sewhite2000
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Posts posted by sewhite2000
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I caught about half of Downstairs on TCM once while visiting my parents, and other relatives were in the house and in and out of the TV room, and I didn't have total control of the TV. i liked what I saw and would like to see the whole thing.
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I found it very squirmy and emotionally honest! I was uncomfortable for a lot of the film, and I mean that in a good way. To some degree, it's an indictment of the under-20 crowd who spend every waking moment humanly possible on social media, which is an easy target for someone middle-aged like myself. But it's more than that. You also feel the incredible pressures crushing down on someone that age, especially female, to be liked by their female peers and to be desired by boys. And the relationship between the protagonist and her single father is by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming. I would say it's easily one of the best films I've seen this year.
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I don't really have a consistent pattern. I would say 80 or 90 per cent of the movies I see, I don't read a review until after I've seen it. But once in a while, I do read a review first. I don't think I've ever let a review read in advance stop me from going to see a movie, however. On the other hand, a preponderance of positive reviews might once in a great while cause me to go see a movie I might have otherwise missed. I would say it's likely I might not have seen Eighth Grade if I hadn't read at least 10 glowing reviews of it in advance.
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Oh, wow, I would love to check this out, but very unlikely I will be up at that time. If I think about it, I'll record it.
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I've always wondered if Bogie's behavior in that scene would have been thinly veiled code for being gay that would have been easily intuited by the audience of the day and not so PC now. But maybe he's just supposed to be pretending to be a pompous intellectual.
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15 minutes ago, speedracer5 said:
The best thing about Al Jolson is that he inspired the Looney Tunes cartoon "Owl Jolson." The cartoon is better than Al Jolson could ever hope to be.
Amazingly, a friend just sent me a link to that cartoon yesterday. If I'd seen it during my childhood, I'd forgotten it.
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On 8/29/2018 at 1:16 PM, TopBilled said:
Added August 2018:
HIGHER AND HIGHER (1943) with Michele Morgan / musical comedy / RKO / expires 27th of December
STEP LIVELY (1944) with George Murphy / musical comedy / RKO / expires 27th of December
ANCHORS AWEIGH (1945) with Gene Kelly / musical / MGM / expires 29th of November
TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY (1946) with Van Johnson / musical / MGM / expires 27th of December
IT HAPPENED IN BROOKLYN (1947) with Peter Lawford / musical / MGM / expires 27th of December
TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME (1949) with Betty Garrett / musical / MGM / expires 25th of October
ON THE TOWN (1949) with Betty Garrett / musical / MGM / expires 18th of October
SUDDENLY (1954) with Sterling Hayden / drama / UA / expires 31st of January
THE TENDER TRAP (1955) with Debbie Reynolds / comedy / MGM / expires 27th of December
GUYS AND DOLLS (1955) with Vivian Blaine / musical / UA / expires 25th of October
HIGH SOCIETY (1956) with Celeste Holm / musical comedy / MGM / expires 27th of December
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1956) with Eleanor Parker / drama / UA / expires 31st of January
SOME CAME RUNNING (1958) with Dean Martin / drama / MGM / expires 6th of SeptemberWell, this got me curious as to how close this list was to the Chairman's recent SUTS day on TCM, and the answer is ... pretty close! The two lists share seven films by my count.
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This was either my fourth or fifth time to see 8 1/2. I feel like there are some dots I'm still not connecting in my head that Fellini probably intended for his audience to take away from the film. As you said, it gives us more questions than answers, but I try not to let that detract me from its overall power. I do probably spend too much time "reading" all the dialogue, a lot of which is probably not necessary, for example, that screenwriter who talks and talks and talks, and I'm not sure he says anything important in the whole movie (At one point, Mastroianni fantasizes the writer gets hung, and Fellini probably wanted the audience to laugh in support at that point). It's certainly ambitious and compelling.
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Oh, well, I've heard of some of those people! I can't read that tiny little print in black at the bottom of the poster when it's that size on my laptop.
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2 minutes ago, Hibi said:
Who was in The Wild Affair? I dont remember it.....
