LsDoorMat
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Posts posted by LsDoorMat
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I think there should only be 5 nominees. The time in which there were more than five was a time when films were not in competition with television and thus there were many more A-list films from which to choose. That is not the case today.
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I just watched "The Ballad of Josie" (1967) on the Encore Western Channel. Yikes! It's like a bad episode of Bonanza without Dan Blocker and with Doris Day. It's basically about a Wyoming woman who finds herself minus a husband (Doris Day) who shocks the men of the town by deciding to herd sheep instead of cows and by wearing (OH THE HORROR!) mens' pants!!! You know, I haven't seen this since I was twelve and I actually remembered it fondly until I saw it today. George Kennedy plays the cattle ranch owning buffoonish bully who wants Josie's sheep dead. Peter Graves is the love interest who threatens to do endearing things like spank Josie if she doesn't shut up. Andy Devine is still playing Andy Devine 30 years later. William Talman, after so many years of losing to Perry Mason, plays a district attorney who is trying to get Wyoming statehood. In the end, the lesson seems to be "who needs the vote anyways ladies, and wear a dress if you want a man!" Oh, the sexism. I guess I just didn't notice this in 1970.
This is the problem with so many 60s films. They have one foot in the 50s, one foot in the 70s, and nothing works.
This thing might just reach a 6/10 mainly because of its star power, even if those stars are being badly used.
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22 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Three Godfathers (1936) - Fifth version of the oft-filmed western, from MGM, producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and director Richard Boleslawski. A trio of bank robbers, Bob (Chester Morris), Gus (Walter Brennan) and Doc (Lewis Stone), head into the desert after a daring hold-up. They discover a wagon containing a dying woman with an infant child. They decide to take the baby with them to the next town, only to face a number of set-backs and problems that puts all of their lives in danger. Will these seemingly heartless men change their ways in order to save the child? Also featuring Irene Hervey, Sidney Toler, Dorothy Tree, Roger Imhof, Willard Robertson, Robert Livingston, John Sheehan, Leonid Kinskey, Victor Potel, and Jean Kircher as the baby.
The first film of this story was a short in 1915, while the most famous today is likely the 1948 version with John Wayne in the lead. I've seen that version, but I liked this one more. Morris may not be Wayne in the screen charisma department, but he's more believable as a morally conflicted semi-bad guy. I also really liked Brennan as the simple but affable Gus, and Stone as the tubercular intellectual Doc. (7/10)
Source: TCM.
I guess I'll always prefer the 1930 version from Universal starring Charles Bickford. It's precode so there are some elements there that the 36 and 48 version just couldn't have in them. Bickford's description of making the film was most hilarious. He claimed that he was stuck with bad dialogue, silent actors who did not know how to behave in talkies, and most of all a "nose picking Golem" for a director - William Wyler. He claimed that if not for him - Charles Bickford - the film would have been a disaster because he single-handedly rewrote the script, taught the actors how to act, and redirected the film since Wyler could not direct as well as he - Charles Bickford - could. I always wondered why Wyler, who was still alive and well in 1966, did not sue Bickford for what he said. Maybe Wyler figured his twelve Academy Award nominations as best director with three wins among those spoke for themselves.
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A girl I knew in high school was an extra in "Logan's Run". She was worried because it was right before senior year and she was in drama club competitions. She was concerned she might be ruled ineligible because technically, by taking that bit part, she became a professional actress. Logan's Run was filmed partly in what is now Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, what was supposed to be a self-contained industrial-residential complex that never reallly took off.
I also tutored Jerry Hall - now Rupert Murdock's wife- in French back in Mesquite,Tx. She has appeared in a few movies since then. She used to lie about her age, gradually pushing her birth year from 1955 to as recent as 1963. In school she was not that bright. When I saw her birth year pushed to 1963 I said to myself - No wonder she had such a hard time with high school French! She was only 10! She pretty much stopped lying about her age after she married Rupert Murdock. After all, does it really matter if you are 63 or 56 if your husband is almost 90???
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Miss Dove in "Good Morning Miss Dove". She had her own life ruined by deciding to cover up the misdeeds of her own father, because she knew those misdeeds did not define who he was as a person. Then years later she turns around and torpedoes Chuck Conners' character's chance at happiness because of a misdeed of his fiancee because "wrong is wrong". Huh?? And how does she turn instantly from a normal young woman into a humorless prig - in and out of the classroom - the minute she becomes a schoolteacher? Bring on the pitchfork indeed.
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On 1/11/2018 at 11:30 PM, ChristineHoard said:
If TCM isn't going to run classic movies that don't have racism or racial stereotypes, we're going to see fewer movies and we'll really see some overplayed films. We can learn from our film history and how it reflects our real history.
