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Bland as gruel? I for one was especially happy to see *The Set-Up* on the schedule. *Bad Day at Black Rock* is quite good too.

I'm thrilled they didn't run war movies today and decided to honor Robert Ryan on his birthday instead. Enough with the glorification of serving the government. Perhaps in the future they can honor people like my father who had 18 months of his life stolen courtesy of the peacetime draft by airing a day of movies starring fellow peacetime draftee Elvis Presley. (Dad spent most of those 18 months at White Sands Missile Range, preventing the missiles from falling into the hands of the Ernst Stavro Blofelds of the world.)

A version of *Milk* in which Jim Jones is given the prominence he really had in San Francisco at the time. Lyle Talbot's son (or, one of Talbot's sons; I don't remember which one) wrote a book on San Francisco that covers Jones' connections with the municipal government; he could do the story if not the screenplay.

See, I had a bigger problem with his use of the phrase "murder mystery". I was born in 1972, and for a long time I've been sick of the romanticizing of the Kennedy era and family, and how so much of what goes on in our (political) culture has to be compared to events that happened between Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon. Can we finally get rid of the !%$&^%@ "-gate" suffix already?

It's not as if Hollywood was ever accurate with its courtroom scenes. At least, not before *Anatomy of a Murder*, and I don't know how accurate that is. Watch Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten in *Half Angel* sometime, for the court scene at the end. Ludicrously unrealistic. Or all those movies with somebody suddenly having a change of heart on the stand.

> I believe the implication is that they abrogated their ownership by failing to honor their contract with him and by acting in bad faith. A court of law would likely have ruled in his favor and ordered the destruction of the property Which reminds me of the failed pet cemetery in the first section of Errol Morris' *Gates of Heaven*. Speaking of which, is the philosophy of *The Fountainhead* really that much more juvenile than that in [*Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe*|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081746/]? But Herzog says things the "right people" like, as opposed to Rand.

> The only problem is that both the book and the movie consist of cartoon characters, Archetypes would be more accurate, I think. > Which isn't too surprising, giving that "Little Orphan Aynie's" primary audience is teenagers and overgrown adolescents. Which is far more mature than most of the political analysis we get out of our infantile elected officials these days.

> The buildings of his they showed in the movie were ALL ugly. They're ugly to you. But it's made fairly clear that there were enough people who found Roark's work beautiful/distinctive enough that he could eventually make a living at it. A niche market, to be certain, but it's there. Ironically, we've reached a point where much of modern architecture is attempting to be different for difference's sake, and the traditional seems to be what isn't wanted. I tend to agree that the movie has serious problems, although I'd also add that I also agree with FBT's assessment of Toohey and his understanding of the danger the Roarks of the world presented to collectivists like Toohey.

Gail Wynand was only giving the people what they wanted, or what they indicated they wanted through their purchasing decisions. (And Toohey was leading a coup from within by hiring people of his philosophical bent.) When it came time for Wynand to try to get what he wanted for himself, Toohey and his acolytes wouldn't let Wynand have it.

> Well, of course, if his stuff was wanted, then that is different. But his stuff wasn't wanted, yet he expected other people to pay for it. There's a scene in the book that isn't in the movie that indicates there were enough people who wanted his stuff to make it profitable. In that scene, a couple of unscrupulous financiers hire Roark to design a bunch of cottages, each unique, for a vacation resort. The financiers are acting *Producers* style, in that they've oversold the thing, expecting it to be a financial disaster from which they can walk away with a bunch of money. But the business turns a profit, and they have to pay the investors more than 100% of the profits. > That's like asking you and me to pay for something that is ugly and that we don't want. You mean like modern "art" that's funded by the state? :-) You might want to read [David Thompson's|http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/10/and-then-of-course-theres-this.html] blog; he talks quite a bit about modern "art": how it's supposed to be "challenging" and "transgressive" -- but only against the right people -- and how often it's being funded by the state despite very low attendance.

