HollywoodGolightly
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Posts posted by HollywoodGolightly
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Monty Woolley
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Sinatra, Frank
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Beautiful Rita tells us what soap she likes best...
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Has anyone watched A Chorus Line recently?
I think Richard Attenborough's film adaptation of the hit musical has always been a bit maligned or criticized for not living up to the stage production. Watching it today, now that "American Idol" have become popular, may actually make it seem a bit more relevant, in that it spends so much of the running time trying to explore the "real life" issues and motivations of the performers who are hoping to get cast in the show-within-the-show.
Although I've never seen this on stage, I found that this time around the movie seemed a bit more entertaining than the last time I'd watched it. It still would be great if they could release it on blu-ray, of course, but in the meantime the DVD version isn't too bad - though a few more extras couldn't have hurt.
The only thing I wish they could have done differently is to allow Michael Douglas's character to spend a bit more time up on the stage with the performers; it's a bit awkward that the only real star in the movie spends so much of his screen time hiding in the shadows in the back of the theater.
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Alexis Smith
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The Sun Also Rises - another Hemingway drama
next: For Whom the Bells Toll
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OH, absolutely, the flying sequences were especially well done, they really made you feel like you were up there soaring among the clouds. I liked those very, very much.
It'll be interesting to see what Pixar does with Toy Story 3-D, let's see if they came up with something as impressive (from a 3-D point of view)
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True, but he was also pretty lucky to work for directors like Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray. I'm sure they brought out the best in him.
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Trane, Benjamin - Gary Cooper in Vera Cruz
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Dave Kehr writes about the Warner Archives release of Mammy in his NYT column:
*Mammy*
Simultaneously one of the most significant and most embarrassing show business figures of the 20th century, Al Jolson was a ferociously charismatic entertainer, among the first to realize that creating an intimate, emotional bond with his public was more important to his success than his considerable technical abilities as a singer.
Brazenly sentimental and shamelessly self-dramatizing, with a complementary gift for taking his audience into his confidence with seemingly spontaneous comic asides, Jolson helped to invent pop stardom as we know it today. But if he is less widely remembered than later ?personality singers? like Bing Crosby, it?s in large part because of Jolson?s strong association with the minstrel tradition, the 19th-century theatrical form that allowed white performers to escape the oppressive decorum of the concert stage by painting themselves in blackface. What once seemed progressive ? a way of introducing African-American music to a wider public ? now seems anything but.
Minstrelsy is central to ?Mammy,? a 1930 Jolson vehicle that has recently been released in a handsome new edition through the burn-on-demand Warner Archive Collection. Playing, as usual, a barely fictionalized version of himself, Jolson stars as Al Fuller, the irrepressible ?end man? (the lead solo singer or comic) of Meadow?s Merry Minstrels. This down-at-the-heels outfit is first presented as an anachronism, playing to half-empty houses in tank towns. By the second act, though, the company has inexplicably returned to Broadway glory, at which point the film bursts into eye-popping two-color Technicolor for a series of elaborate production numbers.
The Technicolor sequences, discovered in the Netherlands Filmmuseum and now digitally reintegrated with a black-and-white print restored by the University of California, Los Angeles, have a bright, busy, carnavalesque look appropriate for numbers like ?Yes, We Have No Bananas? and the ribald ?Night Boat to Albany.?
But the film tactfully returns to monochrome for more dramatic moments, like Jolson?s performance of the title song ? ?I?d walk a million miles for one of your smiles? ? for his character?s white-haired mother (Louise Dresser). The director, Michael Curtiz, even manages a lovely little camera movement to underline the emotion of the scene, no mean feat at a time when film technique was still severely circumscribed by the encumbrances of early sound recording. (Warner Archive Collection, warnerarchive.com, $19.95, not rated)
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Thanks, talkietime, I knew it had to have been shown not too long ago.
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Joan Leslie
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Ryan, Jerry - Robert Mitchum in Two for the Seesaw
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Myrna Loy was in The Red Pony with Robert Mitchum
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Walter Brennan
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I think I'll go for some of those cowboy stamps - just hope they don't reroute the letters to the pony express!
