kingrat
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Posts posted by kingrat
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If memory serves, Harriet Andersson has more of a supporting role in Cries and Whispers, but it's been a long time since I saw that film.
I'd consider Burt Reynolds a co-lead in Deliverance, though Burt Reynolds is more a Village People "Macho Man" than a genuine macho guy like Lee Marvin or Charles Bronson, to my mind.
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"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" was a delight, with a charming performance by Shelley Duvall. I hope all of Shelley's fans get the opportunity to see it. She was a fine actress, with an individual quality.
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Sat., Nov. 19th/20th--All times E.S.T.: All three Harry Palmer films, in order
8:00 p.m. "The Ipcress File" (1965).
10:00 p.m. "Funeral in Berlin" (1966)--Seconding Bogie56's & darkblues' recommendations.
12:00 a.m. "Billion Dollar Brain (1967)--Director Ken Russell's second film.
2:00 a.m. "Zabriskie Point" (1970)--Antonioni is not a favorite director of mine, but film is cinematically stunning; the acting is--amateurish; the viewpoint anti-American. Recommended with reservations, specifically, about the acting.
Looking forward to Funeral in Berlin, which I don't recall seeing. The Ipcress File is a crash course in 1960s directorial shtik, and would be worth seeing for that reason, and of course there's Michael Caine making eyeglasses seem like the sexy fashion statement, and a spy story, too.
Billion Dollar Brain is perhaps even more anti-American than Zabriskie Point, suggesting that the McGuffin is in much better hands with the Soviets than with the Americans. This would represent the height of British anti-Americanism at the time. The first half of the film is standard spy story issue, but the latter half is Ken Russell directorial stuff, which someone or other must like. Certainly not me. Ed Begley, no doubt abetted by Russell, overacts absurdly as a character obviously intended to be Lyndon Johnson.
Filmlover is very kind to describe the acting in Zabriskie Point as "amateurish." Very, very kind.
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I have mixed opinions about M*A*S*H because none of the cast is all that likeable to me, except that I sometimes feel a little sorry for Sally Kellerman's treatment just because she is overly disciplined and militarily "square".
Amen to this. M*A*S*H has not worn well, in my opinion, despite the talented cast.
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And the capital of South Dakota is pronounced "Peer" by the locals.
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Lawrence, you could probably win a lot of bar bets asking people how many times Donald Sutherland has been nominated for an Oscar. I once asked this question in line at a film festival and got the answer "six," which sounds reasonable. Thank you for posting all the photos of and information about Sutherland's 1970 films.
Sutherland is one of those interesting actors who could play romantic leads, given the right role, but was really a character actor, so the transition in later years was an easy one. TCM has tried to get him for its film festivals, but hasn't been able to for the good reason that he's usually working.
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1970: the year the Oscar voters had to agonize about whether to vote for Airport or Love Story for best picture.
The year Dustin Hoffman didn't get an Oscar nod for Little Big Man, but Ryan O'Neal did for Love Story.
If I were voting for worst actor of the year--or possibly, of all time--how to choose between Mark Frechette of Zabriskie Point and James Taylor of Two Lane Blacktop?
For all that, the NY Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics came up with eminently reasonable choices in George C. Scott, Glenda Jackson, Chief Dan George, and either Karen Black or Lois Smith.
George C. Scott, Jack Nicholson, and Dustin Hoffman each gave one of his absolute best performances. Stephane Audran (Le Boucher) and Carrie Snodgress (Diary of a Mad Housewife) were terrific, too.
Skimpole mentioned not having seen Diary of a Mad Housewife or Lovers and Other Strangers. I'd recommend both films. Carrie Snodgress carries the film as the housewife who becomes progressively disillusioned, though never mad as in angry or mad as in crazy. It's hard to say whether her husband (Richard Benjamin) or her lover (Frank Langella) is the scummier. Both are quite entertaining. Like Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue, Snodgress has her one big film and then not much of a career afterward. Too bad, for Snodgress had warmth, intelligence, humor, and an unusual face.
