HollywoodGolightly
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The purpose of this thread is two-fold: first, since there appears to be no other thread dedicated to Kansas City Confidential and, secondly, to bring up the small retrospective of Phil Karlson films being organized by UC Berkeley in June.
Kansas City Confidential is one of the few Karlson movies to be easily available on DVD; the heist noir has a great cast that includes John Payne, Colleen Gray, Preston Foster, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam and Neville Brand.
Payne is an ex-con gone straight who is framed by Foster, who sets up three Kansas City criminals (Brand, Van Cleef and Elam) for an armored-truck robbery after which they immediately leave the country, planning to split the $1.2 million loot in some foreign location at a later date.
KCC will be shown on Friday, June 5, kicking off the Karlson retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive:
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/phil_karlson_2009
*Tight Spot: Phil Karlson in the Fifties*
June 5, 2009 - June 26, 2009
Welcome to Phil Karlson?s fifties America, where corruption and cruelty lurk not just in urban back alleys but in sunny resorts and leafy villages, and injustice is not an abstraction but a visceral blow to the body politic. Karlson is known for a particularly stark and punishing brand of noir, but his visual assaults are based in a brutal morality. Although he objected to screen violence for its own sake, Karlson said, ?when it belongs, you should show it and you shouldn?t pussyfoot around it. You should put it on there the way it happened.? This fidelity to the physical was part of a pulp naturalism that combined authentic locations and downscale details with weird set pieces and startling twists, uncovering the uncanny in the real.
Born Philip Karlstein, Karlson (1908?86) came of age in 1920s Chicago and was seasoned in that city?s underworld as well as its high culture: he was a bootlegger?s lookout and witnessed a mob killing before attending the Art Institute. Later, to pay his way through law school at Loyola, he took a job at Universal, ?washing toilets and dishes and whatever the hell they gave me.? He eventually landed a barely more glamorous position as a director at Monogram on Poverty Row, where he compared himself to ?a mechanic that worked on a line??but ?I was experimenting with everything I was making, trying to get my little pieces of truth here and there.? The experiments paid off in the fifties, when Karlson put out the remarkable run of movies we feature here (all but one of which are unavailable on DVD). Join us for four nights of low-budget ingenuity and exhilarating eccentricity, laced with gritty little pieces of truth.
Juliet Clark
Editor
Friday, June 5, 2009
6:30 p.m. *Kansas City Confidential*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1952)
Friday, June 5, 2009
8:30 p.m. *99 River Street*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1953)
Friday, June 12, 2009
6:30 p.m. *Scandal Sheet*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1952)
Friday, June 12, 2009
8:15 p.m. *Tight Spot*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1955)
Friday, June 19, 2009
6:30 p.m. *5 Against the House*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1955)
Friday, June 19, 2009
8:15 p.m. *The Phenix City Story*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1955)
Friday, June 26, 2009
6:30 p.m. *The Brothers Rico*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1957)
Friday, June 26, 2009
8:30 p.m. *Gunman?s Walk*
Phil Karlson (U.S., 1958)
Series curated by Juliet Clark, with thanks to Steve Seid. Presented with support from the Packard Humanities Institute. We are grateful to Sony Pictures for providing vault prints.
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If Leo McCarey's name is not as well known as some of the other directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, then TCM is doing what it can by starting out this month's "Great Directors" celebration with the movies of Leo McCarey during the morning and afternoon of June 1st.
Here are the movies and shorts to be shown, starting at 6am ET:
*Innocent Husbands* (1925)
In this silent short, an honest husband has to keep his suspicious wife from finding the woman who's passed out in his bedroom.
Cast: Charley Chase, James Finlayson, William Gillespie, Jane Sherman Dir: Leo McCarey BW-21 mins, TV-G
*Be Your Age* (1926)
In this silent short, a young man in need considers marrying a wealthy widow.
Cast: Charley Chase, Oliver Hardy, Frank Brownlee, Lillian Leighton Dir: Leo McCarey BW-22 mins, TV-G
*Dog Shy* (1926)
In this silent short, a man tries to rescue a young beauty from marrying a rich man she doesn't love.
Cast: Charley Chase, Josephine Crowell, William Orlamond, Stuart Holmes Dir: Leo McCarey BW-22 mins, TV-G
*Once Upon a Honeymoon* (1942)
A radio correspondent tries to rescue a burlesque queen from her marriage to a Nazi official.
