kingrat

There are quite a few examples from The Nun's Story, but who can forget Colleen Dewhurst as The Archangel Gabriel?

Dargo, remember that Nelson Rockefeller (or "Wockafelluw") also had the same kind of Elmer Fudd accent that Bennett Cerf had. This must me some kind of regional accent.

Despite the many awards for Lawrence, including David Lean's for Best Director, Lean was crushed that Omar Sharif did not win the Oscar.

We are in total agreement about the merits of The Night Digger, Patricia Neal, and the smokin' Nicholas Clay. There's a reason that Patricia Neal sounds British in her later films and interviews. After her stroke, her husband Roald Dahl taught her to speak again. He was British, so that's the way Patricia Neal imitated him as she learned to talk. Dahl believed, despite the opinions of medical experts, that his wife could return to normal.

Thanks for posting these bodybuilder pictures. Who knew that Sean could ever look so gay? In the later color photo he just looks handsome. Great picture. Pierce Brosnan is the Bond I find most attractive. Sans Fin always says that she thinks Pierce Brosnan looks like he might have a boyfriend, but that doesn't strike me as a negative.

Joe, I have seen Death of a Cyclist and liked it. There's a background of Spanish politics, but it is genuine noir. I haven't seen Pale Flower, but definitely want to record that one.

Or Harvey Fierstein as Virginia Hamm in Torch Song Trilogy.

The longer restored version is definitely the one to see. It looks like a noir masterpiece.

I haven't seen Three Secrets, but would like to, given the three lead actresses. The Hasty Heart is definitely worth seeing. Fine performances by Patricia Neal and Richard Todd. Neal plays a nurse who works to rehabilitate soldiers who have been injured and are not yet able to return home, even though WWII is over. The most difficult patient is a Scotsman, played by Todd, who insists on being stoical and reserved, afraid of "the hasty heart."

Good grief, Barbara Stanwyck's hairdo is spectacularly bad. She is so much more attractive than this.

Yes, it's hard to remember that The Moon Is Blue was a big hit on Broadway, which is why Hollywood filmed it in the first place. So uninteresting in film terms that it's hard to believe it was directed by Otto Preminger. One of his weakest films of the 40s-50s era.

I really like Three Strangers. For most of the movie you can't quite decide what sort of person the Geraldine Fitzgerald character is, and this works well for me. Jean Negulesco fought to have Geraldine Fitzgerald in the lead role and Peter Lorre cast against type. John Huston wrote the script, and he did not like what Negulesco did with it. But I do. Negulesco's black & white films are all worth seeing.

You may notice how often milk is invoked in classic films, always as a symbol of what is right about the American way of life. To choose one example from many, when Ella Raines in Phantom Lady goes into a bar to ask about the missing lady, she orders a glass of milk. Now the audience knows that she is a truly nice, nice girl. You could believe that golden age Hollywood was run as a branch of the American dairy industry. It sounds like the Oscar broadcast could have used Ricky Gervais to take jabs at some highly inflated egos.

In context it seems pretty clear that the actor was Tyrone Power.

Rock is actually thinking: "What was the name of that guy last night . . . Ben? Bill? Biff?"

Sunset Boulevard has some great songs, like "As If We Never Said Goodbye" and "With One Look." The title song is also good; a friend of mine uses it in his show about growing up in Hollywood. Petula Clark has actually played more performances as Norma Desmond than anyone else.

Roy, I wonder what qualifications one needs for this job. Explaining the job title on a resume would be interesting, too.

Great idea for a thread, with so many great examples. Have you ever re-watched a film and been surprised that a performance you loved the first time was so brief? That happened to me with Max von Sydow in Winter Light as the man who's terrified the Chinese will use the atomic bomb and with Zohra Lampert in Splendor in the Grass. I also have to add Juano Hernandez in The Pawnbroker. His heartbreaking scene is the best in the picture.

Making the two movies with so many cast members meant that the regular series wasn't receiving enough attention. I'd think they could have recovered. The 1840 and 1897 storylines were great, and Sam Hall and Gordon Russell could no doubt have come up with others.

Cy Enfield (sometimes billed as Endfield), who later made Zulu, is a talented director. Try and Get Me is good, and Hell Drivers is a must for Stanley Baker fans. I haven't seen The Underworld Story, but look forward to it.

Oh yes, that song in An Affair To Remember is fast-forward material, matched only by the song the crippled kiddies sing to the reformed hooker in The Naked Kiss. Everyone has come up with a good list of performances that should have been nominated. I'll add a few (and will probably think of others as soon as I submit this): Katharine Hepburn in Little Women, possibly her best work ever; although Deborah Kerr was nominated quite a few times, her great (greatest?) performance in Black Narcissus was not, and neither was the performance in The Innocents that some others consider her best; Cary Grant would have been a fine Oscar winner for An Affair To Remember, gloppy song and all, in a weak year; Rosalind Russell was never better than in Bringing Up Baby.

MissW, I'm not terribly fond of Detour either, though I like the performances and some of the directorial touches. Is this partly because I was expecting a GREAT film, whereas earlier viewers who were expecting nothing found a lot more? I also think that 1) the set-up is much too long for such a short film; it's uninteresting until Tom Neal hits the road, and really, until Ann Savage shows up: and 2) the big "I'm not going to let you out of this room" scene goes on and on; and 3) the method by which someone dies is not very believable, though this is the least of the three problems. So at a two and half stars out of four level Detour is fine, but not much more than that.

With the snubbing of 63 Up, the Academy Awards complete their omission of all that series of Michael Apted documentaries. The documentary category is almost always one of the worst, as the documentaries people actually wanted to see in theaters are usually rejected by those who vote for the nominees.

The Group is so episodic that you're not missing much by not watching it all the way through. Mostly interesting for seeing the young players ("Hey! There's Larry Hagman pre-Dallas!), and the source material is strong. Sidney Lumet is perhaps the most uneven director of all time. The Group is badly directed--the big party scene isn't done well, and the funeral home scene was so bad that they basically just did offscreen dialogue over a basic shot. Pauline Kael's essay "The Making of The Group" is worth reading, as well as the Mary McCarthy novel.