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Wow, I just spot checked that print of CONVICT LAKE and it was much better than the fuzzy copy that I saw on the Fox Movie Channel in November 2009. The ending reminded me of another Glenn Ford movie, but I won't say which one and spoil it for those who haven't seen this one.

Exactly James. If the Underground takes up four hours, that's only 2.4% of the whole week. I can't expect TCM or any other channel to please me 24/7, sometimes I can't find anything at all worth watching out of the hundreds of channels that I do receive. So, I've got about 500 movies on DVD, 2,000 on VHS, just over 500 books on the subjects of movies or TV and there are all sorts of things to do online. I check out the Underground occasionally, I saw HAUSU already and thought it was skewed to a demo about one-third my age. But hey, I'm not the only audience member out there and it is worth a look anyway for someone who hasn't seen it. I might have checked out EMPIRE OF PASSION, but the Sandman came calling and when I woke up to a cat nibbling on my toes, Gwangi was in the circus nibbling on a dwarf. The cat doesn't bite down luckily, but the dwarf wasn't so fortunate.

> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote} > LOL, that's what you are doing with your post. Not exactly - I gave the subject some thought before I posted. Plus, I've yet to call anyone crazy for not agreeing with me.

I enjoyed the Godzilla/Rodan/Mothra films. I'm not here to complain about those movies. I didn't think I'd enjoy them , but I did. But you did complain about them before they aired. http://forums.tcm.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8649632 You really have to think a bit more before posting. From your first post ever, it's as if you just wish to rant and don't really give much consideration beyond that part of it. Look at this first post in this thread, first you declare this: TCM showed EMPIRE OF PASSION during the late hours of the night. The last 2 or 3 movies had nothing to do with Godzilla or Inoshiro Honda. WHY DID TCM show them then ? And then later you write the following: They ought to be showing early 30s stuff during those hours of the evening/morning. So, what should they have aired last night between 2-6am - more Honda films or early 30s stuff? Early 30s movies have no connection to Godzilla or Honda, except for perhaps KING KONG which also has a monster wrecking a train.

Yes, good point about the spaghetti westerns. Seeing those pieces of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY before they looped them for the restoration was most disconcerting. Then again, it's a bit weird hearing the nearly four-decades-older Eastwood and Wallach is a mite disturbing also. The fake Van Cleef actually sounds more like what I'm used to than do the other two. Nice to see the original RODAN but I'm going to miss the narration at the end, including "I wondered if I, a twentieth century man, could hope to die as well."

I have seen De Sica's TWO WOMEN AND A MOTH which has yet to appear on DVD. Similar rights issue as when Leone made YOJIMBO as A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. The foreign rights are still in legal limbo and most of the world has yet to see Loren and Magnani as the singing duo who get kidnapped by the Mafia, causing Motha (slight name change there to pay homage to Chico Marx) to flap his wings and take on the Black Hand.

Director Bruce Beresford and his wife Virginia attended our Rialto screening of NORTH TO THE KLONDIKE last year. He was filming PEACE, LOVE AND MISUNDERSTANDING in the area and he's a big Brod Crawford fan. That must have been a thrill. I've been wanting to see KLONDIKE ever since I read about it years ago in Castle of Frankenstein. Richard Bojarski's bio of Chaney included a Pepsi ad to tie in with the film, and somehow the thought of Chaney and Crawford guzzling down soda pop after hours always amused me. Bojarski had quite a few Chaney films on 16mm, but not that one so not even he could fill in the gap for me. But not as much as the idea of the two of them in a short titled KEEPING FIT which TCM did air about a year ago.

In most of the films, the timing of the lip movements did not match the timing of the spoken words. Oh Fred, my sarcasm failed. That's the fault of the dubbing, not the translation. Which isn't a problem with GOJIRA anyway since it has subtitles. Even so, the dubbing has always been part of the charm of these things as well as the peplum sagas from Italy. Yes, I prefer my foreign films to be subtitled, but with the Japanese monster films, and the Italian strong man epics, reading captions would make them a lot less fun.

I find those Japanese films boring. A bunch of them are on TCM tonight. The English translation is always bad. Poor editing. How do you know that the translation is bad - do you speak Japanese?

Some of the elements sound like DAY OF ANGER with Lee Van Cleef who does have to face his protege at the end and he did have some sort of practiced move. However, he's not exactly a sterling character, our sympathies are with the younger man. But I haven't seen it since December 1970 and at 150 bucks for the DVD at Amazon, I'm not likely to be seeing it again. TCM had a spaghetti western fest about a decade ago, but I don't recall this as one of the titles.

After all, the "iconic stars" couldn't appear in EVERY film Especially at that point in time when so many had gone off to war, so the ones who were left had better pickings than ever. It could have been worse - it was Universal and just might have been cast with Robert Paige and Diana Barrymore.

I believe that only PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE ties with THE LOCKET in terms of the labyrinth flashback structure. Both films take you below the sub-basement.

