Sprocket_Man

> Yikes! People are actually talking seriously about remaking this. I see from the internet that a remake of Walter Mitty is in the works (I don't know how serious that is). I don't care so much for that movie, but still, it's hitting uncomfortably close to home. Bear in mind that a new MITTY would be a direct adaptation of James Thurber's story, and not a remake of the Kaye movie in any sense. It's an entirely valid undertaking and, frankly, I hope they get closer to the bone of Thurber's intent than the (agreeably) silly Goldwyn film did.

> Which leaves me to wondering...IF you were to remake this movie, WHO could you possibly get to cast it? Considering you want to use all the same costumes, the same script, same music, sets and the like. WHO in this day and age could HANDLE Kaye's part? Robin Williams could possibly handle the rapid-fire delivery as well as Kaye, but doesn't LOOK the part. And probably doesn't carry a tune as well. This all rather misses the point. THE COURT JESTER was developed and tailored by writer-directors Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, and lyricist Sylvia Fine (Kaye's wife) specifically for Danny Kaye and his unique talents and screen persona. For this reason it couldn't have been made anywhere near as well before there was a Danny Kaye, and can't be made now that he's gone. The window opened, and then it closed (remember that Kaye, whom we think of a fixture of Golden Age Hollywood, made only seventeen movies). It's one of a relative handful of films that are truly the result of a unique alignment of stars and planets, a confluence of existing talents, as well as a market existing for such a movie that would persuade a major studio to make it when, in an earlier or later era (such as now), they would not. Not only has Kaye (not to mention Panama and Frank) departed, but so has that market. The only way one can approach this kind of material nowadays is in the form of wink-and-a-nod condescension, such as the spoofs of Mel Brooks (compare THE COURT JESTER with Brooks's ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS sometime). The biggest difference is that in these modern takes on this kind of material, the characters all have some sense that they're in a movie, hence the winking and nodding, whereas in Kaye's film they merely inhabit the world in which they've been placed. A comedy played straight, if you will. Even a film like THE PRINCESS BRIDE had to adopt the grandfather-as-storyteller framing device to kind of explain away the characters' general sense that their world exists to entertain someone outside of it. It's one of the reasons I love THE COURT JESTER as much as I do. It's no more tongue-in-cheek or inappropriately self-aware than the straight swashbucklers, like THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, it's based on.

> RO and Baldwin were discussing MY FAVORITE YEAR, and Baldwin uttered the statement that O'Toole had never before been in a comedy prior to MY FAVORITE YEAR. RO corrected him by saying that he had, but they were relatively unknown films (my own words). O'Toole also co-stars in a little comedy called HOW TO STEAL A MILLION, "relatively unknown" due to his having to share the screen with some long-forgotten actress named Audrey Hepburn, and its having being made by some obscure journeyman director by the name of William Wyler.

The real howler was Bob Osborne's contention that the casting of Angela Lansbury was some kind of coup on Frank Sinatra's part. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, director John Frankenheimer had to use every manner of persuasion he could muster to talk an adamant Sinatra out of his personal choice for the role of Eleanor Iselin: Lucille Ball (which is actually rather fascinating; were it the smart and sassy Lucy of her early movies, it might've worked, but I don't think anything could have erased the image of wacky Lucy Ricardo from the minds of a generation of TV viewers). No, Lansbury was entirely Frankenheimer's idea, and I, for one, am eternally glad that his vision prevailed. The moment when Eleanor gives Raymond his orders to assassinate Arthur Benjamin and then seals it with that full-on-the-mouth kiss is, in my opinion, the scariest and creepiest single moment ever put on film. I, for one, am sick and tired of the misinformation Osborne and his writers are dispensing on TCM. They do far more harm than good, as most viewers will take what he mouths at face value and never question it, which will only serve to perpetuate these fallacies. In the name of truth and common decency, stop, Bob. Stop.

I can't say fairly that it's an awful film, but everything, absolutely everything in the film rings false. All the dramatic rhythms are off, the character motivations and actions make little or no sense, resulting in these two great stars chewing the scenery with the melodramatic claptrap that's been placed in their, and everyone else's, mouths. The most notable thing about the film (which I'd never seen before) is that it struck me how much Linda Darnell (whose hollywood career began the same year IN NAME ONLY was released) looks like a younger, prettier Kay Francis -- and what a forgettably pretentious, and sexless, actress Francis was. Was Warner Bros. ever lucky when the rise of Bette Davis as it's "queen of the lot" shoved Francis out the door).

