Sprocket_Man
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Posts posted by Sprocket_Man
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>That's fine for you, but I never cared for [SINGING IN THE RAIN), from the beginning. I mean, when I first saw it in a theater in 1952. The '20s characters in the movie over-acted and did not act like they were really in the '20s. I had already seen '20s movies by 1952 and some early '30s movies and Singing in the Rain just didn't seem realistic to me. Nobody ever sounded like Jean Hagen did in that film, with her exaggerated phony voice. That reminded me of high school actors and a high school play.
So, silent pantomime acting from the 1920's, and stilted early talkies are "realistic," but SINGING IN THE RAIN isn't? Why would anybody expect an MGM Technicolor musical to be, in any way, shape or form, realistic? They were never meant to be, and SINGING IN THE RAIN's no exception. It's all about exagerration, something from which most of the film's humor flows.
And "nobody ever sounded like Jean Hagen did in that film, with her exaggerated phony voice?" Take a look at Judy Holliday's Billie Dawn in BORN YESTERDAY, made two years earlier. Billie, and Lena Lamont are both carefully calculated caricatures. They represent an idea, not real people, and serve their respective stories, and their comedic goals, perfectly. The two characters would almost seem to have been separated at birth (except that Lena is grasping and venal, whereas Billie is not). The similarity is, in any case, no accident: Jean Hagen was Judy Holliday's understudy in the original Broaday production of Born Yesterday.
And flow, it does; like or dislike the music, it's one of the funniest movies ever made, period.
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I don't believe any of this. "Rosebud" is the very mechanism that propels the film's plot, is spoken perhaps a half-dozen times, and seen on the sled as it's consumed by flames in the furnace. If Hearst was so apoplectic over its inclusion, then even one mention would have been one too many.
It's quite simple: there can't have been anything removed at Hearst's insistence for two reasons:
One: The film couldn't have survived dramatically with mention of "Rosebud" excised, and
Two: Welles's contract for KANE with RKO was ironclad, and entirely in his favor.
The very same protections he negotiated that prevented Ted Turner from colorizing the film forty years later also handcuffed RKO, which otherwise would have acceded to Hearst's demands. The studio wouldn't make the same mistake twice, however -- that's why they were able to cut and re-shoot THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS while Welles was in South America.
As RKO campaign manual for their exhibitors crowed about their production slate for 1942: "Showmanship instead of genius!"
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>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.
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> {Hexum) thought all the blanks had been removed, but there was one left.
It's actually unclear as to whether Hexum merely thought that, because the gun was loaded with blanks, it was harmless. As you say, there's cotton wadding in the blank cartridge, and the expanding gasses in the ignited gunpowder accelerated it to near supersonic speed in the gun barrel. It struck the man's skull with the force of a swung hammer.
If Hexum was truly so ignorant of the power of the pistol in his hand, then the show's prop master in charge of the guns was negligent, possibly criminally so, for failing to instruct Hexum in proper safety procedures. Even with blanks, the old adage applies: never point a gun at anything you don't intend to kill (that includes yourself).
>Suicide by gunshot. Mexican-born actor Pedro Armendez (1912-1963),
His name was Pedro Armendáriz, not "Armendez."
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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.
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> As you probably know, almost all of the official footage of D-Day was ruined, too. Must be aliens messin' with us.
No, the only thing ruined were all but six frames of still photos taken on Omaha Beach by fames war photographer Robert Capa. It's only considered an unfortunate loss because Capa (best known for his combat pictures from the Spanish Civil War) was considered the best of the best. There's actually plenty of motion picture footage from D-Day.
> Here is a documentary from WWII narrated by Robert Taylor: *The Fighting Lady *(directed by William Wyler)I think this is rather bizarre, since the film carries no director credit, and there's no record of Wyler's ever setting foot in the Pacific Theater (his two credited documentaries, MEMPHIS BELLE and THUNDERBOLT, were filmed in the European Theater).
What's also peculiar is that THE FIGHTING LADY's main title, clearly assembled at 20th Century-Fox, just as clearly credits the music -- correctly -- to Fox's head of music and chief composer, Alfred Newman, but IMDb says it was David Buttolph.
