sewhite2000

Yes, I know. All the others did. I actually paused before typing that sentence, thinking it probably needed more clarity, or someone will tell me I just said something stupid. Then I thought oh screw it, it's probably okay. But no, not around here!

I recognize almost all of the actors, but I can't place most the older movies. 2134 is The Long, Long Trailer. Yes. 2136 They made like seven movies together, so I'm not a hundred per cent sure, but I think it's The Sandpiper. Yes. 2138 Gloria? No. 2139 Oh, that Cruise/Kidman movie where they're Irish immigrants directed by Ron Howard. Can't think of the name. I never saw it. 2140 Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which apparently has no connection to the Hitchcock film other than the title. No. Possibly I've just seen one or two.

January 2 Vertigo (Paramount, 1958) Source; TCM Vertigo is probably one of my 10 favorite movies of all time, and I could probably write 10,000 words about it. This I promise I won't do on this forum! Most of you have probably seen it. I do remember a discussion about it on here a year or two back which made me kind of sad, because I felt like I was pretty much the only message board user who even liked the film. I have discovered in many years on here that I am often in a tiny minority regarding movie likes and dislikes, at least among this crowd. But no matter. So, I will provide a brief set-up of the plot and then save the rest of my chat for a post-mild spoilers section in which I'll still try not to reveal anything major but have to reveal a few things to explain why this movie gets to me. James Stewart has one of those only-in-the-movies professions of a lawyer who becomes a San Francisco police detective with an eye on one day being police chief. This all goes to pot when he nearly dies in a rooftop chase (there are essays out there that suggest he did die, and the rest of the movie is a dream from the afterlife or something - interesting, but I'm going to ignore it), and the officer trying to save him does fall and die. Thanks to his newly discovered severe acrophobia, his superiors want to relegate him to a desk job, in which he has no interest and decides instead to become an early retirement man of "fairly independent means". He's got a friendship with a doting Barbara Bel Geddes, who draws underwear models for fashion magazines, and they have a playful, teasing banter about each other's romantic lives. She's clearly stuck on him, though we learn they were once engaged, and she called it off. Why is never elaborated upon. Shortly after his retirement, Stewart is recruited by an old college buddy who has lived many years out east but has returned to SF to help run a shipping business left to his wife by her parents. He tells Stewart straight-faced that he believes his wife Madeline is from time to time possessed by the spirit of her own great-grandmother, driven to recreate and dwell upon moments of her tragic life, ultimately concluding he fears by making her commit suicide the same way she did. Stewart understandably thinks this is all bunk or some kind of mental issue, but quickly becomes agreeable to trailing Madeline from a discrete distance when he sees she's played by Kim Novak. He crosses some kind of professional ethical boundary line when he saves her from what appears to be a suicide attempt and then begins hanging out with her rather than following her, though not letting her know his connection to her husband. Eventually, he too gets sucked in to the belief that some force is compelling her to do harm to herself. He wants there to be a puzzle he can logically solve and make everything all right again, but things begin to spiral out of control. Okay, Mild Spoilers From Here On Out! Part of the reason I think this is a great movie is its themes with obsession and kinky romantic/sexual roleplaying. For the first act of the movie, Stewart seems to be a rather conventional protagonist, but we learn that he's being played for a sucker from the beginning, and he suffers a nervous breakdown because of the things he's made to believe. The remainder of the movie involves a revelation of the set-up (though initially not to him) and the entrance into his life of Judy, a Madeline lookalike after he believes Madeline is lost to him forever. Judy of course is also played by Novak. I won't go into the specific nature of this dual role for the sake of people who don't want to know, but Stewart's character Scotty wants to mold Judy into an exact replica of the ideal of image of Madeline he holds in his head. It's here he transforms from sucker to obsessive agent of change. He wants to coerce Judy into sublimating her own personality to the point where once again there is only Madeline, and the fact that she's WILLING TO GO ALONG WITH IT, is what makes the film so kinky. Hitchcock explores this theme of uneven dominance/submission issues in some of this other movies - I'm thinking immediately of Marnie and parts of The Birds - but never so thoroughly as in this film. Why does Judy act the way she does? The pat explanation is she feels guilt over her role in what happened to Scotty, but possibly she also gets off on it! You can trace this commitment to the bit all the way back to the Madeline scenes earlier the film, like when Madeline "wakes up" to find herself apparently naked in Stewart's bed, although after repeated viewing I think she was only feigning unconsciousness and just let Stewart undress her! That's pretty kinky for a 1958 mainstream Hollywood movie. Anyway, it's a very dark and heartbreaking film, all the more unconventional for the era in that a murderer gets away with murder, though it was so subtle, most viewers probably didn't even think about it at the time. There was a tacked-on scene, I believe to satisfy the UK censors, that I've seen in the extra features of a DVD I used to own, in which we learn the murderer did get apprehended after all, but I like the ending the way it has always aired here in the US. The acting among the leads is very good. Novak balances her two very different roles nicely. Stewart starts out with a lot of "this darn corset" and "gee whiz, I don't wanna get mixed up in this darn thing" mannerisms that I sometimes find to be overkill, but he undergoes one of the darkest character arcs of his career, and he pulls it off masterfully. But special props to Bel Geddes, who absolutely breaks my heart every time I watch. She disappears halfway into the film, but I never forget her. I don't often comment on a film's look, feeling pretty ignorant about cinematography and art direction and such, but this film, especially in its restored version, is beautiful to look at. The colors are amazing, and I love the on-location street scenes of '50s San Francisco, which seems amazingly uncrowded. Total movies seen this year: 4