> Just out of curiosity, did this film redeem itself with Mayer? It is a good movie and of course Wellman was a terrific director. I am sure Mayer did his best to always put a negative spin on it with Huston, but doesn't he ever have to admit that a movie was good? I guess it was always about the money - that's all that mattered to him. What a shame! Mayer was, by then, largely a professional horse-breeder who sometimes dabbled in making movies. The person whose notice BATTLEGROUND 's smashing success did not escape was Nicholas Schenck, chairman of Loew's, Inc., MGM's parent company. There'd never been any lovel ost between him and Mayer and, as the years passed, it became more and more apparent to Schenck at the home office in New York that Mayer, with his penchant for an Andy Hardy America that was fading fast in the wake of World War II, was, at best, an adiministrator and not a filmmaker, which Oscar-winning screenwriter Schary (hired away from RKO, where'd he'd been head of production) was. BATTLEGROUND was probably a sizeable nail in Mayer's coffin vis-a-vis where he stood in Schenck's estimation, but the process that led to Schenck's accepting Mayer's intemperate It's-either-me-or-Schary ultimatum had begun decades earlier.

*>Griselda*: Just remember that. Get it? Got it. Good.

"On your way, bud."

Whether characters are kneeling or not, one of the oldest and most basic truisms in filmmaking is that an eye-level camera is a boring camera. One eitther places its line of sight slightly above of below the characters' eyes. And while modern directors may be all about pointless trackings and pannings and swoopings of their cameras, the classic Hollywood style, as exemplified by John Ford, was to just lock it down and let the scene play, unless one was following something that was, itself, moving. Ford rarely imployed tracking shots of stationary subjects (there are a few notable exceptions to this, of course). A film frame also isn't about mere up-and-down, right-and-left, but front-to-back, and only great visual directors really understand this and know how to join their frames' foregrounds organically with the backgrounds. Ford could, and Welles, and John Frankenheimer, but the number who really knew how to make that background a living, breathing character were few.

Even if colorizing could duplicate the appearance of real color (it can't), let alone the dazzling tones and textures of Technicolor (it really can't!), to add this superficial layer of tinting (which is all it is, or ever can be) is to rob a film of its context, i.e. the time and place, when and where it was made (and, yes, the technological limitations imposed on its makers). A film is, and should be, the product of its time, since it can never -- nor should -- be anything other than the sum of its makers' talents and sensibilities. For anyone to say that he or she prefers an artificially-colored product (does he or she also favor chocolate syrup on his or her steak?) is to inadvertently reveal that he or she is sadly lacking in the most basic imagination that allows black-and-white to bloom into a kind of brilliant psychic color within one's mind that's unique to each and every viewer (as opposed to something that actually has color, whch everyone unavoidably sees the same way). To paraphrase one of the oldest of old maxims, black-and-white is in the eye of the beholder. Just hope, then, that you aren't merely some kind of old black-and-white movie to someone else.

>Calidor sounds more sinister than Goldstein. More to the point, it sounds less Jewish. The producers decided (I think correctly) that Orwell's story, especially as they wished to present it, isn't about anti-Semitism, so why introduce that element, even in an off-handed manner?

>I agree with you but Shane is somewhat unique in that there isn't any law in the film at all. In a lot of westerns with a similar theme there is at least some law. E.g. Liberty Valance. No so very unique. Because he helped open the frontier, as Riker explains to the Starretts, he feels entitled to dictate "law" as he sees it, and that revolves around unfettered rights for cattlemen on an open range, and few or none for homesteaders. It is, in fact, analogous to the modern argument here in the U.S. as to the rights of Big Business versus those for consumers (hint: Big Business is winning). Because Riker's domain in the Jackson Hole valley is very remote, there's little or no possibility of a territorial marshal riding in and mediating the dispute between him and the homesteaders (not that a single lawman would last long against Riker and his men). In that it's not all that different from Judge Roy Bean's self-styled "only law west of the Pecos" in William Wyler's THE WESTERNER. Remoteness is, then, the very essence of the frontier, and the stories common to Westerns is the idea of ordinary people realizing that they must band together and bring law and order -- the foundation for all civilization -- to the outpost they've chosen to live in, or perish.

> What else? Well, I STILL LIKE Cat Steven's MUSIC! I don't care HOW many Muslim psycopaths blow up HOW many buildings! Well, as Reagan once said famously, There you go again... Why wouldn't you, or anyone else, hate or boycott Stevens's music unless you blame all Muslims for the atrocities a relative handful of fanatics advocate and commit? What does he have to do with them, besides sharing the conviction of all Muslims that "there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet"? Beyond that core belief, Muslims come in all shapes, sizes and temperaments; some of them play in the NBA or NFL, and others are singers like Stevens. And if you do blame them all, then you're just as bad as the generalizations underpinning the fallacious rationalization about all us Western infidels that allows those fanatics to carry out their attacks.

