Fedya

Cries and Whispers (1972). If you're sick of the current trend of having movies use a mostly teal color palette with orange for the explosions, then this is the movie for you. Ingmar Bergman and his inematographer Sven Nykvist use a palette of red, red, red, red, and red as a backdrop for their story of three sisters in circa-1900 Sweden. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is dying of cancer, and her two sisters Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann) come to comfort her in her final days. Not that they're much comfort, since the whole family is dysfunctional for reasons that are never clearly delineated. And they all have bizarre sexual hangups. I'm sure I'll be in the minority, but I found that when it comes to dysfunctional families, this movie pales in comparison to Bergman's later Autumn Sonata. There, the characters are real people and it's easy to identify with them. Here, they seem like little more than ciphers standing in for basic human emotions. It doesn't help that the film is grindingly tedious when it isn't being gratuitously creepy (in the creepy old uncle way, not in the horror movie way). What was the point of the "dream" sequence toward the end, anyway? 5/10 for the story, 9/10 for the cinematography, which won Nykvist an Oscar -- it's not just the overwhelming use of red that makes the cinematography interesting.

Broken Lance is a remake of House of Strangers, set in contemporary (ie. late 1940s) New York with Susan Hayward and Edward G. Robinson (in the Spencer Tracy role) among others. Have you seen that one? Both films are pretty good, although I haven't seen either in a while.

But no number in which the Shaolin Temple sings "On the Good Ship Lollipop".

Will you be drinking a Pepsi or a Coke as you watch?

Rhonda Fleming had a bit part in Spellbound in which her character was one. There's a "Word of Mouth" piece that shows when TCM has Spellbound on the schedule in which she says that when she was auditioning for the part, she didn't know what it was, so she and her very conservative mother (with whom she was living at the time) looked it up in the dictionary.

Chris O'Donnell and Orson Welles' characters have so much in common.

How many versions of Brewster's Millions have there been?

You forgot firebombing stores whose names aren't sufficiently French.

When I blogged about Fury several years ago, I titled the post something to the effect of "MGM makes a WB social-issues film". Fury is a very good movie, but with the MGM gloss they couldn't completely wipe away, there's still something not quite right about it. If you get a chance to see They Won't Forget (based on a real incident!), do so. It's even better than Fury. You'd think Claude Rains would be badly miscast as a southern DA (then again, he also played a Brooklyn cop in They Made Me a Criminal), but of course he pulls it off.

Darn it, I forgo to record The Sin Ship! I was busy watching the Bayern/Atlético match. Infinitely exciting, even if it wasn't the result I was hoping for.

I think it was Richard Barrios when he was presenting Sign of the Cross as part of the "Gay Images in Cinema" spotlight several years ago that DeMille wanted a story of Christian virtue triumphing over Roman vice, so he filled the movie with copious amounts of vice. I love the movie.

The stentorian voice of Reed Hadley in those Fox docudramas of the late 1940s.

Well, in Music For Millions Jimmy Durante plays "Toscanini, Iturbi, and Me" on the piano which is certainly humorous, if not dry. I'd tend to agree with looking at Oscar Levant as dry humor and a pianist.

For those who have FXM, you can catch Hamilton's Man in the Middle (also known as The Winston Affair) on Monday, May 2 at 7:40 AM, and again at 6:00 AM on May 3. It's a pretty good movie with interesting performances from Robert Mitchum and Keenan Wynn.

Have you seen Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde by any chance?

Evangeline: What does he look like? Walter Burns: He looks like that fellow in the movies. You know... Ralph Bellamy. -- Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday

Nightmare (1956). Kevin McCarthy plays a jazz clarinetist/arranger who wakes up one morning having had a terrible nightmare in which he killed a man. He then discovers evidence that perhaps it wasn't a nightmare! So he goes to see his brother-in-law (Edward G. Robinson, who is way too old for the role, but since it's Edward G. Robinson, we don't care), a homicide detective, to talk about it. Things really start getting weird when the two men and their women (singer Connie Russell is McCarthy's girlfriend; Virginia Christine is Robinson's wife) go out to the country for a picnic. A thunderstorm comes up, hilariously scaring Christine, and the group takes refuge in a house that Kevin seems to know too much about, as though he's been there before. Sure enough, it's the house where the killing took place! Eddie begins to realize his brother-in-law is going to have to be arrested for murder. The resolution to all of this strains credulity, however. That having been said, the dream sequences are well done, even on the lousy print TCM ran. And who would have a mirrored room like that? Overall, it's interesting, but probably could have been better. 7/10.

I first saw Picnic at Hanging Rock two years ago when Jacki Weaver (who was in the movie) presented it as part of the TCM Spotlight on the Australian cinema of the 70s and 80s. She was clearly passionate about the movies (not just that one). And yes, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a really good film. For more recent Jacki Weaver, see her excellent Oscar-nominated performance in Animal Kingdom.

I tried to watch Lightning Strikes Twice, but it put me to sleep.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who really dislikes The Damned.

Nice low-budget docudrama. One that would be paired well with Richard Widmark's Panic in the Streets, which I think is also from 1950.

I thought Australia Day was in January. And you missed Anzac Day on Monday.

Friday, April 29: 6:00 PM ABBA: The Movie (1977). Chronicles the Swedish pop group on their whirlwind concert tour of Australia in March, 1977. There's a framing story of a DJ whose job it is to get an interview with the band, but always managing to wind up one step behind them. That framing story isn't very good, except for allowing the fictional DJ to get "candid" interviews with "regular" Australians -- I have no idea how much of this footage was scripted and staged. There's a funny scene of a cabbie who seems to be the one Aussie to hate ABBA, and two little girls who wind up in giggles because one of them says ABBA's outfits are "sexy". The concert footage is good, but the backstage footage of ABBA is even better. Some of it was obviously scripted since they all speak English to each other and not Swedish. But getting to see Björn and Benny play Swedish folk tunes is nice.

This was Burnette several years before "You're Sixteen" (breaks out Ringo Starr's kazoo). And you forgot Connie Francis doing Tuesday Weld's singing. Because when you think rock and roll, of course you think Connie Francis. The thing I find interesting about these rock and roll movies are the artists who didn't go on to greatness.

Hold 'Em Jail (8:00 AM). Wheeler and Woolsey play a couple of guys who get framed by gangsters and sent up the river for it. Needless to say, they wind up taking over the prison right out from under the nose of warden Edgar Kennedy. They then take part in the big inter-prison football game on which the two wardens have a bet. The supporting cast is interesting. Kennedy is the warden, married to Edna May Oliver. They have a daughter of the sort they could only have in a Hollywood movie: teenaged Betty Grable. One wonders whose genes she inherited.