This came up in another thread. I forget which one. It's a British film. Terry Thomas in a supporting role was the only cast member I'd ever heard of.
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You mean you want to extend their contract so they can keep on appearing on TCM for years and years more??? Very nice of you!
(Or did you mean something else ...?)
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Yes, that's who I meant! Oops.
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8 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
Here you go.....
Winning..... for a while at least......
Funny! Although I read that in his newest documentary, Deepak Chopra says Hitler was a liberal.
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I'm probably not the best person to ask, since maybe the Oscar reference book I was using was not Osborne's? I don't actually own the book anymore. I just have all the info I copied out of it. It was a big coffee table book the size of the Osborne books, but it had Universal listed as a producer of Hamlet, which calvinnme says is not in the Osborne book he (?) has. I really thought what I once had was one of the Osborne editions, but this contradictory information is making me question that ...
Anyway, whatever book I did have credits both Goldwyn and RKO for Best Years of Our Lives. That's how I wrote it down.
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If you REALLY want to see that theme, I suggest 1978's Rabbit Test with Billy Crystal, directed by Joan Rivers!
What's the story behind the "rabbit test", anyway? Was that a real medical thing or just an urban myth? If a rabbit died, you knew you were pregnant? What kind of Theodoric Barber of York medieval medicine was that? How did that even work? Did PETA ever protest this procedure? I need information!
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The main reason I would have any interest in the Mitchum version is that late-career Jimmy Stewart plays the General. Is he only in the one scene at the beginning like the General in the Bogie version?
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2 minutes ago, hamradio said:
Cavegirl is referring to nudism / naturalism, not the run of the mill nude scenes in R and NC-17 rated movies.
Yes, I understood that, of course. I think if you read my post more carefully, you would see I was saying that TCM, if they were ever to have a spotlight on any films with nudity, they would be more likely to show the conventional films than the specifically nudist camp ones. But I understood what kind of film she meant.
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I don't guess I've ever seen any of these. I guess they were sort of the same thing as the pre-Playboy girlie magazines that would occasionally be referenced to be owned by Hawkeye when I was a kid on M*A*S*H of "naked girls playing volleyball".
While reading your post, it occurred to me it might not be completely beyond imagining for TCM to have some sort of monthly late night theme of nudity in movies, featuring the best-known and/or most controversial examples, everything from the silents to Hedy Lamarr to whenever Hollywood actually started permitting some nudity in mainstream film. See, I don't even know when that started! It would be educational, TCM! Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket ... Maybe it could go all the way up to Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons (which literally made the crowd in the theater gasp when I saw it). Such a showcase might conceivably include at least one of the films you mention.
But as for TCM focusing on nothing but nudist camp films? Sorry to say after seeing your enthusiasm for the idea that this seems extremely unlikely. I do have some curiosity as to how explicit they were. Were females featured a lot more prominently than males? I just can't imagine a lot of frontal male nudity in that era that wouldn't have caused the morality police to completely lose their minds. Even as late as 1968, when Rolling Stone ran those Two Virgins photos in advance of the album release, it appeared for a time the magazine was going to be busted on obscenity charges, much more so for John's nudity than Yoko's, I think. Also, do these films show entire families? Depending on what the ages are of some of the people filmed might make it problematic for TCM, I would think.
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53 minutes ago, midwestan said:
In the intro to "The Big Sleep", Ben Mankiewicz said the actual movie had been shot in 1944 but not released until 1946, due in part, to a backlog of war pictures Warner Brothers wanted to screen first. Since Bogart and Bacall were such a hit in "To Have and Have Not", scenes with them were added to "The Big Sleep" to capitalize on their screen chemistry. It made me wonder if this scene in the bar was one of those added to the movie.
I always get a kick out of seeing Louis Jean Heydt in other roles. Every time he makes an appearance, I flash back to Martha Vickers muttering..."Joe Brody..who's he?" ?
I really like Sonia Darrow in her surprisingly un-credited role as Agnes in "The Big Sleep". She had some great lines (as did most of the other characters in this film).
