Fedya

And Kris Kringle as a hired killer!

Heaven knows the bald are subconsciously discriminated against, but that didn't stop Donald Meek or Guy Kibbee from having a successful acting career.

Ruby Keeler had a congenital inability to dance, but that didn't stop her from doing 42nd Street.

Oh, and Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar solely with one of his limbs in My Left Foot.

There's a trope of blind people being able to see more than all the sighted characters. Think Michael Wilding in Torch Song, or Priscilla Lane's uncle in Saboteur. That's not what you had in mind, is it?

Your couch must get a lot of use.

Are you ready for your close-up?

My Fair Lady is of course based on Pygmalion, which goes back a year or two, or maybe a bit more, before the 1958 version of Gigi. (I find Maurice Chevalier's rendition of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" to be ultra-creepy.)

+1 Jonathan Shields

Have you seen What a Way to Go!? Those funerals would be a Lush Budgett production.

Advise and Consent is about a bunch of deranged Capitol Hill people. Does that count?

Not long enough. Ooh, they're showing Go West, Young Lady for the Ann Miller salute. She gets a number with "singing cowboy"... Allen Jenkins! And Glenn Ford shows he does have some comic chops. No singing or dancing for Fred Astaire in On the Beach. Just a lot of depressing material about the end of mankind.

Well, George Sanders was in drag in The Kremlin Letter, if memory serves.

Speaking of ballet movies, I've always found The Red Shoes difficult to get into.

I presume that's not the George Sanders movie.

I've never seen the movie, but over the weekend, I finally got around to the following radio documentary from RTÉ in Ireland: Death in Kerry: The story behind The Field by John B Keane You can listen to the documentary at the link above, or download it directly here; the latter link is a ~37MB, 40-minute MP3.

The Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty.The Judy Garland version of A Star is Born.

I finally got around to watching this one off the DVD this weekend, and enjoyed it. The cops, however, would be even more protective of O'Brien's character nowadays than they were in the movie.

TCM ran an Edgar Ulmer documentary last year (I think) in which it was pointed out that the 6-day shooting schedule for Detour is actually an urban legend and that it was something like 16 days, not 6.

Where Love Has Gone (1964). After the credits open with some horrid MOR song over idyllic shots of San Francisco, we cut to the action. Joey Heatherton stabs Joey Stompanato in the presence of her mother (Susan Hayward), who had him as her latest boyfriend. Heatherton's dad (Mannix, er Mike Conners) flies in for appearance's sake, since he's there at the sufferance of Grandma (Bette Davis in another of her juicy later career roles) who controls everything. We get a flashback to how Conners and Hayward married and divorced. Although, this is a flashback to some alternate-universe 1944 in which the US is still at war but everybody wears 1946s fashions and hairstyles. Conners is a war hero; Hayward a sculptress; Davis engineers their marriage and gets all of the bankers in Frisco to make it so that he can only go back to the old family business. Hayward sleeps around (presumably) with her models while Conners drinks himself into a divorce. Back in the present day, the killing is deemed a justifiable homicide, but Heatherton is kept in juvie while the courts can figure out who, if anybody should get custody of her. George Macready, sans his phallic little friend from Gilda plays the lawyer; Jane Greer comes from out of the past to play a social worker; and DeForrest Kelly plays Hayward's art dealer -- dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not an art critic! Davis overacts and delivers pointed bons mots; Hayward wears big hear and recites some terribly overripe lines; Conners gets to be wooden; and Heatherton cries "Daddy!" all the time; you almost expect her to break out into the "I've Written a Letter to Daddy" song that appears at the beginning of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And then there's an ending that makes no sense. If you're looking for a serious movie, I'd rate Where Love Has Gone a 3/10. But if you're looking for the sort of turgid, over-the-top potboiler where you yell back at the screen and laugh at the absurdity of it all, I'd give it an 8/10. It's not quite as "so bad it's good" as Valley of the Dolls or Torch Song, but it's an eminently entertaining disaster nonetheless.

I'd rather have Jocelyn Brando in The Big Heat. Other than On the Waterfront, I've found that Marlon's presence in a movie tends to ruin it for me.

Among other things, she tears a doll limb from limb. She also offers to play a "game" with Shirley in which the intended outcome will be Jane ramming her baby carriage into Shirley, but everybody in the audience, and Shirley on screen, see what's coming a mile away so Shirley pulls out and Jane goes crashing all by her lonesome, much to the delight of Jane's rich greatuncle. Jane also gets the shocking last line, but to mention that would give away the plot of the movie. (Not that you can't guess where a Shirley Temple movie is going, though.) All in all, Jane plays a hilarious brat who steals most of the scenes she and Shirley are in.

It could be worse. They could be showing Hot Spell.

I got gift cards. For my nieces who are still young, I got one a DVD of National Velvet and the other a DVD of The Little Princess. I thought about giving her Bright Eyes, but that one is in black and white, and I also didn't know if my sister would approve of the Jane Withers character.

Well, Gene Roddenberry conceived Star Trek as a sort of Wagon Train to the stars. But what would Roddenberry know?