January 2 News of the World (Universal, 2020) Source: Theater Yeah, so I started going to movies again around Thanksgiving. Sounds like the AMC chain, which has been my primary movie house for at least the last 10 years, is about to go away forever, so I'm trying to sneak in a few more visits. I feel pretty safe. The number of people seeing the movie with me so far has always been in the single digits and sometimes is zero. Private screening! For this film, there were three other people in the theater besides me. I took note when I saw the Universal logo appear. Back at the beginning of the pandemic, Universal announced they were going to start making their films available for streaming within two or three weeks of theatrical release, when for the entire existence of streaming that window of time had always been more like three months. This got the CEO of AMC so hacked off he said the chain wouldn't show Universal movies anymore. But obviously, that didn't happen. The pandemic has gone on for another 10 months, and everyone is following the Universal model, even more so. Beginning with Wonder Woman 1984, Warner Bros. announced they would be releasing all their features to theaters and to streaming on the SAME DAY. The theaters now just have to take whatever they can get. Anyway, on to the movie. There was some discussion on these message boards recently about Tom Hanks, with just about everybody I remember reading having a pretty low assessment of his talent and in particular comparing him unfavorably to Jimmy Stewart, which is kind of interesting because my next review is going to be a Stewart film. I personally don't have the issues with Hanks that many of you seem to. He's usually a dependable lead, not one with a ton of range, maybe, but I've always thought he had a fairly captivating screen presence. I found this film intriguing because its hero, played by Hanks, is a Confederate veteran. I wasn't sure there would ever be a movie again in which a Confederate soldier or veteran could be shown to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever, much less heroic ones (the movie is based on a novel). Now, there's a certain soft-sell to this whole aspect of the film: the words "Confederacy" or "Confederate" are never mentioned, but Hanks says he was with the Texas Third Infantry and surrendered at Galveston. The movie is set during Reconstruction, five years after the war ends and takes place entirely in Texas (it was filmed in New Mexico). Since I've lived my whole life in Texas, this facet was also of interest to me. It references a number of places with which I'm familiar, albeit nearly a hundred years before I was born. There are some details that feel accurate, based my amateur historical interest. Union Army occupiers are everywhere, fomenting resentment among the citizenry. The Texans are told they won't be readmitted to full statehood until they ratify Amendments 13-15. Hanks' character, a former San Antonio printer turned army captain, is now a professional news reader, a traveling Walter Cronkite of his day. He goes from town to town with the latest newspapers where the citizens are too hard-worked and possibly often illiterate to make a habit of reading newspapers. And for a dime each, they gather in the local gathering hall and let Hanks enlighten and entertain them for a couple of hours. Was this a real thing? It's not anything I'd ever heard of before, though it's fascinating to consider how news "traveled" in an era before telephones, much less social media. It gives the character a unique spin, although his profession doesn't play a huge part in the narrative, other than it gives him an excuse to be traveling and also in one scene where he uses his rhetorical abilities to fire up a crowd as a means of self-preservation. After an opening sequence that shows Hanks performing his job in Wichita Falls not far from the Oklahoma border (which was, I think, still Indian territory then), we get to the meat of the plot: he discovers a young girl, perhaps nine or ten, who's been "rescued" from the Kiowas who took her captive when she was a toddler and who in turn slaughtered her entire family of Germanic immigrants (there were a lot of these in central Texas - New Braunfels and all that). So, she's "twice an orphan", a Dallas boarding house operator and apparently eff buddy for Hanks whenever he's in town played by Mare Winningham (the only other performer I recognized by name in a largely anonymous supporting cast) who speaks a little Kiowa tells him. This part of the movie was a little confusing to me, but I think after the army killed her Kiowa family, one black soldier was escorting was her to relatives but got lynched by a bunch of Texas racists. After trying to go through proper channels, Hanks realizes his only option to ensure the girl's safety is to make the 400-mile trek to central Texas himself to try to get the girl to an aunt and uncle. The remainder of the film is highly episodic and reminded me of Cold Mountain, in which Jude Law plays a Civil War deserter walking several hundred miles back to his home and the woman he loves and having one random encounter after another in a crazy mixed-up world. Hanks and the girl Johanna encounter everything from an evil local despot to grimy Confederate veterans who apparently intend to recruit her into prostitution (again, this isn't really explicitly stated. The film tiptoes through a lot of what were probably unfortunate realities of the era) to an epic dust storm to a runaway wagon to ... oh, I'm not even sure I remember all the rest. The girl speaks only Kiowa and a few fragments of German she remembers and is highly willful and resentful of being forced to adapt to Anglo culture. The inability of her and Hanks to communicate for most of the film reminded me a little of the interaction of Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, including a scene where the girl has no interest in learning how to use silverware, though no knock-down, drag-out fight ensues, fortunately. The young girl, whose name I never committed to memory, is pretty good, though I found her character arc and transformation a little too pat. Along the way, the pair bond and we learn in bits and pieces about Hanks' former life. The fate of a wife he says he "left" in San Antonio isn't revealed until near the end. Despite the elements I mentioned that intrigued me about the film, it didn't really move me that much. As I said, there is a certain soft-focus about the realities of that time and place. There is some gun violence, but it's pretty sanitary. There is one horse-shooting scene that occurs off-camera. There are hints of racism, though no racial slurs are uttered. I think the film was intended to appeal to an older audience that would like to see a good-old-fashioned style Western. It's co-written and directed by Paul Greengrass, who I think did at least a couple of the Jason Bourne movies and United 93. Total movies seen this year: 3

