misswonderly3

> {quote:title=cujas wrote:}{quote} > When I was a kid-- I thought "Out of sight" really was James Brown--As an adult, I almost got killed one day playing "Living in America"on the car radio. I was driving around Kansas City--I grooved out when he said KC--the radio was so loud that a Fire Truck almost got me. That to me was really living in America. > cujas, I'm sorry I didn't respond to your story sooner. I think it's because I'm not sure I got it quite right...you were zooming around in your car, a young and reckless adult in Kansas City, blasting out James Brown so loud on your radio that you didn't hear/see the fire truck coming? You must have been quite a party girl ! Edited by: misswonderly on Mar 27, 2011 1:34 PM

finance, you're a logical person. I haven't done any research studies on it, but my guess is, there are many times more Americans on this site than Canadians. So, I'm just saying, we Canucks don't want to be outnumbered any more than we already are. (arrogantly adopting the "royal we".)

> {quote:title=johnbabe wrote:}{quote} > but also, one can add ingrid bergman(her sappy over the top love seens are ridiculous - especially in Notorious (check out her acting at the horse racing scene) > johnbabe, whatever are you talking about? I love Ingrid Bergman, she's one of the best, and so beautiful ! (Dare I say it -even more beautiful than her fellow Swede, Greta Garbo.) You think her love scenes are sappy and over the top? I never get that when I watch her, I think how passionate she is, how warm and touching her performances are. I love that scene at the horse track in *Notorious*, she's perfect in it. Cary Grant is being so mean to her, she doesn't realize he's just all mixed up and jealous, and she's so sad about it. *Notorious* is one of my very favourite Hitchcock's. Edited by: misswonderly on Mar 26, 2011 12:49 PM

Well, Saturday night's coming up, but I'm not in Tennessee. Wish I were. Ok, the real Elvis, the original. Love the Sun Records rockabilly Elvis, enjoy the rock 'n roll King Elvis, ambivalent about the latter-day Elvis. Sometimes he was good even then. Like with Suspicious Minds . I really like the original recording, the arrangements are great; but who doesn't want to see Elvis doing it live, in that white fringey studded outfit, shaking away like it was 1955? So I went with a compromise video, Elvis shakin' it , but the music playing is the studio version. I just can't walk out...

Don't go, anne,baby...we need all the Canadians we can get on this site.

> {quote:title=jr33928 wrote:}{quote} > Here's just a few of the actors who irritate me > Victor Mature > Charlton Heston > Anthony Quinn > Marilyn Monroe > Jack Lemon (his last name describes him perfectly) > William Powell > Katherine Hepburn > John Forsythe (what a STINKER) > Lucille Ball (except for "I Love Lucy") > Joan Crawford > Paul Newman > Elizabeth Taylor (but sorry to hear she died,i know many people loved her) > Richard Burton (usually) > Mickey Rooney > There are others,but i try real hard to forget them. JR. > "Just a few" ? So, who do you like ?

MovieProfessor asked: "...Anybody have a favorite Astaire/Rogers dance? " Hmm,. that's a tough one. So many. Well, I guess I have to go with the crowd and cite Cheek to Cheek as one of my very favourites. Face the Music and Dance, Ginger's beads whacking Fred on the jaw notwithstanding, has got to be right up there too. Also Never Gonna Dance, because of the wistful sweet tune. Zounds, every one I've picked has some tale of off-screen violence attached to it ! I also love The Way You Look Tonight . I cannot emphasize enough how essential the quality of the songs are to these dance numbers. In a musical, the music is everything. If F and G and swung and twirled to some other melody in any of these performances, I'm not sure they'd be so affecting and memorable.

