Sprocket_Man
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Posts posted by Sprocket_Man
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>Chief O'Hara is practically an idiot...one wonders why the heck Gordon let O'Hara keep his job. At times those two are like Abbott & Costello.
Isn't it obvious? Next to O'Hara, Gordon (who's hardly an Elliott Ness, himself), looks like a genius.
The fact is, Mayor Linseed should can 'em both and hire, well, Elliott Ness.
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Hey, jaymuss-eato, DON'T POST THE SAME DAMN MESSAGE ACROSS MULTIPLE FORUMS!
Thank you.
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> I found it very annoying and difficult to read...it was distracting in the extreme. Made it very difficult to even understand what his point was.
IRKSOME, even (yes, that's how to spell "irk," jaymuss-eato. Were you, by any chance, drunk when you started this thread?).
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> Frederick Forsyth's gripping novel was turned into a gripping film by Fred Zinnemann. He wanted to make a film where the audience knew the assassin was not going to kill de Gaulle, but still would go to see it. He pulled it off. It was a very well received film by both critics and movie goers. I think the book is one of the best of that type and so it the film. I don't know how many time I've watched it and still love watching. The same with the book....
I like to think that the reasoning of Zinnemann (and the executives at Universal, who of course had to be talked into making a movie in which the audience knows, going in, that the assassin fails in his mission) was that, outside France, Charles DeGaulle was roundly disliked to the point of being despised, even by France's closest allies in NATO (maybe especially in the NATO countries), and the audience would, on some level, be rooting for Calthrop to succeed.
Of course, the real human drama is found in Calrthrop's pursuers, especially Label (Michel Lonsdale), Caron (Derek Jacobi) and the Security Minister (Alan Badel), who all have their agendas; they all want to catch the Jackal before he can do the deed, but each for slightly different reasons...
And as for Cyril Cusack's gunsmith, one can imagine that he was the mentor of George Clooney's character in THE AMERICAN, a couple of years ago. A dangerous trade, that...
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> Does Shatner still have his real hair?
It's in an envelope in his safe deposit box.
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>As much as an advocate am I for the dye-transfer technology, I think just as much of the look of classic Technicolor pictures is due to the DESIGN. The modern color processes can replicate colors just as well (though not with the opacity of dye-transfer), but most films are designed for realistic or even purposefully drab effect.
>Most of the prints being transferred for DVD or cablecast on TCM are NOT dye-transfer prints. They are new, lowfade prints struck from (usually) original separation negatives. But they retain the "Glorious Technicolor" look because of the set, costume and lighting designs. Can you imagine a film today being designed to resemble one of the Archer(s) productions?? Not bloody likely. That was cinematic poetry. Today the emphasis is on CGI trickery, not painting with a broad, extravagant palette (or a broad Eugene Pallette!!
).Well, no. I know someone who used to work for the old Metrocolor Labs. One day, he related, Columbia sent over an IB Technicolor print and asked them to run off a new Metrocolor (Eastman) print that would duplicate it. The Metrocolor Labs staff tried and tried and tried but finally had to give up. They concluded that there was just no way that a chemical print could match the tones and contrasts of dye-transfer Tech. This was, granted, quite a long time ago, and film technology has advanced since then, but those metallic dyes at the heart of the IB process are still the gold standard -- even if they weren't permanent and fade-free...but they are...
I do agree with you that that long-gone style of cinematography maximized the potential of those colors (which were also chosen by art directors and costume designers with far more care than they are today). That generation of cameramen knew how to define objects and planes within the frame with color and shadow, a lost art nowadays.
As for DVD's and Blu-rays, they're transfered from prints only as a last resort; if negatives exist in useable condition, either full-color monopack or black-and-white negative color separations, then transfers are made directly from those elements. They will always yield the sharpest image and the truest color.
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Angela Lansbury's Eleanor Shaw Iselin in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE; nobody else even comes close.
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> As OtisCribleCoblis:
> that really was a gun in Leonard's pocket
>That may be true, but it was loaded with blanks.
Which is one of the holes in the film's story: why would Eve load more blank rounds in the pistol than she planned on firing at Roger in the cafeteria (after all, it's not as though one can miss when shooting blanks)? All it could possibly do (and did) is expose her to jeopardy.
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> You seem to be something of an eggspert on Joe Makiewicz, answer me this: is there any truth to the stories that he relentlessly bullied Mongomery Clift on the set of Suddenly Last Summer? I have no idea whether they're on the level or not, but many sources claim Katharine Hepburn spit in his (or his producer's?) face on the last day of shooting? Or is this made-up, Hollywood Hoo-Hah?
