sewhite2000

It was such a small part of his overall career, I guess the movie decided to ignore it. Seems like they might have thrown in a shot or two of him on a movie set as part of a montage sequence, though. The first I ever got any inkling of it was, I think, his "Hurt" video, which included a few brief clips of at least one of his movies, all dolled up in Western gunfighter apparel. I remember at the time thinking, wow, he must have made some kind of really early music video! The idea that he'd been in a full-length theatrical film never occurred to me at the time.

I know I've seen both, but only the original version for a very long time now, so I've probably forgotten most of the differences. The scenes of Dreyfuss losing his mind, ultimately driving his family into leaving him, are reduced considerably in the Special Edition, I think. Spielberg, I think, decided he'd put in too much of that in a film where he more wanted to inspire wonder than bum everybody out. The big selling point was Dreyfuss actually inside the alien ship at the end, about which I remember almost nothing. Just a lot of bright lights, as I recall. And maybe there's one more scene of Truffaut and his team in the Special Edition. Oh, well, I'm sure all the diferences are listed online somewhere. I should probably stop guessing about stuff I barely remember.

I love movies where big jazz stars just happen to be at the local nightclub, and it's not treated as any kind of special occurrence. There's a potential day for a Programming Challenge lineup. I'll just throw that out for free! Gene got around, I guess. He also happens to be at that nightclub Barbara Stanwyck is performing at in Ball of Fire. And don't get me started on the all-star lineup at that club Mickey Rooney works at in The Strip. The town in Till the End of Time appears to be much smaller than Boone City. There is a bar all our protagonists seem to keep going to, and an avuncular owner something like Hoagy Carmichael who also won't serve hard liquor to the barely legal (but doesn't play the piano), but the only music there is on the jukebox.

There's no listing on MovieCollectorOH's database for the Special Edition, although I'm not entirely certain it would be considered a separate entity.

Just Sun Records! Maybe you're saying that because that's what the Lovin' Spoonful called them? But, unless I'm really missing something, that should read, "yellow Sun Records" with a lowercase "y", merely denoting the color of the records, not part of the company name. That song also screws up the city, because Sun Records was in Memphis, not Nashville. Good song, otherwise, though.

So, I watched Till the End of Time last night for the first time ever, and it's probably impossible for any longtime TCM viewer to watch without comparisons to The Best Years of Our Lives arising. They were both released in 1946. They were both released by RKO. They're both about three World War II veterans who have just been or are just about to be discharged in the opening scenes and are returning home to lives they barely remember and maybe don't comfortably fit into anymore. In both films, one of the three veterans has lost two extremities (hands in Best Years, legs in Time). Niven Busch, who wrote the novel on which Time is based, was married to Teresa Wright, one of the stars of Best Years. The difference between the two movies, of course, is one of them got nominated for a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, got called by Bette Davis the best film of all time and gets to appear on TCM probably 10 times as often as the other. So, I'm curious what my fellow posters who've also seen Time think about it and how it stands up having to (probably unfairly) compete with Best Years, then and now. Best Years certainly has more impressive casting across the board, and it's interesting to note that two of its three protagonists are older-than-normal military personnel, as represented by Frederic March and Dana Andrews. All three protagonists in Time are supposed to be around the same age as Harold Russell's Homer in Best Years, very young men who hadn't started to make a life for themselves apart from their parents when they were called to duty.

Of course there was an original theatrical release in 1977 and the Special Edition from 1980, which deleted some scenes from the original and replaced them with some previously unreleased scenes. My understanding is TCM has only ever shown the 1977 original. Any scenes you remember that they're not showing are probably from the Special Edition.

Looks like Johnny Cash did quite a bit of TV work, and while theoretically some of those TV movies could end up on TCM - who will show a TV movie once in a blue moon - I'm only counting four theatrical films that he ever did. And, according to MovieCollectorOH's database, only one of those four films has ever aired on TCM, Five Minutes to Live, which last aired in October, 2014, almost five years ago, as Brrcold indicated.