Lovers and Other Strangers is one of the best comedies of the 1970s. (Okay, it's not the greatest decade for comedy, but this film made me laugh out loud and think at the same time.) The film cleverly weaves together several couples who will all be attending a wedding. Richard Castellano's deadpan humor is a particular delight. I still remember the "Yankee pot roast" moment, part of the "We're not happy, we're content" scene. Very good writing by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna. Castellano is the top rival to Chief Dan George, for my taste.
Although Karen Black and Lois Smith are both first-rate in Five Easy Pieces, I'd like to give a shout-out to Wanda Gaos as the maid in Tristana. I must confess that I found Tristana surprisingly dull (and full of the period brown-tone cinematography which is not to my taste), but Wanda Gaos, perfectly deadpan as Saturna the maid, steals every scene she's in. Too bad the script isn't built around her reactions (or non-reactions) to the behavior of the upper-crust types she has to put up with. Too bad she and Richard Castellano couldn't deadpan their way through a film together sometime.
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Marty includes one of the rituals in some 1950s households, the whole family watching Ed Sullivan on Sunday night.
Bigger Than Life is another of the many 1950s films which includes watching television as a family activity. We learn from this film that New York City public school teachers were so poorly paid that James Mason needed a second job. So did Jean Simmons in This Could Be the Night.
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My Favorite Year would probably be my second favorite O'Toole performance. Skimpole makes an excellent point about O'Toole not always working with top directors.
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I remember listening to Suzanne, the Noel Harrison version, over and over again.
There are several Joni Mitchell songs inspired by her affair with Leonard Cohen, such as The Gallery, and, I believe, The Priest and Rainy Night House. The lyrics "You are a holy man, on the FM radio" from Rainy Night House certainly would fit Cohen.
A movie connection with Leonard Cohen: his song Everybody Knows is put to good use in Atom Egoyan's Exotica.
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Sometime around the mid-1970s I was chatting with an English theater manager about Peter O'Toole. His opinion was that the grueling conditions and the tremendous demands placed on O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia had to some extent burned him out as an actor, but that was unimportant, given the accomplishment of that one performance. Of course, some of O'Toole's lesser performances might be career peaks for some other actors, but I believe the theater manager had a point.
Whether or not O'Toole's Lawrence is a personal favorite, which for me it is, it seems to be the most iconic performance of the decade.
As for the most iconic female performance of the decade, I wonder if it isn't Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. That's why I picked her over Jo Van Fleet in Wild River, a difficult decision.
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Best of the 1960s:
Best Actor - Peter O'Toole, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Best Actress - Lee Remick, WILD RIVER
Best Supporting Actor - Gene Hackman, BONNIE AND CLYDE
Best Supporting Actress - Angela Lansbury, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
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I really liked that movie. I partcularily liked the "Sermon on the Mount" segment( "WHAT?. Blessed are the GREEK?") Whenever I've seen it re-enacted in other "serious" biblical efforts, I wondered at how COULD all those people REALLY hear what was actually being said?
Also the segment of the meeting of the zealots where one shouts, "What have the Romans ever given US?" and a few speak up..."Roads"...Architecture"...Sanitation"...and so on.
Sepiatone
"Did 'e say blessed are the cheesemakers?"
One of my favorite films.
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I wonder what Alice's Restaurant looks like now. I liked it a good bit when it first came out, especially Pat Quinn's performance as Alice. The most memorable scenes are perhaps the funeral in the snow, with lots of people arranged as if on stage, while Joni Mitchell sings "Songs to Aging Children Come" on the soundtrack, and the camera movements with Pat Quinn alone at the end of the movie.
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Hibi, thanks for posting the Alexandra Moltke interview.
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To answer skimpole's question, I believe Genevieve Page is supporting in The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes. Only Sherlock himself is a lead role.
I agree with Bogie that Gazzara, Cassavetes, and Falk are all leads in Husbands. Cassavetes is a much better actor than director, as Husbands demonstrates at great length.
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Someone mentioned Goodbye, Columbus, a film I haven't seen but have read about in a book I highly recommend, When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins by Ralph Karen and Ralph Rosenblum. Rosenblum was a highly respected film editor who saved more than one film. If you read this book, it will be impossible ever again for you automatically to ascribe the final form of a movie to its director. The stories about A Thousand Clowns, The Night They Raided Minsky's, and several other films are really hair-raising.
