kingrat
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Posts posted by kingrat
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I'd encourage anyone to give *Walkabout* a try, because some people like it very much. I can't help thinking that given 1) a great story premise and 2) spectacular scenery, Roeg gets about as little out of the material as possible. It doesn't help that his idea of subtlety is bonking us over the head with a cast-iron skillet.
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Skkimpole, you had me at "Jean Gabin." Love all five of those movies. Another outstanding schedule. The twisted fairy tales theme is a great idea, especially considering how popular that theme is today.
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Sapphiere, I don't know if Ty will be SOTM for May, but he will be eventually when all the details can be worked out with Fox. At the "Meet TCM" panel at the film festival this year, someone asked Charlie Tabesh, the head TCM programmer, about having Fox stars as SOTM, and he said that this is something TCM would very much like. The two he mentioned by name were Marilyn Monroe and Tyrone Power.
As you noted in your original post, more Tyrone Power films have been appearing on TCM in the last year. Fox now seems to be willing to lease films (for the right price, no doubt) they used to keep for themselves, as the upcoming TCM premieres of *Laura* and *The Ghost and Mrs. Muir* indicate.
Tyrone Power for SOTM is a great idea. The programmers work about six months ahead, so they are probably working on May now.
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If imdb is correct, Margaret Sullavan made 17 movies, which is just barely enough for SOTM (four a night for the four weeks). A SUTS day would probably be 12-13 films. Whether all these films are available, I don't know. However, I'd love to see a tribute to Sullavan, especially if some of the less familiar titles were shown, like *The Good Fairy*, *Back Street*, and *The Moon's Our Home*.
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Swithin, I believe that's how we've treated it in the past. If a movie is known to be scheduled, then by the future date of our program challenge entry, it will have been "p/s," previously shown.
This means that *The Ghost and Mrs. Muir* and *Laura* will no longer require the use of premieres.
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*The Breaking Point* and *The Macomber Affair* are two of the better Hemingway adaptations, and very good films. If you can accept that it doesn't have the flavor of Hemingway, Frank Borzage's 1930s version of *A Farewell to Arms* is a pretty good romantic movie.
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Fred, I think you're absolutely right. This is sometimes referred to as "stage diction." Bette Davis used it, and so did Joan Fontaine. It was common among stage-trained actors.
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To anyone just discovering the wonderful world of classic movies or to anyone wanting to watch some old favorites, February will be a treasure trove. One of the spins on this year's Oscar month is an evening salute to some notable films of a particular year. Feb. 1 devotes a whole day to 1939.
The programmers have selected a number of films from the early years of Oscar--the Feb. 20 double feature of Jeanne Eagels in *The Letter* (1929) and Ruth Chatterton in *Madame X* (1930) should please pre-Code fans--and a generous helping of foreign films. Feb. 4 begins with three great favorites of mine: *La Strada, The Burmese Harp*, and *The Virgin Spring*, continues with one I haven't seen, *Closely Watched Trains*, and for good measure adds *The Battle of Algiers, Z*, and *Babette's Feast*. What a feast!
Deanna Durbin makes an appearance in *Three Smart Girls* on Feb. 10--the Universal vault slowly begins to open--and the Fox vault opens, too, with such films as *The Young Lions* and *The Ghost and Mrs. Muir*.
I've always been curious about *The Mark* (Feb. 20). *Gambit* (Feb. 17) is a treat I haven't seen in years. Naturally, I'm always glad to see *King Rat* on the TCM schedule, but it's usually in a late-night slot, but on Feb. 24 it's in prime time on the West Coast as one of the five films chosen from 1965 that evening. Got to record it for the intro! That's the most respect *King Rat* has been shown in quite some time. By the way, *King Rat's* Oscar nod was for Burnett Guffey's B&W cinematography.