I saw the Ford at Fox box set at Half Price Books tonight for $70 and am thinking about getting it. It's 24 films Ford directed at the studio between 1924 and 1952, so from both the William Fox and the Darryl Zanuck eras. Plus an alternate version of The Iron Horse (1924) released in the UK only and the documentary about Ford's early career Becoming John Ford. There are some biggies on here: Judge Priest, The Grapes of Wrath, Drums Along the Mohawk, How Green Was My Valley, Young Mr. Lincoln and Wee Willie Winkie, plus lesser-known films in all sorts of genres. I found some online reviews and articles from when this set was originally released in 2007, and the list price then was $300! Holy crap. In retrospect, it seems this was pretty much the end of these massive box sets. It was just before the 2008 stock market crash, and suddenly people didn't have so much discretionary income. Also, the streaming era was in its infancy. I don't know that there's really been any DVD box set of this scope since then. Fox and TCM worked out some kind of cross-promotional agreement where a number of these films were shown on TCM, and I remember watching a few of them back in '07. The original price listing seems pretty insane in hindsight. But I could purchase it now for less than $3/movie. Sounds pretty good ... right?

Oddly, probably his biggest moment of fame:

I have a friend who's a fellow classic movie buff. Back in college, he and a guy we both went to high school with who'd probably never seen a movie made before 1980 in his life went to see a revival of Lawrence of Arabia (possibly it was the 30th anniversary). My friend was very excited about this. After Lawrence took Akaba and came back to Cairo with his young charge, and all his superiors and Claude Rains decide they need to send him back, they walk off, the music swells, and the word INTERMISSION appeared on the screen. And the other guy yelled to my friend, "OH MY GOD, IT'S NOT OVER???", except he stuck in the F-word between about every one of those words.

TCM showed THIRTY war movies on Thursdays in May! You could have planned ahead, recorded some of those earlier in the month and still had your marathon. I'm sorry you didn't get to have them spoon-fed to you without you having to do anything but hit the on button on your TV, as you've been accustomed to in previous years, but with the tiniest bit of planning and foresight you could have still had your weekend the way you like it.

This is a tiny point of contention, but I believe Drowning Pool was based on a novel from 1950, so even though the author was still contemporary, they could have thought about making that particular adaptation a period piece (although they'd already set Harper in modern times).

Looks like the novels on which they were based were written around 1950, but the filmmakers chose to put them in contemporary settings.

Thanks. I thought I'd heard of that title, but I didn't see it in Reagan's imdb resume, so I wasn't sure if it was a real movie or just my imagination. I didn't realize he wasn't in it.

Son of a gun. Your post sent me scurrying to the DVD box, and yep, there's de Cordova's name. Well, the Tonight Show is probably almost certainly where I first heard Bonzo mentioned, as well. And Johnny probably really went into overdrive in mentioning once Reagan became president.

Had trouble sleeping each of the last two Thursday nights and happened to turn on TCM just as each of these movies was beginning. I haven't been watching the Paul Newman tribute otherwise. I saw Eddie Mueller was introducing Harper, but I didn't turn on my TV until the opening credits were already rolling for The Drowning Pool. Did he present all the Newman films in May? Nice to see him expanding his role on the network a bit, if he did. Newman playing so many tough guys it was probably seen by network brass as an okay transition for Mueller. They probably won't have him introducing the Shirley Temple lineup in August. Thoughts on these films, anyone? I found them both watchable but pretty slow moving. If they were made today, they would be punched up with more fistfights, gunfights and car chases, no doubt. There are really no action sequences to speak of in either, except for the sanitarium escape by flooding the room scene in the latter. I guess the first one was a big enough of a hit to merit a sequel, but nine years seems an eternity to wait. I don't know if the second one had a significantly smaller budget, but the star power of the first (Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, Shelly Winters, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner) diminished in the second (after Woodward and Newman, the most famous people in the movie were Anthony Franciosa, Murray Hamilton and Richard Jaeckel). Both films featured an uncomfortably young female (Pamela Tiffin in the first, Melanie Griffith in the second) lying down on a bed and asking Newman/Harper if he wants to "relax". He turns down both. Newman has his easy charm, but he kind of seems to be sleepwalking through both of these movies. The plots to both are really complicated; I stopped trying to sort out what was going in my head about halfway through each and just focused on the acting and the atmosphere.

Isn't just watching her for 59 minutes worth it?

It's Felicity Huffman, now of the college admissions scandal. Her future husband, William H. Macy, is also in the movie. Possibly it's how they met?