Cast: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Walter Slezak, Albert Dekker Dir: Leo McCarey BW-115 mins, TV-G
*Love Affair* (1939)
Near-tragic misunderstandings threaten a shipboard romance.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman Dir: Leo McCarey BW-86 mins, TV-G
*The Milky Way* (1936)
A mild-mannered milkman stumbles onto a career in the boxing ring.
Cast: Harold Lloyd, Adolphe Menjou, Verree Teasdale, Helen Mack Dir: Leo McCarey BW-88 mins, TV-G
*The Kid From Spain* (1932)
An innocent man accused of robbing banks masquerades as a bullfighter to escape the police.
Cast: Eddie Cantor, Lyda Roberti, Robert Young, Ruth Hall Dir: Leo McCarey BW-96 mins, TV-G
*Duck Soup* (1933)
When he's named dictator of Freedonia, a con artist declares war on the neighboring kingdom.
Cast: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx Dir: Leo McCarey BW-69 mins, TV-G
*The Bells Of St. Mary's* (1945)
A liberal priest tries to soften the strict nun running a boys' school.
Cast: Bing Crosby, Ingrid Bergman, Henry Travers, William Gargan Dir: Leo McCarey BW-126 mins, TV-G
*The Awful Truth* (1937)
A divorced couple keeps getting mixed up in each other's love lives.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Alexander D'Arcy Dir: Leo McCarey BW-91 mins, TV-PG
I found this great quote in the TCM article on McCarey:
*Jean Renoir was once quoted as saying, "McCarey understands people - perhaps better than anyone else in Hollywood." That quote is oft-used, but with good reason. McCarey's later features all have moments of quiet and humanity, and the viewer can't help but feel engaged and welcome in the worlds McCarey creates.*
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I'm recording it right now, I see that the time slot is 2 hours 30 minutes, so it should be OK. And I wasn't aware that it had never been officially released, because apparently moviesunlimited.com sells it on VHS. Could it be that it is in the public domain?
At any rate, glad to have a recording of it.
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> I mentioned a few days ago that the following Blu-ray classic titles were on special on Amazon, but Adventures of Robin Hood has now been lowered to $12.99 from $15.49 and Rio Bravo is now $12.99, too (but I don't think it makes a great Blu, unfortunately)
Peter,
What did you find lacking in the Rio Bravo blu-ray? I think at $12.99 it's a pretty good deal. I didn't buy it, but I did rent it from Netflix and thought the image was pretty impressive, albeit not quite as impressive as The Searchers, but pretty good nonetheless. (And certainly _much_ better than it looked on TCM last time it was shown)
I confess I didn't spend too much time looking at the extras... was that what you thought was lacking?
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> All I can say to this and all the complaining before the film has been seen is..."Oh, give me a break! Or, rather, give Disney a break!"
Nothing would make me happier than to see Disney exceed expectations here, and creating a new standard for racial sensitivity while remaining entertaining as always.
Having said that, I thought the article gave some good examples of _past_ insensitivity, which most of us as kids may not have picked up when we first watched those movies (and the article didn't even have to mention Song of the South, usually one of the most cited examples).
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Hi, John, and welcome to the forums
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us; as I explained before, I'll probably not be able to watch my recordings for a day or two, but I'd like to come back at that point with more detailed comments.
Oh, one thing - you might want to think twice about posting your e-mail and/or phone number here in the forums, just to be on the safe side.
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Well, I want to congratulate all the participants because you've all entered some really _amazing_ schedules. I'll be taking a closer look once the voting stage begins, but in my mind everyone who participates is already a winner because of all the fun they have. As I explained to Chip previously, I had to cancel my plans to make a schedule at the last minute due to some personal stuff that came up, however it still has been a great learning experience just to put myself in the frame of mind of the potential programmer.
Kudos to everyone and especially Chip because he's been such a great challenge organizer!
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Well, as I said, I've seen the remake (which as RO pointed out in the outro, was directed by former TCM guest programmer David Mamet) and I do have TCM in the background, but I won't sit down and watch these two movies properly until later.
I do think they seem pretty good, and I am always delighted to discover British movies from the 40s that I didn't know before.
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Just came across this story, which deals specifically with an animated movie Disney will release in December - but also touches on the many examples of stereotyping it has been accused of, going back to 1941's Dumbo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/fashion/31disney.html
May 31, 2009
*Her Prince Has Come. Critics, Too.*
By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES
?THE Princess and the Frog? does not open nationwide until December, but the buzz is already breathless: For the first time in Walt Disney animation history, the fairest of them all is black.
