Film_Fatale

*Elephant Man*

Ullman, Tracey

> {quote:title=Bronxgirl48 wrote:}{quote} > By the by, I'm getting the apartment painted next weekend. > > I wound up finally picking not shades of green or what I thought would be "nautical" blues (they invariably had lavender tints unfortunately) but what is named -- get this -- "Belgian Waffle" -- a mellow, light amber-honey (Forever Amber!) that I hope will impart antiqueness, coziness, understated class, and will also in its own way compliment my coastal New England-ish decor. > > I just hope I'm not getting maple syrup and butter over the walls as well. Well, that does it. I'm having some waffles for breakfast.

> {quote:title=metsfan wrote:}{quote} > Yes Barb, it was an experience I'll never forget. Too bad I didn't have a mask of the head of Anubis or the sacred spells to bring Imhotep back from the dead. Imagine the wonderful architecture he would have created in modern times or even a cure for certain illnesses. Thanks again! I plan to extract more brains and display the canopic jars at home for visitors to open. > > How about this cake? > Save me an ear.

> {quote:title=ILoveRayMilland wrote:}{quote} > Whoa! "Guys And Dolls" is AMAZING! I love it! It is definitely classic! Might be a bit of an acquired taste, I happen to like it just fine but I've heard a lot of people who are totally dismissive about it.

Tod Browning directed *Dracula* starring Bela Lugosi

The documentary on the *Hondo* DVD has some nice anecdotes about what it was like shooting the movie - which was filmed in Chihuahua, M?xico in the middle of summer, with temperatures usually well above 100 degrees. Not to mention that they were filming in 3-D, and the cameras they had to carry around were HUGE.

I watched *World War II: When Lions Roared* today; strictly speaking it shouldn't be included when discussing war films, because it was made for TV. However, it's also one of the most compelling presentations about the relationships between FDR, Churchill and Stalin that I've ever seen. Michael Caine is astonishingly good as Stalin, to my ear at least he got the Russian accent just right. John Lithgow is very good as FDR (apparently with only minor makeup in the nose) and Bob Hoskins makes a memorably cranky Winston Churchill.

I was watching *Hondo* earlier today; that's one 3-D movie that even when originally released, hardly anybody got to watch in 3-D. From what the documentary in the bonus features says, it played for 1 week in 3-D in some major cities and then all 3-D copies got pulled, and the movie was re-issued in 2-D.

> {quote:title=Bronxgirl48 wrote:}{quote} > I don't know about laughing with him IRL; remember that documentary, I think it was called Wild Man Blues, where he's travelling through Europe with his jazz band? This guy is crawling with neuroses, and seemed depressed most of the time. > > He's got a lot of money, though. Honestly, I think it's just an act. He acts that way when he's in front of the camera, even if it's a documentary crew. From what I've read, he really isn't like that most of the time.

> {quote:title=hlywdkjk wrote:}{quote} > What _was_ different this year was TCM setting aside the daytime hours to bring in Steven Bochco to co-host with Robert Osborne and present some exceptional courtroom dramas Ah, so that's who the guy was? I'm surprised I hadn't seen any promos ahead of time.