I thought it was a construction site, not a finished building. And the scene of Neal driving up to it makes it look like it's one of those outskirts of the big city housing project type buildings, not a downtown building. The bigger point I was trying to make is that if we look at it as a creative type against some horrible corporation -- which is why I mentioned a director going up against the studios, although I could also have mentioned *Heroes for Sale* -- a lot of people get the point and side with the individual. When it's somebody going up against the government, suddenly everybody's views change. Also, my understanding is that Ayn Rand based Howard Roark on Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings can be fantastically useless in spite of their beauty or originality. (Falling Water being a prime example.) There were people who wanted Wright's stuff, so I'd guess there would really have been people who wanted Roark's stuff too.

> How can one not laugh at scenes as ridiculous as the old society dame and her napkins declaring that the Banner must be stopped? Meanwhile her friend fired her cook because she caught her reading the Banner. Substiute "Fox News" for "the Banner". Alternatively, I know a lot of people in the UK make a point of saying contemptuously that they don't read the Daily Mail. The funny thing is, there's a fair bit that I think Rand got right in The Fountainhead, such as the slow capture of the media by an interested party, or her attacks on modern "art" (which are in the book but not in the movie). That having been said, she definitely didn't know how to write a good screenplay, which is where the film ultimately fails, although most people want to blame the movie having the wrong political philosophy. Imagine a variation on The Fountainhead in which the Roark character were a movie director/screenwriter who mapped out everything for a movie: let's call the movie *The Magnificent Ambersons* for the sake of a hypothetical. And then the studio goes and edits the movie beyond recognition, so the director responds by destroying all the rushes. It's still somewhat unrealistic, but I think a lot more people would be championing the individual who stands up against the view of mass culture than champion Howard Roark.

Just once I'd like to see Robert or Ben call out a poster here in one of their intros. Even if it were to make fun of my views on *Member of the Wedding* or *I Want to Live*. I know it'll never happen, but it would be fun to see.

Just as movies like *The Wet Parade* show the ultimate futility of the war on alcohol, the war on other drugs is just as futile.

But Broderick on TCM last night didn't look like that wax statue. He had Harold Lloyd-style glasses (at least for the first intro; I didn't watch the others) and a really bad hairdo. I thought he also came across as a bit stiff.

James A. Fitzpatrick, the "Voice of the World" (or is it "Voice of the Globe"?)

*Cruel Story of Youth* is quite good, and has similar themes: a boyfriend uses his girlfriend to get in positions that compromise wealthy businessmen, at which point the boyfriend swoops in and blackmails the men for money. The movie also has wonderful color cinematography of Tokyo at night circa 1960.

Thank you. I would have guessed it was from one of those drawing-room comedies from the early 1930s. I actually have *Easy Virtue* on one of those el cheapo DVD sets of old Hitchcock movies, but haven't gotten around to watching it.

Are you sure you've got the right movie? in [*Man in the Middle*|http://justacineast.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-winston-affair.html] (also known as *The Winston Affair* ), Mitchum plays a US military attorney in India defending Keenan Wynn. He doesn't do any escaping, certainly not to Northern Ireland.

In another forum, somebody used [this photo|http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GLDNP1S45Vo/Uakf-zYOzkI/AAAAAAAAMUY/NsWzC-Mosfw/s640/pearl+clutching.jpg] to illustrate pearl-clutching. I'm going nuts trying to figure out who it is. Apparently, it's being used fairly commonly to denote pearl-clutching, since the poster used a reverse lookup and got only hits for it being used as an exemplar of pearl-clutching, and not for being from whatever movie. SO who is it? And do you know what movie it is?

> For the past year and a half, members who have joined the site have been stripped of their rights What rights? TCM doesn't even have to provide a "Classic Film Union".

Not complete without a roller-skating baby peeping Tom. :-)

My understanding is that there are two or three companies that provide listings data for the box guides and various Internet TV listings sites. I'm not certain whether the blame would normally be on TCM for providing incomplete listings (sometimes in the monthly schedule there' s imcomplete information), or with the listings services.

> This is a discussion forum. I'm not on here to demand anything from TCM but to discuss choices the programmers made. My emotions or any lack thereof are not the issue. It's so obvious when someone tries to obfuscate the issue. So please cease the patronizing comments. I agree. If I called somebody who disagreed with me an apologist for TCM, that would be obfuscating the issue, and patronizing to the poster in question.

I get the heebie-jeebies thinking about "matthew.kleinmann" panned and scanned. ;-)