Edited by: kingrat on Nov 7, 2013 5:49 PM
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Tonight TCM will show *The Gypsy Moths*, not one of John Frankenheimer's best films, but worth seeing and rarely seen. Burt Lancaster, Gene Hackman, and Scott Wilson take their skydiving act from small town to small town in the Midwest. Deborah Kerr plays a local housewife (maybe not the most believable casting, but it reunites Deborah and Burt).
If you missed *The Swimmer* a week or so ago, it's on again tonight. An unusual film, with Burt showing off an amazing physique for someone over 50.
Though TCM is showing a generous number of Lancaster films this month, I wish they had been able to include *Go Tell the Spartans*, a modest but well-done film about Vietnam which got lost next to the more heavily hyped *Coming Home* and *The Deer Hunter*, but which some critics preferred.
Edited by: kingrat on Nov 6, 2013 4:03 PM
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Let alone the political ideas in *The Fountainhead*, whatever you may think of them, the film is bizarre, not the one to convince anyone of King Vidor's skill as a director. Lots of strange voiceover which is like narrative summary of what you might be seeing and hearing had those scenes actually been shot.
The overdone phallic imagery is pretty funny, like the elevator going up at the end of the movie.
Quite a few people would put *The Fountainhead* in the Bad Movies We Love category. I believe it did appear in the book of that title.
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Cinecrazy, I'm chortling about Olivia and Joan fighting to inherit the tontine in *The Wrong Box*. Too funny.
Abudgell, I hope you'll come to the festival and have a great time. There are sure to be films, panel discussions, and other events which will appeal to you, and it's easy to chat with strangers in line or at Club TCM because you have a big common interest.
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Thanks to TCM for showing this film. I?d always wanted to see *Boy* (Nagisa Oshima, 1969) for a personal reason: an acquaintance with an attraction to lowlifes had a boyfriend whose family earned a living by staging slip-and-falls in grocery stores. In *Boy* the 10-year-old hero and his stepmother pretend to be hit by automobiles, then the father shakes down the drivers, who pay off to avoid being charged by the police. The family goes from city to city so that they won?t be recognized and caught.
Oshima tends to film scenes in long shots, which distances us from the characters. This does have the advantage of not sentimentalizing or overdramatizing the story. *Boy* has a fair amount of New Wave-ish stuff, like scenes shot with various filters or in black and white, for little reason that I can tell. If this is supposed to tell us more about the emotions of the young protagonist, it does not.
Ironically, the strongest elements of the film are traditional: the strong central situation, which was ?ripped from the headlines,? and the casting of the young non-professional, himself an orphan, to play the boy. His impassive face is a perfect camera subject, and we feel even more strongly the emotions which he doesn?t show. To deal with what?s happening, he tells his little brother stories about monsters and aliens (excellent writing, as much as we can tell from the subtitles). I also love the scenes with the yellow baseball cap which is his prize possession for a little. The very best scene, which comes late in the film, involves a snow-covered landscape with the two boys, both dressed in black; a snowman; and a red boot. Oshima looks like a much better director in the composition of these shots.
Unfortunately, *Boy* is not available on DVD. Earlier films which are described as ?left-wing, influenced by Godard? don?t sound too appealing. I?ll pass on *In the Realm of the Senses*, thank you very much, but *Cruel Story of Youth* sounds interesting, as does the late film *Taboo*, about homosexual feelings among the samurai warriors.
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Fred, you've pointed to some serious plot problems. As is often the cause, the filmmakers hope you'll be so swept along that you don't stop to ask questions like that. Harry is totally paranoid--except when it's convenient for the plot that he not be.
I'll admit not liking this movie. Of course the ugly brown-green cinematography is supposed to reflect the world Harry lives in, but it's still ugly. Although well-acted, the film is sour and sluggishly paced. A good noir director would take us to despair a heck of a lot faster.
It was clever for the programmers to follow *The Conversation* with *Blow-Up*, since that's the obvious inspiration for the plot. "Hey, let's do *Blow-Up*, but with sound instead of photography."
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Though I've had no trouble understanding Mark Cousins so far, in Episode 9, 1967-1979, I thought he said in his discussion of *The Last Movie* that the locals "pulled no pawnshops." Then it dawned on me that "punches" was the word.
