kingrat

Henry Fonda: The Long Night (one of his three or four best performances; excellent film) Ida Lupino: Deep Valley Faye Emerson: The Mask of Dimitrios Eleanor Parker: The Very Thought of You Jean Simmons: Home Before Dark Paulette Goddard: Diary of a Chambermaid

SUSAN SLADE and CLAUDELLE INGLISH.

I am enjoying this thread WAY too much. How about a musical starring Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg? Oh, wait . . . .

Don't miss Crime Wave tonight, which has spectacular noir photography by John Alton and superb direction by Andre de Toth. With The Killing, The Ashphalt Jungle, and Suddenly, this is an incredible lineup. Did I mention that Timothy Carey is also in the cast of Crime Wave and The Killing?

While Luchino Visconti had the cast of Rocco and His Brothers together, I wish they could have made an Italian version of Written on the Wind. This might have been as good as the original. Rock Hudson - Alain Delon Lauren Bacall - Claudia Cardinale Robert Stack - Renato Salvatore Dorothy Malone - Annie Girardot Robert Keith - Katina Paxinou

Most writers know that "thin as a rail" and "smart as a whip" are clichés. However, they seem to believe that "rail-thin" and "whip-smart" are oh so clever. If you describe a movie's dialogue as "whip-smart," you are letting us know you are "box-of-rocks-dumb."

SPOILERS AHEAD: I did not see Night Moves this time around, but recall it as a fairly well-made film--it's fun to see James Woods and Melanie Griffith so young--with a typical 1970s ending. Which, alas, is not a compliment. Many 1970s filmmakers reacted against the well-made films that Hollywood had usually produced. This was understandable, but it left the problem of how to resolve their own films. If the neatly wrapped-up ending was felt to be false, what could be put in its place? One solution was to make the ending quick and ambiguous, or simply unclear. Night Moves seems to fall in this category, if I remember correctly. Are we supposed to assume that Hackman and most of the others end up dead? This would be the ultimate 1970s take on the P.I. film, with the detective ending up dead. The unsatisfying ending probably also has something to do with the film's lack of commercial success.

Christopher Reeve got his start on Love of Life. Not only was he an extremely good-looking man who could act, he clearly had brains and a sense of humor. His humor and irony brought added value to his soap character, just as they did to his Superman. His character was mildly villainous (selfish, a bigamist), though redeemable.

A little-known Anthony Quinn film which will be shown is A Dream of Kings. Quinn is a Greek-American living in Chicago. Irene Pappas plays his wife, Inger Stevens plays his mistress, and Sam Levene is his best friend. All four are very good. Daniel Mann considered this his best film.

One of the interesting aspects of Broadcast News is that this is the first film not set in the South where the smartest person in the room is a Southerner. This was absolutely new, and it represents the growing importance of the urban, educated South in national politics. Holly Hunter's casting, very late in the day, and her use of her Southern accent give the film an added dimension.

I particularly dislike Gordon Willis' cinematography, which comes close to ruining the film for me. Willis' insistence on making most of the scenes as murky as possible means that key scenes get lost. The few action scenes, including the climactic fight, are throwaways because we can't see what's happening. Notice how the editor tries to salvage this by lots of quick cutting to make this seem more interesting and exciting than it is. If Willis is trying to create a color equivalent for film noir, he fails. The sex scene has the same problem. We can't see the faces of Fonda and Sutherland, so we can't see what this means to them. In fact, this is one film where the cinematographer seems much more the auteur of the film than the director. Sutherland's character is underwritten, and Sutherland's natural charm supplies what little interest the character has. As TopBilled wrote, the identity of the killer is obvious. The actors are all good; they deserved a better developed script and better lighting.

I have a good friend who can't tell the difference between Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Leonardo Di Caprio. The Departed drove him crazy because it had both Damon and Di Caprio--or was it Brad Pitt? Cameron Mitchell/John Garfield are another pair of lookalikes, and Dane Clark was sort of a "poor man's Garfield," too.

The most recent episode of Downton Abbey showed a new footman with hair very full on top and shaved on the sides, not a very credible haircut for the 1920s. Usually that show has a good sense of period, with wonderful costumes, although the writers sometimes use words from outside the period. I agree with Palmerin that an out-of-period hairstyle can really break the illusion and knock you out of a film.

Actually, at the time Annie Hall was released, almost anyone who would have gone to a Woody Allen movie would have known the name Marshall McLuhan, although not everyone would have read Understanding Media. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In had a running gag where Henry Gibson would say, "Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?" "The medium is the message" was as commonly recognized a phrase then as "the tipping point" is now, and Understanding Media was a best-seller, just like The Tipping Point.

Fred, thank you for posting the clips of Lawrence of Arabia and the Bruckner Sixth Symphony.