I second and third this opinion. These films were made (usually) prior to 1960, not last week. And you can't understand where you are going if you don't understand where you have been. You've also got films like "The Best of Everything", made in 1959, where female college graduates of the ivy league start out...in the typing pool??? As a woman that just shows me how far we've come. I'd never want to not show these films just because they are anti-feminist. That's a sentiment that didn't even exist until the 1960s and really didn't catch on in American society at large until the 1980s.
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Underplayed:
Alias French Gertie
Dancing Sweeties
Golden Dawn
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"Once a Thief" (1950) - on yesterday 1/9. What a film! When I sit through a B movie this is the kind of thing I want to see! It starts out something like "My Friend Irma" in rom-com territory then by the end of the film has segueyed darkly into Duel in the Sun with Ladies They Talk About and a touch of Asphalt Jungle along the way. Very interesting for something made on the cheap AND it was on in prime time.
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2 hours ago, LawrenceA said:
Isle of Fury (1936) - Tropical programmer from Warner Brothers and director Frank McDonald. Val Stevens (Humphrey Bogart) and Lucille Gordon (Margaret Lindsay) are getting married on the small Pacific island where they live when a ship crashes off-shore during a storm. One of the rescued sailors is Eric Blake (Donald Woods) a man with a secret agenda that threatens the newlyweds' happiness. Also featuring E.E. Clive, Paul Graetz, Gordon Hart, George Regas, Sidney Bracey, and Tetsu Komai.
This early starring role for Bogart is cheap, silly, and a little boring. He also looks goofy with his pencil mustache. The "highlight" of the film is a poorly staged underwater battle with a giant octopus. (5/10)
Source: TCM.
Yes, and Margaret Lindsay spends all of her time looking at her new groom (Bogie) like she just spent all of her money on a house she just doesn't like. In what universe would a woman prefer the bland Donald Woods to Bogie? I guess to make it halfway believable they had to give Bogart that ridiculous moustache.
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On 1/2/2018 at 12:14 PM, lavenderblue19 said:
On 12/31/2017 at 10:08 AM, Calvinnme said:
I believe that the woman is a saloon keeper and she is actively looking for her sister. The man is a preacher and is always calling on the saloon owning woman to repent. I can't remember why she eventually shoots the preacher, but afterwards she learns he is married to the sister for whom she has been searching. I've asked this question before on this forum, but nobody ever answered the original question. Back in the days before paid programming, when TV stations would air westerns in the afternoons and on weekends, I saw this one several times. But it has seemingly disappeared off of the face of the earth.
Calvinnme- Check this film out. Although the description is slightly different, Hellfire a 1949 Republic film has some of the plot points you've mentioned. There's a preacher, there's a woman looking for her sister.she's a singer/dancer in a saloon. Read the whole description on TCM's database, be patient at first it may not sound like the film but as you read you might recognize it. (hope so)*Then Google - The Horn Spot: Film Review: Hellfire (1949)
Thanks so much! This IS the film. I could vaguely remember the female outlaw's appearance but Marie Windsor is definitely the actress! Mystery solved. Now why isn't this thing on DVD or streaming or youtube or something??
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On 1/2/2018 at 2:40 PM, jamesjazzguitar said:
I assume that scene was in November and that the wedding was talking place in late February \ early March.
Thus NO mistake.
Nope. The wedding is supposed to be at Christmas, and when father and daughter are talking they are saying the wedding is three months away. There IS a mistake. When Maureen O'Sullivan's character goes looking for Nick Charles about her father's disappearance it is right before Christmas. She is worried because he said he would be back by then.
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An article in Forbes as to why the new Star Wars film is a flop in China.
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The Brute Man (7/10) 1946
NOTE: I actually saw this a week ago, but just now had time to post here.
This was a B film made by Universal but sold to poverty row outfit PRC for distribution, and there are no big names here and no big budget, but it is very poignant for several reasons, which I will get into later.
This is basically a 20th century Frankenstein story. Someone is going around murdering people with his bare hands - "The Creeper" as he is called by the newspapers and the police. The audience sees the murderer from the beginning, and none of the murders seem premeditated. It is initially a deformed man with monstrous strength apparently visiting people he knew before, and when they become afraid or try to scream or run, he kills them in anger.