There's no reason for Wyler to have been deprived of screen credit for the film -- if he actually did it -- but he simply could not have directed THE FIGHTING LADY, or even supervised the post-production at the studio in Los Angeles, because he was in Europe at the time.
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>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.
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Lucy's el Adobe, on Melrose Ave., to be precise. Decent Mexican food, but I haven't been there in years.
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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.
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Robert Taylor. Wooden actor, great hair:
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Ironically, Novarro was tortured by the pair much like the character of Simonides, steward to the House of Hur, was by agents of Messala in the silent BEN-HUR (whose star was, of course, Novarro). In each case, the torturers came away empty-handed.
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They may very well have spent more on teaching their students how to spell, too.
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>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.
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> One time during the mid 1990s, I was on one of the tours, and the guide went on and on about how much they conserved and cherished the estate, and how much respect they had for the architect, Julia Morgan, and did everything in their power to preserve her legacy at San Simeón. Well, smartass that I've been known to be, asked the guide if the Hearst Corporation was so interested in respecting and preserving Julia Morgan's legacy, why where they so adamant about tearing down the Julia Morgan-designed Herald Examiner Bldg. (the Heral Examier was a defunct Hearst newspaper) in downtown Los Angeles, in order to turn it into a parking lot (this was a current controversy at that time here in LA). The guide stated she didn't know anything about that. I found myself explaining to some of the tourists in the group exactly what the controversy was about.
The docent worked for the State of California, not Hearst. The State surely does care about Morgan's legacy, but has no control over what Hearst does with its still-private properties.
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>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).
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> 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.
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>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).
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>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.
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Richard Rodgers.
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>I've always noted Kirk (Douglas's character's) mention of the cancer and cigarettes in his tirade on his dislike of radio and commercialism in LTTW. However, how many films after that did we still see cigarettes dangling from drs. mouths in films and TV shows? Generations brought up on watching glamourous people smoking.
My favorite smoking-doctor scene is iin THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, when the physicians attending Klaatu at Walter Reed Army Hospital light up while discussing their patient's startlingly advanced age and life expectancy on his planet. One of them remarks, "He made me feel like a second-rate witch doctor." Indeed.
Though the U.S. Surgeon General's report was issued in 1964, the dangers of smoking, implicating it in incidence of bronchitis, emphysema and many forms of cancer, had been known for decades. The tobacco companies conducted ongoing research, and the findings -- usually damning, as you may imagine -- were conspicuous in the firms' internal, eyes-only memos. They knew they were addicting generation after generation (making sure of it, in fact, by spiking their cigarettes with extra nicotine, which they'd discovered to be the addictive factor in tobacco) and killing their customers, betting on the fact that they could get young people hooked faster than the older users would die off. A cynical strategy based on nothing but profit-over-all.
>Jeff Chandler and Jeffrey Hunter both died when they were 42. Both died of comlications after surgery.
Hunter had suffered a stroke, the second of two, and was then involved in a serious fall that required surgery which he did not survive.
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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.
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And Goring is, no doubt, starved for Techicolor up there...
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Did you say possible???
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> How very cool. Are you going, [~Sprocket_Man]?
I'd love to; it's certainly something to tell one's grandchildren one did but, no, a drive up to W.R.'s castle isn't in my itinerary (unless I get to stay in the guest wing for a couple of months, as Hearst's friends often did back in the old days).
31 Days of Oscar Canada Logo
in General Discussions
Posted
> :Walbrook is fascinatingly miscast, perhaps...
Not necessarily; you haven't seen the long-lost excised part of the film in which his character browbeats Glynis Johns's character into becoming the first-ever Hutterite ballerina.
> One doesn't got many opportunities to hear film scores by Ralph Vaughn Williams, either.
True, but Williams wasn't the first choice to score the film. Powell and the producers had wanted Miklos Rozsa (who had written the music for Powell's THE SPY IN BLACK -- also about a German U-Boat's grounding in Canadian waters -- four years earlier), but he'd already gone to Hollywood with Alexander Korda's THE THIEF OF BAGDAD company (co-directed by Powell), decided to stay there because of the greater opportunities, and was unavailable.