Daytime February 28 A rerun of last night's Noir Alley and then a "random" Sunday full of movies that were probably intended for 31 Days of Oscar. The Awful Truth (Cary Grant, Irene Dunne) (Columbia, 1937) Rebel Without a Cause (James Dean, Natalie Wood) (Warner Bros., 1955) Days of Wine and Roses (Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick) (Warner Bros., 1962) To Sleep with Anger (Danny Glover, Paul Butler) (Samuel Goldwyn Co., 1990)

The Old Dark House is a lot of fun and is surprisingly loaded with star power. I can't speak rationally about the 1977 Star Wars, which was the seminal moment of my childhood and will always be remembered fondly by me. There was quite a collective groan by what felt like every poster on these boards but me when TCM finally aired it a couple of times a year or two ago. I will say it's probably impossible to view it the way I saw it in the theater in 1977. George Lucas added all those CGI extras and changed how the Han Solo/Greedo scene went down when it was re-released to theaters near the end of the '90s, and the original version was promptly "disappeared". The three leads are each appealing in their own way. Harrison Ford just had massive starpower written all over him, and it's evident in this movie. Mark Hamill is pretty much perfect as the naive farmboy who has to grow up in a hurry, and Carrie Fisher is refreshingly spunky and self-reliant in a way female leads often didn't get to be even as recently as the late '70s.

