clore

Supposedly TOO LATE FOR TEARS is to be restored by The Film Noir Foundation in 2014. I've seen a bunch of copies on the web and most are watchable, but this movie does deserve a clean-up. One must keep an eye on the running times, they vary depending on the source.

I really wish that TCM could uncover the film KATHY O' - a 1958 film with Duryea as the press agent for a rotten little child star played by Patty McCormack. He has to hide her nastiness from a magazine writer who also happens to be his ex-wife - causing him all sorts of complications. It was up on YouTube a couple of years ago, but not for long as Universal had it removed.

I never had any great love for the guy, but he did impress me in a few films. However, it's not as if I'd see a film just because he was in it. What did impress me was his talk show appearances. For a time he seemed to be a semi-regular on Merv Griffin's CBS show and the man was one of the best raconteurs I've seen. Charming, funny and constantly telling amusing anecdotes. I had never seen that side of him in a film.

My mother grew up in White Plains, NY which is where Dan Duryea was raised. She was born 11 years later and didn't know him, but she knew a number of people who did know him. It seems that these folks were quite surprised to see him up on screen slapping women around and being nasty in general. "He's such a nice boy" they would say. TCM has aired a short made around 1950 or so, and in it we see Duryea on his time off and being a scoutmaster.

*FredCDobbs said:* *I can't think of any movie, offhand, where two different races marry.* Here's one for you, although I've forgotten if they're already married when the film starts. I haven't seen it in decades: BRIDGE TO THE SUN http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054701/combined

I had heard of THE BURGLAR for many years, I just never had the chance to see it until last June. About 30 years ago, I set the VCR to record it as it was listed to air at 130am on a weeknight. I ended up with the French remake which I watched but recorded over as I didn't save movies with commercials in them.

Nice to see Dan get his due. I got a bunch of his films last year and had a ball with them. A couple came from the Warner Archive, here's what I posted on the IMDb about them: CHICAGO CALLING This was a nice little film. Duryea played the average man here, a bit down on his luck as we first see him, a point emphasized by the stairway that we see him descending en route home. His wife is about to leave him since he's chronically unemployed, and says she's going to take their daughter with her. This happens the next day and then he later gets a telegram stating that his daughter was injured in a car accident and is about to undergo surgery. He'll supposedly get the details the next day via a phone call. But that's just it - his day started out bad, and only got worse as the phone company terminated his service and if that isn't bad enough, his dog is also injured in an accident while he's out trying to scrounge up money to pay the bill so he can get the call the next day. It reminded me of Loretta Young's "Cause For Alarm" in which we follow the protagonist through an agonizing day, in her case she was trying to retrieve an incriminating letter. It may have been sunny in each film, but the characters are having one very dark day. "Chicago Calling" may be the title, but what we get is the lower environs of Los Angeles in all of its seediness. But still some helpful characters emerge, such as a counter-woman who must have seen The Grapes of Wrath and has a soft spot for Duryea's woe, and a young boy, the one whose bicycle hits Duryea's dog. The boy's "help" only compounds Duryea's problems, but he meant well. A very nice job on a low budget, the director John Reinhardt died the next year, but based on this and "Open Secret" - another budget job that had antisemitism in its sights, he had a lot of promise that might have been fulfilled had he gotten the breaks. THE UNDERWORLD STORY Mike Reese is a reporter who is about as sleazy as they come. He must be, he's played by Dan Duryea in the Cy Endfield noir gem. Chuck Tatum of ACE IN THE HOLE has nothing on Mike - except that he probably makes a bigger salary. Mike's lost his job because given some confidential info about a mobster's secret testimony, Mike runs it the paper that employs him which causes the bad guys to know just where to ambush the man testifying. Sure, the paper is equally at fault, but they'll get off by printing an apology, Mike's the scapegoat. With a stake provided by the local New England gangster who benefited most from the silenced witness, Mike buys into another suburban newspaper. Shortly thereafter, the murder of the daughter-in-law of a prominent publisher and the cover-up as well as the innocent black woman accused of the murder, has Mike manipulating all in his path to make his way back to the top and a few bucks on the side. As the guilty person says of the accused: "She's a n-word, who is going to take her word over ours?" This one is that gritty, but it moves with B movie speed not trying to make a social statement. Or is it? What happened to director Endfield, having to relocate to England owing to HUAC, has some reviewers reading "witch hunt" into the narrative. But if one didn't know the personal history, it's a riveting tale anyway that reveals the levels and layers of corruption and also of the depths of sacrifice. Subtext is just as often the baggage one brings to a film as opposed to what the director installs. Gale Storm, Herbert Marshall, Harry Shannon, Michael O'Shea and Howard da Silva in what seems to be a return to the kind of character he played in THE BLUE DAHLIA all figure prominently. Mary Anderson plays the accused black woman and there's a bit of irony now in that casting (beyond her being Caucasian) - her brother James Anderson played the vicious Bob Ewell in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. She would also play Duryea's wife in CHICAGO CALLING a couple of years later. Both films are highly recommended. I've also picked up his British film TERROR STREET but have yet to get around to a review of it. It's not bad plot wise, although there is one action scene that seems out of place with Dan defeating two cops in a brawl and he's not photographed in a flattering manner at all. I can also recommend his late career British thriller DO YOU KNOW THIS VOICE which I saw courtesy of a friend's screening: Dan Duryea is once again a man down on his luck, so he opts for a new profession as a kidnapper. His inexperience shows as he kidnaps the son of some working class people who couldn't afford the ransom anyway, plus he accidentally kills the child. No spoiler here, this all comes out in the first fifteen minutes and just as exposition. On revealing that, he tells his wife who is also in on the plot, that the boy was "lucky to have died clean" - as in free of sin. How considerate Dan! Otherwise, Dan's a nice guy who hung around in Britain after the war, he's nice to his neighbors, and that's where the tide turns. It seems that one of those neighbors, played by Isa Miranda, caught a glimpse of the kidnapper making a ransom call. She offers to help the police capture the man by making it public that she saw him and then just sitting as bait for the criminal. She only saw the caller from the back, but that's a minor point as long as the caller doesn't know that. All of this happens in the first twenty minutes, so don't worry about too much being spoiled. Some of it is only referred to anyway as it happens off-screen or even before the film starts. From here on, as far as the story goes you're on your own. Unfortunately the director Frank Nesbitt not only telegraphs the ending, he writes it in the sky with gigantic letters by fixing the camera on a key prop that comes into play later. Otherwise, the performances are tops and while it's obviously done on the cheap, that only enhances the look of the film which isn't exactly set among the upper class anyway.

