Sprocket_Man

>It sounds like Fox took the optical music tracks and tried to create a stereo soundtrack for the film by combining them with the optical composite track. It's been common for years for Fox to issue DVD's of their old films with 3.1 or 5.1 simulated stereo (as I recall, the "improved" track on their THE MARK OF ZORRO was so full of shrill distoryion as to render it utterly unlistenable). You're probably right, and Fox prepared a video copy for transmission with one of those reworked tracks instead of the original straight, original optical audio track.

Interesting that you claim to know every note of his score...but not that there are two "r"'s in his last name: Bernard Herrmann.

>I’m doing an assignment as part of my masters degree (in Information) that asks us to look at particular “hobby” or past-time..." In order to avoid embarrassment in the halls of academe where, presumably, people know better, someone who's going for a master's degree should know that the expression is pastime, not "past-time" (the word, a slight contraction, meaning what one does to pass the time...). Pastime; I strongly recommend that you spell it thusly in your thesis.

> It's an obvious set. The lack of detail is a dead giveaway. When Warner Bros. started making prison movies in earnest, Jasck Warner's friendship with the then-warden at Sing-Sing allowed the studio to film at the New York prison, but mainly exteriors and second unit interior establishing shots only. Filming indoors, even under the warden's auspices was too problematical to both security at the prison, and the safety of the film production people, so the actors were seldom there on location. There was also the matter of studios valuing complete control -- of lighting, camera angles, sound -- over authenticity. They were already spending huge sums of money on studio overhead and the salaries in their art and construction departments, so it made more economic sense to use those resources to build a prison (or anything else) right there on the lot. >MGM was the distributing agent for all of Hal Roach's product in 1931, back when MGM owned and operated all of their own Loews theaters - but for whatever reason, MGM refused. You've got it backward: unlike all the other studios, which ran their theater chains, Loew's Corporation was the parent company; it owned MGM, and was the distributor of the studio's films, not the other way round.

Robert Taylor. Wooden actor, great hair:

They may very well have spent more on teaching their students how to spell, too.

>It's enough to give one the heebie-jeebies. 1.66:1 cropped to 1.37:1 gives me the heebies. 1.85:1 cropped to 1.37:1 gives me the jeebies. But BEN-HUR's 2.76:1 cropped to 1.37:1 gives me the full heebie-jeebies.

>Basil Rathbone is the common thread as the despicable villain. Well, one can also say that Eugene Pallette's Padre Felipe is just a reprise of his performance as Friar Tuck in ROBIN HOOD (and Montagu Love, who was the evil Bishop of the Black Canons in the Flynn film is, in ZORRO, Don Diego's father, Don Alejandro).

> I do not think this airing of Sweeney Todd is what Ted Turner had in mind when he created TCM. You're probably just a vegetarian taking things just a little too far.

>For an American english speaker, reporter Dorothy West did a good job pronouncing his name in her interview with him. (See interview link in my last post) "Bay-la". Not to be confused with model and sometime actress Bayla Wegier, whom Fox studio chief Darryl Zanuck christened Bella Darvi ("Darvi" being a contraction of Darryl and his wife's name, Virginia. Considering that Miss Wegier was also Zanuck's mistress at the time, Mrs Z was awfully understanding).

>Speaking of scores, did you know that Bernard Herrmann was to score the "Seven Per-Cent Solution", but sadly he died before the film was completed...... I did know, and had Herrmann been able to write the music, it probably would've been a better film (apart from William Walton, who was a musical titan of the 20th century, I've nver been especially fond of the work of British film composers. John Addison, who did score THE SEVEN-PERCENT SOLUTION, was a middling talent at best; his music failed to dig under the characters' skins and add to the audience's understanding of what they were thinking and feeling. Most of what's there is simple, superficial reinforcement of what's already up there on-screen, which is really the hallmark of second-rate film music, and why it's so often disparaged as being merely "mood music." Of course, all film scores for Sherlock Holmes stand in the shadow of Miklós Rózsa’s brilliant music for Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, which really plumbs the depths of this moody and elegiac look at the great detective's most embarassing and heart-breaking case (Rózsa actually makes a one-second cameo appearance in the film, conducting Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at the ballet). Had Herrmann been able to score his own Holmes film, it would have fascinating to see (and hear) what a composer equal in skill and stature to his great friend, Rózsa, might've wrought. >I remember Nicol's Holmes. James Farentino is also gone. Two actors dead at 73? Ugh, too young. Williamson was 75, but both actors are 100% dead.