> 'Cause a good deal of me beef with Joe Mankiewicz comes from this story, and I have to admit I have no idea if it's true or not. It wasn't cool to pick on Monty when he was in the shape he was in, and I think his weak performance hurts an already iffy film.
I was going to check my copy of Mankieiwcz's biography, Pictures Will Talk, to see if there's any mention of the above, when I realized that it wouldn't be necessary.
Firstly, bullying actors simply wasn't Mankiewicz's way. His sets were pretty congenial places, and he was as articulate a director as one would ever hope to meet. I suspect that his view is that if he couldn't talk an actor through what he had in mind, it was probably impossible to achieve.
Also, as you probably know, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift became close friends during the filming of A PLACE IN THE SUN in 1951 (and she likely saved his life immediately following his devastating car accident during the filming of RAINTREE COUNTY ). Taylor was famous for being fiercely loyal to her friends, especially the vulnerable Clift. Had Mankiewicz ever treated him badly during the shooting of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, do you think for one instant that, a year or so later, Taylor would have insisted that Fox hire Mankiewicz to replace Rouben Mamoulian as director of CLEOPATRA (one can argue, purely as a matter of fanciful, melodramatic hindsight, that being in charge of CLEO was the whitest of cinematic white elephants, since it was a grueling three-year ordeal from which Mankiewicz's career never fully recovered)?
The idea, then, that Mank showed anything less than complete professional courtesy to Clift is absurd.
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>...and thus is the reason you ALSO don't see Randolph Scott ride up on his horse and help protect Cary from the evil clutches of Mason...and ah, Landau.
I had occasion, the day before yesterday, to converse with Landau (whom I'd met before). Nice, thoughtful man.
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> ...why is it sometimes there is such a small top and bottom banner that the movie almost appears full screen? And other times there is a thick top and bottom banner?
Well, the real point is that during the pre-production the director decides in what ratio he want to shoot his movie. Is it an epic that demands a huge physical canvas ("canvas" being the operative word, since filmmakers, like painters, can choose the shape of the picture they're going to paint -- though in film, only up to a point -- that best conveys the image and emotions they're trying to evoke), like BEN-HUR at an immense 2.76:1, or something more intimate, that works better within a more modestly-proportioned frame, 1.85:1?
When telecast, the transfer to TV screen doesn't do anything the cinema didn't do when the film was exhibited theatrically. Theatres come equipped with scrims that block off the top and bottom of the screen to fit the frame of the film with which the venue's been provided (sometimes it's done using different apertures in the projectors), so the screen visible at your local Bijou isn't the same size or proportion every time you visit, either.
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It's all moot unless you actually like to eat chopped liver (mit schmaltz).
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Surely not. I've never heard of any such place, and I've been here in Hollywood for ywenty-nine years.
You may wish to contact the Fashion Institute of Technology here in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum, both of which maintain extensive collections of movie costumes.
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> I always thought those elegant objects d'art James Mason possessed ( including the most elegant of all, Eva Marie Saint) were to demonstrate that he was a man of sophistication and taste, surely a requirement for all Eastern Block spies in the 1950s.
I think you're missing the point that Vandamm is no "Eastern Bloc spy," but a dyed-in-the-wool mercenary with no political convictions, whose only interest is selling secrets to the highest bidder.
That's how he could afford the ersatz Frank Lloyd Wright House, and a woman like Eve Kendall.
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>This isn't personal. In fact, some of your posts I enjoy. But there are two sides to every story.http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/182nxnes.asp?page=3 Jake in the Heartland
The Weekly Standard -- no fair person's idea of objective journalism. A right-wing rag designed, like Fox News, to reassure the already reliably right-wing that they're on the side of the angels.
Thev only problem: they're not.
> Don't forget J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of HUAC in the late 1940s.
> A few years later he went to prison after being found guilty of fraud,
> and wound up in the same place as some of the Hollywood Ten.
> And yes, when he was called before a grand jury he took the fifth.
> I believe one of the Ten made a witty comment when coming across
> Thomas in prison, but I can't recall offhand what it was.
Thomas was co-chairman of the Committee (with Martin Dies), and he was convicted of tax evasion, not fraud. Obviously a great patriot, Thomas; taxes were for everybody else to pay, but not him.