Princess Tiana, a hand-drawn throwback to classic Disney characters like Cinderella and Snow White, has a dazzling green gown, a classy upsweep hairdo and a diamond tiara. Like her predecessors, she is a strong-willed songbird (courtesy of the Tony-winning actress Anika Noni Rose) who finds her muscle-bound boyfriend against all odds.
?Finally, here is something that all little girls, especially young black girls, can embrace,? Cori Murray, an entertainment director at Essence magazine, recently told CNN.
To the dismay of Disney executives ? along with the African-American bloggers and others who side with the company ? the film is also attracting chatter of an uglier nature. Is ?The Princess and the Frog,? set in New Orleans in the 1920s, about to vaporize stereotypes or promote them?
The film, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, two of the men behind ?The Little Mermaid,? unfolds against a raucous backdrop of voodoo and jazz. Tiana, a waitress and budding chef who dreams of owning a restaurant, is persuaded to kiss a frog who is really a prince.
The spell backfires and ? poof! ? she is also an amphibian. Accompanied by a Cajun firefly and a folksy alligator, the couple search for a cure.
After viewing some photographs of merchandise tied to the movie, which is still unfinished, Black Voices, a Web site on AOL dedicated to African-American culture, faulted the prince?s relatively light skin color. Prince Naveen hails from the fictional land of Maldonia and is voiced by a Brazilian actor; Disney says that he is not white.
?Disney obviously doesn?t think a black man is worthy of the title of prince,? Angela Bronner Helm wrote March 19 on the site. ?His hair and features are decidedly non-black. This has left many in the community shaking their head in befuddlement and even rage.?
Others see insensitivity in the locale.
?Disney should be ashamed,? William Blackburn, a former columnist at The Charlotte Observer, told London?s Daily Telegraph. ?This princess story is set in New Orleans, the setting of one of the most devastating tragedies to beset a black community.?
ALSO under scrutiny is Ray the firefly, performed by Jim Cummings (the voice of Winnie the Pooh and Yosemite Sam). Some people think Ray sounds too much like the stereotype of an uneducated Southerner in an early trailer.
Of course, armchair critics have also been complaining about the princess. Disney originally called her Maddy (short for Madeleine). Too much like Mammy and thus racist. A rumor surfaced on the Internet that an early script called for her to be a chambermaid to a white woman, a historically correct profession. Too much like slavery.
And wait: We finally get a black princess and she spends the majority of her time on screen as a frog?
?Because of Disney?s history of stereotyping,? said Michael D. Baran, a cognitive psychologist and anthropologist who teaches at Harvard and specializes in how children learn about race, ?people are really excited to see how Disney will handle her language, her culture, her physical attributes.?
Mr. Baran is reserving judgment and encourages others to do the same. But he added that the issue warrants scrutiny because of Disney?s outsize impact on children.
?People think that kids don?t catch subtle messages about race and gender in movies, but it?s quite the opposite,? he said.
Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer who is African-American and has two children, applauded Disney?s efforts to add diversity.
?I don?t know how important having a black princess is to little girls ? my daughter loves Ariel and I see nothing wrong with that ? but I think it?s important to moms,? she said.
?Who knows if Disney will get it right,? she added. ?They haven?t always in the past, but the idea that Disney is not bending over backward to be sensitive is laughable. It wants to sell a whole lot of Tiana dolls and some Tiana paper plates and make people line up to see Tiana at Disney World.?
Few people outside the company have seen footage of the movie. Among them are consultants like Oprah Winfrey, whom Disney asked for input on the racial aspects of the film and was cast as Tiana?s mother. (Movie theater owners and members of the N.A.A.C.P. have also been shown scenes, and the reactions, according to a Disney spokeswoman, were ?extremely positive.?)
Rather, fueling the debate are photos of related merchandise taken from a toy industry event, a one-minute teaser trailer and Disney?s enormous cultural impact.
The company wants to vanquish once and for all the whispers of racism that linger from stumbles in the past. Yes, ?Dumbo? traded in black stereotypes in 1941 with its band of uneducated, pimp-hat-wearing crows. All the animals in ?The Jungle Book? from 1967 speak in proper British accents except for the jive-talking monkeys who desperately want to become ?real people.?
More recently, ?Aladdin? ran into trouble in 1993. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee labeled certain song lyrics defamatory (?Where they cut off your ear/If they don?t like your face/It?s barbaric, but, hey, it?s home?).
The company responds that criticism of such well-worn examples ? particularly of films from the ?60s and earlier ? applies a 21st-century morality to movies made in sharply different times. The United States barely had a Civil Rights Act in 1967, much less a black president.
Disney executives think people should stop jumping to conclusions about ?The Princess and the Frog.?
