kingrat

The musical score is great. "Old Devil Moon" is my favorite. Petula Clark is charming--had she been born earlier, she could have been a huge musical star in the 1940s. Fred Astaire is a delight, as always. Although the story is dated, I suspect the film now looks better than many films that seemed "hip" at the time.

I wondered if one or more of the scriptwriters had seen Harold Pinter's play The Dumb Waiter, which was produced in 1957, the year before Murder by Contract. Pinter's play, though less realistic, has the set-up of two hitmen waiting to learn who their next target will be. The scenes with Vince Edwards, Philip Pine, and Herschel Bernardi have certain parallels, including the dark comedy and the emphasis on waiting. The film, for all the holes that people have rightly noted, definitely kept my attention. I didn't care for the preachy preachy preachy scene where our sanctimonious hitman says he's no worse than soldiers, people who drop bombs, etc. I would guess this was an addition by Ben Maddow, whom Eddie Muller identified as an uncredited scriptwriter. The look of the film is surprisingly arty, very Nouvelle Vague except that most of those French films hadn't been made yet. The first scene where Claude (Edwards) goes to Mr. Moon's apartment, for instance, gives us a low angle shot with Claude seated and we don't see Moon's head, only his torso. With a master cinematographer like Lucien Ballard, this has to be deliberate choice, not a mistake. I loved the location shots of 1950s LA. Most of the actors were unknown to me, but quite good. I was expecting a much more conventional film, but I'm not complaining.

I think a lot of jazz musicians held it against Glenn Miller that he did so many novelty songs. They felt he had the ability, but went the wrong direction, as they saw it.

That color wheel scene was very interesting. This is another film bio with the "accepted by Louis Armstrong" scene. You know musician X is good because he gets the opportunity to play with Louis Armstrong and he holds his own.

Huston probably made more good films after the end of the studio era (say 1966) than any other director of his generation. He made the difficult adjustment and and was able to give us films like Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood, and Prizzi's Honor, all very different from each other and from his earlier masterpieces. Many people are also fond of The Dead. The first shot of Fat City is overwhelming, as the camera slowly pans along the street of the small town while the soundtrack has Kris Kristofferson singing "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

Absolutely, Dargo. I've rarely seen a period film with so little sense of period. It looks and feels as contemporary as Rebel Without a Cause.

I enjoyed the film, and it's one of June Allyson's best performances. She and James Stewart have nice chemistry together. The problem the scriptwriters faced is that, apart from the ending (which, as Eddie Muller and guest Christian Sands pointed out, would have been known in advance to the original audience), there just isn't a lot of drama in Glenn Miller's story. He didn't have multiple marriages or get hooked on heroin or anything like that. To show an arranger trying to come up with a unique aural style doesn't lend itself well to a visual medium. The script makes it more of a cute romantic story with an unhappy but uplifting ending.

Xander is most definitely hot.

Tomorrow has Days of Glory, a film I keep meaning to watch all of. I've only seen the ending, where Gregory Peck swears his girlfriend into the Communist Party as they keep firing at the invading Nazi army. Whether the whole film is this funny and achieves Lylah Clare depths of infamy, I don't know.

Who knew that the Court Jester and Miss Ellie from Dallas would actually make a reasonably good romantic couple? Yes, that's Danny Kaye and Barbara Bel Geddes in The Five Pennies. Color cinematography nominated for Oscar, some great jazz musicians, Danny Kaye doing his comedy shtick, some pathos and self-sacrifice along the way. Louis Armstrong has some memorable moments. Danny Kaye's cornet playing is dubbed by Red Nichols, the character he is playing. Tuesday Weld plays Danny Kaye's daughter as a young teenager, but we mostly see the character as a young girl, played by Susan Gordon. SPOILER: There is a polio subplot, and we get to see the parents using the Sister Kenny method of wrapping hot towels around the legs of their daughter. The scene where a nurse takes the parents and others into an intensive care unit as she tells them how contagious everything is, and how they must be careful not to touch anything--well, it seemed very timely indeed. This is an entertaining film, well done by everyone concerned.

