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Fedya

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Posts posted by Fedya

  1. Note that Oscar Hammerstein is with Sigmund Romberg. (Richard Rodgers, of course, was collaborating with Lorenz Hart.) You can also see the two of them together in the "Silver Anniversary" short that WB made in 1930.

     

    Unfortunately, the short missed some opportunities to use talking pictures better. It showed congratulatory telegrams from those stars doing location shooting, rather than filming them speaking into a microphone on location; considering the purpose of the short, you didn't have to hide the microphone.

     

    And WB didn't have quite the cavalcade of stars MGM would have two decades later for Some of the Best.

  2. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972).

     

    Paul Newman plays Roy Bean who in this movie version becomes judge after killing a bunch of brothel people when he takes them all on in a shootout. Bean then proceeds to become a snotty, obnoxious jerk who cares not one whit about the rule of law, hanging everyone in sight and generally being a self-centered blankety-blank. And we're supposed to like this guy.

     

    It all makes the movie almost unwatchable; like Julie Harris' character in Member of the Wedding I wanted somebody to smack this Roy Bean into the next county. And don't bet me started on his creepy obsession with Lillie Langtry.

     

    2/10. I hated it. There's two hours of my life I won't get back.

    • Like 2
  3. The toilets in the bathrooms were avocado green until they were replaced with low-flow toilets in the late 90s. The sink is still original. The goldenrod kitchen appliances were also replaced in the 90s.

     

    The light in the bathroom is a standard bulb, not a (traditional) fluorescent. My grandparents had one of those round fluorescent ceiling lights in their kitchen, too, something like this:

     

    31ZDxWwCXaL.jpg

     

    The house dates to the mid-1950s.

  4. Doesn't have much to do with noirs per se, but your post reminded me of the

     

    il_570xN.275025249.jpg

     

    Milk glass ceiling light fixtures that seemed a staple of public building in 1940s films.

     

    Even more unrelated, in trying to find that type of light, I came across this photo:

     

    5aedc0b3de2a173fe171204e2a08954d.jpg

     

    Which is almost exactly the same type of light fixture I've got in my bathroom. The fixture dates to 1974, since it's original to the house. :o

    • Like 1
  5. "Red Hollywood" is a good documentary on the Hollywood Ten's contributions (of which Billy Wilder said "Only two were actually talented, the rest were just unfriendly"), and you can see there was a lot of very naive soapboxing on the part of Trumbo and other screenwriters that was trying to jump on the ideals without noticing the details--

    I think it was Bud Schulberg (who named names) who said something to the effect that the Communists seemed very protective of free speech, until it was speech they disagreed with. Or something to that effect.

     

    I've read that Dalton Trumbo tried to get anti-Communist stuff (like Koestler's Darkness at Noon) from being turned into movies.

    • Like 1
  6. No Down Payment is meant to be taken seriously, but I crack up every time I watch it.

    I'm glad you brought up No Down Payment. It's a movie I have serious problems with, since it comes across as people trying to check items off a list of issues they want to bring up regarding the suburban developments and the changing culture.

     

    And yet, I've seen quite a few reviews that basically boil down to, "It's great because it questions the suburban lifestyle." I see the same thing with reviews of Douglas Sirk movies. Sirk is making the right pointed commentary about American suburban culture; therefore the movie is good.

     

    BTW: You don't need to hit the return key until you want a new paragraph. The board software does wrap posts when they actually show up, even if the software is borked in the composing window. (Of course, the board admins have been adamant about the idiocy of newest posts first, so this will never be fixed, either.)

  7. (As suggesting that Hitler was bad enough for us to get involved with was chiefly flag-waved by the left-leaning Communist communities, and was as Subversively Leftwing before 1941 as suggesting we should go to war).

    American Communists were all for going after the Nazis up until the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact in August 1939, at which point they suddenly turned on a dime. They suddenly turned again in June of 1941 when Hitler invaded the USSR.

     

    Noted Hollywood Communist Dalton Trumbo actually wrote an isolationist agitprop novel, The Remarkable Andrew, that used the ghost of Andrew Jackson to try to convince people not to get involved in the war in Europe.

     

    The Communists shouldn't have been blacklisted, but they should be remembered as the dupes and apologists for a monstrous ideology that they were.

     

    (Leni Riefenstahl shouldn't have been blacklisted either, and should have been included in the Trailblazing Women series that TCM ran the past two Octobers.)

    • Like 1
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