Fedya

I think Too Many Girls is a lot of fun, even though it has no basis in any sort of reality. And how could you forget Eddie Bracken?

You mean like the head of SAG?

Yes, it's poignant, but I've always found it very well done visually.

For entrances, one that I don't think has been mentioned is Ginger Rogers in Gold Diggers of 1933. Monty Clift has a memorable entrance in From Here to Eternity, too.

Their exit in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is even better.

Mildred Pierce? Bruce Bennett and Ann Blyth both break Joan Crawford's heart, in a fashion. How about Marnie?

The thing I like about Outward Bound is its attempt to use sound as a plot element, something interesting for an early talkie. Speaking of Leslie Howard and the supernatural, there's also Berkeley Square.

Portrait of Jennie

One Man's Journey is excellent. In addition to Barrymore and May Robson, there's Joel McCrea as Barrymore's son; Frances Dee as McCrea's fiancée; Dorothy Jordan as the foster daugher Barrymore raises when her mother dies in childbirth; and underrated character actor David Landau as Jordan's biological father. The movie was out of sight for decades because it was one of six for which the rights were given to Merian C. Cooper as part of his severance package from RKO; TCM got the rights to them about a decade ago. The movie was remade as A Man to Remember with Edward Ellis in the Barrymore role, but the remake is nearly sunk by Dalton Trumbo's didactic screenplay.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

A couple of years ago on Veterans' Day, on another board, I said that I'd be honoring my dad, who had 18 months taken out of his life courtesy of the peacetime draft, which he spent at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico keeping the missiles from falling into the hands of the Ernst Stavro Blofelds of the world. (The part about being drafted and serving at White Sands is the truth; the bit about Blofeld is, of course, a bit of an exaggeration.) My word did so many of the posters go nuts.

Decoration Day should be for Civil War movies. Armistice Day should be for World War I movies.

Too Late For Tears (1949). I recorded this back in December when TCM did its memorial tribute to people who died in 2015 and this film was shown in honor of Lizabeth Scott. (Kristine Miller, who is also in the movie, died in late 2015, but her death wasn't publicized until February or March.) Scott plays a bored housewife who apparently has a backstory: her first husband committed suicide. She and second hubby Arthur Kennedy are on their way to a party when somebody throws a satchel in the back seat of their convertible. They open the satchel to find it full of fake Hollywood cash that of course is real to movie characters! And then the car that the satchel was intended for shows up behind them. Wife suggests they keep the cash; hubby isn't so certain but goes along. And then Dan Duryea shows up looking for the satchel, or more honestly, the cash located within. Lizabeth gets the brilliant idea of double-crossing both Kennedy and Duryea, and running off with the money on her own. Miller, who plays Kennedy's sister living in an apartment across the hall, begins to suspect something, especially when Kennedy's old army buddy (Don DeFore) shows up. It's a lot of fun, although the Production Code enforced an ending we can see coming. Crime can't possibly pay for Lizabeth, now, can it? Still, I give it an 8/10.

Dracula роrn! Actually, I think Rule 34 would imply this exists: If you can think of it, there's already been роrn of it.

I misread the title at first and thought you wanted us to created a boxed sex kit.

Have you ever seen Damnation Alley?

What do you have against Hud? Yes; Dorothy Dandridge was robbed of an Oscar that year for her performance in Carmen Jones.

Only twice? I noticed that too, and it was grating.

Shaaaaaame!! Come baaaaaack!!

Angels Over Broadway. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. plays a down-on-his-luck pety con artist on a rainy night in New York. Cut to John Qualen with much less of an accent than normal; he's about to commit suicide because he embezzled $3,000 and the boss just found out. They separately wind up at a nightclub where there's also wannabe stage star Rita Hayworth. Fairbanks figures Qualen is rich and decides to get him to be the mark in a high-stakes poker game. Formerly successful playwright Thomas Mitchell, whose career has gone downhill due to hitting the bottle, learns the truth about Qualen and decides to help. The movie has a bunch of interesting ideas, but they're all jumbled together in a way that makes the movie a mess at times. Fairbanks is wrongly cast, I think, while Hayworth isn't given much to do. Qualen and Mitchell come out the best, especially Qualen, in this dialogue-heavy movie that was written and co-directed by Ben Hecht. 6/10 for the performances from Mitchell and Qualen.

Goodson and Todman figured out by the mid-60s that if you could tape celebrity-driven shows like Password in rapid succession, you could get five shows done in one day and have the same celebrities all week. Most of the producers through the 90s, when network game shows finally died, also eventually became efficient enough to have five shows on one taping day as well. (This also meant fewer times having to strike the set, which also saved money.) The Price is Right was an exception since it was an hour-long show and had a lot of prop changes; I think they had (and still have) three taping days a week and do either one or two shows each taping day. I'm told Wheel of Fortune actually tapes six shows each of the tape days they're in LA (I don't know how much they've gone on the road in recent years). Five of the episodes will be in one theme week, while the sixth will be part of an "America's Game" week; if you look carefully, the shows in the "America's Game" weeks don't really have any overarching theme. The game shows that taped five-a-day would usually tape three shows in a morning/early afternoon session, break for a meal, and then tape the other two shows. This was partly so they could rotate audiences, and partly to give the crew a break: if they had the crew working for longer than (I think) six hours without a meal break, union rules would force the producers to pay overtime. Match Game lore has it that the celebrities drank copious amounts of adult libations during those meal breaks such that the panels were rather looser in the fourth and fifth shows up a taping session. A friend of mine from a game show board ran into Paul Williams at some event a few years back, and mentioned to Paul that he had just seen Paul on a GSN-run episode of Match Game. Paul's immediate response: "Was I lit?" Since Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came to prime time in 1999, however, many game shows take a much longer time to produce. In Millionaire's case, it was partly that contestants were given pretty much unlimited time to think on questions, and the producers would edit things down in post. For other game shows, it's as though the producers are tinkering during taping, to the detriment of the shows and the audiences. So many of today's (or the post-Millionaire) prime time game shows are ridiculously overproduced and use the same obnoxious devices. Last summer's 500 Questions, for example, had 9 hours -- and didn't even get through 500 questions.

The Conqueror I DVRed this one back in September when Susan Hayward was Star of the Month. John Wayne plays the future Genghis Khan, seeing Tatar Hayward, falling in love with her, and stealing her from the leader of a third tribe. There's a fourth tribe led by Thomas Gomez who are kinda-sorta allied with the Mongols. After many complications, Hayward is in love with Wayne, he's Genghis Khan, and they live happily ever after, or at least until they join the rest of the cast in getting cancer. The basic plot really isn't that bad, but the idea of casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan is about as off as whoever came up with the idea of casting Dragon Seed with Hollywood stars as Chinese people fighting the Japanese occupation. (Agnes Moorhead appears in both, if memory serves.) Wayne also has an awful wig that rivals the one Cary Grant had in The Howards of Virginia, or Robert Wagner's pageboy wig in Prince Valiant. All the men also have these horrid Mongol moustaches. I haven't even gotten to the dialog yet, which is by far the worst part of the movie. Oh boy is it laughable. 4/10 for serious merit; 7/10 for the so-bad-it's-good value.

Kismet, we are doomed!

This of course refers to two different people.

I read the novella first and found it creepy. So there's that.