sewhite2000

Twin Peaks and The Simpsons are my two favorite shows of all time. I loved very much the first five seasons of Cheers. I was reluctant for a while to get into Seinfeld. It seemed a little too hipster for me, but I understand now how brilliant it was. M*A*S*H and All in the Family. The Wonder Years. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under. I suspect almost none of my favorite shows from childhood hold up. The only two new shows I've watched in the last 10 years are Babylon Berlin and Stranger Things. They would make my list too.

Pretty sure she smokes in at least one scene in Young Man with a Horn.

Here's what I found about Ida Lupino a month or so ago: Ida Lupino was born to a show business family in London in 1918. Her mother took her to a film audition in 1932 when she was 14, and she won the part she was seeking. That picture was Her First Affaire. At the age of 16, she came to Hollywood with bleach blonde hair in 1934 and played a number of small and mostly not-well-remembered parts. About her only noteworthy role was in 1935's Peter Ibbetson at Paramount when she was 17. It wasn't until The Light That Failed (1939), also at Paramount, that she began to consistently get good parts. She got typecast mostly as hard but sympathetic women from the wrong side of the tracks. She spent pretty much all of the decade of the '40s at Warner Bros., defining herself quickly as Hollywood's leading hard-luck dame in films like The Sea Wolf (1940) and High Sierra (1941). Her tough, knowing characters held their own against the biggest leading men of the day - first Ronald Colman in The Light That Failed, and then at Warners, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. She played everything from a traveling saleswoman in Pillow to Post (1945) to a tough nightclub singer in The Man I Love (1946). She became less in demand as approached her 30s - there was a lot of competition for good female roles between up-and-comers and established stars. She opted to leave Warner in 1947, hoping she'd have more success securing good roles as a freelancer. This didn't happen, so she began working as a director, writer and producer. She co-wrote the screenplay for Not Wanted (1949), made at Universal, and when the director Elmer Clifton fell ill, she took over, although he still got sole credit. She joked that as an actress she'd been the poor man's Bette Davis and now as a director she was the poor man's Don Siegel. She continued to write, direct and act, mostly on low-budget melodramas, in the '50s, sometimes doing more than one of those jobs on the same film. She moved to television at the end of the decade and directed episodes of everything from The Untouchables to The Fugitive (both on ABC) for the next 10 years. In the '70s, she returned mostly to acting, making guest appearances on multiple television shows and occasional small parts in movies. Her final film was My Boys are Good Boys, a tiny independent production with Ralph Meeker and Lloyd Nolan in 1978. She died from a stroke while she was battling colon cancer in 1995 at the age of 77. She was married three times. The first, for seven years, was to the actor Louis Hayward. The longest marriage and the one that gave her her only child, a daughter, was for 33 years to the actor Howard Duff (I'm not too familiar with him, but late in his career, he played Dustin Hoffman's attorney in Kramer vs. Kramer), which ended in divorce.

I pity the fool who would do that!

The link to the new Wonder Woman movie was probably unnecessary, but it was probably approved as a good example of synergy by the higher ups of a mega mega mega corporate enterprise. However, I'm weary with male put-down of films that assert female authority of their own destinies. It's just a spotlight of films featuring some real life women who did some amazing things given the constrictions and weight of a male-dominated society pressing down them and oppressing them at every possible opportunity. I don't see that as a bad thing.

I hear that Christopher Nolan is determined to release his new film Tenet to theaters in July. I often find his films a bit insufferably pretentious and deliberately obfuscating of traditional narrative in ways that seem to please him immensely but are of little value to me. Having said that, there's usually something pretty interesting going on his films, so I will probably go see it, if the theaters around here ever actually do reopen.

I provided a mini-bio of Lupino, mostly cribbed from imdb, when I discussed her as a potential SUTS day recipient in the thread about that month that should still be in the first handful of pages, I think. If I can find that particular post again, I'll post it on here.

One of the themes of the month is "Real-Life Wonder Women". Last night was devoted to singers or women in show business, so there was Tex Guinan, Billie Holiday and two movies about Fanny Brice.

That's gotta be Mort Drucker drawing the Drive-In poster, right?