It was in the minimum-security federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut, that "Unfriendly (or Hollywood) Ten" member Dalton Trumbo, upon encountering Thomas on a clean-up crew, commented to him, "I see you're still shoveling s-h-i-t, Thomas." -
> In Bacall's documentary on Bogart, she claims Humphrey travelled to Washington to protest the Blacklist making a valiant, unrelenting stand. In Stephen Bogart's Bogart documentary, he claims his father completely folded at the first pressure and dropped the protest.
Bogart and Bacall went to Washington with a group kown as the Committee for the First Amendment, whose other members included Danny Kaye and Gene Kelly. The facrt is that the whole contingent, to one degree or another, got cold feet and didn't carry out the controntation of HUAC that they'd planned.
So, it wasn't just Bogart, but full marks to son Stephen Bogart for not deifying his father by attributing a stalwartness he didn't display.
> Some sources have claimed Kazan was pressured and bullied to name names, some that he did it out of misguided conviction, others have claimed that he ratted on people to deliberately destroy their careers out of pettiness.
Well, the fact is that everybody who was called before HUAC as an "unfriendly" witness was bullied and pressured. Despite that, man,y, if not most, of them held firm and didn't name names, so Kazan coul hardly use the Committee's tactics as an excuse.
> And finally, Joseph Mankiewicz for years told the tale of how Cecil B. DeMille admonished the DGA for not forcing its members to pledge a loyalty oath and started spouting the names of directors who were against it with a German accent. According to some sources, one of them the DeMille doc that aired on TCM a little while ago, this was Uncle Joe spinning something of a self-serving tall-tale (apparently self-importance runs deep in the Mankiewicz gene pool).
Mankiewicz did, indeed, tell that story, notably in George Stevens, jr's documentary film about his father, GEORGE STEVENS - A FILMMAKER'S JOURNEY, but the transcript from the October 22, 1950, meeting of (what was then known as) the Screen Directors Guild membership to determine Mankiewicz's fate as president of the union does not bear this out. The stenographer who transcribed the meeting's minutes makes no indication that DeMille ever employed a German accent to mock certain members. Moreover, Mankiewicz specifically recalled DeMille applying that accent toward director Fred Zinnemann, who was actually in Europe at the time, scouting locations for his film TERESA (1951).
> Is it mentioned often that Gary Cooper was a friendly witnesses (sic) before the HUAC prior to the numerous airings of (irony) High Noon?
Not every "friendly" witness named names, and Cooper, while conservative, was no red-baiting John Wayne. Many of the "friendly" witnesses called by the Committee were there purely as window-dressing, designed to curry favor with the public and demonstrate that all the "real" patriots were on their side.
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My admiration for THE SEARCH, a deeply affecting film that draws so heavily -- and wonderfully -- on the then-new Italian Neo-realist school, has made me feel for years that it's a shame that its director, Fred Zinnemann, was not the man to have eventually directed SCHINDLER'S LIST. As good as Spielberg's film is, it still lacks the spareness and angularity found in this and other of Zinnemann's best films.
For several years after Thomas Kennealy's book of Schindler's List was published, Billy Wilder -- like Zinnemann an Austrian Jew -- wanted to acquire it to make a film, but could find neither backers nor insurance to cover a director then well into his eighties. Zinnemann would have faced the same obstacles, of course (ten months younger than Wilder), but it's not hard to imagine that the film of it he might've produced as a masterpiece. Sadly, we'll never know.
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> Some would say, he had too much blood on his hands+.+ As well he did. He was no better than any of the criminals existing in the fevered brain of Roy Cohn. Too bad Garfield's daughter wasn't there, she could have gotten up and left in protest. the film community was divided upon his receiving an honorary Oscar. Did anyone take a stand that night?
It wasn't a matter of who "took a stand," but who didn't -- in a very literal sense. When Kazan came onstage to receive his nonrary Oscar, many in the auditorium rose to give him a standing ovation -- including his number one cheerleader, Karl Malden -- but many did not. My most vivid memory is of actors Ed Harris and his wife, Amy Madigan, sitting stone-faced in their seats, arms folded hard across their chests.
Kazan was a great director, and if, say, he'd once murdered someone in the heat of passion and went to prison for it, only to be later paroled, I'd say he did his time, paid an appropriate penalty and deserved to go back to work and/or be honored by his peers for his professional accomplishments.
But Kazan's informing to HUAC was the calculated act of a man who felt his career was more important than the careers of those peers, and who shoved them out of the lifeboat, to drown in a raging sea, so that he could go on doing what he believed he deserved more than they. For that kind of cynical self-preservation, no deserves to be forgiven.