My first grade music teacher taught us many of the songs from it and she was absolutely beside herself when it was going to air on TV back in the days when we only had four channels (the three broadcast networks and PBS). She told us, "Students, you must watch this movie. It's the greatest movie musical of all time!" I'm relatively sure no other student in the entire first grade was moved by her words enough to actually watch it, but even at that delicate young age, superlatives meant everything to me (I already had a copy of The Guiness Book of World Records, which I read daily), and well, if something was deemed the greatest of anything, by God, I was going to learn more about it. I'm thinking it must have taken four hours to air in a single night. If it's 174 minutes long, there were probably about 65 minutes of commercials. That would have been 7 pm - 11 pm in out Central time zone location. My parents did not let me stay up to finish it. I'm thinking I probably had to go to bed at 9 pm, so I was only halfway into it. I had to ask my music teacher the next day at school how it ended, because my parents couldn't remember. My dad did say, "Well, I don't really remember how they got away from the Nazis in the movie, but I know they got away, because the Von Trapps became a famous musical family, and they toured the whole world. The Von Trapp children are still alive, I think." That blew my mind, as well. I don't think anyone had bothered to tell me it was a "true story" until that point. It wasn't until the next year or maybe the year after that I was allowed to stay up to watch the entire movie.

I do! Mainly, I was just trying to generate some conversation among my fellow posters.

I've been purchasing some older movies on DVD at Half Price Books that I'm going to give to my dad for Fathers Day or maybe for his birthday a couple of months later, which would give me extra time to assemble a bigger collection. Anyway, I saw Bedtime for Bonzo for $6 and couldn't resist picking it up. It's a Universal film, and I'm pretty sure it's never aired on TCM. I was in sixth grade when Ronald Reagan became president. I knew he'd been an actor, but there was no Internet then, no easy place to learn about his filmography. The only movies of his anyone ever talked about in those days were Bonzo and Knute Rockne, All-American (maybe once in a blue moon Kings Row would get mentioned). I never had any idea what other films he made until I started watching TCM some 20-plus years later. Has anybody seen it? Is it worth watching myself, or should I just pass it along to Dad unopened?

"Murder ... She Hoped!" was the Mad magazine parody title, as I recall. I would have been terrified to invite Jessica to anything, because someone always got killed everywhere she went!

I like the idea behind this thread, but it was too hard for me to think enough films to fill up a day's programming with this theme! I will throw out one that I don't think anybody's mentioned yet: The In-Laws (Warner Bros., 1979), in which Peter Falk has a framed autographed picture of JFK on his wall that says, "At least we tried". When Alan Arkin asks him what that's all about, Falk replies, "The Bay of Pigs ... it was my idea". 😀

Disney used to re-release at least one of its classic films every year when I was a young child, and frankly that's how I saw most of those films for the first (and in some cases, only) times: Dumbo, Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, Mary Poppins, The Love Bug and, oh yes, the "infamous" Song of the South, among others. I also a re-release of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang around the same time, and for decades, I just assumed it was a Disney film, too (especially since Dick Van Dyke was in it!), only having learned during a TCM airing a few years ago that it wasn't. Then I saw almost zero re-releases between then and just a handful of years ago. Largely, they just weren't a thing anywhere I lived. But that has changed recently. I live in a big city, and I imagine these sorts of films pretty much only come out in sizable cities. The AMC theater nearest to me is a participant in the TCM/Fathom Events program, and I think it was in 2017 that I saw every one of the re-releases they did that year. Now, I'm on their A-List program where I pay $20/month and can see 12 movies for no additional cost beyond that fee. But the TCM/Fathom Events series I learned to my disappointment when I attempted to go see To Kill a Mockingbird recently is exempt from the program. I would have had to pay full price to see it, and I was like nah, I'm good. There's also one local theater that runs old fan favorites or cult films every midnight Fridays and Saturdays. These are usually stuff like Stanley Kubrick films, The Godfather movies, The Graduate, the Evil Dead movies, Rocky Horror Picture Show. It would be extremely rare for them to show something from pre-1968, say, but I think they've had Casablanca and Citizen Kane before. When I was younger, I used to go to some of these, but I'm not too crazy about being out on the streets past midnight on the weekends anymore, so it's been a long time. (Edit: Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure they've shown It's a Wonderful Life)