Sprocket_Man

Alistair Sim, not Sims.

It's not that George C. Scott's such a great Scrooge (he's certainly okay, but doesn't sound convincingly English). Just as a dramatization of, say, Moby Dick needs a great Ahab but is only as good as the actor cast as Starbuck, so is A Christmas Carol only as effective as the actor playing Bob Cratchit. So very often cast as a screen villain (TIME AFTER TIME; TITANIC), David Warner is surely the finest Cratchit ever. Believable, sympathetic, conflicted between his need to humor his enployer, Scrooge, and the betterment of his family, especially crippled Tiny Tim (when one looks at Gene Lockhart in the 1938 MGM version one is never in doubt as to why the Cratchit family doesn't have ebnough to eat -- Bob's been chowing down on everybody else's share). Warner's performance also allows the viewer to ignore the story's most glaringly illogical aspect: with Britain in the throws of the Industrial Revolution, and trained bookkeepers in such demand that they can write their own tiickets, why does Bob live in such fear of Scrooge? Being sacked by the old man is the best thing that could possibly happen to him). The rest of the supporting cast is equally superb: Susannah York, Frank Finlay, Edward Woodward, Roger Rees, Angela Pleasance, all plummily British, making up for the perhaps-a-wee-too-Yankish Scott. My only real complaint is that the film, made for U.S. television, was filmed in standard ration 1.33:1, rather than a more expansive widescreen. Still, it was a rather constricted age, and Scrooge's gathering predicament should seem a bit suffocating, like his cold, airless and lifeless bedroom. And, yep, I just got the Blu-ray, too.

> Okay this thread is for the ladies... who are the classic film actors that you find the most sexy, good-looking and charming? And who are the ones who make your skin crawl? One cannot read the title of this thread and fail to recount the famous tale of an inebriated John Barrymore's soujourn into the ladies' room during some long-forgotten Hollywood function. A shocked woman entered the restroom and came upon the Great Profile relieving himself in one of the toilets. WOMAN: "Sir! This is for ladies only!" BARRYMORE (turning toward her, his member in hand): "So, Madam, is this!"

> Tangentially, Kenneth Mars' death makes me wonder how many of the main actors who were in Young Frankenstein are still alive? Gene Wilder and Teri Garr? Yes? And Cloris Leachman (now in her mid-80's); all the other featured players are dead (Gene Hackman, who played the Blind Man, uncredited, notwithstanding).

>Anyone remember some discussion essentially making the point that there never was, has never been, any kind of societal clique in the history of NYC that was even close to the one depicted in this film. Whether there was or not is irrelevant; Mason's character would have been kicked out of any clique as soon as they found out he was hooked on cortisone.

>Robert Newton, the acid bath... Someone needed to explain to Newton's character (not to mention the screenwriter, director, producer, etc.) that any acid capable of dissolving human flesh wouldn't stay sealed up for very long in a rubber hot-water bottle...