A producer of the film, Peter Del Vecho, said: ?We feel a great responsibility to get this right. Every artistic decision is being carefully thought out.?
Ms. Rose, familiar to movie audiences for her role in ?Dreamgirls,? has also defended Disney.
?There is no reason to get up in arms,? she told reporters at a recent Los Angeles Urban League dinner. ?If there was something that I thought was disrespectful to me or to my heritage, I would certainly not be a part of it.?
Ms. Winfrey declined to comment. A spokesman for the N.A.A.C.P. said the organization had no immediate comment.
Disney often gets criticized no matter how carefully it strives to put together its television shows, theme-park attractions and movies. For years, Disney has been lambasted by some parents for not having a black princess. Now, some of those same voices are taking aim at the company without seeing the finished product. (Officially, the princesses are Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel of ?The Little Mermaid,? Belle of ?Beauty and the Beast? and Jasmine of ?Aladdin? ? all white except for Jasmine, who is Arabian. The leads from ?Mulan? and ?Pocahontas? are sometimes sold with the Princess merchandising line.)
Mr. Del Vecho said the idea for a black princess came about organically. The producers wanted to create a fairy tale set in the United States and centered on New Orleans, with its colorful past and deep musical history.
?As we spent time in New Orleans, we realized how truly it is a melting pot, which is how the idea of strongly multicultural characters came about,? Mr. Del Vecho said.
He described Tiana as ?a resourceful and talented person? and the rare fairy tale heroine ?who is not saved by a prince.? Once the decision was made to make the lead black, he added, ?We wanted her to bear the traits of African-American women and be truly beautiful.?
Getting ?The Princess and the Frog? right is of enormous importance to Disney. The company needs hits, as evidenced by a recently announced 97 percent drop in quarterly profit. The Disney Princess merchandising line is a $4 billion annual business and the company has plans for Tiana to be everywhere. Get ready for Tiana dresses, elaborate dolls and Halloween costumes.
The movie also marks a return by Disney to traditional hand-drawn animation. A failure could be the final nail in the coffin of an art form pioneered by Walt Disney himself.
In the last 20 years, Disney has made huge strides in depicting race. In 1997, the company?s television division presented a live-action version of ?Cinderella? with a black actress, the singer Brandy, playing the lead. In 1998, ?Mulan? was celebrated as a rare animated feature that depicted Chinese characters with realistic-looking slanted eyes; most animated films (even those from Japan) had Westernized versions of Asian people until that time.
THE debate surrounding ?The Princess and the Frog? illustrates how difficult it is to deal with race in animation, experts say. Cartoons by their nature trade in caricatures.
Mainstream producers have largely avoided characters of color for fear of offending minority groups, although black producers have been creating cartoons featuring stereotyped characters since the days of ?Fat Albert.?
Disney can take some comfort in a backlash to the backlash.
?This is one of those situations where I am ashamed of the black community,? Levi Roberts said in a YouTube video. ?Are we being racist ourselves by saying this movie shouldn?t have a white prince??
Perhaps the final word ? for now ? should come from somebody who is African-American and a former Disney animator.
?Overly sensitive people see racial or ethnic slights in every image,? wrote Floyd Norman, whose credits span from ?Sleeping Beauty? to ?Mulan,? in a 2007 essay on the Web site Jim Hill Media. ?And in their zeal to sanitize and pasteurize everything, they?ve taken all the fun out of cartoon making.?
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Well, it's a good thing it is on the Essentials next Saturday. Also, just in case you should be interested, there is an alternate ending that is included in the DVD version - just in case you ever decided to rent it or buy it.
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Classic directors only?
Just kidding.
A lot of the obvious favorites have already been mentioned so I will try and spare everyone the usual Hitchcock-Ford-Capra-Wilder-Wyler-Fleming-Lubitsch-Lean yadda yadda yadda and mention only the ones that either haven't been mentioned already or aren't likely to be mentioned:
D.W. Griffith
Erich Von Stroheim
Abel Gance
Buster Keaton
G.W. Pabst
King Vidor
Raoul Walsh
Tod Browning
Sergei Eisenstein
Michael Curtiz
Busby Berkeley
William Wellman
James Whale
Richard Thorpe
Phil Karlson
William Castle
Anthony Mann
Leni Riefenstahl
Alexander Korda
Marcel Carn?