Look at that tiny little Oscar! Was it a better world they singled out children for outstanding performances outside of competition? I mean, when Anna Paquin won Best Supporting Actress when she was like 11, how did the other four nominees feel? I don't remember the thread title now, but there was some discussion recently of Garner's adult appearance in Black Widow, in which it felt like about 50 people chimed in to say how unflattering her haircut was in that movie!

I just watched The Birds again the other night, and Rod Taylor and Veronica Cartwright are supposed to be brother and sister. He was 33. She was 14. And Jessica Tandy, who was 54, was supposed to be mother of them both.

Just sounded like something funny to say. It was recently pointed out that there is no tongue in cheek emoji, so I should be wary of being taken too literally sometimes.

January 1 Please Don't Eat the Daisies (MGM, 1960) Source: TCM I believe Ben M. introduced this by saying Doris Day was entering an era where she was playing more sexy, sophisticated types rather than just the girl next door, and while I wouldn't deny she's sexy at times in this movie, she does play a housewife and mother of four boys and is pretty typical Doris Day of the era: sincere and earnest and devoted to her man and occasionally put out by his behavior and that he's not getting what she's trying to tell him. It reminds me of her pairing with James Garner in The Thrill of It All. The plot actually revolves around the actions of her husband, played by David Niven, a respected academic who's just become one of the seven drama critics for the competing New York newspapers who suddenly finds himself with the power to make or break a show with one review. His first time out of the gate he trashes a show produced by a longtime friend and particularly trashes its mercurial star, played with comic sexiness by Janis Paige. Niven becomes an overnight celebrity after Paige publicly slaps him in a restaurant with a photographer conveniently present, then makes nice and kisses him at a party and wiggles her rear end for him after he insinuates in his review that this is about all she's good for. This stokes some jealousy in Doris, but she also worries Niven is going to throw his integrity out the window and start trashing everything, because that's what his public wants. Meanwhile, the family is in the process of trying to move to the country where their four little hellions will have fewer babysitters to terrorize and their giant dog won't have to be carried for elevator rides. It's not really a musical movie, but Doris does get to sing a couple of times, including a brief reprise of "Whatever Will Be Will Be", her big hit from The Man Who Knew too Much. It's pleasant if not particularly engrossing. The always endearing Spring Byington plays Doris' mother (I believe Ben said this was her last movie), and Jack Weston has a supporting role as a cabbie who wants to be a playwright and who essentially becomes the family's personal Uber driver 60 years before there was Uber. It was based on a book by Jean Kerr about her experiences as the wife of drama critic Walter Kerr and later became a TV sitcom lasting for two seasons. Total movies seen this year: 2