Cummings is so light -- and so darned jumpy and over eager -- that after a few minutes he makes you want to punch him in the nose. Hitchcock himself was VERY disappointed that he was "stuck with those two." As much as I like Hitchcock, the man had the bad habit of trying to shift the blame for what were perceived as mistakes. I've read his knocking of Cummings in SABOTEUR, citing that the actor was forced upon him by Universal and that he was all wrong for the film because it was a dramatic part and that "Cummings had a comedy face." So why in hell did Hitchcock use him again, a decade later in DIAL M FOR MURDER, made at Warners and Cummings was not a contract player there? He can't say that Cummings grew out of his "comedy face" as the actor was known for his youthful appearance even into the 60s. Hitchcock liked to blame the initial failure of VERTIGO on James Stewart, claiming that he was too old looking for the part. Did Stewart suddenly age 20 years after he signed the contract? I thought that Priscilla Lane was more than just tolerable in a role that wasn't particularly strong on character. There were stronger femmes in other hitchcock films. Cummings was acceptable and while I'd have even preferred Robert Young, I can't knock Cummings as he has his moments. He puts over the scene at the pool quite nicely and I sympathized with his character in the scene at the shack where he's pleading for safe keeping.

> {quote:title=finance wrote:}{quote}To me, Janssen's manner of speaking always made it seem as if he was constipated. Steven Seagal causes me to have that reaction. Of course, these days he looks as if anything other than a grunt is exhausting for him. But he does prove that even Orson Welles could have been an action hero.

I assume that if you start talking graphic sex, that will also get the thread closed. In my case, that's almost ancient history. I'd be working purely on memory and not recent experience.

I like the "Hands" night, although THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS should kick off the night. HANDS OF A STRANGER is an uncredited adaptation of HANDS OF ORLAC, and thus belongs grouped with MAD LOVE and HANDS OF ORLAC. The 1962 film hasn't played in ages on TV and when I saw it in 1965, it was listed as HANDS OF A STRANGLER in the TV Guide and that was an alternate title for yet another adaptation made a couple of years earlier and starring Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee. That one I still haven't managed to see but it was the one I wanted to see that night. September 4 appears to be Edward Dmytryk day, it is the 104th anniversary of his birth. The 5th appears to be psychiatrist day. There's a big gap on the 14th which is AT SEA day - please TCM, spare us another showing of ICE STATION ZEBRA.

Least favorite: THE GHOST WRITER. This was on TMC one night and seeing all of the positive reviews for it on Rotten Tomatoes, I had to take a look. Some compared it to Sir Alfred's thrillers, but for me it was more like Hitch-schlock. A thriller is supposed to be thrilling, isn't it? You're not supposed to have time to think about the the implausibilities while it unravels. There were plot holes big enough to drive a BMW through and there were certainly enough of both. I was writing to hear that my mileage may vary and that I can lease one at my tri-state BMW dealer. The protagonist here was in the long run as dumb as the one played by Warren Beatty in THE PARALLAX VIEW, but with the latter I'm compelled to keep watching rather than to keep looking at my watch. My dissatisfaction has nothing to do with personal prejudices against Polanski or the film's politics.

Yes, Tex was actually entertaining to watch as he sketched clouds and spirals of wind or a big smiling Sun up in the sky. Plus he had "Uncle Wethbee" who was an "assistant" that was just painted faces, probably made from wood:

Antoine was trying to be amusing - he was on WABC which was the first station in NYC to adopt the "happy news" format. Somehow I doubt that we'll find the remark among the writings of Confucius. About a dozen years later, a candidate for Governor in Texas - Clayton Williams - made the same remark, but he said that "rape is like bad weather, if it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it." Williams lost the election to Ann Richards.

As Tex Antoine said, don't fight it, just enjoy it. Actually, what Tex Antoine said was "With rape so predominant in the news lately, it is well to remember the words of Confucius: 'If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.'" The switchboard lit up like the tree at Rockefeller Center at Christmas. It cost him his job because his apology moments later was to say that he didn't know the latest story concerned a very young girl. That only increased the flood of phone calls from women who were rightly outraged.

I like how Victor Mature says at one point that they'll use elephants to help transport the circus and refers to Hannibal using elephants to cross the Alps. A year later, Mature played Hannibal in another film.

You can't. The only other thing to do is to start talking politics, when it gets heated, the admins will come in and close the thread. No, I'm not trying to be facetious. Only the administrator can shut down a thread and that's usually for discussions that get out of hand.

This just looked like a good place to put in the two cents I wanted to put in last month but was too angry to say anything coherent, the whole issue was and continues to be so ridiculous. I guess it was a good place as you had something going and while there are no patents here, I think most think enough of others to not "borrow" their ideas. Plenty of times I thought of doing something like the "weekly grooves" with more trivia and fewer exclamation points, but that's Mark's franchise. I could easily start posting Agee reviews, but the OP of this thread has that nailed down and there's enough lore to go around that if I wanted to launch a board franchise, I could come up with my own idea.

It wasn't held back because it was bad. By the time the film was finished in October 1944, the war was beginning to seem to be coming to an end soon. Warner Bros. decided at this point that it was better to get the war related films into theaters and hold back on the period pieces. Those wouldn't be dated by the time the war ended. They did the same with DEVOTION and a couple of others and this in turn caused THE WOMAN IN WHITE, filmed in 1946, to be released in 1948. The studio had a backlog of releases.

Marlene is an actress that not everyone likes, so she's hard to predict if someone is going to like her or not. I have a friend who when anyone mentions that they saw Dietrich in a particular film, will come back with "That's the one where she sings in a saloon, right?" He's right most of the time.