clore

> {quote:title=misswonderly wrote:}{quote} > Wait...I thought that particular subject matter was limited to George Brent. Actually, George Brent made a crack about Kay Francis' aws - no pun intended. In LIVING ON VELVET, noticing that she has trouble pronouncing "April," he tells her to repeat the following phrase: "Around the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran" You can imagine how the response sounded. Kay had to be a good sport to put up with a scene such at that. Or else she went around the set laughing at Brent's big wound wear wend.

Was there any other actor/actress of the Hollywood studio system days who had such a startling career rebirth as Dick Powell? Yes, and someone with very similar origins. John Payne had a very similar start, even overlapping with Powell at Warners. Payne went over to Fox after that but obviously no one there saw his darker side as it was mostly lighter stuff to which he was assigned. But effective with LARCENY at Universal, Payne proved that he had the stuff and soon amassed a string of noir and western credits. Too bad Fox didn't realize this and cast him in THE BRASHER DOUBLOON. With Payne, Conte, Mature or even Mark Stevens, why they went with George Montgomery is a mystery worthy of Marlowe himself. Supposedly when the preview audience saw James Stewart's name at the start of WINCHESTER '73, there was laughter in some sections of the theater. Fox was so uncertain that they held up the release of BROKEN ARROW which was filmed before but issued after WINCHESTER '73.

Father and son? The just departed R. G. Armstrong: Frequent Eastwood co-star Bill McKinney:

I once caught BLOOD MONEY on FMC, back-to-back with CALL HER SAVAGE. The former was an amazing pre-Code gangster film and filled with all of the necessary ingredients to make it into my top ten. But while I was able to record the Clara Bow film on a subsequent airing, I never spotted BLOOD MONEY on the schedule again.

You should visit Ty's web site - whew, this guy is whacked out. Talk about BERSERK!

> {quote:title=helenbaby wrote:}{quote}This was posted on IMDB's message board too. How could you get through all the verbosity to understand what the hell the guy was saying? I was snoozing after the 1st paragraph. Apparently this guy thrives on controversy (although I'd never heard of him, others had.) It's the same person, just using a different name here. The OP never links to the article itself, always to the same blog address that will then provide a link to the article in question. Also, rarely does the person join in any subsequent discussion, so as far as I'm concerned, the intent is just to raise the number of hits at her blog site. Most of the time, the "news" is days old anyway.

I saw TROG theatrically - once was enough. Still, I prefer it to BERSERK but that's faint praise.

> {quote:title=TopBilled wrote:}{quote} > TCM did not schedule BERSERK, one she made in 1967 for Columbia. It aired around Halloween last year, but it isn't scheduled this October. It is in Technicolor...all the others from this decade are in black-and-white. TROG, also in b&w, was not made till the next decade. TROG is in color, please that's one of its few assets.

Well, I already used "Wow" and "Double Wow" to describe the "The Projected Image" series in October so I need to find a new exclamation. Maybe I'll just borrow an appropriate one. Since it's Fleischer you're talking about, may I suggest: "Well blow me down!" Edited by: clore on Jul 28, 2012 9:43 AM

The problem is that cats are never the heroes of their films. More often than not, they are just a problem for the wonderful, heroic, beautiful, lovable, terrific, brilliant dog. Check out SHADOW OF THE CAT when the titular feline is a problem for those greedy family members who murdered its owner. THE THREE LIVES OF THOMASINA has a dog or two in the story, but they aren't the cat's problem. Runs out of steam at the end, but overall it holds up, I just watched the DVD a few weeks ago. RHUBARB is the mascot of a baseball team and when he scares away the mascot dog of another team, his own team is inspired enough to start winning some games. My mother loved this movie so much that she named one of our many cats after it.

> {quote:title=PrinceSaliano wrote:}{quote}DIE SCHLANGENGRUBE UND DAS PENDEL (1967) ... a German horror film starring Christopher Lee and Lex Barker, shown on American television as THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM. Probably not the best venue, but there is an 80-minute cut of it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5GMAiCk9Ts Not having seen it since a WOR airing in the 70s, I watched it a couple of months ago - fairly clean copy.