The police almost catch "The Creeper" after the second murder, but he climbs up a fire escape and into the apartment window of a girl playing a piano. The girl seems unafraid of him and when she asks him if he is in trouble followed by knocking on her door, she hides the man and tells the police that she has seen nor heard anything strange. However, the police never identified themselves, and later you can hear running, yelling, and shooting nearby. If The Creeper is in her apartment who exactly are the police shooting at? But I digress. The Creeper learns the girl is blind, cannot see his ugliness and is therefore friendly, plus she didn't know it was the police at the door, because they never said who they were. Like the Frankenstein monster, in a blind person The Creeper has found a friend.
Meanwhile the police have connected the first two victims and go to visit two people who were connected to them 15 years before in college and who are now married to each other and doing well for themselves. They tell a tale of a popular athlete, Hal Moffat, who was tutored in chemistry by the husband, but when Hal got a little too friendly with his girl - now his wife - the tutor gave the jock the wrong answers to questions for an oral exam the next day. As a result, Hal failed the oral test and was given a long complicated chemistry experiment to do as remedial makeup work. Always having a bad temper, and realizing he had been deliberately tricked, Hal threw the test tubes to the ground, but the liquid splashed on his face. In the hospital, the doctor told his friends that Hal's features would be deformed, and that even his glands, which effect how features are formed and how bones grow, would be effected.
So we have a blind girl who needs money for an operation to restore her sight, a bitter homicidal man who knows that the couple who betrayed him years ago are doing well financially, and who also tends to take violent revenge on anybody who crosses him, and the police who now know who the murderer is, they just have no idea how and where he is living and what he looks like. How will all of this work out? Watch and find out.
The poignant part of this is how art so imitated the life of the man who plays "The Creeper", Rondo Hatton. Mr. Hatton was also a popular athlete during high school who was injured by poison gas during his service in WWI. That chemical exposure later caused acromegaly, a slowly progressive deforming of bones in the head, hands and feet, and internal and external soft tissues. The deformity, which was progressive, broke up his first marriage. He did, however, marry a second time. So it may be that the low imdb rating (3.8) is from people who do not like the fact that Universal, who had a contract with Mr. Hatton, used his deformity to exploit him in such roles. However, I think his performance was pretty good. After all, there is no time for real dramatic depth in these old B films. I'd recommend it as a well done post war (WWII) horror film.
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On 1/4/2018 at 4:49 PM, marcar said:
This may be a cop out, but I have seen some pretty bad movies just because Michael Caine was in them. He elevates whatever movie he's in, even if it is terrible. Examples: Gambit, Deadfall, The Magus, X, Y and Zee, The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Jaws, the Revenge, Blood and Wine, The Prestige, Insterstellar, Now You See Me 2...you get the picture. Decade after decade he keeps it real.
I quite agree. In the late 80s Michael Caine was in a slew of bad movies and I would actually buy a ticket and watch because I knew I could count on a good performance from him. An exception in that time period would be "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" which was hilarious.
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James Gleason
He adds a little "get wise to yourself" to every film I've seen him in.
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I think I prefer "Love Affair" to "Affair to Remember". One thing that has always bugged me about Affair was how nosey all of the passengers were on the boat about Grant and Kerr being seen together. What is the big deal anyway? Cary Grant's character is renowned for being a playboy! How did all of these post WWII nouveau riche (and nouveau middle class) passengers think he got that reputation?
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On 1/5/2018 at 2:21 AM, hamradio said:
While execs want viewers to know it’s not a movie channel, they’ll draw from the heritage of Paramount Pictures for a halo effect, using cinematic tools of the trade for the net’s promotion, complete with fonts and camera angles familiar to film buffs.
I'm with TB on this one. This is so much corporate-speak claptrap. You are not going to see Martin and Lewis on this channel, and if a Paramount film does pop up it will be considered a moldy oldie if it was made before 2000.
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On 1/6/2018 at 1:45 PM, NipkowDisc said:
won't watch it. just too unpleasant for me when them two murder the old ladies. and that poor little child and her mother at the end. this is one of the most disturbing films I ever saw. I can sit through In Cold Blood but not this.
You know, films about what was rare in the 40s - the serial killer with nothing against his victims - don't bother me. I guess because I know it was so rare back then. After reading about the Wichita Massacre of 2000, I guess no classic era film about serial killers will ever bother me again. If you don't know what that is and this film bothers you, read about that and you'll never feel safe again. I think it was one of the last cases Antonin Scalia heard and ruled on. The Kansas Supreme court always finds some reason to overturn every death penalty that technically has nothing to do with their objection to the death penalty. It went to the Supreme Court, and after Scalia enumerated the killers' crimes, it seemed that even the defense attorneys were embarrassed to be there. And no I'm not a big Scalia fan, but in this case he was right. And the killers still sit on death row. Maybe they'll never be executed, but at least nobody was ever paroled from death row, and that's OK by me.
