Fedya

Is the airing of *The Letter* a premiere? I'm also thrilled to see TCM got the rights to *Dante's Inferno*. Watch for one of the shipboard dancers; that's a young Rita Cansino, as the screen credit goes.

For me it would be one of *King Kong* (the local library showed it as part of one of its programs for kids) or *Calamity Jane* (my uncle and grandfather were projectionists and one summer evening one of them had a projector and screen set up in the backyard and showed it). I don't remember which came first. *Calamity Jane* put me right off musicals and Doris Day.

TCM just showed Raymond Burr's *A Cry in the Night* again today. There's an actor who looked like a creep. And I like his work.

> One thing: I feel like I've made a link between "auteur" and "art" that I didn't mean to but was pushed into pursuing. I think the underlying message of the anti-auteur stance (not saying this about you, Arturo) is, "Don't dare make art." So I feel like I'm defending two positions here. Well, I have a different position when it comes to "auteur" work I don't like, which boils down to "Just because you're an auteur doesn't automatically make your picture better". Orson Welles may have been an auteur, but stuff like *F For Fake* is in my opinion nearly unwatchablecrap, and it's not any better just because of how much time during his career. *Mr. Arkadin* is also a muddled mess. Don't tell me I watched the wrong version unless you're willing to tell me which of the 598459843279852745 edits Orson Welles intended for us to see. The other thing I sense a lot of the time when I hear people who talk about their preference for indie/auteur/foreign stuff is that many of them seem to think they're somehow better fans because they look down their noses at the Hollywood studio system.

William Castle would have had a scale-model biplane flying over the viewers' heads.

Just because you don't like him doesn't mean he's a creep. I mean, I don't like Brando, but that doesn't make Brando a creep.

> But shortly into the movie, here comes CLARK GABLE! And NO. I DIDN'T see his name in the opening credits. I did. :-p I didn't care for the ending, however. I was hoping (but didn't expect it to happen) that when Elfie (Marjorie Rambeau) came to the apartment looking for money from Bennett, that Bennett would leave Eflie there to be Menjou's kept woman and run off with Bob Montgomery. It certainly would have been a bigger shock!

> She always struck me as the actress who may have had the highest IQ. I would have guessed Hedy Lamarr was the smartest.

Ah, but *Skidoo* is a fun bad. If you want a movie that's so bad it's not even "so bad it's good", try something like *Dondi*.

*Soylent Green*.

I missed it. Is it anything like *Desire in the Dust* ?

I don't believe anybody's mentioned *Night Must Fall* yet, in which Robert Montgomery may or may not have a human head in a hatbox.

Bette Davis romantically paired with Sterling Hayden. Wendell Corey romantically paired with anybody. And yet Hollywood did both. :-) Then again, Davis paired with Sterling Holloway would be an interesting couple....

The corpse in Alfred Hitchcock's *The Trouble With Harry* is mistreated six ways from Sunday.

Some of you may recall the name John Calvert as having played the Falcon in a couple of the Falcon movies in the late 1940s. However, his real profession was as a magician, and he had an 80+ year career doing magic around the world. (He'll be turning 101 next month, but I'm not certain if he's still performing. The documentary was released in 2009.) For those of you who have the Documentary Channel -- and you should have it if you have DirecTV where it's channel 267 -- they're running the documentary John Calvert: His Magic and Adventures overnight tonight at 2:00 AM ET, which is still 11:00 PM Wednesday out on the west coast. The documentary deals mostly with his career as a magician, which started in the late 1920s and is an adventure all by itself. Calvert flew the entire cast of his magic act from venue to venue until a plane crash in the late 1940s, and when the act went to the Far East, he took the cast there in a yacht, fending off pirates along the way. Oh, and he met his wife on that tour of the Far East. The documentary does mention his film career, both as the Falcon and as a technical adviser on *The Silver Chalice* (presumably he handled Jack Palance's illusions). If memory serves from when I watched the documentary back in April, Calvert said something to Paul Newman after the movie flopped saying he felt bad about what it would to do Newman's career, only for Newman to remind him of that a few years later after Newman became famous. It's quite an interesting documentary.

There's a valid reason to leave a movie in hysterics:

> Even so, isn't the theme even a little creepy It's a musical. Of course it's creepy.

> Only problem is, how come she's not all sweaty and crumpled? Ceylon just before the rainy season? Women were genetically different back then, and didn't have the genes for sweating. You'll notice the women of the 50s were also genetically different in that they all had pointy boobs. ;-)

Alas, poor finannce; I knew him, Horatio.

In the 1932 film [*Week-End Marriage*|http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023677/] one of the characters (I think it's the Preston Foster character) does the grocery shopping, and you can clearly see he's bought a roll of toilet paper.

How could you forget *Soylent Green* ? :-)

I think only the Canadians got a bunch of Italian sci-fi films. Here in the States, we got *War of the Planets* and *The Wild Wild Planet* but other than there there was British stuff and stuff produced in Japan like *The Green Slime*.

> I'd consider "The Time Machine", "Village of the Damned" & "Five Million Years to Earth" classic sci-fi, no matter what year they were made. And the two Italian moves they showed: *War of the Planets* and *The Wild WIld Planet* are both a lot of fun, even if they're really lousy. I will admit I wouldn't have minded seeing another airing of *They Came From Beyond Space*, however. What's up with the performance art thing in *The Wild Wild Planet* anyway?

> Don't tell the end, as I was called away and missed it. Rosebud was Robert Young's sled.

My problem with *Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter* is that, from the looks of the commercials, it seems to have no color palette.