I'm going to have a video done with me wearing a pajama top, thrift-shop jeans, sandals and no socks. I'll have it done as soon as I get up out of bed, before I even groom myself. If it works for Mark Cousins, maybe it will work for me.

Gary Cooper had more than one http://garycooperscrapbook.proboards.com/thread/489/garys-duesenbergs?page=1&scrollTo=1490

I had to laugh last night when, while showing a clip of John Barrymore in *Twentieth Century*, he referred to him having "unkempt hair."

I haven't seen it in ages, but I love VOODOO MAN, I must have seen it six times by the time I was twelve years old.

A slight correction - Tobor was the robot of a different film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047590/combined

I haven't seen it in 30 years and I'll be happy to replace the VHS that I made of that broadcast. This was one of those perennials at NYC revival theaters in the 60s, always paired with THINGS TO COME and I saw them at the Thalia and the New Yorker theaters. Very good film - and here's to things being put "in apple pie order."

Is that info provided somewhere? Both the monthly and the daily online schedules have it as being the 98-minute version.

As I recall, he's a silhouette in a doorway window.

The male looks a lot like Johnny Downs.

You're quite welcome. He was also in THE DEVIL BAT with Bela Lugosi as well as a writer for Red Skelton. In addition, he had a good run as a B western hero., for a while he was billed as Dave "Tex" O'Brien.

Dave O'Brien

I don't either, I don't watch any network TV at all. In fact, when I saw the reference to Stowe being in REVENGE, I thought it was referring to her 1990 movie with Kevin Costner.

That's what we called the "contamination factor" when I was writing sales materials and grandiose presentations for trade shows, all using quantitative and qualitative audience data. Much of the time, someone else, usually my supervisor, would be giving the presentation - my job was to make him and the company look as good as possible. What it comes down to is that if I or my boss offer up a bunch of stats and someone can prove one of them to be erroneous, then they have the right to doubt any of the claims. An occupational hazard perhaps, but it remains with me whenever I read a book on film history or watch a documentary on film. I would say the parallel would be when you watch something, based on your own experience, what you see as flaws in cinematography annoy you.

*FredCDobbs said:* *With an average of more than 4,000 movies shown on TCM each year, I don't pay any attention to any small minor mistakes in some of the introductions. I don't care. I wish I could talk 4,000 times a year without making a single mistake.* Well, forgive me for saying so, but you made a mistake right there. Only about a third of the movies aired get an intro M-F, and on weekends, about a third don't get an intro.

Actually Cousins comes off as much more down-to-Earth in the intro segments. While the accent is still there, the cadence is different and one can grasp his enthusiasm. The problem is looking at him. It appear that he slept in his clothes for an hour after binging all night, forgot to put his socks on and I almost expect birds to build a nest in his hair. While I imagine he considers this to make him appear as an edgy eccentric, for me it comes off as his being a poseur. His starving artist days have long passed. I don't ask for Saville Row, but Skid Row thrift shop demeans him. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-la-et-0830-tcm-jpg-20130901,0,3504253.photo

*skimpole said:* *What is up with the forums so that each entry in General Discussions has the same time?* That was part of the recent "upgrade" that brought us turquoise in exchange for losing a few features we used to have.

*Arturo said:* *Let him do it chronologically, instead of interpolating what led to what 50-100 years later. Save it for later and focus on 1918-1928,* That was really annoying last night. He spent the first third of the program on clips from 30s and 40s films and how they derived from things developed in the 20s. The clip from GWTW was identified as Scarlett and her lover basking in the sunset. Well, how does three-strip Technicolor relate to something from the 20s? Also, the narration was wrong, it was Scarlett and her father, not her lover. This is Tara, not *Chinatown*. There are more errors cited in the "Worse (sic) Original Programming" thread. I won't detail them here again, I think this is supposed to be a cheerleading thread and I don't mean that sarcastically.

I want a Philip Ober night so that they can run FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and NORTH BY NORTHWEST back-to-back.