I'm pretty sure Ronald Reagan had gone freelance by about 1950. I think I remember Robert Osborne discussing this when introducing Storm Warning. He'd still turn up in some WB films in the '50s, however, though they tended to place him down in the billing, since they had no need to promote him anymore. He's billed below Ginger Rogers in Storm Warning, below Doris Day in The Winning Team and below Virginia Mayo in She's Working Her Way through College (which just aired). I think Spencer Tracy's final MGM film was Bad Day at Black Rock after a 20-year run at the studio. But he was back to narrate How the West Was Won. Pretty sure James Stewart's MGM contract expired during his WWII service. I recall an anecdote in a Stewart bio I read some years ago, where Stewart had a private meeting in Louis B. Mayer's office after the war and told him he didn't want to be tied down to one studio anymore and, according to Stewart, Mayer threw a tantrum like a little child. Yet somehow, one of his collaborations with Anthony Mann, The Naked Spur, ended up getting made at MGM, and Stewart was in How the West Was Won also.

This word hasn't dropped out of the language entirely, but it was already so out of of use even in my childhood, I had no context or point of reference for it. Yet I would see it in older movies containing some sort of swami or Eastern character purporting to have mystic powers. I always thought they were saying "faker", like the cynical Caucasian characters would think the swami was a fake. fakir [ fuh-keer, fey-ker ]SHOW IPA SEE SYNONYMS FOR fakir ON THESAURUS.COM noun a Muslim or Hindu religious ascetic or mendicant monk commonly considered a wonder-worker. a member of any Islamic religious order; dervish.

Sorry to hear this. I must confess back in the day of my watching the series in its original run, I thought this was Karl Malden, to whom Herd bore an uncanny resemblance.

I didn't stay up that late (so I didn't see the conversation you're talking about), but I presume you mean the sequel Funny Lady, which I think aired after, and not Funny Girl, as MacDowall wasn't in the original. It's the only gay character I specifically remember him playing, but there are probably a lot of his films I haven't seen. This is not the first time TCM has tied in its programming to a movie or some other product presently in release. I think they showed all the previous versions of the A Star is Born movies at the same time the newest version was in the theaters, for example. Looks like they planned this particular tie-in before they new COVID-19 would push back the film's release date.

That's funny. A very similar urban legend sprang up years later that Marilyn Manson was actually Paul from The Wonder Years.

I watched Bedtime Story, the inspiration for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, last year on YouTube, and as I recall, Brando referred to David Niven as "Dad" early on in the movie. Also, in Dr. Zhivago, when the older soldier asks if Lenin will be the new tsar, a younger soldier tells him, "Listen, Daddy, there are no more tsars!" I think it was just a flippant way for younger people to address their elders for a while. Sort of the '60s equivalent of "OK boomer."

The original lyrics back in place for Blazing Saddles. A friend I grew up with couldn't get over the way he swayed and really exaggerated the second syllable of "cocaine". I think it was maybe his favorite moment in move history.

Some get a kick from cocaineI'm sure that ifI took even one sniffThat would bore me terrif-Ically, tooYet, I get a kick out of you This verse was altered for the 1936 movie, but the original lyrics referenced cocaine explicity.

My gosh, I didn't even know imdb had this option. Looks like I'm due for some serious time in front of my laptop (moreso).

I think the censorship code would have distinguished between a plotted murder and killing someone who's about to kill you, like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder, for example.

That opening number was about the most awesome thing in the world as far as I was concerned when I was in seventh grade.

The OP listed only five moments, culled from all three movies.

Yep, guess that one went unpunished on screen!

Can't believe I forgot "Never tell me the odds!" I'd probably have to work that one in somewhere.

I was the only boy in my school who wanted to grow up to be Han Solo and not Luke Skywalker. So, all my favorite moments probably have something to do with Han. I would say in addition to the moments listed above, my favorites would be: 1. Han shoots Greedo (first!). 2. Han and Leia kiss for the first time. 3. Han tries to BS his way through a Death Star emergency check ("We're all fine ... how are you?", immediately wincing at how ridiculous that sounded) 4. The fight scene aboard Jabba the Hutt's barge (which Han doesn't have a ton to do with, but he does kill Boba Fett by accident and helps rescue Lando). 5. Harrison Ford's improvised response to Leia's declaration of love ("I know.") Runner-Ups would be pretty much any interaction between Luke and Han in the first movie ("Do you think a princess and a guy like me ...?" "No!"; or "Great work, kid! ... Don't get cocky!")

As I recall, they certainly do in the 2002 movie version. But again, that was long after the end of the production code.