Film_Fatale
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Posts posted by Film_Fatale
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> {quote:title=rainingviolets21 wrote:}{quote}
> And did anyone mention the most beautiful and lovliest redhead ever to appear on the screen
> ARLENE DAHL ?
Lovely, indeed! Arlene was just honoured Saturday night at the San Francisco Film Noir Festival; the event included screenings of *Wicked as They Come* and *Slightly Scarlet* - the latter one, in SuperScope and Technicolor, of course also features Rhonda Fleming.
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Jean Arthur
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For music-lovin' folks - two great modern musical movies are coming up next Friday as part of the TCM Underground:
*Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains* (1982)
An obsessed young woman launches an all-girl rock band.
Cast: Diane Lane, Ray Winstone, Peter Donat, David Clennon Dir: Lou Adler C-88 mins,
*Eddie and the Cruisers* (1983)
Cast: Tom Berenger, Michael Pare', Joe Pantoliano, Matthew Laurance Dir: Martin Davidson
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Myrna Loy is such a _great_ choice! I just watched the Myrna Loy special (narrated by Kathleen Turner) and she was just such a great leading lady! :x
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> {quote:title=redriver wrote:}{quote}
> A knowledgeable friend of mine calls this one of the very best movies ever made. I like telling this story. It's not something I hear very often.
And if your friend's nose doesn't start to grow when saying that, you know your friend really means it.
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Trailer for *Silverado*
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?o_cid=mediaroomlink&cid=220601
Trailer for *Barbarosa*
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?o_cid=mediaroomlink&cid=220671
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For anyone who may be interested in the original thread on *The Iron Horse*, it can be found here:
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO...
*Dean Jones !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*
(Jan. 25, 1931)
*Tobe Hooper !!!!!!!!!!!!*
(Jan. 25, 1943)
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http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-schneer25-2009jan25,0,1814423.story
*Charles H. Schneer, film producer, dies at 88*
Schneer, the producer of 25 films, was best known for his collaboration on several movies with special effects genius Ray Harryhausen.
By Jon Thurber
January 25, 2009
Charles H. Schneer, a film producer best known for his influential collaboration on several movies with special effects genius Ray Harryhausen, has died. He was 88.
Schneer died Wednesday at a hospice in Boca Raton, Fla., according to his daughter Stacey Schneer Lee. Schneer, who most recently had been living in Delray Beach, Fla., had been ill for several years, his daughter said in a news release.
Schneer was the producer of 25 films, including "Hellcats of the Navy," the only film to star Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis, the future president and first lady.Schneer began his three-decade partnership with Harryhausen in 1955 with the fantasy film "It Came From Beneath the Sea" about a giant octopus that destroys the Golden Gate Bridge. The idea for the film, with stop-motion animation by Harryhausen, was Schneer's.
"Charles and Ray were an ideal couple. They were both enthusiastic about doing fantasy films at a time when fantasy films were not being taken seriously by the studios," Arnold Kunert, Harryhausen's agent and close friend, told The Times. "Schneer, in his wisdom, believed in Ray's talent as a stop-motion animation artist."
According to Harryhausen's website, by the end of the 1950s the two men had made a conscious break away from science fiction and embraced the fertile world of fantasy, myth and fairy tales.
That decision resulted in several memorable films, including "Jason and the Argonauts," (1963), "The 3 Worlds of Gulliver" (1960), "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" (1958), "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974) and "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" (1977). Their last film together was "Clash of the Titans" (1981).
"He functioned as a producer in the best sense of producing," said film critic and historian Leonard Maltin. "Ray is an artist, and creative people like that really need someone to facilitate the business end of things so they can focus on what they do best. That's how their partnership thrived."
But according to Kunert, Schneer was more than just the money man. He was heavily involved in the creative end.
"Charles had a habit of going through the newspaper and clipping out ideas from feature stories about extraterrestrials and unusual phenomena," Kunert said. "He brought the idea for 'Earth vs. the Flying Saucers' to Ray's attention, and Ray came up with the artwork and worked on the story and, of course, created all the visual effects. Charles was a collaborator in many ways."