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With Audrey Hepburn in ROMAN HOLIDAY
I almost forgot to include this in the OP - the schedule for July's tribute to Star of the Month Gregory Peck will be as follows:
*_Monday, July 5_*
*Moby Dick* (1956) 8:00 PM
*To Kill A Mockingbird* (1962) 10:00 PM
*The Keys of the Kingdom* (1945) 12:15 AM
*The Yearling* (1946) 2:45 AM
*The Paradine Case* (1947) 5:00 AM
*_Monday, July 12 - Tuesday July 13_*
*Roman Holiday* (1953) 8:00 PM
*The Valley Of Decision* (1945) 10:00 PM
*Spellbound* (1945) 12:00 AM
*The Great Sinner* (1949) 2:00 AM
*Man With A Million* (1954) 4:00 AM
*I Walk the Line* (1970) 5:30 AM
*Designing Woman* (1957) 7:15 AM
*_Monday, July 19 - Tuesday July 20_*
*Captain Horatio Hornblower* (1951) 8:00 PM
*Captain Newman, M.D.* (1963) 10:00 PM
*The Guns of Navarone* (1961) 12:15 AM
*The Purple Plain* (1954) 3:00 AM
*On the Beach* (1959) 4:45 AM
*Days Of Glory* (1944) 7:00 AM
*Behold a Pale Horse* (1964) 8:30 AM
*_Monday, July 26_*
*How the West Was Won* (1962) 8:00 PM
*Duel In The Sun* (1946) 11:00 PM
*Mackenna's Gold* (1969) 1:30 AM
*The Big Country* (1958) 3:45 AM
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*_TUESDAY, APRIL 20_*
*Dangerous Crossing* (1953) 7:30am ET
A bride's (Jeanne Crain) husband (Carl Bentz) disappears on board a luxury liner in the mid-Atlantic and she desperately searches to find him amidst dangerous circumstances.
Cast: Michael Rennie, Carl Betz, Casey Adams, Mary Anderson. Director: Joseph M. Newman
*Cry of the City* (1948) 9am ET
A New York police lieutenant (Victor Mature) walks a tightrope as he tracks tracks his former best friend, who is now a cop-killer.
Cast: Victor Mature, Richard Conte, Shelley Winters, Fred Clark, Tommy Cook. Director: Robert Siodmak.
*Somewhere in the Night* (1946) 11am ET
An amnesiac (Hodiak) returns from WWII trying to discover his lost identity and learns that he may be a murderer.
Cast: John Hodiak, Richard Conte, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
*_WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21_*
*Nightmare Alley* (1947) 10:30am ET
Tyrone Power is excellent in a change-of-pace role as a carnival con man who masters a mind-reading act and teams up with an unethical psychiatrist to scam wealthy clients in this part-film noir, part-gothic thriller.
Cast: Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, Taylor Holmes, Mike Mazurki, Ian Keith, George Jessel. Director: Edmund Goulding
*_FRIDAY, APRIL 23_*
*The Dark Corner* (1946) 10:15am ET
A private eye (Mark Stevens) framed for murder is chased by cops and crooks.
Cast: Clifton Webb, Mark Stevens, Lucille Ball, Kurt Kreuger. Director: Henry Hathaway
*Panic in the Streets* (1950) 12pm ET
A medical officer (Richard Widmark) races against time after he discovers two gun-happy hoodlums (Zero Mostel and Jack Palance) are running around the streets of New Orleans carrying the virus to a deadly new plague.
Cast: Paul Douglas, Jack Palance, Barbara Bel Geddes, Zero Mostel. Director: Elia Kazan
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Are you talking about the intro? I'm pretty sure they started out by talking about Robert Walker, maybe you missed the beginning?
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*Dede Allen dies at 86; editor revolutionized imagery, sound and pace in U.S. films*
Her work on 1967's 'Bonnie and Clyde' ushered in a new aesthetic that's now the standard in American film. She earned Oscar nominations for 'Dog Day Afternoon,' 'Reds' and 'Wonder Boys.'
By Claudia Luther
April 18, 2010
Dede Allen, the film editor whose seminal work on Robert Rossen's "The Hustler" in 1961 and especially on Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 brought a startling new approach to imagery, sound and pace in American movies, died Saturday. She was 86.
Allen, who was nominated for Academy Awards for "Dog Day Afternoon" (1975), "Reds" (1981) and "Wonder Boys" (2000), died at her Los Angeles home days after having a stroke, said her son, Tom Fleischman.
Allen was the first film editor -- male or female -- to receive sole credit on a movie for her work. The honor came with "Bonnie and Clyde," a film in which Allen raised the level of her craft to an art form that was as seriously discussed as cinematography or even directing.
"She was just an extraordinary collaborator, and in the course of editing that film, I came to develop confidence in Dede," Penn told The Times on Saturday. "Indeed, she wasn't an editor, she was a constructionist."
The two were "not just collaborators," Penn said, "but deep family friends. We made six films together."
Greg S. Faller, professor of film studies at Towson University in Maryland, said "The Hustler" and "Bonnie and Clyde" "must be considered benchmark films in the history of editing."
"It's hard to see the changes she made because most of what she did has been so fully embraced by the industry," Faller said.
Allen departed from the standard Hollywood way of cutting -- making smooth transitions starting with wide shots establishing place and characters and going on to medium shots and finally close-ups -- by beginning with close-ups or jump cuts. Although these editing methods had been pioneered by the French new wave and some British directors, Allen is generally credited with being the first to use and shape them in American film.
In Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon," she employed a staccato tempo, sometimes called shock cutting.
"She creates this menacing quality by not cutting where you'd expect it -- she typically would cut sooner than you might expect," Faller said. "You weren't ready for it."
She would also begin the sound from the next scene while the previous scene was still playing, a technique now standard in film editing.
In all, Allen edited or co-edited 20 major motion pictures over 40 years, but she was most closely identified with Penn and a handful of A-list directors such as Rossen, Lumet and George Roy Hill and actor-directors Paul Newman, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.
Besides "Bonnie and Clyde," which was produced by Beatty and starred Beatty and Faye Dunaway, Allen's films for Penn included "Alice's Restaurant," "Little Big Man," "Night Moves" and "The Missouri Breaks."
She edited Lumet's "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "The Wiz"; Hill's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Slap Shot"; Newman's "Rachel, Rachel" and "Harry & Son"; Beatty's "Reds" (with Craig McKay, who shared the Oscar nomination) and Redford's "The Milagro Beanfield War."
But it was the violent tale based on the true story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow -- lovers and robbers on the run during the Great Depression -- that secured her place as a pioneer in film.
Hardly a chase scene or violent sequence filmed since "Bonnie and Clyde" has not been a reference to Allen's distinct style, which she developed under Penn's direction.
"What we essentially were doing," Penn said Saturday, "was developing a rhythm for the film so that it has the complexity of music."
The famed final ambush scene in which Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down on a gravel road in rural Louisiana contains more than 50 cuts, though it lasts less than a minute. At Penn's urging, Allen and her assistant, Jerry Greenberg, employed slow motion at some points and faster speed at others, creating a tense, violent and balletic conclusion.
Although the film initially left some movie critics in near-apoplectic disapproval of its mix of comedy and graphic violence, Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker magazine, called it "excitingly American."
Kael had special praise for the movie's editing, especially the "rag-doll dance of death" at the end of the picture, which she called "brilliant."
"It is a horror that seems to go on for eternity, and yet it doesn't last a second beyond what it should," Kael wrote.
In his review in 1967, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert called it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance."
Kael's review and other critical praise prompted many to reevaluate the film, which in 1998 was listed at No. 27 on the American Film Institute's list of the "100 Greatest American Movies of All Time."
Dorothea Corothers Allen was born in Cincinnati on Dec. 3, 1923. She attended Scripps College in Claremont but left to take a job as a messenger at Columbia Pictures, hoping she could someday fulfill her dream of being a director.
Within a year, she was an assistant in sound effects, working on three-reelers. After long hours at her job, she would sit beside Carl Lerner, then an editor in television who later edited "Klute" and other films. With Lerner's guidance, she learned the craft of editing: the assemblage of various scenes to create a coherent film.
In the early days of Hollywood, the cutters, as they were called, were often women, perhaps because, as Allen once commented to author Ally Acker, "women have always been good at little details, like sewing."
But later those jobs mostly went to men, especially after World War II when military veterans returned to the film industry.
Unable to get a stronger foothold in the movies, Allen went with her husband to Europe and then New York City, where she took various jobs, including editing commercials, while raising her two children.
Working on commercials helped shape her style of editing, she often said.
In the late 1950s, Lerner recommended her for her first major editing task -- for director Robert Wise's "Odds Against Tomorrow," the taut film noir starring Harry Belafonte.
Allen credited Wise, who had been a film editor ("Citizen Kane"), for giving her the confidence to find her footing in the profession. She began experimenting with using sound to move the action forward, the precursor to her method of initiating sound from the next scene while the previous scene was still running.
"The overall effect increased the pace of the film -- something always happened, visually or aurally, in a staccato-like tempo," Faller wrote in "Women Filmmakers and Their Films."
"Odds" led to Rossen's "The Hustler," which gave Allen her first real opportunity to demonstrate what she had learned, including the use of cuts instead of dissolves between scenes.
"I think it surprised Rossen, but he left it," she told the Film Quarterly in 1992 of her way of editing. "He used to say, 'It works. It plays. Leave it. Don't improve it into a disaster.' "
Ebert wrote of Allen's work on "The Hustler" that she found the rhythm in the pool games -- "the players circling, the cue sticks, the balls, the watching faces -- that implies the trance-like rhythm of the players. Her editing 'tells' the games so completely that if we don't understand pool, we forget that we don't."
When "Bonnie and Clyde" came along several years later, Allen employed her well-honed techniques and instincts about performance and story to help Penn deliver a film unlike any made in America before.
In 1994, Allen received the highest honor from her peers, a career achievement award given by American Cinema Editors. In November 2007 she received the Motion Picture Editors Guild's Fellowship and Service Award.