There is so much to love for soap fans in SOAPDISH. Though I haven't seem the film in a long time, I remember thinking that The Young and the Restless may have been the soap giving most inspiration to the movie. But it worked both ways because there's a scene in SOAPDISH where someone mentions "the scene where Blade shoots the Contessa." Not long after that Y&R actually introduced a character named Blade! Played by Michael Tylo, I think. There's also a scene in the movie where we see a naked rear view of Stephen Nichols, "Patch" on Days of Our Lives. Patch was always too macho for my tastes--I remember a female co-worker of mine who had a major crush on him--but I saw an episode of Days several months ago where Patch had been possessed by the spirit of the evil Stefano DiMera, or had been implanted with his memories (happens all the time!) and Patch was simply a hoot.

So glad to discover so many SOAPDISH fans. Lots of good taste on this thread. Cathy Moriarty's possible Oscar bid was probably compromised by the fact that Harvey Fierstein dubbed her lines. Great lines, great line readings.

I had never heard of A Man Called Adam (1966), directed by Leo Penn, father of Sean Penn. Leo Penn directed a lot of TV and made one other feature film, Judgment in Berlin (1988). The film follows the troubled path of a great jazz trumpeter (Sammy Davis Jr.). Most of the characters are three-dimensional, and the cast is great. Cicely Tyson is the smart woman, a civil rights activist, who makes the foolish choice of getting involved with this talented but self-destructive man. Ossie Davis is the wise older man who tries to counsel her against this. Peter Lawford has some great opportunities as Davis' agent, and he's in the most memorable scene in the film. Frank Sinatra Jr. is an aspiring trumpeter who wants to learn from his idol. One of the biggest accomplishments of the film is showing how the African-American characters look at the white characters, and the film doesn't take the easy path of black = good and white = bad. Cicely Tyson brings believability to every moment she's on screen, and Sammy Davis Jr. makes his juicy big scenes work. Johnny Brown and Ja'net Dubois have some good scenes in supporting roles.

There is a persistent trend to rewrite history in recent British films to suggest that unlike Americans, Britons were actually very accepting of those of different races and ethnicities. However well-intentioned, this is absolutely false. In the 1960s and 1970s I heard charming and intelligent Brits whom I liked very much make comments that most Southerners had learned to be embarrassed about. This trend includes Darkest Hour, the Branagh remake of Murder on the Orient Express, and more than one recent Father Brown episode.

I think part of this is the persistent male fantasy about a "sympathetic older woman" who gives the eager but shy boy his first sexual experience so that he "becomes a man." As if! Because there was more freedom to show sexual scenes on film, this fantasy continued and was down-aged from the Tea and Sympathy template. There's a scene in Truffaut's Two English Girls between two underage girls that, while not explicit, would be rightly considered unacceptable today. As for the films where underage girls fall for, say, Peter O'Toole, who could be their grandfather, that kind of fantasy would appeal to Harvey Weinstein types.