> I don't know if I am more eloquent than you, or eloquent at all, but I will try to put down what I think are the elements of Ozu's greatness. He is a master of composition, equaled only, in my mind, by William Wyler. I think this is a rather odd statement. There's no greater admirer of Wyler's work than me, but even I wouldn't call him a "master of composition." The conception and framing of his shots were impeccable, as one would expect, but he was no great visual stylist like John Ford or Orson Welles. It is, in fact, precisely the quietly appropriate camera work in his films that has kept him from being a darling of the cineastes and Cahiers du Cinéma crowd like the abovementioed directors, as well as the likes of Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray (who, for all their talent, stand in Wyler's shadow, as far as I'm concerned). No, Wyler's greatness lay in his unmatched ability to elicit the best work of his writers and actors in service of the story, giving his films exceptional depth and truth in their emotional landscape. He was notoriously inarticulate at communicating to his actors how he wanted them to approach their parts and what he wanted them to do, but he knew what he wanted and would keep at it until that bit of magic in the performances he envisioned appeared. With Wyler, it was all about that story and the film, and not about drawing attention to himself, which has been the downfall of countless directors more concerned with making it clear how brilliant they are.

Had WINGS (the newly restored print I'm seeing at paramount on Thursday) not been a Best Picture winner (or even the first Best Picture winner), do you honestly believe it would be headed for Blu-ray? The films you name may be worthy of release on disc, but that's only one the basis of artistic and creative merit, whereas the only merit the studios consider woorth the effort is economic. Still, kudos to Paramount for having a high enough regard for the company's history to be willing to take something of an economic bath on the project. I guess there's a point where the embarassment of not doing it outweighs the financial losses they'll take (had the studio a channel like TCM, whose voracious need to be fed hundreds of films a month, requiring Warner's to invest in ongoing restoration of their films, including silents, Paramount might have done it, anyway, but this is obviously a special case).

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN was released in 1948. There were no widescreen films...anywhere. The picture was 1.37:1, and couldn't have been anything else.

> ...since I switched to a new TV and DirecTV, I've grown accustomed to watching a stretched picture with really fat people on TCM. You just keep catching news reports about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

Philistines? No, these are Philistines:

>Lewis Stone turns in a fine performance for director Rex Ingram in THE PRISINOR OF ZENDA (1922). In one of his last roles, Stone also played the Cardinal in the 1952 Stewart Granger PRISONER OF ZENDA. Quite a pair of bookends, those.

> Terrific acting by Steiger (as Gillespie) when he finds out, after he interrogates and berates Tibbs (Poitier) on suspicion of his being a killer, that Tibbs is a cop. He wordlessly looks at his police badge, and his humiliation and embarassment is total. Gillespie's reaction is actually more one of bewilderment at how any place in a society he thinks he knows could grant a black man any kind of authority, especially over white people. The humiliation and embarassment come later as he begins, slowly, incrementally, to see Tibbs as a human being and not an adversary and threat. > I liked the first suspect that was thrown in jail. When he spoke with Tibbs he kept pronouncing Gillespie's name as "Gillepsie" (at least, this is what I kept hearing). I thought that was a nice touch. He actually pronounces it "gill-LEPS-pee."

> Although (Stone) only worked for 12 weeks in his last years, L.B. Mayer saw that he was paid for 40 weeks... Well, the final two years of Stone's career were after Nicholas Schenck accepted Mayer's threat to resign and Dore Schary was running the studio. > I used to think that too but, as mentioned earlier, being only 58 does seem to work out. As Peter Bailey says to his elder son in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE: "You were born old, George," and so it probably was with Stone. Then, too, when you were 58 in the late 1930's, you were older, due to the shorter lifespans and the rapidity with which people seemed to age back then (it did provide some wonderfully wizened faces for the movies, though -- take a look at the extras in 1935's A TALE OF TWO CITIES sometime -- that you can scarecely find nowadays, at least in the U.S. You have to go Third World countries with shorter life expectancies if you want to fill your movies with the same kind of craggy, gap-toothed mugs).

{font:arial, helvetica, sans-serif}Rod Serlings TV series "Night Gallery" had a "Man With The Black Bag" episode. It's actually called "The Little Black Bag" (starring Chill Wills), adapted from a classic science fiction short story by C.M. Kornbluth.{font}

It's spelled "hooey." And hooey it is.

>The relic was smuggled out of Nepal with the help of Hollywood movie star James Stewart, who was on holiday in Calcutta with his wife, Gloria. Hidden in Gloria's lingerie case, the finger finally reached the scientist in London. Which is the real reason why, one thing leading to another, Stewart and Doris Day's little boy was kidnapped, forcing her to sing Que Sera Sera at an unnamed foreign embassy after her scream saved the ambassdor from being assassinated at a performance of Benjamin Britten's Storm Clouds Cantata the Royal Albert Hall. Well, it's no more improbable than the notion of yetis roaming around the Himalayas, is it?

The program's called Downton abbey." Whether it's uptown or downtown is irrelevant.