The NYT dedicates its Tuesday DVD column to *Boomerang!* and the other noirs released this week by Fox Video: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/movies/homevideo/02dvds.html September 2, 2008 New DVDs *On the Margins of Noir* By DAVE KEHR FOX FILM NOIR Film noir is a notoriously difficult concept to define, and after years of futile attempts I?ve come to rely on the time-honored method of the Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: I know it when I see it, as he so succinctly observed in regard to pornography. Not that I?m complaining, but I didn?t see much of it in the three new titles that, as of Tuesday, have been added to the Fox Film Noir collection: Archie Mayo?s ?Moontide? (1942), Elia Kazan?s ?Boomerang!? (1947) and Jean Negulesco?s ?Road House? (1948). Worthwhile, each and every one, but all the movies exist on the margins of noir, sharing some of its characteristics but not quite meeting all the requirements. ?Moontide,? the earliest film in the new batch, provides an illuminating link to one of the frequently overlooked sources of noir: the movement known as ?poetic realism,? which flourished in France from the mid-1930s until the onslaught of war. (It survived in a cramped, embittered form right through the German occupation.) ?Moontide? represented the Hollywood debut of Jean Gabin, perhaps France?s most popular star of the period, thanks largely to his association with poetic realist films. Among Gabin?s movies ? all successes in the art houses of America ? were Marcel Carn??s ?Jour Se L?ve? (1939); Jean Gr?millon?s ?Remorques? (1941); Julien Duvivier?s ?P?p? le Moko? (1937); and of course Jean Renoir?s ?Grande Illusion,? which opened at the Filmarte theater in New York on Sept. 12, 1938, and played for an extraordinary six months. At the beginning of the war Fox signed both Renoir and Gabin to contracts, and it was expected that Renoir would direct Gabin?s first Hollywood film. Instead, the job initially went to another European refugee in residence at Fox, the Austrian-born filmmaker Fritz Lang. He developed the screenplay with the novelist John O?Hara and began shooting with the cinematographer Lucien Ballard. In ?Moontide? a rootless, hard-drinking French sailor, Bobo (Gabin), achieves a tentative domesticity operating a bait shack with Anna (Ida Lupino), a waif he has rescued from a suicide attempt. The story is so much in the foggy, claustrophobic, doom-laden spirit of poetic realism that at times it seems almost a parody of it. Fate is present in the form of Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), a blackmailer with knowledge of a murder that Bobo might have committed. A kindlier metaphysical force is represented by Claude Rains, playing a waterfront philosopher with the unfortunate name Nutsy. What Lang might have forged of this we will never know. After fighting with studio executives over the script, he was replaced by the ambitious but stylistically inert Archie Mayo (?The Petrified Forest?). Mayo stripped both poetry and realism from the film?s visual presentation, leaving his cast to bob around in what is too obviously the studio tank. Gabin, clearly uncomfortable with English, seems to be speaking an octave above his usual darkly rumbling register, and his character never seems more than a standard-issue abstraction: the fallen angel in search of romantic redemption, here provided by a cherubic Lupino. ?Boomerang!? also owes its existence to a European model. Produced by Louis de Rochemont, the man behind the popular documentary series ?The March of Time,? the film was among the first Hollywood productions to be influenced by Italian neo-realism. Introduced to American audiences by Roberto Rossellini?s ?Open City,? which opened in New York a year before ?Boomerang!? was released, the neo-realist style tried to seize the authenticity of the moment by abandoning the studios for the streets. De Rochemont and his young director ? Elia Kazan was then only on his third film, and ?Boomerang!? is the first that really bears the mark of his personality ? tried to capture the same quality by shooting this true-crime story on location, in Stamford, Conn., using the mobile technology of the newsreels. Updating a case that had taken place in Bridgeport in 1924, ?Boomerang!? casts Dana Andrews as a courageous district attorney who risks his career by refusing to prosecute a suspect (Arthur Kennedy) he believes to be innocent of the charge against him: the murder of a local priest. The wrong man, of course, is a classic noir theme, but ?Boomerang!? goes out of its way to dispel the genre?s pervasive sense of paranoia. All it takes, the film seems to suggest, is one good man to stand up, and the shadows will all be dispersed. Kazan takes things a step further: although the real-life killer was never captured, the film points to a hollow-eyed neighborhood creep as the true murderer, providing a reassuring closure. In the years between ?Moontide? and ?Road House? Lupino matures from an overage ing?nue into a dramatic performer of real presence and power. In ?Road House? she plays Lily Stevens, a Chicago lounge singer with no voice, as she bluntly admits, but plenty of attitude. Her signature song is ?One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),? which, when she talk-sings it in the rural nightclub-****-bowling alley owned by the simmeringly psychotic Jefty (Richard Widmark), leaves the locals silent and slack-jawed: disillusionment on this scale is something they?ve never seen before. Ably directed by Negulesco as a thatch-work of chiaroscuro lighting and strongly angled set design, ?Road House? was an important step on Lupino?s way toward taking charge of her career, as a producer and highly talented director in her own right. It was Lupino who found the story and commissioned a script from the writers Margaret Gruen and Oscar Saul, and sold it to Fox, along with her services as a star. And she is magnificent, dredging up decades of bitterness and resignation. (Her native English accent had long since disappeared, replaced by a self-created abstraction of Eastern urban inflections.) But again, after a promising start, the film veers into unconvincing romantic conventions, introducing the insufferably pure figure of Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), Jefty?s brawny best friend and rival for Lily?s affections. The denouement, which involves another trip to the studio tank, is forgettable. Yet ?Road House? offers at least one indelible image: the row of cigarette burns that Lily leaves behind on the lid of her piano, the blackened grooves like hash marks recording the days served of an emotional life sentence. (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, $14.98 each, not rated)

In case anyone's interested, here's a link to the Variety review of *Burn After Reading*: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117938083.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

> {quote:title=clore wrote:}{quote} > Did you watch it and if so, how was the print quality? Print quality wasn't bad - about on par with many TCM pre-codes.

> {quote:title=MissGoddess wrote:}{quote} > Monseigneur Pouty Pirate: I do believe you are in need of a visit from Miss Mayo to put that > frown upside down. > > I do believe Ms. Mayo should do the trick

*Fury* is one of the best of Tracy's 30's pictures. Great and unforgettable.

Let's hope everyone will be OK. And that someday there will be a serious effort to rebuild New Orleans!

I missed it last time but plan to watch or record on the 20th. B-)

> {quote:title=Bronxgirl48 wrote:}{quote} > I don't why any woman would stay with Woody Allen except to advance their career or personal agenda. Maybe because he makes her laugh?

> {quote:title=scsu1975 wrote:}{quote} > Elmer - Homer .. oh well, they both end in "er." I do remember the part about it being filmed in Stamford. Close enough for me!

> {quote:title=RetroJune52 wrote:}{quote} > can someone please help me ... i'm trying to find a few June Allyson movies on DVD or VHS and don't know how to get them...can anyone help me out? > > I'm looking for > *The Girl in White ------want this one the most!!!!!!!!!!!!!* > > *Two girls and a Sailor* > *The sailortakes a wife* None of the movies are available on DVD but *Two Girls and a Sailor* was released on VHS. Since these are MGM titles, there's a good chance they'll be on the TCM schedule at some point and you can just watch/record them.

Listening to the audio commentary now. Wouldn't have recognized Arthur Miller (who makes a cameo here) if the commentators hadn't pointed him out.

> {quote:title=MissGoddess wrote:}{quote} > A Streetcar Named Desire > Do you know if this is a colorized photo?

John Hodiak was in *Lifeboat* with Tallulah Bankhead

> {quote:title=MissGoddess wrote:}{quote} > With one of their Siamese cats > > What lovely cats they had! :x