Sprocket_Man

You want a movie with lighter-than-air ships, I'll give you lighter-than-air ships:

No, it's based on a play by Miklos Laszlo. There was no earlier film version, though I wouldn't be surprised if some other play or film utlized some of the basic plot contrivances Laszlo later used in his.

A couple of the best Australian actors -- a couple of the best from anywhere -- are assumed by audiences to be British: Judith Anderson and Leo McKern. Conversely, another actor who many think of as Australian actually was English: Peter Finch.

> Why doesn't Paramount release this classic Western {#3 on AFI's Greatest Westerns} list and # 45 on its greatest movies of all time. They considered it about four years ago, along with THE QUIET MAN, while THE AFRICAN QUEEN was being restored and bonus materials prepared for Blu-ray. In the end, the studio decided that they didn't want to spend the money restorations of the other films would entail. While I think that it's inevitable that both films will eventually find their way to Blu-ray (possibly via a small specialty video label, such as Olive Films, which has a contract to put out post-1949 Paramount catalog titles), it's probably not imminent. As for the film's central casting, I've always felt that Ladd was still too much the pretty boy to convey the essential world-weariness that led Shane to flee the life of a gunslinger (SHANE is, in fact, probably the last film Ladd made before he began to show signs of aging). I also don't think he was an actor with sufficient depth to fully exploit the past, as written. It needed a Joel McCrea.

>An aluminum suitcase, filled with money, travelers checks and some jewelry, that Mix had packed on a shelf in the back seat, flew forward hitting Mix in the back of head, breaking his neck and shattering his skull. Not the first fatal incidence of money going to an actor's head.

> Slim Pickings in Dr. Strangelove. It's Slim Pickens.

Yes, it was Goldwyn. Among the many other memorable remarks credited to him is, "A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park."

> All info that I have indicates that it was on November 7-8, 1976 that GWTW first aired on network TV. Upon further reflection (and subsequent research), I've determined that it was actually the first network telecast of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, November 22, 1975, that I forsook for that showing of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS thirty-six years ago this past Tuesday.

No, it was 1975. I remember the night quite clearly, as I opted to see THE TEN COMMANDMENTS at the Ziegfeld Theatre instead of watching GWTW on television. After the movie my date and I went to the Carnegie Deli, where I had a corned beef sandwich (I don't remember what she had, but a mutual friend tells me she told her it was a liverwurst sandwich). In November, 1976, I'd already graduated from college, was no longer living in New York City, and couldn't have gone to the Ziegfeld that night. 1975.

> I never thought I'd see the day the Gone with the Wind would be on any other channel but TCM. Wonder how much they had to pay for that priviledge? You're forgetting GWTW's days being telecast on Ted Turner's other channels, WTBS and TNT, before there was a TCM (and which still telecast the film on basic cable). Whether stipulations of exclusivity in the deal with AMC will curtail these other showings remains to be seen. And let's not forget that GWTW's life on television began with a November, 1975, telecast on NBC. PS: There's no "d" in privilege.

If you need to battle a Thing from Another World, or those that Came from Beneath the Sea, you're apt to find another redhead even more beautiful

> The Convicts make me think it's "We're No Angels" with Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray and Peter Ustinov as the convicts and Joan Bennett as the Girl and it is Christmas time here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048801/ WE'RE NO ANGELS takes place in the late 19th century -- no motorbikes. It's also in color and VistaVision and is clearly not the film the original poster remembers.

Too bad they never got round to eating the dog.

Movies as bad as IAMMMMW are like slavery and racism: the very idea that these things exist and cause so much misery should shame the whole world.

> A question for Sprocket Man: Alfred Newman - was he Randy Newman's father or how were they related? Seems as though I have heard of another Newman who was involved with music in films. Also, that is great to know how he provided work for all those composers - I had no idea. Alfred Newman was one of ten children; Randy is the son of Alfred's brother, George (one of the few Newmans not a professional musician), making Alfred Randy's uncle. Alfred is the father of film composers Thomas and David Newman, and composer-cellist Maria Newman.

> Since I been watching Fox films I've begun to appreciate Alfred Newman, their in-house scorer. It seems that no matter what was thrown at him, he delivered. I'll watch the opening credits to *All About Eve* just to hear that lively theme. Again, a wonderful garden of musical delights abound in movies thanks to all the great musicians who contributed to them. Remember that, form 1939 to 1959, Newman was the head of Fox's Music Department, making him one of the studio's more important executives. It was a lot of work on top of those films he chose to score himself (he could pick and choose, as long as a film's producer didn't have another composer in mind). As Head of Music, he offered steady employment to Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, Cyril Mockridge, Hugo Friedhofer and David Raksin, and was happiest when he could hand out an assignment and indulge in his first love: conducting.