In the preface to his book "Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life," written with Tony Dalton, Harryhausen said Schneer's enthusiasm for making movies was "unbounded" and called his longtime friend "the unsung hero" of his career in films.
"He would supply the practical element . . . and always knew what would work and what wouldn't," Harryhausen wrote. "Without his help and foresight, much of what we planned together would not have seen the light of day."
Schneer was born May 5, 1920, in Norfolk, Va., but spent some of his youth growing up in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He graduated from Columbia University and started his career at Columbia Pictures. During World War II he produced training films as a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps Photographic Unit stationed on Long Island.
In addition to producing most of Harryhausen's films, Schneer produced the biographical film "I Aim at the Stars," on the life of physicist Wernher von Braun, one of the leading figures in the development of the U.S. space program. He went on to produce the film version of the musical "Half a Sixpence" starring Tommy Steele.
Schneer moved to London in 1960, where he remained for the next 45 years, relocating to Florida in 2005. Besides filmmaking, he chaired the London events committee for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, of which he was an active member.
In addition to his daughter Stacey and another daughter, Lesley Silver, he is survived by his wife of 68 years, Shirley; his sister, Babette Schneer Katz; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Donations in his name may be made to the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Department of Development, Mayo Clinic, 200 1st Street SW, Rochester, MN 55905.
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Unless I'm mistaken about someone, I believe it's at least 6 people from the TCM boards.
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Did anyone else watch *The Big Heat* this morning? B-)
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> {quote:title=joefilmone wrote:}{quote}
> What a cool poster! I'm sure the movie did not match this outrageous sexy vision.
Truth be told, joe, I can't imagine any movie that would quite live up to that poster.
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*Turner Classic Movies tip for Jan. 24, 2009: Witness for the Prosecution*
January 23, 4:12 PM
by Doug Krentzlin, DC Classic Media and Performing Arts Examiner
Marlene Dietrich & Charles Laughton in "Witness for the Prosecution"
?Witness for the Prosecution,? TCM, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009, 8 p.m. (EST)
According to Billy Wilder, the reason he signed on to direct the film version of mystery author Dame Agatha Christie?s courtroom thriller ?Witness for the Prosecution? was he ?wanted to make a Hitchcock picture.? The resulting movie was a commercial and artistic success that Christie considered to be the best film translation of her work.
Set in London, ?Witness for the Prosecution? (1958) stars Charles Laughton as Sir Wilfrid Robarts, a celebrated barrister who agrees to defend American Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) on the charge that he murdered Emily French (Norma Varden), a wealthy old woman he was acquainted with.
Robarts describes Vole as a ?drowning man clutching at a razor blade? not only because of the volume of evidence against his client, but because Vole?s wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich) plans to testify on behalf of the prosecution. As the trial gets underway, it becomes clear that Robarts' only hope of exonerating Vole is to impeach Christine?s testimony by exposing her as a perjurer with ulterior motives of her own.
Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with Harry Kurnitz based on Christie?s hit play (which, in turn, was based on her short story of the same name). The remarkable recreation of the Old Bailey courtroom was the work of Wilder?s favorite art director, Alexandre Trauner.
The first-rate supporting cast includes John Williams and Henry Daniell as members of Robart?s defense team, Torin Thatcher as the lead prosecutor, Una O?Connor as French?s maid Janet and Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Laughton) as Robart?s personal nurse Miss Plimsoll (a role created especially for the film).
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*Turner Classic Movies tip for Jan. 24, 2009: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek*
January 23, 3:59 PM
by Doug Krentzlin, DC Classic Media and Performing Arts Examiner
?The Miracle of Morgan?s Creek,? TCM, Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009, 2:15 a.m. (EST)
Nobody in Hollywood made funnier movies in the 1940s than Preston Sturges and ?The Miracle of Morgan?s Creek? may be his most hilarious film.