It WAS on DVD in Spain: http://www.amazon.es/Verdugo-Berlanga-Jose-Lopez-Vazquez/dp/B003Z7SFZW/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1343179888&sr=1-1 Look around better and you might be able to find a copy out there. Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out. Last night I watched my DVD of Bava's KNIVES OF THE AVENGER. Seeing the star of that film, Cameron Mitchell, reminded me that I've not seen FACE OF FIRE since it aired on WOR-TV in 1966. James Whitmore co-starred as the unfortunate handyman who becomes disfigured in a fire and then shunned by townsfolk. It's an adaptation of Stephen Crane's "The Monster" but it's not exactly a horror film. This disturbing slice of Americana was actually shot in Sweden, an early effort of Albert Band. It should be in the Allied Artists catalog and hopefully a candidate for future airing or a Warner Archive title.

I long thought that 3 GODFATHERS (1948), with John Wayne, was an original, and loved it. Then on TCM I watched THREE GODFATHERS (1936), with Chester Morris, and later, HELL'S HEROES (1930) with Charles Bickford, and found myself appreciating all three films, though practically word for word/scene for scene repeats of each other. Now I've discovered that there is another, older, silent version: THE THREE GODFATHERS (1916), with Harry Carey, that I wish TCM could gain access to and air for me (us) to see and enjoy! In addition to Harry Carey starring in the 1916 version of THREE GODFATHERS, he also appeared in MARKED MEN in 1919, another adaptation of the same story and this one was directed by John Ford. Harry Carey's character was rechristened Cheyenne Harry, a name he used in films from 1916-1936. There's even a 1915 version of the story titled BRONCHO BILLY AND THE BABY, so next time someone whines about how Hollywood of late is nothing but remakes, you can use all of this to silence their complaining.

As fascinating as they are, IP addresses make for boring conversation, have never been used as a plot device in a classic movie, and won't be seen in HD or SD. It's a little known piece of trivia that originally Michael Caine was to star in THE IP ADDRESS FILE back in 1965. But it was decided that this wouldn't be a good idea since in 1965, nobody knew what an IP address was in the first place since the internet didn't exist. So, with just a little tinkering, one exec came up with THE IPCRESS FILE and that was met with unanimous approval since everyone knew exactly what was meant by Ipcress.

Oh, I should have said that this chess thing happened about five years after we were married. He had gotten the chess item - I think it was called "Chess Challenger" - as a gift for Christmas and he was enjoying setting some of us up to be beaten by it. This was at a Christmas Eve gathering. I'm an unorthodox player, I've never studied the game, I just know how the pieces move. The thing is that I don't guess my opponent's next ten moves, there's too many variables. I just anticipate the next two perhaps. Maybe the machine wasn't programmed with anything other than traditionalists as opponents. It took maybe an hour, but I did beat it. The other guests made such a fuss that he came in fuming. It took a while for my father-in-law and I to get along. I hadn't volunteered for military service, opposed the war in Nam and I rarely watched sports other than horse racing. I believe it was Robert Klein who once joked about his in-law who was such a sports buff that "he watched anything that was listed in the TV Guide sports section, even if it was Lithuanian Midget Mud Wrestling at 4am." It wasn't until I got my first VCR in August 1980 that we found common ground. I guess he didn't think it macho enough to be an old movie fan, but suddenly he started talking about Astaire and Rogers films and Deanna Durbin movies and how he was going to have to get one of these VCRs so he could tape the old movies on TV. It turned out that he had quite a collection in the upstairs bedroom of books on old films while downstairs the bookshelves had sports books, an encyclopedia and manuals on crafts such as home wiring and plumbing. You could say I helped him come out of the closet as a movie buff.

> {quote:title=Bilgewasser wrote:}{quote} > I remember many years later when Bobby Fisher won the chess championship > and 13 had a giant paper chess board and the "host" would move the pieces manually as they came in. Talk about low tech, but I guess that was the best they could do. I was thinking of that earlier today as it was 40 years ago, right around this time of year. I was still dating the woman who became my wife (and then my ex). Her father was a chess buff but had to work and thus could not watch the match. He had his wife monitor them and log each move on a sheet of paper - talk about low tech. If he could have in those days, he would have recorded and watched them. He bought one of those early computerized chess "toys" - it wasn't a computer program. He had it for a few weeks but always lost. I'm no buff, but somehow I managed to beat the thing on my first try and wow, was he upset. I thought he was going to throw the thing across the room and as far as I know, he never used it again. I guess that's where his daughter's temper originated.

Yes, WABD was Dumont. I think that it was in 1958 that the call letters changed, I do recall that it was right around the time that school started. I barely remember "Shock-O-Rama" as the films that they showed didn't have the Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney names that I was already associating with horror films, even as I was just becoming exposed to them. I never got to stay up late for the Zacherley shows on WABC, but usually one or two titles were rerun on the weekend without the host.