Someone dares to suggest that Tiomkin was an overrated, self-promoted semi-fraud who cobbled together strings of largely incoherent notes, and it sends bumblebees flying up the nearest... Well, be that as it may; as the old saying goes, it takes all kinds to make a world, but your "analysis" of Rozsa's career is so ludicrously off-target that it makes replying to it rather pointless (though I will address ther matter of SODOM AND GOMORRAH: Rozsa did it -- reluctantly -- as a favor to its producer, Maurizio Lodi Fe, an old friend, after the original Italian composer's score was rejected. Rozsa saw that it wasn't going to be a very good movie, and there's nothing that saps a composer's creative juices more quickly than knowing he's providing musical accompaniment to something that doesn't tell a compelling story, knew that time was short, and found the Italian musicians surly and poorly disciplined, yet he waded into that messt with the same professionalism he mustered for the most promising productions. What he produced was, in fact, far better than the movie and the score it deserved).

I have -- it's sealed in a bottle buried beneath a couple of palm trees that form a big "W."

>I...feel that "The Guns of Navarone" is one of the finest scores ever written for an action/adventure film. In this category, Dimi was supreme, way above his contemporaries. Sorry, but I'ive just gotta go...*gag.* If one examines a couple of Tiomkin's biggest commissions of the 1960s, 55 DAYS AT PEKING and THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, one must realize and admit that he wouldn't have even been approached had producer Samuel Bronston not rubbed Miklos Rozsa the wrong way during the production of EL CID by not standing up to the sound-effects editors, who butchered parts of Rozsa's score, and they had continued their otherwise artistically splendid collaboration. I can only sigh when I dream of what might have been...

[m-8584769#8584769]. "Ex*poi[/u]*tation?" Is this about what happens when the one essential native dish is missing from a Hawai'ian luau?

Selznick wasn't ruthless, and I never said he was -- as independent producer and studio production chief he never screwed anyone out of money or screen credit, and never had a reputation like Zanuck's for taking actresses into a bedroom behind his office (I've been in the office he used when he ran Selznick International at the Culver City Studios lot; there's a hidden bar, but no bedroom) -- and people generally liked him, but you're right: he was driven, and it took a toll on him. By contrast, Schulberg's Sammy Glick was ruthless (in later years Schulberg came to rue having created the character, so often did young men seeking their fortunes in the movie business and finance come up to him during the money-obsessed 1980's to tell him that Sammy was their role model and hero. It was astonishing to Schulberg that these vapid men couldn't see or understand that Sammy Glick was a villain, and a tragic one, at that. These kids thought they were paying Schulberg a compliment; in reality, he saw it as anything but). As I said earlier, Jonathan Shields was an amalgam of the two, one real and the other fictional. One shouldn't look too closely, then, to find extensive parallels in either.

{font:Arial}>...maybe, just maybe [selznick|http://forums.tcm.com/] was definitely the character of “Jonathan Shields” from the 1952 MGM drama about {font}{font:Arial}Hollywood{font}{font:Arial}, “The Bad and The Beautiful.” Well, I don't see how something can be both "maybe" and "definitely." You've got to choose one or the other, but not both. "After all, "maybe"'s already an equivocation, so you're equivocating on your equivocation. And Jonathan Shields was based on Selznick -- in part -- especially the part about the producer-father whose career was destroyed by a rival. In Selznick's case, his Dad, Lewis J., was ruined by a competitor -- Louis B. Mayer, David's eventual boss at MGM and whose daughter, Irene, the younger Selznick would marry. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is also part "What Makes Sammy Run," Budd Schulberg's (himself the son of a producer, in this case B.P. Schulberg, who ran Paramount for a while in the 1930's) classic novel about a ruthless filmmaker that has yet to be filmed, itself. While Jonathan Shields isn't nearly as brutal as Sammy (he's more ingratiatingly manipulative than ruthless), Schulberg still should have sued Vincente Minnelli, John Houseman and MGM for soing something Sammy might've done...if there was money in it. {font}

Gotta disagree. It's quite astonishing, when one considers its Poverty Row beginnings, that Columbia has more Best Picture Oscars than any other studio. The problem is that an equally surprising percentage of its films that were not the A-list fare intended for Oscar consideration are junk. The studio's average product was typically far below that of Paramount, MGM, Fox, etc. If ever there was a company with a split personality, it's Columbia Pictures.

> Gotta give a shout out to Jack Cardiff who was the cinematographer on such classic Powell/Pressburger movies as RED SHOES and BLACK NARCISSUS. The greatest cinematographer of all time, as far as I'm concerned (and whom I had the pleasure of meeting about five years ago). THE VIKINGS is my favorite of all the films he shot, but there's scarcely one in his entire oeuvre that fails to take my breath away.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: any and all time, effort and money should be redirected from finding and restoring the last few minutes of the movie to destroying the negative and all prints of this wretched, wretched film.