Episode 9 showed that Cousins holds the common belief, which I don't share, that the 1970s was one of the high points in American movies. (The high point in brown-tone cinematography, yes. Much sepia sludge was on display in the clips shown.)
Given the overwhelming emphasis on directors in the series, it was startling to see so much attention given to writers in this episode. Who'd have thought Buck Henry would get so much time? Or that, given how many brilliant films have gone unmentioned, a mixed bag like *Catch-22* would be so prominently featured?
One of the good things about seeing Cousins' film is that it sparks us to think what we would have done differently, how we would conceive the history of film. I'm still catching up with some of the films TCM showed in relation to this series, like the interesting *Boy* and the brilliant *Knife in the Water*.
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Thelma, thank you for a very informative post.
Lydecker, I'm also a fan of Thomas Schatz's *The Genius of the System*.
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This interesting and unusual film, which is on tonight, will be repeated in November when Burt Lancaster is star of the month. Most of the people who saw it at this year's festival seemed to like it.
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*Badlands* would be a very different movie without Sissy Spacek. We're always getting Holly's view of things, where she is mostly innocent and her psycho boyfriend looks like James Dean. There's intentionally a big disconnect between what Holly says and what our reaction to a scene is, and this does indeed lead to some very dark comedy at times.
For a long time I avoided the film, assuming that Malick glorified the killers, but I think he finds just the tone and just the distance so that he doesn't.
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Fred, I couldn't agree more. If you get the chance to see this film on the big screen, don't miss it.
Hard to believe that there were two different cinematographers, so cohesive is the vision. One of the most stunning directorial debuts in movie history.
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Thanks, Dargo. Yep, it's all me. Let us know what you think when you've had a chance to see it.
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Mikhail Kalatozov?s *I AM CUBA* (1964) has some amazing camera shots and gives us a look at the First World metropolis Havana was before and just after the revolution. The pro-Castro and anti-American propaganda will appeal to that audience, but most people who see it today will watch for the cinematography of Sergey Uruvetsky and the directorial wizardry of Kalatozov. As with *THE CRANES ARE FLYING*, I had the thought that Kalatazov is like Ken Russell with talent?or enough talent. *I AM CUBA* is very uneven in quality, not least because Kalatozov is, consciously or not, urban and bourgeois at heart, and the peasant scenes fall flat by comparison.
The film splits into four episodes, and the first and the third are the parts I?d like to see again. The first has the amazing camera shot which descends a hotel wall, follows a bathing beauty into the pool, pops out of the pool, and back in. This is the part where we?re invited to enjoy the casino and the bar with great-looking women and hot jazz, all the while clucking with disapproval at the Americans who have the wherewithal to afford the great-looking women, etc. The scene with the masked dancers is like a shaky cam version of von Sternberg. Some of these shots are so elaborate I started watching and even re-winding just to see where the cuts occurred. The actors who dubbed the English lines of the ?Americans? are really atrocious. At the center of this episode is Maria, a poor and devout young woman who becomes a prostitute at the casino to make money. Had an American audience in 1964 seen this, some of them would not have liked the part where the dark-skinned jazz singer flirts with a lovely blonde in a Jean Seberg hairdo.
The second part?a tenant farmer who grows sugar cane learns that his land will be sold to United Fruit and he will get nothing--marks a significant drop in quality. The first half of this episode, until the farmer sends his children to town, is full of visual clich?s. For instance, there?s the John Ford doorway shot, the Gabriel Figueroa shot of the noble peasants silhouetted against the sky?now I understand why Kazan did not want Figueroa to photograph *VIVA ZAPATA*. There?s also a scene from the ground?s point of view where the camera whirls around exactly like Ken Russell. The shrewdest bit of social criticism in the entire film comes when the daughter goes to the tiny village nearby and drinks Coca Cola and plays a song on a jukebox.