Bilgewasser and Swithin: Do either of you remember when Channel 13 was WNTA? They were owned by National Telefilm Associates and much of the schedule was 20th-Fox movies that were in the NTA catalog. I remember seeing HOUSE OF STRANGERS and CRY OF THE CITY as a youngster on their Friday late movie. They also aired the syndicated series based on HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE. Or how about Allen Swift as the host of the daily POPEYE show on WPIX? He would come on a mock ship and say "Four bells, Six O'clock, Captain Allen Swift on deck to greetcha." He left for more lucrative voiceover work, one of them being doing most of the voices on DIVER DAN. Or Gloria Okon doing the weather t the end of the show for Arnold Brick Oven Bread? Here's something you guys may enjoy, it's from the late 80s with Stewart Klein interviewing former WNEW (I remember when it was WABD) kid show hosts Sandy Becker, Soupy Sales and Uncle Fred Scott: It's in three parts, the links follow at the finish of the chapters.

> {quote:title=Swithin wrote:}{quote}Clore, we're about the same age. How well I remember Claude Kirchner, the Terrytoon Circus, and Clownie (or was it Clowny?). I loved Modern Farmer, as an NYC boy I thought it so romantic, all those countrypeople working in the fields. Modern Farmer was on in the very early morning hours in NYC -- maybe 6am or something like that. I'd like to see those films again, are they available? "And now it's time for most of you to go to bed." Usually sis and I went to bed when Claude Kirschner said that - we may not have gone to sleep right away, but we went to bed. I haven't found a trace of THE MODERN FARMER since those days when it came on right after "The Star Spangled Banner." We didn't care, heck we used to watch the dot that remained on screen when we turned the set off. Another early morning favorite was "Learn To Draw With Jon Gnagy" - at least for my sister. I have a strong visual sense, I just can't get it down on paper. My skill is as a photographer. Sis had considerable talent when it came to drawing faces or horses, but not so much when it came to landscapes and such. She so wanted one of those Jon Gnagy kits, but it was too expensive to buy one from what may have been our first viewing of an infomercial.

One night in 1957 - I wasn't quite six years old yet - my mother suggested that rather than go upstairs to bed as Claude Kirshner would say at the end of "Terrytoon Circus" - that I might want to check out the program coming on next at 730pm. My sister and I would watch "The Modern Farmer" if it meant staying up later than usual, so we checked out this movie from "the old days" as we used to refer to anything from my mother's youth. It was KING KONG and from then on, sis and I watched just about every "Million Dollar Movie" presentation on a Friday night. Not that it had to be Friday, they showed the same movie M-F twice in a row in the evenings, and three times in a row on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Years later, I talked with someone who had worked at WOR for years, a film buff and author named Chris Steinbrunner. He told me that during its first week on the air, it was estimated that KING KONG was seen by over 80% of NYC's TV households. That was because while each showing may have been eclipsed by the shows on the networks in the same time period, by the time you added up each of the 16 screenings, it had been seen by almost everyone who owned a TV set in the NYC area.

I'm glad that you guys liked it. Calvin - I'm in sympathy with your ailment. I have my own physical troubles which I won't go into, but I'm told that maintaining my sense of humor is as valuable a weapon against them as any treatment.

Poor calvinnme, the messenger who has come to let us know that A FACE IN THE CROWD will air twice in October. Why not get Count Floyd to host it? "Tonight we have a scary movie about a hillbilly who preys upon the entire country, sucking their brains out of their heads. He takes Vitajex and turns into a hideous monster and there's only one woman who is brave enough to face him, the same woman who confronted Gort the robot."

Possibly MISSILE TO THE MOON.

They can both be viewed or download online here, being in public domain: Thanks for the tip. I'll sample the print quality and see if they're worth watching. If they are, I'll make the sacrifice of watching them on my PC. The problem with that is that the seating isn't as comfy as the couch, and the screen is smaller. But for those things that TCM doesn't air, the Archive is a blessing. Recently watched SHED NO TEARS there, a minor noir with Wallace Ford that was quite enjoyable.

I've purchased all of the 20th-Fox Charlie Chan sets, but I waited until I could get them for 25 bucks or less per set. I'm on a retirement budget, so I must be frugal. The two Moto sets have yet to come down to that level, they're still hovering around 36-38 dollars a set. So, as far as the 31st goes, two Wongs make it right.