I don't know whenever I've watched three movies on TCM back to back, but I did last night with A Man Called Adam, Young Man With a Horn, and The Five Pennies. All three, which take the form of biographies of a trumpeter or cornet player, were definitely worth watching and listening to. The only one I'd seen before was Young Man With a Horn, which I liked better this time around, probably because I knew how the love triangle was going to work out and I could concentrate more on the music and cinematography. I'd rather post separately about each film rather than have a really long post about all three. Louis Armstrong was in all three films. I hadn't realized that Louis Armstrong appeared in enough movies he could have his own SUTS day. When Louis gives his seal of approval to one of our musicians, then the audience knows that the guy really has the chops. In his commentary with Eddie Muller, Monty Alexander said that Bing Crosby was the one who brought Louis Armstrong to the attention of the wider audience. Crosby's enormous popularity at the time made it easier for Armstrong to be accepted. I was really impressed by the cinematography of Young Man With a Horn, the direction by Michael Curtiz, and the set design. Lauren Bacall's apartment is full of interesting details. Kirk Douglas has one of his best roles; Lauren Bacall is well-cast as the unsympathetic intellectual who, for 1950, can be identified by some as a lesbian; Doris Day, cute as can be, sings with the art that conceals art. She never seems to be styling a song; every note sounds effortless, perfectly in place, and just what the songwriter intended. Monty Alexander mentioned that as a child he was deeply moved by her singing of "With a Song in My Heart" in this film. Hoagy Carmichael plays the sympathetic friend perfectly, just as he did in Night Song with Dana Andrews. Juano Hernandez, who has become one of my favorites, plays the trumpeter who teaches and inspires the young man who becomes Kirk Douglas. The structure of the film is familiar, but the execution surpasses the material.

Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life. The African-American singer and actress Juanita Hall is best known for playing Bloody Mary, a Pacific Islander, in South Pacific and a Chinese-American woman in Flower Drum Song. About Othello: The word "Moor" in Shakespeare's time had two different meanings: 1) A native of Morocco or North Africa; 2) a "blackamoor," the Elizabethan term for someone of African descent. Most Shakespearean actors, including Orson Welles, favored the first definition. Olivier chose the second alternative.

Eric, Forbidden Broadway usually had at least a couple of versions. One was up-to-the-minute with parodies of new shows, and the other was called the "Midwestern Version," the one with well-known shows so that the audience would get the jokes. Sounds like your Boston audience needed the Midwestern Version.

The problem for the actor re-creating a stage role is that the film performance may not be fresh. An example that comes to mind is Deborah Kerr in Tea and Sympathy. Kerr is always good, but this feels to me like a last-month-of-the-run performance, perfectly competent but often on auto-pilot, not much discovery for actor or audience. I have no problem with Joel Grey winning the Oscar for Cabaret. Great performance. But it's true Pacino should not have lost the Oscar to Joel Grey--he should have lost to Stacy Keach in the Best Actor category.

Mylene Demongeot plays David Niven's girlfriend in the early part of Bonjour Tristesse. It would be interesting to see her in a part like this. And Massimo Girotti in something very unlike the Antonioni film he is best known for.

I think it's clear that Molly will be freed, since the D.A. now knows who really committed the murder. But yes, she disappears from the film, and Mary Anderson looks as white as, well, Jeanne Crain in Pinky. Yvonne De Carlo in Band of Angels was a little more believable, and someone like Dorothy Lamour would also have been more believable.

I was laughing a lot watching these films. The first hour of Monkey Business, with the Marx Brothers on the ship, is especially funny. Did you notice the parody of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude in Animal Crackers (the asides about how the characters really feel)? Strange Interlude was the highbrow play which Groucho & Co. enjoyed making fun of.

Although Bogart and Grahame have good chemistry, in real life if I were Laurel's friend I would be so glad once she and Dixon were over. He's a very scary guy.

Wow, you're right, Tiki. She does have big hands. The camera angle and the dress are both very unflattering. The dress makes her look flat-chested and draws attention to her arms.

Gale Storm is in at least one other noir, Abandoned, which I saw at the Palm Springs Film Festival a few years back. Beautifully restored and not to be missed, with some excellent location shows of downtown LA. Gale plays a nice girl who comes to LA trying to find her missing sister. Dennis O'Keefe tries to help her. How about Marjorie Rambeau, Raymond Burr and Mike Mazurki as a trio of villains? The Underworld Story seemed like a reasonably good three star out of four film. On the preachy side, and the pace seems to drag a bit half to two-thirds through. Howard Da Silva is a great villain. The Da Silva/Herbert Marshall scene is probably the best in the film. Great contrast of styles. Gar Moore is very good in the role Keir Dullea would have played in the early sixties.