>Those weren't sound proof cameras. They were regular cameras inside a special sound-proof box called a "blimp". See my Gone With the Wind camera below. That's a regular Technicolor camera INSIDE a hand-made sound-proof blimp. Wrong. Because of the complex mechanism needed to transport three rolls of black-and-white film within Technicolor's immense cameras, they were uniquely noisy, requiring a special, even more immense lead-lined housing to contain the unwanted sound. Ordinary Mitchell cameras, used for black-and-white photography, and running only one negative within it, did not require extra sound-proofing, though MGM did go to the extra (and largely unnecessary) step of using custom-designed housings for its cameras. When monopack negatives came into wide use in 1953, the Technicolor cameras were retired and those same old Mitchells were used -- again, witho no extra noise-containment housings necessary -- to photograph color films (with or without CinemaScope lenses -- it made no difference. Of course, when newer widescreen processes were introduced, such as VistaVision, Technirama and Todd A-O, they employed custom-made cameras that supplanted the old Mitchells). >Actually, the problem with the visuals with Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was because all the old film that was used was made from multiple copies and tended to be of higher contrast than the modern film, because the old film was many generations away from the original camera negatives, while the new stuff was only about 3 generations away from the modern camera negatives. The modern film (the newly shot film) was closer to the original camera film than the classic scenes were. That's why they didn't match up very well. They should have led into the old film with modern film that had been copied several times, like the way Orson Welles made multiple copies of his newsreel films in Citizen Kane to make them look old. He also scratched them a lot too, although they were just as new as all the other scenes in Citizen Kane. Wrong again. It has nothing to do with DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID's using dupe sources for its classic film clips (many of which were taken from original negatives or fine-grain interpositives) but, rather, that black-and-white negative and print film were constantly being reformulated by Eastman Kodak and its competitors, always trying to make the film faster (more light sensitive) and achieve as lower grain. This evolution resulted in a gradual lessening of film contrast; watching b&w films from the 1930s-on, it's fairly easy to tell which decade a film's from by the amount of contrast it displays. The reason the 1940s & '50s clips used in DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID doesn't look like the newer footage is that the film's cinematographer, and the post-production people to whom the film was handed after it was shot and ready for editing, didn't have those old film stocks to work with. It's not that they couldn't have achieved a seamless fusion with the old clips, it's just that they didn't have the time and/or knowledge and/or dedication to accomplish it. Woody Allen's ZELIG, released only a year later, does manage to duplicate the look of vintage footage, and brilliantly. >Those cameras from the 40's and 50's gave a texture to film that was so beautiful. Those machines must be somewhere...why not dust them off and use them? Utilize the mid-century microphones and recorders, too. It has nothing to do with the cameras (the lenses are another matter; they're actually much sharper now), and everything to do with the aforementioned film stocks and, even more importantly, the cinematographers. Sadly, the use of light and shadow that we associate with classic Hollywood cinema, acquired through two generations of trial-and-error experimentation, is no longer "fashionable," meaning that even if modern cameramen somehow wanted to duplicate the look of old-time movies, they haven't the knowledge or skill to achieve it.

That all the British characters being portrayed by German actors in that country's TITANIC should sound crude and guttural should be perfectly unbderstandable in light of the Nazis government's approving the film's production as a work of propaganda intended to reinforce stereotypes of the British as elitist, degenerate warmongers. It would, in fact, have been shocking had they been portrayed as anything else. There is also the matter of schools of acting, which vary from country to country. Just as there is certainly a "Hollywood school" (with distinct, though minor, variations elsewhere across the U.S., such as the "New York school"), so, too, is the German approach distinctive. No less valid (and, indeed, many German actors, such as Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt and Paul von Henried, became sought-after commodities when they emigrated to Hollywood) than their American counterparts' approach, it's also unsurprising that it should inform and permeate an all-German piece like TITANIC. Lastly, as to THE MORTAL STORM, it should be kept in mind that Louis B. Mayer sought to keep the German market (that included the German-occupied countries of Europe) open to MGM's product until the last possible moment (no matter that he was a Jewish immigrant born in one of those soon-to-be occupied counreies, in this cast Belorussia). By the time THE MORTAL STORM -- a typically "soft" MGM melodrama -- was released the handwriting was on the wall: the European market was about to be closed to all the U.S. studios, anyway. It's to the Warner Brothers' credit, and mayer's shame, that nothing coming out of Mayer's studio was as hard-hitting, or "prematurely anti-Fascist" as Warner's CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY, released in 1939, when the studios could still indulge in the fantasy that they would be able to conduct business in Europe, and withdraw steady profits, as usual, irrespective of the war or grander political considerations. Jack L. Warner may not have been a saint, but he had guts, unlike his ever-greedy crosstown rival, Mayer.

Steve Jobs and Bette Nesmith Graham were just fronts; Hedy invented the Mac, the iPod and Liquid Paper.