Hey, everybody! It's a new year, and for the third year in a row I'm going to try to provide a review of EVERY movie I watch during the year! My previous efforts have stalled for one reason or another fairly early on. In 2019, I had to economize, and cable TV seemed to be the one thing I could really do without, so I lived without TV or Wifi at home for four months. That made posting on here difficult, obviously, and I abandoned the project. And 2020 was the year all the movie theaters closed down, and I spent much the year wrapped up in some family crises, so I never really got going then, either. I'm going to try to stick with it this year. Okay, so I will try to review each movie only once. If see North By Northwest five times this year, which is always a possibility, I'll only review it the first time. I haven't decided if I will acknowledge that I watched more than once. May be extraneous information. I'll give the title, studio, year of release, date I watched it and the source and hopefully a relatively brief and pithy review. I will try to acknowledge when it's the first time I've seen a movie. And I will try to provide an image from the poster or a still from the movie, although the last time I tried to do that, it seemed that imdb was no longer permitting copying and pasting images from its site, so I'm not sure how easy that will be anymore. Oh, yes, and I will keep a running tab of how many movies I've watched in 2021. Here we go! January 1 It's a Gift (Paramount, 1934) Source: TCM All I knew about WC Fields from childhood was "Go away, kid, ya bother me!" which was the one line my generation identified with him (Just like all I knew about Cary Grant before I became an adult was "Judy! Judy! Judy!", which he apparently never actually said). I was just never exposed to him anywhere until I became a TCM watcher. I see now he was of that sight gag humor milieu of the '30s/'40s that also characterized the Three Stooges shorts I watched as a child, as well as Abbott & Costello and Laurel & Hardy and others. This is the Fields film TCM shows most often. Probably because it doesn't have Stepin Fetchit in it. Sounds like Fields wrote all the gags himself, much like Stan Laurel, and the directors were just kind of along for the ride. I don't know if Fields ever did shorts. This movie could have easily been broken up into five or so shorts, as it tends to take one situation and just milk it for all it's worth. So, Fields plays a New Jersey street corner grocery store owner who dreams of buying his own orange grove in California and gets the chance when his Uncle Bean (shown in a family portrait it appears as Fields with a fake moutstache) dies, and Fields takes a loan from the bank on speculation of the inheritance money he's about to receive. And so, it's a road trip for Fields and his constantly critical wife (some of the best scenes involve him sneaking out of the room while she's droning on), his cusp-of-adulthod daughter who's mooney-eyed over the earnest young man who sold Fields the property ( and now wants it back, realizing it was not as advertised) and his roller skating young son who seems to dote on his dad though he has an unfortunate habit of leaving his skates carelessly around the home (and guess who ends up stepping on them? The same gag as Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch). Anyway, it's a mostly pleasant diversion. Some gags work better than others. Some are over in a second (love when the boy says "Look Pop I found an orange!" and hands Fields something that's more the size of a walnut). Some seem to go on way too long (they practically make a whole movie out of Fields' efforts to sleep on a porch swing when every force in the universe - including a seemingly sentient coconut and a blathering insurance salesman - are aligned against him). The best extended bit is admittedly very funny albeit not so PC anymore, as a blind customer destroys Field's store from top to bottom while trying to get some chewing gum. TCM did not feel the need to issue a warning about the insensitive portrayal of blind people prior to the movie, but that day is probably coming. My childhood impression of Fields from that one line I knew was that he was a drunken misanthrope, but here he comes across as a pretty regular guy, just trying to get ahead in the world and do the best he can for his family, who mostly don't appreciate him. This film would have been made around the time of the great Okie migration, and I think there's a bit of class-conscious humor when the family drives onto a millionaire's estate thinking it's a public park (and immediately running over a Venus de Milo statue! Ha ha ha ha). It all breezes by in something like 71 minutes, and I laughed a lot. I had to go to Google Images to get this. It seems to be impossible to do from imdb anymore, but admittedly I am pretty computer stupid. If someone knows how I can make these images smaller, I would like to learn that, too. Total movies seen this year: 1

Primetime February 27 Well, it says here the theme is Dances with Wolves. So guess what the movie is? Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell) (Orion, 1990) Noir Alley: Odds Against Tomorrow (Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan) (United Artists, 1959) And then more random programming to round out the late night and leading into early morning before the Noir Alley rerun. Girl Crazy (Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland) (MGM, 1943) The Story of Three Loves (Pier Angeli, Ethel Barrymore) (MGM, 1953) Quentin Durward (Robert Taylor, Kay Kendall) (MGM, 1955) The Wind and the Lion (Sean Connery, Candice Bergen) (Columbia, 1975)

2122 is Tugboat Annie. Yes. 2125 is It Came from Outer Space. Yes. 2128 is An American Werewolf in London. Yes. 2129 is Turner & Hooch. No. 2130 is Outbreak. These kinds of movies briefly topped all the streaming rental charts for a while this year, I think I read. I haven't seen it. So, I think I've seen three.