The saddest story concerns Goodbye, Columbus and why neither Oscar nor any of us nominated Monroe Arnold for best supporting actor. As Uncle Leo he had a long speech in the wedding scene which he delivered so powerfully that the crew applauded him and felt that he was a cinch to get an Oscar nomination.
The movie's over, and Ralph Rosenblum, director Larry Peerce, and the producer are working on the final shape of the film. They decide that they can't use the entire ten minutes of Monroe Arnold's scene, that it seems to slow the pace and unbalance the mood. They trim and experiment and try it out on preview audiences and try trimming the scene some more. At last Monroe Arnold's scene is cut down to forty-five seconds.
It's the night of the premiere. Monroe Arnold is there with his wife, nervous and eager to see his big scene. Rosenblum realizes that no one has had the guts to tell him that now he's only on screen for forty-five seconds.
And that's why we're not familiar with Monroe Arnold.
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According to Donald Spoto's biography of Alan Bates, Bates had it in his contract that he would not be shown frontally nude in Women in Love, which is why we see so much of Oliver Reed in the wrestling scene.
I completely agree with all who admire Jean-Louis Trintignant in Z. A tightly focused performance in what could easily have been a forgettable part. I also love Marcel Bozzuffi as the hitman. Z is one of those left-wing homophobic films where only the bad guys could possibly be gay. The joke is that Bozzuffi has so much energy that he walks away with the film and I almost end up rooting for him. I really liked Z when it first came out, somewhat less so when seen again a couple of years ago. But Bozzuffi and Trintignant are the real deal, and so is Charles Denner as the firebrand who has to be kept under control by his colleagues.
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Abandoned (1949) Black Market Babies
Moving along at a good pace Abandoned makes use of numerous Los Angeles' locations. The iconic LA City Hall looms ominously. A young woman Paula Considine (Storm) arrives at the Missing Persons Detail in search of her missing older sister and her baby. There she meets reporter Mark Sitko (O'Keefe) who takes it upon himself to assist her, it doesn't hurt that she is cute. Stiko spots a man tailing her who turns out to be a PI named Kerric (Burr).When Paula and Mark check the morgue's Jane Doe's they find her sister but not the baby. Through various channels, old newspaper articles and various tips they discover a black market baby racket that is protected by the mob.Its an entertaining film especially if you are not expecting much, could use a restoration. Full review with screencaps from a multigenerational file here : http://noirsville.blogspot.com/2016/11/abandoned-1949-black-market-babies.htmlJoe, I saw a gorgeous restoration of Abandoned at the Palm Springs film noir festival a couple of years ago. The LA location shots are great. This is a surprisingly good movie. Loved the fight between Raymond Burr and Mike Mazurki (!), and Marjorie Rambeau has a juicy role as a villain.
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I'm looking forward to The New Land and The Young Girls of Rochefort.
Some of you have mentioned not seeing The Hasty Heart. It's a must for Patricia Neal fans. She gives one of the best performances of the year, playing the nurse in charge of the servicemen recuperating after the war is over. Richard Todd is also excellent as the difficult Scotsman who causes so much trouble for his wardmates (or hutmates, perhaps). Vincent Sherman is a rather underrated director. Ronald Reagan doesn't let the side down, though Neal and Todd have the juicy roles.
A Cry in the Dark is not at all a comfortable movie, but very well made. Meryl Streep gives one of her best performances as a woman who's rather cold and not very likable, so that people want to believe she killed her daughter. After all, the alternative would be to accuse a dingo of killing the baby, and the PETA types aren't having any of that. Sam Neill, as Streep's thoroughly dominated husband, has a great scene where he breaks down from sheer exhaustion on the witness stand. Streep and Neill won the Australian equivalents of the Oscar, both much deserved.
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I believe that Mamma Mia! is--there must be a politically correct way to put this--an unacknowledged musicalization of Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. The similarity of the plots is pure coincidence (wink, wink).