>When I Wikipedia'd (is this a word? Well, it is now)... Everbody thinks nothing of turning nouns into verbs in this day and age (something akin to a sex-change operation: it can be done, but it's usually painful, and either way, you may never again be able to pee standing up). At least break yourself of the dependency on the much-overused apostrophe; it should be written "Wikipedia-ed." As for Kelley, he indeed appeared in a number of Westernsd, including GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL, TENSION AT TABLE ROCK, WARLOCK and the Rawhide TV series. I wrote the cast and crew bios that were to appear as bonus material on the DVD of STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (at the last moment, Paramount decided that they didn't want to go to the expense, and cut the feature). I remember the details of Kelley's bio very clearly: among the casrt members, he was truly beloved for being a simple, decent human being who was often called upon to mediate disputes between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (unlike in Star Trek's fictional universe, in which Kirk was typically caught between Spock's logic, and McCoy's opinionated emotionalism). When Kelley was in high school and college he had planned to follow a beloved uncle's footsteps and go into medicine, but the Great Depression got in the way: the Kelleys simply couldn't afford to send DeForest to medical school. One thing led to another and DeForest migrated west to stay with a relative in Los Angeles. He thought he might like to try acting, and was accepted into the company of one of the local playhouses, which eventually led to motion picture work. Decades later, and years after his stint on Star Trek, Kelley received a considerable amount of mail from a number of doctors who thanked him for making "Bones" McCoy such a inspirational figure that they went into medicine, themselves. What I loved about writing Kelley's story was that it was so wonderfully symmetrical: unable to become a doctor, it led to his playing a character who turned out to be one of fiction's most famous doctors. It just may be that DeForest Kelley ended saving more lives and easing more suffering by being an inspiration than he would have by taking up the Caduceus, himself.

> Man, I should not have made that joke in my last post. There have been heavy rainstorms in my area all day today and would you believe my cable went out for 20 minutes-at exactly 8pm when the movie was just about to start. I can't believe it! It finally came back on but I missed the first 20 minutes of "The Mystery Of Edwin Drood". If anyone is recording this movie PLEASE PLEASE private message me. I have been waiting for years to see this movie and now I missed the first part. Dickens meant for your cable to go out for the first twenty minutes; it's how he guaranteed that the mystery would stay a mystery. >With too much money hemorrhaging out, (the Laemmles) were ousted by financier, J. Cheever Cowdin in 1936. Junior's last successful film was SHOWBOAT. Hollywood took its revenge, though: Groucho Marx's shady-lawyer character in 1939's AT THE CIRCUS was called "J. Cheever Loophole."

Nobody's called "Mr Leak" (I can just imagine the kids in class whispering among each other that they have to go to the restroom and, well, you can guess the rest)... > If it wasn't for his red pen and constant correction of my grammar and spelling, I may have been encouraged to write with more expression. That's like saying that if it weren't for these awfully restrictive clothes I'm forced to wear, I might win the Boston Marathon. In any event, like the old admonition that it doesn't take any more muscles to smile than it does to frown, it's not an either/or proposition, and content isn't impoverished or stifled by paying attention to style.

...DECADES BEFORE HERMAN CAIN... That sounds like that 1940's Warner Bros. short (I forget the title) that's an allegory about Jesus and Mary looking for a place to stay so that she can have her baby. In this film, the young couple take refuge in an Italian restaurant as all around them learn the meaning and value of charity...

It's not that some studios are less apt to rent their films than others (they all want to make as much money as possible, after all), it's just that availability is a constantly shifting landscape, determined by what films a studio has already licensed elsewhere, and the terms of those licenses (i.e. whether they're exclusive or allow for competing channels to show the same thing...and even what constitutes "competing"). There's also the not inconsequential matter of TCM's programmers apparently not always knowing what's available and what they've got when they get it. They often do seem like some naif who's never had sushi in his life and can stare at a tableful of it without realizing that there's a whole meal in front of him.

>I used to work in a high-end grocery store in Beverly Hills... There are no grocery stores in Beverly Hills.

Definitely not Audrey Hepburn. The frame looks like it's from Godard's BREATHLESS, but don't quote me...

> "She was going to take my son and I to the typical stopS..." She was going to take my son and *me*... ("I" is not a more high-toned way of saying "me"; they're different parts of speech, and not interchangeable).** * *Americans.

>I don't understand the POV that the Academy should of taken away Young's Oscar, but I admit I don't know much about the history of the Academy with regards to taking away Oscars. e.g. Who else has had their Oscar taken away? What was their so called crime? Wait a second...you actually think that old newsreeels weren't staged?