> Sprocket, you say "Communism collapsed under the wieght of it's own inefficiency"? You mean it wasn't because of Ronald Reagan??? :0 Sepiatone
I'm going to resist making a wisecrack in favor of pointing out that, to the extent that outside forces aided and accelerated that eventual Soviet collapse, it was the policy of containment, devised in 1947 by President Harry Truman, Soviet expert George Kennan and Secretary of State George Marshall -- and adhered to by every U.S. president until the USSR's dissolution in 1991 -- that asccomplished it. Giving Reagan any credit for this is like praising and rewarding a child for not having the bad taste to murder his parents.
h4. Will the real Mankiewicz please stand up?> Sprocket_Man wrote: Joe Mankiewicz praised his work as a director, not a human being.
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> > To read the opening comment on the thread, I thought the writer was posting about host Ben Mankiewicz. Who is the source in the comment, Joe or Ben? I can comprehend how someone can be praised for their work in their vocation, yet not be liked as far as their character or personality. Anyone working will have that experience.
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> Of course (slaps himself on the side of the head). Having worked for years in an attempt to bring a film about Joseph L. Mankiewicz to the screen, my first thought when seeing that surname is to think of Joe -- not his older, Oscar-winning brother, Herman; screenwriter sons Chris and Tom; his nephew; political consultant Frank; great-nephews Ben and Josh; nor even Oscar-nominated screenwriter Don...with whom I've worked. The notion that the earlier poster was referring to one of Ben's TCM introductions didn't even occur to me.
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> Still, the core of my comment, that the reference was to Kazan's work, and not his politics or actions during the Witch-hunts, remains valid.
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>Wasn't Margaret Sheridan, the female lead in The Thing (1951) one of Hawks women? I've heard she got the part because of their relationship. The story I think is within 3 years of the film she'd met and married someone else, had a child and retired from films.
Sheridan isn't the female lead in the film, she's the lead. She gets top billing. That may be a measure of Hawks's regard for her.
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>CineSage, what's a sunjegation of a froup? I must have missed that in the movie.
That's the Lewis Carroll version. Having to enter your Jabberwocky universe did that to me.
It should read "subjugation of a group."
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Kazan was a rat, with no sense of scruples whatsoever.
Joe Mankiewicz praised his work as a director, not a human being.
As for the Communists in Hollywood (or anywhere else in the U.S., for that matter), most of them were indeed "dupes," seduced by an ideology that, like Christianity, always promised more than it could ever deliver.
Sure the Soviets had agents in this country who were here to undermine our institutions; we had agents in the USSR whose job was to acomplish the very same thing? So what? That's what adversaries do. But there's little true blame to be laid on those in the Hollywood community who were rightly outraged and disgusted by decades of policies and actions taken by the wealthiest and most powerful in society (sund familiar?) that thought nothing of using the mechanism of government to increase their wealth at the expense of others.
In any case, Communism wasn't exactly the greatest evil ever introduced into the world; it was a social experiment -- an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution -- that had its run and then collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiency and injustices.
The only reason people like you keep bringing it up, then, is because you admire the very "malefactors of great wealth" (Theodore Roosevelt's words) whose depradations forced many Americans to seek solutions in that system that promised more than it could deliver. In making promises that more and more Americans are beginning to see as empty rhetoric, U.S. society risks going the same way at the USSR...and you and your kind, sir, with your divisive claptrap, will be its palladin.
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>I'm surprised that no one has - as far as I can tell - mentioned this upcoming event:
On March 9 ( sold out) and possibly March 11, at the William Randolph Hearst estate in San Simeon, California, a screening of *Citizen Kane* will take place, as part of the 2012 San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. Hearst's great-grandson, and president of the Hearst Corporation, Steven Hearst, will be present in a meaningful gesture which, on the part of the Hearst family, finally acknowledges the greatness of the film.
Well, then you haven't been looking terribly hard. I started a thread on it on January 23rd:
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It was shot flat 1.37, and is supposed to be hard-matted to 1.85 for theatrical exhibition.
Nevertheless, there is, as they say, many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. If the matting is applied improperly, it can retain too much at the bottom of the frame, at the expense of the top.
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What, you have something against Nazis (by the way: you don't make words plural by adding apostrophes)?
North by Northwest 411
in General Discussions
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>Possibly James Stewart in *Rear Window*. Broken leg obviously = impotence, relative to Grace Kelly; hence leading perhaps to the voyeurism.
Well, what part of a man doesn't seem flaccid by comparison when encased in all that unyielding plaster?