Perhaps Hepburn was more admirable in her public life than Davis. I was unaware that Bette Davis could be nasty like that to her co-stars (and to Lilian Gish, just as venerable as Davis ! ? ) and that's a little disillusioning for me. There was a thread not too long ago about stars and their personal lives and whether people think about their misbehaviour when watching them on screen. I come down very strongly on the side of those who try- usually successfully - to forget all about whatever the actor is like off-screen. no matter what they've done, it has no bearing on their art. The only time their private life bothers me is if some moral or political stand they've taken in their art conflicts with some thing they've done in their personal life. In other words, some kind of hypocrisy is involved. This obviously would apply more to directors or writers than actors. I've never seen *Juarez* - I'll try and catch it next time it's on. Maybe it just comes down to the original title of this thread...when all's said and done, sometimes an actor/actress is irritating to us, we can't even always explain why. And sometimes we can be enthralled with a star for the same reason -or rather, lack of reason. It's all very subjective, isn't it?

Well then, musikone, you may get a kick out of this thread: http://forums.tcm.com/thread.jspa?threadID=152322&tstart=0 scroll one down to see my send-up of *Kitty Foyle* .

> {quote:title=Swithin wrote:}{quote} > Most of the actors of the golden age, in the films we love, tended to be cast in similar roles. That was the studio system, and it was a GOOD system. It wasn't the theater, where the Lunts could go on and seem to be totally different, unrecognizable people in every play. In a funny way, it wasn't about the acting -- it was about the movie. All the great character people played versions of the same role again and again, for the most part. OK, Bette Davis could put on eyebrows and seem different, but when Charlotte Vale took off those eyebrows, she was Judith Traherne. And as Julie in Jezebel, Bette is really another version of Traherne. And take Greer Garson, one of my favorites -- she was always pretty much some version of the same great lady in all of her films. And another one of my favorites -- Beulah Bondi -- a great actress -- but always pretty much Beulah Bondi. > > I hate to say it, but in some ways the actors -- and I love them all -- in those films were to some extent props -- great directors learned to use them to the best advantage. This is all rather a simplification, obviously, but it's pretty much how things were. Swithin, you make a very good point with that. I don't argue that the studios would take an actor or actress and decide to create an image around them from which they rarely varied to any significant degree. And yes, this is true of almost all of the stars from the "Golden Age". However i still say that Katharine Hepburn, even more than most stars from that era, displayed little range in her career - maybe she reached a little farther as she got older. Bette Davis may have played variations on the same persona, but she played a far greater variety of roles than Hepburn did. For one thing, as you've mentioned yourself, she was willing to play old and unattractive women long before she was even middle-aged. She also played, especially in the 30s, girls who were prostitutes or anyway "tarts", unpleasant women (I'm tempted to say b*tches), selfish, vain , proud, nasty people, and leave us not forget murderers. I may be wrong - I often am - but offhand I don't recall Katharine Hepburn taking on those kinds of roles. And I don't buy "but she had to do what the studio wanted her to do" - she was every bit as strong and assertive about what she wanted as Davis was. But it isn't just the way everyone exaggerates her acting skills that bothers me; it's just, as I've said, there is, to me anyway, something offensively smug and conceited about her -oh, dahling, she's just soooo wonderful ! She seems to me like she's always thinking about herself in some way, even on screen. She's always "acting". Edited by: misswonderly on Mar 25, 2011 10:19 AM

Why do so many people think Woody Allen is annoying?...Don't answer that !

Anyway, that little venture into broken dreams territory was just an extra. This was what I'd been thinking about today. James Brown and some funky babe, shaking it up fine with Superbad. Think Uncle Bob and Alex could take some cues from her moves?

I actually like the title Boulevarde of Broken Dreams. I think it's very evocative, all about lives of quiet desperation and all that. The older song - I don't say "original version", because it's a different song altogether - is pretty old, was around even before Tony Bennett did it. Apparently it was written in 1934 to accompany the film *Moulin Rouge*. Don't quote me on this, I just got it from wikipaedia, and we all know how reliable it can be. I found a version of it with some film noir images, so I thought that one would be fun. Et voila : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6HOGEx8bac

I'm afraid I almost always find her "mannered and annoying". And I don't think it's character-driven, I think it's Katharine Hepburn driven. Although now that you mention it, she did almost always play variations on the same kind of character -another reason why I think she's over-rated. People go on and on about what a great actress she was, but she never demonstrated the versatility of, say Bette Davis or even a lesser-known star like Ida Lupino.