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The actual Martha Beck was a morbidly obese woman - she had been so her whole life - so much so that she had trouble getting a job as a nurse, her field of training. She was promiscuous - maybe that was the only way she could get any male attention. However, she wound up pregnant twice from casual affairs, and so distraught was one of the fathers at the thought of marrying Martha that he attempted suicide. The father of the second child stayed married to her only long enough to establish the child's legitimacy, and then left skid marks on his way out of town.
Ray Fernandez was born in Hawaii of Spanish descent, married, had four children, served in WWII, and led an unremarkable life until the steel hatch of a ship landed on his head and damaged his frontal lobe. At this point, people who knew him say he changed completely - no wonder. He developed a complete lack of impulse control, abandoned his family, and embarked upon a career of romancing and fleecing lonely women. There is even some evidence that he killed at least one of his marks prior to ever meeting Martha. That's the true story of both of our main characters.
So initially planning to fleece Martha, Ray and Martha instead go on the road and fleece other women, with Martha abandoning her two children in the process.
The actual end to their crime spree came when the family of one of the victims became suspicious and called the police. Martha killed the child - as the movie showed - but seemed to be unaffected by her action and she and Ray were caught returning from the movies after the double murder, no contrite Martha being involved in their actual apprehension.
Why I am going to great lengths to tell the actual story? Because the actual truth is not only mitigating on Ray's behalf, but somewhat damning on Martha's. You can tell that the film wants to paint Martha as one of Ray's victims too, and she was to the point that always being obese - and we know how kind children are to other fat children - and being rejected so as an adult, does something to people sometimes for their whole lives. Thus she does not abandon her own children -there aren't any - nor is she able to recover from killing a child in the film. To tell Ray's true story is to humanize this guy since the brain damage he suffered is probably almost completely responsible for his actions and was not medically understood when these crimes happened in the 1940's.
On the technical side, Criterion really cleaned up on the sound on this one. As recently the 1990s the sound was so bad it was almost impossible to sit through the film.
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5 hours ago, EricJ said:
For thirty years, I've been pointing out the mistake most people make due to the movie opening in theaters within a month of the Village People train-wreck "Can't Stop the Music", and most people to this day who haven't seen either literally can't tell the two movies apart by title. (The fact that end-of-summer promotional theatrical re-releases would show the two movies together in a double-feature didn't help the issue any either.) The Razzie awards dogpiled on both movies for the cheap disco-bashing joke--even though there's no actual disco music in "Xanadu"--and testament to the confusion since, quick, which one won Worst Picture of 1980?
Don't Stop the Music won the Razzie. I think it might have been the very first Razzie worst picture award.
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I really liked Mr. Arliss. I've seen all of the films mentioned above except "The Tunnel". If you want Arliss at his best you have to see "The Working Man". It doesn't pop up on TCM that often. I think the last time I saw it was during Summer Under the Stars month as part of Bette Davis' day.
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22 hours ago, MovieCollectorOH said:
Have you ruled this out?
No, that isn't it. It was almost certainly made later than 1935 and the owner of the gambing house/saloon was a woman, not a man. The two leads are basically the male preacher and female saloonkeeper. I think that he knows they are related through his wife, but I know that she does not until AFTER she shoots him.
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I can remember seeing her in "Moss Rose" where she plays the lead and in "The Late George Apley" where she had a supporting role. The first film was a good performance in a better than average film, the second was in a terrific film, and it is hard to judge her performance because Ronald Colman really is the whole show. She will probably always be remembered for "Gun Crazy", though.
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47 minutes ago, speedracer5 said:
Lol. I remember having to watch this movie in my 10th grade (1999-2000) American Government class. Haven’t seen it since.
What on earth has "The American President" got to do with American government class??? But then we had to watch the 1935 version of "Les Miserables" in first year high school French class (1972-1973) so I am one to talk. I can't remember what the reason was that the French teacher gave for that one.
That Obscure Object of Desire
in General Discussions
Posted
I've got a bunch of obscure ones I want to see:
Coffee Tea or Me (1973) - This thing was a time capsule by the time of the VCR, never on DVD.
Never Steal Anything Small (1959) - Stars James Cagney
This Earth is Mine (1959) A Rock Hudson film I saw on TV years ago. Seems to have disappeared from the planet.
Once More My Darling (1949) - Robert Montgomery and Ann Blythe
I Want a Divorce (1940) - Dick Powell and Joan Blondell, who did get divorced 4 years later.
Tin Pan Alley (1940) - Fox musical with Alice Faye and John Payne which gets no airtime on the lame FX Retro.