Richard Rodgers.

I agree; I still grind my teeth at the idea that a piece of tedious and preachy whimsy like YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU won the 1938 Best Picture Oscar. As for ZORRO, it's a terrific film, has what may be the best sword duel ever filmed, and deserves to be in the pantheon of great swashbukling films, but it's not quite in the same league as ROBIN HOOD, which is, in my admittedly biased view (it's my favorite film, and I own Flynn's sword and Rathbone's truncheon), the perfect fairy tale and the best of its kind ever.

And Goring is, no doubt, starved for Techicolor up there...

Did you say possible???

>The most important cultural advancement there is the idea of allowing a right turn on red. (Woody Allen) Something that's prohibited everywhere in New York City (the only saving grace for Woody must be that, like most New Yorkers, he probably doesn't drive).

Niven and Flynn were roommates in the early 1930s, when they were both new to Hollywood, and the hard-drinking pair did, indeed, share a beach house they christened "Cirrhosis by the Sea." Niven, who was genuinely fond of Flynn, was nevertheless a realist when assessing his old friend in his memoir, The Moon's a Balloon: "With Errol, you always knew where you stood -- he always let you down."

I, along with all the other attendees at Paramount's screening of WINGS last Thursday evening, was given a copy of the new Blu-ray, and it looks splendid. I haven't had the opportunity to go through both documentaries start-to-back, but they seem well done.

>Viveca Lindfors gives an intelligent performance as the Queen. Lindfors' performance, like the film itself to some degree, I think is somewhat underrated. I think her final scene with Flynn, played in The Grand Manner, is a memerable one, aided immeasurably by Max Steiner's breathtaking musical score. I knew Lindfors slightly, and she was a lovely woman. She was "imported" into Hollywood to be the "new Ingrid Bergman" (as was Alida Valli at about the same time). Of course, there's never been another Bergman, no could there be, but Viveca didn't need to be. She was Viveca, and that was, in itself, a very fine thing. As for Max Steiner's score, it's just been re-recorded in its entirety by Tribute Film Classics (http://www.tributefilmclassics.com|http://www.tributefilmclassics.com/, though the title hasn't appeared on its website just yet) in modern digital stereo by the Moscow Symphony orchestra under William Stromberg) for release later this winter. I can't wait to get my copy of what is my very favorite Steiner score.

> I agree that it is disheartening to view the physical and emotional deteriation of Errol Flynn in his last decade. That would not, however, in my opinion, apply to his work in Adventures of Don Juan. That was the last great star vehicle of his career and he gives a wonderfully nuanced performance, capturing the world weariness of an aging lover growing tired of the chase. There was much of the real Flynn there which is why he's so good in the part. I've always really liked the film, but it is, in a way, two films: the first half is light, filled with Don Juan's rueful humor about the life he's led, and the reactions of a skittish public at news of his return to Spain, whereas the latter half is standard swashbukler derring-do, with little in the way of humor at all. That bifurcation, with the latter half decidedly inferior to the former, keeps THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN from being the truly great film it might've been, and the capstone of Flynn's career as the great heroic swashbucker of the sound era (it probably won't come as a shock to any of you that Flynn's performance is, in a way, autobiographical, merely transposing the swath he cut through Hollywood with that of a fictional rake in 17th century Spain. I strongly suspect that much of the dialogue that screenwriters Harry Kurnitz, George Oppenheimer and, uncredited, William Faulkner and Robert Florey, was taken directly from the musings of an older and, perhaps, wiser, Errol Flynn beginning to look back on his "wicked, wicked ways" with a tinge of regret).