Yeah, June Allyson is pretty irritating most of the time. You have to wonder why she became even a second tier star. The one exception for me with Allyson is her performance as the young step-daughter in *The Secret Heart*, in which she was both irritating and sympathetic at the same time. Of course my fave star I love to hate is...Katharine Hepburn ! Although I do like several films of hers', for the most part I find her unbearably smug, affected, and just too, too wonderful for words.

I like John Dall. Maybe I'm perverse, but I actually do think he has charm. He's got a great smile, it just beams. Admittedly, this could be seen as beaming but creepy to some, certainly in *Rope* . John Dall is perfect in *Gun Crazy* . He brings a certain vulnerability, a hesitation, to the role that really fits with the character.

He certainly didn't get much commercial attention after that time - his "cool new wave" stock went down. He was always good, but like many serious musicians, once he started exploring more complex music, not just the accessible catchy hit material like "Watching the Detectives" (don't get me wrong, I like that stuff too, nothing wrong with accessible and catchy), he kind of fell off the popular music radar. Critical acclaim he continued to receive, at least by some. He's certainly produced some clunkers over the years, but that can be said of all musicians, even the great ones. I've always liked Elvis Costello and continued to follow his music long after his "new wave" factor had changed from cool to lukewarm.

I was going to say, maybe they could get away with a line like that because *Rio* was pre-code, but then I couldn't remember for sure if it was. Thanks.

I apologize if others have pointed out this problem (I just don't want to take the time to read this whole thread). Has the "Save Now" option been permanently deleted? I can see it below the posting field here, between "discard" and "post message", but it's barely visible, it's been "paled" or whatever the word is. And nothing happens if you click it. I found it very useful if I wanted to just draft a comment, maybe add a photo or look something up, and actually post it later. Now there does not seem to be any option to "save" a message without actually posting it. You have to either post it, or discard it, at the time you write it. Any chance that there are plans to restore the "save now", keep a draft, option?

Thinking of *Flying Down to Rio*, I'm remembering a line in it that someone pointed out to me the first time I saw it. It just whizzed past me then, but now I notice it, and realize how sneaky and clever the screenwriters could be, getting around things that shouldn't/wouldn't have been said with double entendres . An American chorus girl, indignantly jealous of the attention a South American rival is getting from men: "Just what do those girls have south of the equator that we haven't got? " Edited by: misswonderly on Mar 24, 2011 10:58 AM

C.B., you mentioned "charm school" in another forum (talking about the film *Caught* .) Every time i hear that phrase I think of Elvis Costello's extremely beguiling and well-crafted song Charm School from his album "Punch the Clock". I cannot resist...it's a charming song. (not sure I like the pink graphics and the writ-large lyrics, but it was all I could find.)

Oh well, at $4.99 we can't complain too much. Did you gt any laughs at how bad it was?

Quite possibly the most beautiful woman ever. And a wonderful actress. When she was on screen, you couldn't take your eyes off her.

I'd actually never thought of comparing *Night of the Hunter* and *No Country for Old Men* before. It's one of the things I like about these forums, they can give you new ideas about movies. The Shelley Winters character in NOTH is really dumb; kind of pathetic. The Josh Brolin character in NCFOM is not so much dumb as just average, not equal to the monumental task of keeping one step ahead of his chilling relentless pursuer.

KITTY TIN FOYLE ((updated remake: KITTY ALUMINUM FOIL) A young woman from the wrong side of the tracks gets a job as secretary for a tin foil magnate. They fall in love, but cannot reconcile their class differences. Kitty believes in bringing her lunch to work in recyclable containers, while the magnate, naturally, wants everyone to wrap their sandwiches in tin foil. "Darling, we'll have the whole world brown-bagging it." Sequels in the works: *Kitty Wax Paper*; *Kitty Saran Wrap* Edited by: misswonderly on Mar 23, 2011 10:35 AM