For seven years during the 1990s, Allen was an executive at Warner Bros., overseeing pre- and post-production on many films. She returned to editing with "Wonder Boys" and was co-editor of Omar Naim's "The Final Cut" (2004) and editor of "Fireflies in the Garden" (2008).
In addition to her son, Tom, a sound recording mixer, she is survived by her husband of 63 years, Stephen E. Fleischman, a retired TV news executive, documentary producer and writer; daughter Ramey Ward; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Claudia Luther is a former Times staff writer
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Nice photos, Tatiana. And welcome to the forums!
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I watched it in 3-D and I concur. Also, I believe Dreamworks is making all its animated movies in 3-D from now on.
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James Aubrey (right) in LORD OF THE FLIES.
April 18, 2010
*James Aubrey, who Portrayed the Hero in ?Lord of the Flies?, Is Dead at 62*
By BRUCE WEBER
James Aubrey, a British actor who had his first role when he was an untrained schoolboy, portraying Ralph, the right-minded boy who strove to ward off the savagery of his fellow castaways in the 1963 film ?Lord of the Flies,? died on April 6 at his home in Cranwell, Lincolnshire, in central England. He was 62.
The cause was pancreatitis, said his brother-in-law, David Fleming.
Mr. Aubrey had a busy career on stage and television in England, where he performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court Theater, Birmingham Rep and the Cambridge Theater Company, and where he was probably best known as Gavin Sorenson, an American interloper in a British family, in the steamy, soapy mid-1970s series ?Bouquet of Barbed Wire? and its sequel, ?Another Bouquet.?
He was, however, one of those cultural figures who begin at a peak of recognition and spend a professional lifetime unable to reascend the heights. He was just 13 and living in Jamaica when the director Peter Brook saw him at a swimming pool and selected him to lead the adolescent ensemble for ?Lord of the Flies,? a striking and controversial adaptation of William Golding?s grim fable about British schoolboys who survive a plane crash on a remote island and devolve into barbarians.
Ralph, Mr. Aubrey?s character, barely manages to hold on to his humanity, but he is the story?s hero, trying to shield the chubby, asthmatic Piggy (Hugh Edwards) from the persecution of bullies and otherwise striving to uphold the principles of civilized society. Mr. Aubrey, whose youthful, intelligent face is both literally and figuratively sullied by the experience, became an emblem of innocence lost.
James Aubrey Tregidgo was born on Aug. 28, 1947, in Klagenfurt, Austria, where his father, Aubrey James Tregidgo, a career soldier, was serving in the British Army. The family traveled with his assignments, and young James was educated in Germany, Singapore and Jamaica. The swimming pool where Mr. Brooks spotted him was on an Army base.
?Lord of the Flies? was shot over the summer of 1961 on the island of Vieques, in Puerto Rico; the editing took a year. When it was released, it was hailed as shocking and brilliant at least as often as it was decried as amateurish and shameful.
By that time Mr. Aubrey had already appeared on Broadway in a play called ?Isle of Children,? which starred Patty Duke. Though its title makes it sound like a remake of ?Lord of the Flies,? the play actually concerned a teenage girl afflicted with a frail heart; Mr. Aubrey played her closest friend. It closed after 11 performances, and Mr. Aubrey never came to Broadway again.
Bitten by the acting bug, he trained at the Drama Center in London and appeared in numerous productions at the Royal Court Theater in the 1970s; one was Joe Orton?s comedy ?Loot,? directed by Albert Finney.
In 1977, at the Shaw Theater, Mr. Aubrey played Tom Wingfield, the emotionally burdened son of an aging Southern belle, in Tennessee Williams?s ?Glass Menagerie,? a production attended by the playwright.
Mr. Aubrey was once married and once divorced. His survivors include his sister, Janet Fleming, of Brighton, Sussex, England; and a daughter, Sarah, who lives in Paris.
After ?Lord of the Flies,? Mr. Aubrey?s film roles were considerably less prominent. His credits included ?Galileo,? Joseph Losey?s 1975 biography of the 17th-century astronomer; ?The Hunger? (1983), a vampire story starring Catherine Deneuve; and ?Cry Freedom? (1987), Richard Attenborough?s South African apartheid drama.
Mr. Fleming, his brother-in-law, acknowledged that Mr. Aubrey was sometimes frustrated at never having matched the recognition he received as a boy in ?Lord of the Flies.? But, he said, he had his moments.
After seeing the 1977 production of ?The Glass Menagerie,? Tennessee Williams inscribed a copy of his memoirs to him.
?To James Aubrey,? Williams wrote. ?The best Tom Wingfield anywhere, ever.?
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Oh, I totally agree. This is the early Glenn Ford, carefree-looking and suave:
And much later in his career:
Name a Celebrity - Name a Movie
in Games and Trivia
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Polly Bergen was in Move Over, Darling with James Garner