The third episode, the heart of the film, has a storyline similar to John Huston?s *WE WERE STRANGERS*, also a film about revolution in Cuba, but made before Castro?s revolt. Enrique, a student, wants to kill the chief of police who murdered his friend, but another friend, evidently the leader of the student rebels, warns him of the need to change the system, not to get rid of one man. Spoilers: The twists of the plot are quite satisfying. Enrique can?t kill the policeman because he sees him with his wife and child; the policeman will kill the student who urged Enrique not to kill him; Enrique will try and fail to kill the policeman again, during the riot, and the policeman will kill him, but this only gives the rebellion the martyr it needs.
The filming of the third episode often took my breath away. It begins with a newsreel of Batista, then pulls back for us to see that we?re at a drive-in, then some young men attack the screen. There?s a beautiful scene of Enrique walking the night streets of Havana, with the shop windows ethereally lit. Any film noir director would be proud to claim the scene where Enrique runs up the stairs (at first we don?t know why, but learn it?s to kill the police chief). Enrique?s funeral inspires the incredible shot which goes up several stories, crosses the street, goes into a cigar factory and out a window and then floats above the street below. This section makes a satisfying film all on its own.
The fourth and final episode, in which a peasant gives part of his family?s meal to an exhausted Jesus, er, Fidel and finally decides to join the revolution, can?t begin to sustain the same level of quality. After so much dazzling camerawork, nothing would work more powerfully than simple framing and cutting?appropriate, perhaps, also for the campesino?s simpler way of life?but the camera swoops and tilts and jitters like a junkie waiting for a fix. The only part of this episode which made a strong impression was the moment when the peasant and his wife are reunited near a waterfall. Near the beginning of part four, three captured rebels, when asked ?Where is Fidel?? respond ?I am Fidel!? Hey, the dudes had seen *SPARTACUS*. The ending, with the grinning campesino now part of Castro?s army, comes perilously close to camp. As much as Kalatazov is the perfect director for the urban scenes, he is not well suited to depicting peasant life.
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*Loss of Innocence* turned out to be a fine film, directed with the delicate touch it needed. Kenneth More as a charming thief and Susannah York and Jane Asher as sisters on the verge of womanhood all gave memorable performances. Too bad this isn't on DVD. I hope TCM will repeat it.
If *The Good Die Young* isn't quite a top-notch noir, it was still most enjoyable, with strong performances by Laurence Harvey as a guy who just gets slimier as the movie goes on, Stanley Baker as a boxer at the end of his career, and Richard Basehart as a nice guy married to Joan Collins (who, amazingly, is playing a nice meek girl) whose mother (Freda Jackson) is truly a monster. All this and Gloria Grahame, Robert Morley, Margaret Leighton, John Ireland, and Lee Patterson, too.
By the way, TCM has featured Susannah York a couple of times previously.
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Just a belated thank you to TCM for showing *Les Maudits* (*The Damned*) (1947), a little-known Rene Clement film about Nazis and Nazi sympathizers trying to escape in a submarine to South America. Anyone who likes Forbidden Games and Purple Noon should check this one out. You can draw a line directly from the claustrophobic scenes in the submarine to the scenes on the boat in Purple Noon.
Clement seems to have a characteristic blend of objectivity and irony, an awareness of the dark side of human nature (surviving the German occupation of France will do that) without giving in to cynicism. I hope TCM will repeat *Les Maudits*.
Dargo, I believe you said that you also enjoyed it.
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Perhaps this will encourage TCM to run *Knife in the Water* again in the next year. It's a remarkably good film. No wonder it was a big international success.
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I think *The Lady Vanishes* would be very suitable for Family Night, with a little comedy added to the suspense and romance, although *North by Northwest* would also be an excellent introduction to Hitchcock.
Passes Purchased! Who else is counting the days?
in General Discussion
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Yes, Michelle, I'm starting to count the days, too. The process of buying the pass was easy and went through without a hitch. I hope a lot of TCM fans can make it to Hollywood for the first time. It's a great experience.