I think that Warner Bros. has the best tour. Universal's is bigger and more famous, but they've turned their lot into an amusement park with little real movie-making to be found. Sony has a tour, but they don't have a backlot like Warner's, so all you see are a bunch of soundstages. Warner's also has a museum on the lot that's filled with all sorts of terrific artifacts, with one whole floor of the facility dedicated to the Harry Potter films.

> Mel wanted to create a comedy, and at the same time, I feel, have an affectionate tribute to the Flynn that I presume he really did meet. And the reality is that the Alan Swann character is only partially like the aging swashbuckler. Brooks' characterization of him (perhaps, as clore suggests, with a bit of John Barrymore thrown in for good measure) presents him as a flamboyant drunk who was also, at heart, a sweet, even sentimental man, softening the portrait, and making it more attractive than the real Flynn was in the '50s. Mel Brooks was an uncredited executive producer on the film, and it was made by his production company, but he did very little hands-on work on it. He neither wrote, nor directed it. Frankly, MY FAVORITE YEAR is too good to be a Mel Brooks film.

Riker's speech, when he meets the Starretts and Shane as they return from the July 4th festivities, is a model for how to humanize a villain in a drama. Riker makes several valid points; in the final analysis the problem isn't his point of view, but his methods, and it's those brutal methods that lead to his undoing.

Oh, I think the film, does go into that, as it must, only it's done largely through action, and not dialogue, which is why SHANE is an intensely cinematic experience. There is dialogue concerning it, however; perhaps the most important is in the exchange between Shane and the cattleman, Riker, during their final confrontation: SHANE: Your kind of days are over. RIKER: What about you, gunfighter? SHANE: The difference is, I know it. One can impute that Shane may have killed one too many men, but the the overarching sense is that he knows the West that Riker extolled, rightly claimed to have helped build, and is trying to preserve along with his open range at the expense of the homesteaders, is dying with every shovelful of earth turned over by a "sodbuster." The whole film is, then, a meditation on obsolesence, and what it means to be fleeing ahead of the inexorable, irresistable forces by an evolving society that make one obsolete. In the end, though implored to stay by Joey Starrett, the wounded Shane leaves the now-tamed town ("Tell your parents there are no more guns in the valley") because he knows that he is obsolete, making him a man without a country (in this he's an earlier version of THE SEARCHERS ' Ethan Edwards, though for a different reason: gunfighters will always see Shane as a "sodbuster," or, at leasr, "sodbuster-lover," while homesteaders will always view him as a gunfighter). So he rides away, into the mountains, to become, simply, the stuff of legend.

>Yep, clore. I remember Garner's short lived and quirky little series, "Nichols", where he played a motorcycle riding sheriff in early 20th Century Arizona. (being into motorcycles since a teenager, I remember that the most about it, of course). I've been hoping for years that someone would pull these few epsiodes out of the vault and issue them on DVD. I've very fond memories of this series.

>Is this the film where I read that behind the scenes Ethel caught Dan in her costume in her dressing room? Because all I could think of was that I bet that Dan Dailey wishes he was wearing some of the ladies' costumes. Remember that Dailey also played Clyde Tolson, second in command at the FBI and, perhaps J. Edgar Hoover's partner in wearing feather boas (and more) in Larry Cohen's weird biopic, THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER.

>Interesting you mentioned this, the cellphone can thank the old Star Trek TV series for its creation. An inventor set out to make that sci-fi gadget a reality. The "brick" you are referring to was a first of the multistep evolution of the flip open cellphone. That's silly, and just plain wrong. Cellphones, of the flip-open variety and otherwise, came into existence because it was an inevitability, nothing more. The same thing was true of "Edison's" lightbulb and "Bell's" telephone. The technology advances, and someone figures out a use for it, but if the person who figured it out was prevented from doing it by, say, being hit by a train, then someone else does it. It still happens, because it can't not happen. It's society and civilization that demand, and are ultimately responsible for, creation and advancement, not the individual.