Fedya

DO NOT PASS GAS; DO NOT COLLECT $200.

Weren't there stairs between him and the door?

The critics' joke about Phil Collins is unoriginal: Stravinsky supposedly said that Vivaldi only wrote one concerto, but he wrote it 400 times.

Lionel Richie and Diana Ross singing Endless Love over the closing credits of the movie of the same name.

Stewart was laid up for quite some time. I'd assume those two weeks were from before the start of the movie. If Stewart had been watching everybody all that time, he would have seen something between the Thorwalds that would have bothered him but that he couldn't quite put a finger on.

Not to be confused with the Robert Walker movie.

When were those lost scenes originally cut out of the movie? There are a lot of movies that get released in theaters one way, and then when the DVD comes out, we get a "director's cut". And look what Orson Welles did to some of his movies, constantly re-editing them. I don't know what the right solution is, but something about partial reconstructions -- especially with stills replacing moving images -- bothers me.

Wait a second: Mandarin is auto-censored here? How are we to talk about that version of the language (as opposed to Cantonese), or the oranges?

They also added an hour and a half back to Greed. Damn Erich von Stroheim for not writing a two-hour movie in the first place.

The computers in my office remind me of the Sperrys in Jumpin' Jack Flash. And our boss is a similar blowhard.

Show them Advise and Consent, in which a Betty aged around 40 has a handful of lines as a Senator from Kansas.

I was looking through the TCM schedules, and none of the prime-time lineups list a Guest Programmer as the night's theme. There's also no link on the main site to any article about this month's Guest Programmer.

To be fair to Moving Picture World, audiences had probably never seen anything like this on the screen before.

Victory (1981). Michael Caine needed to pay off another house, so he made this movie in which he plays a World War II POW who was a soccer star before the war. A Nazi officer (Max von Sydow) recognizes him, and ultimately a soccer match between the German team and a team of Allied POWs is set up. Sylvester Stallone, who would rather escape, plays the goalie; the rest of the team is actual aging football stars led by 40-year-old Pelé. The movie has a terrible reputation but is nowhere near that bad, as long as you can not just suspend disbelief, but send it into outer space. Plot holes and idiotic character motivations abound. On the plus side, it's nice to see John Huston directing a film that's not self-indulgent and bloated. 7/10. It entertains.

I don't think of either movie as a noir.

Border Incident (along with Mystery Street a year later) are two movies that show that Ricardo Montalbán really did have acting chops.

Weren't there flushing toilets No Time for Sergeants?

The Getaway (1972) Sam Peckinpah takes the heist formula and inserts a lot of slow-motion violence into it. Steve McQueen plays the Dix Handley character everybody tries to bone. Ali McGraw (who as far as I know Steve was not yet smacking around) plays his wife. Gloria Bunker plays a woman kidnapped by one of McQueen's ultraviolent partners in crime (Al Lettieri). 7/10. The story is OK, but Peckinpah's depiction of violence quickly grows tedious. Not that I'm opposed to violence on screen; it's that the way the violence is shown played as if Peckinpah was trying to put stylish touches in where grim realism was needed. (It's on TCM again tomorrow, July 5, for those who want to watch.)

Do you think George Raft bothered to read the script?

You should watch Red Light, where Perry Mason gets Col. Potter to kill George Raft's brother.

Skippy Homeier, 1930-2017 Skip Homeier, who started his career as a little Nazi in an American family in Tomorrow, the World!, died June 25 at the age of 86. Homeier had a career spanning nearly 40 years on film and TV, perhaps most memorably as Dr. Sevrin in the "Way to Eden" episode of the original Star Trek series.

One of the majesties of the English language is that there is a world of difference between a wise man and a wise guy.

Your winnings.

That's a lot of wisdom.