I used to own a double-sided DVD with the two different versions of the film, one on each side - the 1944 version as it would have looked if it had been released then, and the 1946 version with the new scenes, also with some of the original scenes slightly reworked, i.e., the version everybody knows. For example, a scene in Bogart's office was reshot with Bacall no longer wearing a widow's veil and with a bit about him encouraging her to scratch her leg added to make it a little sexier, I guess. And yes, as I recall, the bar scene with all that racehorse talk was added for the 1946 version.
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Hope you added some butter ... or just more Parm!
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I'm intrigued by the trailer! Although I acknowledge the editing there may misrepresent the feel of the actual film.
On the topic of Welles, I watched The Magnificent Ambersons the other night for the first time in a long time. I had really forgotten everything about the plot, except I vaguely remembered it had something to do with Joseph Cotten re-emerging into the life of a woman he'd loved long ago. I know it was hacked down from 141 to 88 minutes while Welles was off in South America or something, and I'm sorry nothing survives of what was lost. Saving footage for the director's cut on the DVD was not a priority back then, apparently! ?
Robert Wise was primarily responsible for the final cut, and I have to say for nearly cutting the movie in half, what remains is surprisingly coherent and has a strong narrative. So, props to Wise for salvaging what he could. It holds together so well that I'm curious what was missing! The final shot of Cotten and Moorehead walking down a hall toward the camera is the most generic in the movie. My understanding is that this quick-explanation ending with a redemptive note was a total studio add-on. Otherwise, the film is chock full of many unusual and arty shots that I think were probably European-influenced, but they don't distract from the narrative.
It makes me wish things could have worked out better between Welles and RKO. I dream of a world where he kept cranking out a movie of comparable quality and innovation for them every year or two like Wilder at Paramount or Capra at Columbia. They couldn't have all been Kane, of course, but no doubt they all would have been interesting!
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This is a film I've seen probably a dozen times and still enjoy though the plot is nearly impossible to follow. I think in my very first viewing I "got" the veiled pornography reference that they couldn't make explicit in the Hayes Code era, what with hidden camera and all, and Carmen is wearing a robe or something.
What I really can't see at all from many viewings of the film is that Carmen apparently murdered Sean Regan. A year or three back, I got into an argument on here with someone who'd probably read the book - sorry, I've forgotten who - who really took me to the woodhsed for not understanding what is apparently incredibly obvious in the book, which I haven't read. This person sorta went out of his (?) way to make me feel stupid, and I may have gotten my dander up, but the film obfuscates things to such a point, I feel in my defense that I can be forgiven for not grasping this extremely important plot element.
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6 hours ago, calvinnme said:
Robert Osborne's book on the Oscars credits J. Arthur Rank-Two Cities Films for the Best Picture producer for Hamlet. The intro to the copy I have has "Arthur Rank Productions". But in spite of that, I think I remember a copy of Hamlet with the Universal-International intro. I just don't remember where I saw it.
Hey, TopBilled, are you ever going to forgive me for disrespecting 1940s Universal?
Many years ago, I hand-copied a lot of information out one of the Oscar history books. I still use this notebook as my primary Oscar reference today. I'm weird like that! I thought it was Osborne's book, but possibly it was not. Whatever book I copied it out of listed Universal along with Rank as a producer, because that's what I wrote down in my notebook 16 or 17 years ago. Anyway, you can look at production companies on imdb and see that Universal-International was clearly the film's American distributor.
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1 hour ago, slaytonf said:
It's nothing unusual. TCM almost never shows the silent version.
Actually, the last two times Front aired on TCM prior to this airing, it was the silent version. I guess Nipkow wasn't watching the first time, but he was definitely watching the second time when he got on these boards and made it sound like the worst crime ever perpetrated in the history of humanity
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I'm beginning to doubt TCM's liberal credentials.
in General Discussions
Posted
A large number of people on both the right and what I would call the center-left seem to be quite alarmed about all these post-Bernie liberals declaring themselves to be Socialists. Consequently, I kinda doubt TCM, which probably has left-center sensibilities at most, IMO, is going to be running a lineup of programming celebrating May Day any time soon ...