I'd like to add a kind word for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, one of the best movies of the year, and, with Wild River and Wise Blood, one of the most authentically Southern movies Hollywood has ever made. The African-American characters have been updated a bit from Carson McCullers' novel without being turned into sloganeers for black power. Alan Arkin is perfect as the deaf man, Sondra Locke is just fine as the ingenue who tries to connect with him, and the ending packs a wallop because we care about the characters. I'm also quite fond of Laurinda Barrett as Sondra Locke's mother. Robert Ellis Miller is an obscure director, but this film is definitely a winner.
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Tom, thanks for the great write-up on Will Penny. I'll put that on the must-see list.
Lawrence, three on the films on your unseen list--Les Biches, Secret Ceremony, and Teorema--actually have more in common than I'd ever realized. One of the trends of the period was weird films about small groups of people, often involving role playing of various kinds. I'm thinking of Games as well, and two films I haven't seen, Cul-de-Sac and Negatives.
In Secret Ceremony a prostitute (Elizabeth Taylor) pretends to be the mother of a neurotic girl (Mia Farrow). Robert Mitchum is a ne'er-do-well who intrudes on the proceedings. Pamela Brown and Peggy Ashcroft have small roles as maiden aunts or some such. Beautifully photographed, rather baroque direction by Joseph Losey. At the time I liked this better than most other people did. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea.
Les Biches is for those who truly relish Claude Chabrol, and I'll plead guilty to that. Films like Le Boucher and This Man Must Die can be safely recommended to anyone, but Les Bonnes Femmes and Les Biches, both of which I love, not so safely. "Les biches" means "the does," that is, the doe-eyed Stephane Audran and Jacqueline Sassard, both involved with Jean-Louis Trintignant as well as each other. A couple of imdb reviewers complained that this isn't a serious study of bisexuality, which is absolutely true, if irrelevant to the film Chabrol actually made. There are some brilliantly directed scenes and a wonderful musical score. There is also a pair of bitchy queens, one of whom reads from Chairman Mao's little red book. Gee, could that be a satire of Godard? You betcha.
Teorema is a film I really liked, which is a minority opinion. Maybe it's just because Terence Stamp was so handsome in those days. Stamp plays a kind of deity figure who wrecks the lives of an upper-middle-class family when father, mother, son, daughter, and maid all fall for this sexually irresistible stranger. Pasolini tried to explain this as anti-bourgeois because the maid becomes a saint; in the film, this seems as devastating as the fate of the others. It's like one of Iris Murdoch's darker parables. Again, proceed at your own risk.
The Bride Wore Black: I don't think Truffaut actually learned much from Hitchcock, despite his great admiration for the master. Temperamentally they are worlds apart. The film works best as a series of vignettes about the lives of the men Jeanne Moreau is determined to track down and kill, with Michel Piccoli especially noteworthy. A safer recommendation than the other films mentioned above, but at best three stars out of four.
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You're too smart for us, Dargo. But you knew that!
In a clip introducing several new Twentieth Century Fox films, Darryl F. Zanuck pronounces Pier Angeli's first name as "Pierre." Of course, her real last name was Pierangeli, but Annamaria Pierangeli was a bit much to put on a marquee.
I have to agree that Veronica Lake is a perfect movie star name.
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In The Talk of the Town Ronald Colman loses Jean Arthur to Cary Grant, but he still has a bench on the Supreme Court, not to mention his valet, Rex Ingram.
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Your Favourite Performances from 1929 to present are...
in Your Favorites
Posted
My choices in the supporting category for 1971 would be Leonard Frey and Rosalind Harris in Fiddler on the Roof, one of my favorite movie romantic couples. Norman Jewison shifts the focus of the film from comedy to drama, starting with the casting of Topol rather than Zero Mostel, but the subplot with the eldest daughter catches the perfect balance for romantic comedy. In the film, as opposed to most stage productions, "Miracle of Miracles" is the standout musical moment, and that has everything to do with the acting of Rosalind Harris and Leonard Frey.
Rosalind Harris is perhaps not conventionally pretty, but as a young woman in love she looks radiantly beautiful, and with a fine intelligence. How can an actor best known for a flamboyantly gay persona be convincing as a heterosexual lover? Watch Leonard Frey in this film.