documentary 20 years later declaring it a bad idea to show it.