I haven't seen most of these films, except for classics like Lawrence of Arabia, which I love (best epic ever); Lost Horizon, which I love most of; and Mrs. Parkington (Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon are much sexier than usual; love their opening scenes, love the scene with the bustle, love Agnes Moorehead, and in general like this quite a lot. Teresa is a very odd film, with all the various ingredients very well directed by Fred Zinnemann. Closest in style to The Search in its Italian scenes, but the New York half is like a number of 50s movies about overbearing moms. That nice Patricia Collinge seeks her teeth into the terrible mom role, and Pier Angeli is like a young Ingrid Bergman. None of her other work is on this level, though she's certainly good in The Angry Silence. Hollywood didn't know how to develop the very special quality she shows in this film and turns her into a generic pretty young actress. I love that the John Ericson character is shown as a coward, and never redeemed. This was probably career suicide for the young actor, who's capable. It's very important that the screenplay is by Stewart Stern, who will go on to write Rebel Without a Cause. Much of that is seen in embryo here: the overbearing mother, the sensitive young man who must stand up to her, the pretty young woman who helps make a man of him. Also similar is the weird relationship where the Ericson character thinks his commanding officer is like his father (parallel with Sal Mineo allegedly seeing James Dean and Natalie Wood as his parents). Just as the Mineo/Dean relationship is sexual on Mineo's side, notice the soldier at the beginning who offers bread to Ericson--this is a pass.

Andre, There is usually a mix of film and digital at the TCM Film Festival. In the future, we can expect it to be more digital. New restorations are usually digital. Sometimes vintage prints are shown. Raw Deal, for instance, was a 35mm from the Library of Congress, if I remember correctly. The Bad and the Beautiful was a vintage 35mm from the MGM archives. The program for the festival and the information on the website about the slate of films to be shown usually indicates whether the showing will be film or digital. However, this information is not usually available until shortly before the festival. The quality of the "prints" shown at the festival, whether digital or film, is of great importance to TCM, and they make every effort to provide the best possible version.

The plot of Mamma Mia! can be found, without the songs, in Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. Listen to the opening bars of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony and you'll discover the inspiration for Maurice Jarre's main theme for Lawrence of Arabia.

This sort of thing is always fun. Too bad that the list is hard to access, rather than being available in one long document. But I have to say--if you're taking away Oscars, you let Charlton Heston keep his Best Actor award over Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot), James Stewart (Anatomy of a Murder), Laurence Harvey (Room at the Top), etc.? Sheesh. What were these people thinking? And Andy, I love me some film noir, but the best film of 1947 is OBVIOUSLY (he says, pounding his shoe on the table) Black Narcissus.

When the Johnny Depp DILLINGER came out a few years back, the ads featured a scene lifted from BONNIE AND CLYDE. An old farmer is getting money from a teller at the time the bank is being robbed. The robber (Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow/Johnny Depp as Dillinger) asks if the money belongs to the man or the bank. When the old guy says, "Mine," the robber lets him keep it.

For my taste, the scenes with Glenn Anders in The Lady from Shanghai, Akim Tamiroff in Mr. Arkadin, and Dennis Weaver in Touch of Evil all go on much too long, especially the scenes with Weaver, which to me are agonizingly long. Any producer who wanted to chop those scenes to smaller doses has my wholehearted approval. However, this is clearly part of Welles' sensibility. He obviously loves the long, drawn-out, in-your-face weirdness of these scenes and encourages the actors to go over the top.

Pauline Kael noted that some critics gave unfavorable reviews to Pather Panchali, said that the next two films in the trilogy weren't as good as Pather Panchali, and then complained that each subsequent film of Satyajit Ray wasn't as good as the trilogy. A few years back we had a local reviewer who always hated what other critics had praised and praised anything that other critics had hated. Most people thought that The Avengers was a dud, but this guy gave it four stars and put it on his top ten for that year. I like independence in a critic, but this seemed too predictable to represent his genuine taste.

No one has mentioned Jo Ann Worley, who played the mother, Fanny Farkle. Ruth Buzzi as daughter Flicker usually wore a polka-dot dress, if I remember correctly, and would lie on the floor, kick up her heels, show off her petticoats, and say "Hiiiii!" The Farkle Family segment of Laugh-In was essentially the same sketch with the same running joke every time--and that was the joke. If you dug The Farkle Family, that was the point. We wanted variations of the same joke. By the way, one sign of its popularity is that there was a racehorse named Fanny Farkle who ran at the Florida tracks.

Thanks for the posting, TopBilled. Though it's hard to swear for the accuracy of any accounting figures coming out of Hollywood, at least we get an idea of which movies were popular, and they are not always the obvious suspects. I love PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, but would not have dreamed that it was a top 10 box office film of its year. This shows how many people wanted to see Ava Gardner, who is breathtakingly beautiful in PANDORA. Lana Turner's pull at the box office is clear, especially when paired with Clark Gable. **** TONK is a terrific and fun film, HOMECOMING a surprisingly moving one, and neither is well known today. When the so-so SOMEWHERE I'LL FIND YOU hits the top 10, you know people really want to see Gable and Turner. Abbott & Costello make the top 10, Martin & Lewis make the top 10, HOUSE OF WAX makes the top 10. Fox can usually count on a Betty Grable film hitting the top 10. HITLER'S CHILDREN is certainly a surprise.

Wow! This is exciting news. Sophia Loren has had such a marvelous career. Marriage Italian Style, which I've never seen, sounds like a great choice for the festival. And I'm especially happy for filmlover, too.