The movie?s real-life miracle is that it managed to get past the 1944 censors. ?The Miracle of Morgan?s Creek? tells the story of small-town gal Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) who loves to party with servicemen. After one particularly wild night, she discovers that she is pregnant and has vague memories of marrying someone whose name sounds like ?Ratzywatsky.?
In need of a husband pronto, she sets her sights on local nerd Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) who has always had a crush on her. After Trudy and Homer get in more and more trouble, the film ends with the funniest dues ex machina in the history of the movies. (I won?t give away the ?miracle,? but it appropriately takes place on Christmas Day.)
As usual with Sturges? films, the supporting cast gets the biggest laughs, especially William Demarest (as Trudy?s father, town constable Officer Kockenlocker) who steals the show with a series of exquisitely executed pratfalls.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/22/NSB615D3KR.DTL
*Noir City 7*
G. Allen Johnson
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Arlene Dahl grew up a nice girl in Minneapolis. Her Midwestern hospitality shines through even on the phone from her home in New York, where she has just finished fixing breakfast for her family.
So it's no surprise to learn that in 1956, after years of appearing in musicals ("Three Little Words," with Fred Astaire) and comedies ("The Bride Goes Wild," with Van Johnson), she astonished everyone, including herself, by deliciously playing the vamp in two movies, "Wicked As They Come," in which she plays a ladder-climbing user of men, and "Slightly Scarlet," which RKO's original press book aptly called "a tale of racketeers and redheads" - Dahl was the bad sister of Rhonda Fleming.
"This was meat for any actress. Or in this case, red meat!" Dahl said. "Yes, I had more fun with these two films than making any of the goody-goody pictures I did. ... Rhonda and I made ("Slightly Scarlet") because we wanted to show people we weren't one and the same person. We had red hair, you know. ... We just had a great time together making that film."
Dahl, 80, will be in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage between those films Saturday night at the seventh annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival. The 10-day festival, which plays at the Castro, opens Friday night.
The theme of this year's festival is "newspaper noir" - each film has something to do with the ink-stained media; Friday night's opening night double bill is "Deadline U.S.A." with Humphrey Bogart and "Scandal Sheet" with Broderick Crawford.
That's right up Dahl's alley - for years, beginning during her acting career, she parlayed her renowned good looks into a syndicated beauty column, which she wrote three days a week for years. And she wrote it herself, mind you. No ghostwriter here.
"It was called, 'Let's Be Beautiful,' " Dahl said of the column that was part of the Daily News Syndicate, which sent a woman's page editor to her house for six weeks when she first started writing until she got the hang of it. "The only problem with that was I had just married Lex Barker, and I didn't think a third person in the house would work well, but about that time, he was sent to Africa to film a Tarzan picture ... It was 20 years before I gave it up and started writing books."
Barker was one of her six marriages, the latest being businessman Marc Rosen for the past 24 years. A union with Fernando Lamas produced their son, the actor Lorenzo Lamas, who Dahl says will be at the Castro to check out his mother's films on the big screen.
"You never know what's coming," Dahl said. " 'Slightly Scarlet,' as a matter of fact, has become a classic in France. They run it at the Cinematheque every year.
"Being a redhead, I tried to make all the films in color, because it lent a lot to my persona, I believe. But this is the most fun I had with any role, because I played a kleptomaniac, a nymphomaniac, general pain-in-the-you-know-what to my sister Rhonda, and I had a great time."
Starts Fri. Through Feb. 1. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., S.F., www.noircity.com.
*There's a thread on the SF Film Noir festival in the Gangster & Film Noir forum:*
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http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117999016.html?categoryId=25&cs=1
*Writer Mickell Seltzer dies at 91*
Mickell worked on 'One Million, B.C.,' 'Turnabout'
Mickell Seltzer, writer and wife of producer Walter Seltzer, died Jan. 22 of heart failure in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 91.