Daytime February 27. We begin with Saturday Matinee. I'm listing only the features. The Longest Night (Robert Young, Florence Rice) (MGM, 1936) Gunga Din (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen) (RKO, 1939) Dr. Kildare Goes Home (Lew Ayres, Lionel Barrymore) (MGM, 1940) Then, it's random movie afternoon. Definitely some more fare intended for 31 Days of Oscar. Knute Rockne, All-American (Pat O'Brien, Gale Page) (Warner Bros., 1940) 12 Angry Men (Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb) (United Artists, 1957) A Man for All Seasons (Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller) (Columbia, 1966) Chariots of Fire (Ben Cross, Ian Holm) (Dist. in the US by Warner Bros., 1981)

I've seen Man of the West. My memory is so spotty, I can't ascertain that I've seen all of any of the others. I know I've seen at least parts of Dillinger and The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond. But I guess I'm going to put them in the "No" category because I can't recall any specific scenes in either. So, I've probably just seen one all the way through.

Yes and yes. Read no further if you don't want plot twists revealed! Jimmy Stewart turns out to be the murderer in After the Thin Man. And Tom Hanks is the villain in the Coen Brothers' re-imagining of The Ladykillers.

This thing has fallen so far down, the alert that the November 2019 schedule is up is ahead of it. I need to finish this. It appears primetime February 26 is still unscheduled, a large block of time. I'll have to check back. But we do know what's on TCM Underground. Two late '80s films about guys on the run. Out of Bounds (Anthony Michael Hall, Jenny Wright) (Columbia, 1986) Hiding Out (Jon Cryer, Keith Coogan) (DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, 1987)

I want that Barton Fink feeling. Oh, he was in that, too.

You've touted Yvonne DeCarlo before, but my exposure to her is still very limited. Beyond The Ten Commandments and Cris Cross, I don't think I've seen any of her films. Donald Sutherland, on the other hand, I've seen in many films. I believe never nominated for an Oscar somehow. Some highlights from his early career: I believe as a mute in Die! Die! My Darling (it's been a while), which I think was also his film debut He has a memorable scene impersonating a general in The Dirty Dozen, which probably helped make him a star. A small part in The Bedford Incident, which is just a good dramatic tension film worth seeing, though not necessarily for him. It's already been mentioned, but he's fantastic in Klute. It's Jane Fonda's film, but he more than holds his own. I don't know that Johnny Got His Gun is a film I ever want to watch a second time. It's too wrenching. But check out Sutherland's scenes.

2111 is Manhattan Melodrama. Can't believe it, but I've never seen it. 2114 I'll take a wild guess and say Green for Danger, which is a movie I caught on TCM quite a few years ago and really enjoyed. But that's just a shot in the dark. The more I think about it, probably not. Almost looks like Robert Mitchum on the right. I'll just have to wait and learn. 2119 is Watership Down. No. 2120 is Fletch. Much loved by my generation, but I've only seen bits and pieces of it and ... meh. So, I may not have seen any of these all the way through.

2102 is The Mortal Storm. Yes. 2104 is Umberto D. Yes. 2107 is Day of the Dolphin. No. 2108 is The Gods Must Be Crazy. Yes. 2109 appears to be some modern version of Village of the Damned. No 2110 is Erin Brokovich. Yes. Looks like I've seen at least four.

I loved the sax on "Turn the Page". I assume that was him.

Daytime February 26 Strange Magic Their Big Moment (Zasu Pitts, Slim Summerville) (RKO, 1934) Miracles for Sale (Robert Young, Florence Rice) (MGM, 1939) Fingers at the Window (Lew Ayres, Larraine Day) (MGM, 1942) The Strange Mr. Gregory (Edmund Lowe, Jean Rogers) (Monogram, 1946) The Mad Magician (Vincent Price, Mary Murphy) (Columbia, 1954) Magic Boy (Katsuo Nakamura, Hiroko Sakuramachi) (Dist. in the US by MGM, 1961) Two on a Guillotine (Connie Stevens, Dean Jones) (Warner Bros., 1965)

Alto ... Reed? Surely not the name on his birth certificate.

I wasn't quite born yet during Gilligan's Island's initial run, but like millions of people my age I watched every episode multiple times each in syndication (well, the color episodes anyway. I refused to watch anything in black and white as a child except for The Three Stooges and Leave It to Beaver). I was so young, it was before I even began to think of Mary Ann and Ginger as hot. I just responded to how sweet Mary Ann was. I very excitedly watched that made for TV movie where they finally got off the island (temporarily).