Fedya

And if the copyright holders refuse? Now, if you want to lobby Congress to reduce the copyright lengths, have at it. Good luck going up against Disney's billions.

Didn't she have to do a health and safety inspection for her cousin?

Maybe they didn't want to pay for it.

And Liz Taylor looking at a man's package.

Both sides of her face?

There's a reason I did a Programming Challenge filled solely with films released in 1960 and later.

The Hoodlum Saint (6:00 AM) is interesting, if only for the casting of William Powell, Esther Williams, and Angela Lansbury

I'm not a fan of Judy Garland's singing. Sure, she could act, and showed it in movies like The Clock, but that singing drives me up a wall. (Also, I like to see who's paying attention.)

We're supposed to identify with Bonnie and Clyde, even though they both get shot up at the end.

I'm reminded also of the Pvt. Snafu shorts that were shown as part of the five directors who served in World War II spotlight last fall.

New Orleans (1947) Society Girl (Dorothy Patrick) trained in classical music hears the new sound and falls in love with it. Conflict ensues with the people who think the new sound isn't proper. That's the plot of the film, which has even less of a plot than, say, The Cobweb. It's also a story line that's been done over and over, with various embellishments (all those "put on a show in the barn" movies Rooney and Gumm did, or Twist Around the Clock). The embellishment here is the music of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. The story is a 4/10, not bad, but thoroughly unoriginal. The music is a 9/10.

The worst people are the ones who put on a front of politeness and urbanity, masking their true evil underneath. Think Herbert Marshall in Foreign Correspondent, or Alexander Scourby in The Big Heat.

Can't we just say numbers, like Fellini let us do?

I think you mean the movie ended with Ann giving up her career. Carole was a bit too dead to give up hers.

And Bing turned out to be abusing children, just like a real Catholic priest!

She has another great line, something to the effect of, "You can go to some nice, warm place... and I don't mean California!"

Dirty Gertie is of course a retelling of Somerset Maugham's "Rain" (and of the Joan Crawford movie), except with the ending changed presumably because black audiences had even more reverence for their clergy than white audiences would have had. I mentioned in the "I Just Watched" thread that I saw Abar: Black Superman recently, and one of the interesting things Abar does as with his superhuman powers is to have a black reverend step into his Caddy after the service, and have the Caddy change into a horse and buggy, which is certainly an interesting commentary on the clergy.

I hope you never blurted out "No wire hangers!" in a job interview.

So what did you think of Girl With a Pearl Earring?

I can also recommend her final film, Out to Sea, starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. (And Donald O'Connor, who gets to do a little ballroom dance solo and enrage Lt. Data.)

If you have a good relationship with your mother. For me, things like Mildred Pierce, Autumn Sonata, and Ordinary People would be more appropriate....

That's Hedley, thank you very much. (And you've got Greg Peck and Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum and Joel McCrea and Sydney Greenstreet and... need I go on?)

Bloody Mama (1970). Roger Corman's low-budget take on Ma Barker, leader of a crime family in the 1930s. Shelley Winters plays Ma incestuously; the sons are played by Don Stroud, a young Robert DeNiro; Robert Walden, and Clint Kimbrough. (I think; I'm going by memory here.) Bruce Dern plays a fellow convict who's OK being a dominant gay in prison if that's how to get sex; Diane Varsi shows off her bare breasts as a prostitute. It's interesting and over the top; I have no idea how based in reality it is. Shelley Winters looks like she's having a blast chewing the scenery as she gets to play unrelentingly evil. So evil that she turns off her sons. Robert DeNiro gets to shoot heroin. There are some nice vintage cars and some nice location shooting (all done in Arkansas). Warning: there's a scene of implied animal abuse. 7/10

That's an interesting position.

Abar (1977). A black doctor and his family move into a wealthy (ie. white) suburb of Los Angeles so he can focus on his research. Unfortunately, all his neighbors are preternatuarlly racist, in ways that make the cast of In the Heat of the Night look like pikers. So the family winds up being protected by Abar, the head of the Black Front for Unity. It turns out that the doctor is working on a formula for invincibility, and after he perfects it, he administers it to Abar, who uses he newfound superpowers to make black teens go to college, black hobos drink milk instead of malt liquor(!), and black preachers ride a horse and buggy instead of a Caddy. Really. The plot veers wildly, with a wacky western dream sequence and liberal use of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech punctuating things. Meanwhile, the acting ranges from pretty bad to unbelievably awful. The doctor is ridiculously wooden, while his wife resorts to over-the-top screaming. And then there's the fabulous 1970s design. There probably wasn't enough of a budget for a wardrobe, so most of the people presumably wore whatever they had (thankfully, they didn't have Audrey Hepburn's Givenchy). This results in a lot of authentic 70s black fashion and some garish color schemes in the outfits. But there's even more garish color in some of the sets. The doctor's new house has lovely avocado green shag carpeting, and one room that's entirely bright red, as though it had been borrowed from Bergman's Cries and Whispers. (Because every blaxploitation movie should be compared to the Bergman œuvre.) The result is an utter disaster, but one that winds up being a hell of a lot of fun. 1/10 if you're looking at it as a normal movie; 8/10 if you're looking for a "so bad it's good" experience.