After graduating high school, she started her career in the story department at the Hal Roach Studio, where she collaborated on the screenplay for fantasy "One Million, B.C." starring Carole Landis and Victor Mature. Her other screenplay credited included Thorne Smith's "Turnabout" and a trio of other Thorne Smith (Topper) comedies.
She was married in 1938 to publicist-turned-producer Walter Seltzer. She became a writer of celebrity magazine stories, and then worked as a publicist for Warner Bros, working with stars including Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall.
She was active in volunteer work for mental health organizations.
She is survived by her husband of more than 70 years, Walter.
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O'Hara, Carreen - Ann Rutherford in *Gone with the Wind*
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*Big Heat, The*
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Donna Reed
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Michael,
We should do as filmlover suggests, but let me just add that if you are considering upgrading to blu-ray anytime in the near future (1-2 years) you might want to hold on and wait until you can upgrade to the *Godfather* blu-ray set. The difference is totally amazing and you'll be glad you did.
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About Eddy Duchin...
*Musical style*
Playing what later came to be called "sweet" music rather than jazz, Duchin's success opened a new gate for similarly styled, piano-playing sweet bandleaders such as Henry King, Joe Reichman, Nat Brandwynne, Dick Gasparre, Little Jack Little, and particularly Carmen Cavallaro (who acknowledged Duchin's influence) to compete with the large jazz bands for radio time and record sales.
Duchin had no formal music training -- which was said to frustrate his musicians at times -- but he developed a style rooted in classical music that some believe the forerunner of Liberace's ornate, gaudy approach. Still, there were understatements in Duchin's music that were beyond Liberace's self-conscious glitz. By no means was Duchin a perfect pianist, but he was easy to listen to without being rote or entirely predictable. He was a pleasing stage presence whose favourite technique was to play his piano cross-handed, using only one finger on the lower hand, and he was respectful to his audiences and to his classical influences.
*Notoriety*
Duchin's 1938 release of the Louis Armstrong song "Ol' Man Mose" (Brunswick Records 8155) with vocal by Patricia Norman caused a minor scandal at the time with the lyric "bucket" being heard as "**** it." Some listeners analyze the recording and conclude that there is no vulgarism uttered, while others are convinced that Norman does use the f-word.
The "scandalous" lyrics caused the record to zoom to #2 on the Billboard charts, resulting in sales of 170,000 copies when sales of 20,000 were considered a blockbuster. The song was banned after its release in Great Britain. The notorious number can be heard on a British novelty CD, "Beat the Band to the Bar."
*Legacy*
Columbia Pictures, having enjoyed success with musical biographies, mounted a feature film based on the bandleader's life. The Eddy Duchin Story (1956) is a fictionalized tearjerker, with Tyrone Power in the title role. The film did well in theaters, and was well enough known to be referenced in one of Columbia's Three Stooges shorts: the Stooges' spaceship is about to crash when Joe Besser yelps, "I don't want to die! I can't die! I haven't seen The Eddy Duchin Story yet!"
An anthology of some of Duchin's best recordings, Dancing with Duchin, was released in 2002.
Perhaps Duchin's strongest legacy, however, is his only child. Peter Duchin (b. 1937), was the product of his first marriage (to Marjorie Oelrichs) and 14 years old when his father died, but the boy began a musical education with his father and eventually studied formally at Yale. In time, he became an orchestra-leading pianist in his own right, as well as the author of a series of mystery novels, a presence in high society (into which his mother had been born), and a frequent entertainer (as well as musical director for U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson's inauguration) at the White House and on television. In his 1996 memoir Ghost of a Chance, Peter Duchin wrote about the wholesale fictionalization in The Eddy Duchin Story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_Duchin
*Eddy Duchin Orchestra - Lovely To Look At (1935)*
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Coming up this Sunday, Jan. 25, at 8am ET:
*Show Boat* (1951)
Riverboat entertainers find love, laughs and hardships as they sail along "Old Man River."
Cast: Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown Dir: George Sidney C-108 mins, TV-G
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Frank Sinatra
Noir City 7 - San Francisco Film Noir Festival
in Film Noir--Gangster
Posted