Jean Renoir
Ren? Clair
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Jules Dassin
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Max Oph?ls
George Cukor
Vittorio De Sica
Jacques Demy & Agn?s Varda
Roman Polanski
Sam Fuller
Nicholas Ray
Robert Wise
Alain Resnais
Louis Malle
Jean-Luc Godard
Fran?ois Truffaut
Luis Bu?uel
Carlos Saura
Sergio Leone
Jean-Pierre Melville
Akira Kurosawa
Kenji Mizoguchi
Mike Nichols
Federico Fellini
Bernardo Bertolucci
Ingmar Bergman
Sam Peckinpah
Robert Altman
John Schlesinger
Peter Greenaway
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Aki Kaurism?ki
Pedro Almod?var
Alfonso Cuar?n
John Woo
Wong Kar-Wai
Hayao Miyazaki
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Uh... Pygmalion perhaps?
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The Yellow Rolls-Royce
When Dana wanted to get her dad something really special for Father's Day, she decided to throw caution to the wind and get him....
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Wrighter, Marge - Jan Sterling in Union Station
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A Majority of One
nw: vegemite
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Kane, Gail (In The White Sister, tonight's Sunday Silent feature)
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Claude Akins was in The Killers (1964) with Angie Dickinson.
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Quine, Richard - directed The Solid Gold Cadillac
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Once Upon a Honeymoon
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Sorry, I hope you folks aren't discussing this one in one of the other threads, I just didn't see a separate thread for it.
I don't know much about it, except that I'll be recording it tonight for later viewing. Apparently it has only been released on VHS before, never on DVD.
Does anyone know much about it?
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> {quote:title=CineSage_jr wrote:}{quote}
> Ingrid Bergman was nearly six feet tall. She had few leading men who weren't shorter than she was.
Good point, CineSage. In that regard, she was without a doubt _above-average_.
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You're probably right about that, I haven't checked the blogs recently, but it's always a good thing when there are several choices available so that conversations have more chances of taking place. Plus the site is still in a pretty early stage, so nobody knows which way it could go eventually.
But I think it's a good thing they didn't just stick with the initial groups that they had 2-3 weeks ago.
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> {quote:title=fxreyman wrote:}{quote}
> I know that this thread is devoted to DVDs, but I am listing how many of both types I have in my collection Both DVD and VHS. Since a great many people here still use VHS to tape off of TCM.
I think that's a good idea, Rey. Obviously many of us also have VHS tapes and blu-rays, maybe even laserdiscs, but it would make for a very awkward thread title to include all of those.
> What I am doing and have been trying to accomplish these past few years is to replace my VHS tapes with store bought / by on the internet DVDs. I do not have a DVD-R machine, nor am I willing to purchase one.
Is there any reason you decided against getting a DVD recorder? I'm only asking because I have found it very convenient to be able to transfer anything from TCM or other movie channels into a DVD-R, each of which can be as cheap as $0.25 or so.
> Maybe Holly or Frank would know, but my guess is that not ALL current titles on regular DVD will also be produced on Blue-ray discs?
Chances are, it won't happen. DVDs have been around for about a decade, and there are still many titles that were once released on VHS that aren't out on DVD. The same could happen with blu-rays. Nobody really knows what the format's life expectancy could be, or how willing most movie fans would be to choose a digital delivery format (streaming, downloading, etc.)
Right now, studios are still reluctant to release some older movies in blu-ray because the blu-ray sales might account for maybe 5% or so of all the copies they will sell on both formats. But as more people switch to blu-ray, that could change quickly.
The tipping point, most likely, will be the release of very popular movies, like the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Lord of the Rings trilogies, which aren't on blu-ray yet. (Though LOTR could supposedly be released on blu-ray this year). By the time all of these movies are on blu-ray, the format will be well on its way to being adopted by most people.
Still, classics are always going to be tricky, because a lot of movies just aren't in good enough shape to look good in a HD format. It really takes a good restoration and a careful video transfer to make them look as good as they can on blu-ray. We can expect this to happen with the most popular of the classics, but maybe not with the more obscure titles.
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Oh, it wasn't a musical? Ooops. I wonder if TCMWebAdmin would mind moving this thread to the comedy forum....
Who loves the lovely and talented Irene Dunne
in Your Favorites
Posted
Don't forget TCM will show two movies with Irene Dunne today, June 1st, as part of the tribute to the films of Leo McCarey:
*Love Affair* (1939) 9:30am ET
Near-tragic misunderstandings threaten a shipboard romance.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman Dir: Leo McCarey BW-86 mins, TV-G
*The Awful Truth* (1937) 6:15pm ET
A divorced couple keeps getting mixed up in each other's love lives.
Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Alexander D'Arcy Dir: Leo McCarey BW-91 mins, TV-PG