WPBS and WLIW in New York have always relied on movies as an important part of their schedules. Ironic as it may seem, the PBS stations in Los Angeles (formerly KCET, and now KOCE) have never seen movies as being important. L.A.'s PBS stations are, and have always been, terribly inferior to their New York counterparts, adding to the pervasive sense that Southern California is a cultural wasteland.

"Humor" is not the same thing as comedy, and the presence of humor in a film doesn't make it a comedy. Comedy, wit, satire, puns, they're all subsets of the concept of humor, and the terms aren't interchangeable. SUNSET BOULEVARD is wickedly funny (as are all of Billy Wilder's films, most written with Charles Brackett or I.A.L. Diamond), but it is not a comedy, unlike SOME LIKE IT HOT, which, most emphatically, is a comedy. It's always seemed that the film's intent determines whether it's a comedy or not. If it's funny for the sake of being funny, with gags paying off as they come while simultaneously building toward an ultimate payoff, then it's a comedy; when the humor is there for the explicit purpose of sharpening and adding rueful punctuation to a drama (as in SUNSET BOULEVARD), then it can't be considered anything other than a drama...that's also funny.

> I honestly don't expect Mr. Osborne to have to double-check everything. But I will say that while he was on vacation, there were far fewer such gaffes. Perhaps the copy was being checked for accuracy better since they might have a problem attracting hosts otherwise. Or else someone on the staff is going out of his/her way to make Robert Osborne look less than knowledgeable. You raise an important point. What we don't know is whether Osborne has final say as to the copy he reads. The possibility exists that the writers and other support staff don't have final say, and that Osborne brooks no disagreement with his own memory and judgment. If this is so, then it's disgraceful, and so counter-productive, since Osborne would be the one sabotaging his own reputation. > Flynn's liver was well known to be at least 60 years old! Before the doctor doing the autopsy on the 50-year-old Flynn was told whom he was dissecting, he remarked that his subject's organs looked like those of an 80-year-old. Somehow I think the devil-may-care Flynn would've taken a bit of perverse pride in knowing that, beyond the momentary pleasure in consuming all that alcohol, it also provided forensic evidence that he was second-to-none at burning the proverbial candle at both ends.

>For the 31 Days of Oscar festival, TCM has scheduled 1965's "Battle of the Bulge" for 3 p.m. Researching on-line, I am not able to locate any Oscar nominations for this picture. The TCM site says it was an Oscar Nominee in the documentary feature category, and although there is a 1965 documentary about the BOTB that meets this criterion, it is less than an hour long. (The time slot alloted by TCM for "Battle of the Bulge" is two hours and 45 minutes, which would accommodate the longer, non-nominated war epic. A documentary that accompanied the dramatic film, The Battle of the Bulge...The Brave Rifles, was nominated for an Oscar. Its 52-minute running time qualified it for the Best Documentary, Feature-Length, category.

> It seems in 1961/62, the Motion Picture Academy commissioned an artist to create portraits of each winner of the "Best Actor" and Best Actress" Oscar since 1928. The "complete" portfolio contains 69 portraits. (I don't know how it could end up with an "odd" number of 69. Was there a "tie" in one of the early years?) There was a tie for the Best Actor award in 1931-32, between Frederic March ( DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE ) and Wallace Beery ( THE CHAMP ). Beery had one vote less than March, but rules in effect at the time stated that if any eligible nominee's total came within three votes of the nominee finishing first, it would be considered a tie. The fact remains that a lot of ham was served that year. The total number of Oscar-winning actors and actresses would later return to an even number when Katharine Hepburn ( GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER ) and Barbra Streisand ( FUNNY GIRL ) tied -- this time with the exact same vote tallies -- in 1968.