Sprocket_Man

>I think Emile Meyer in SHANE and Buddy Baer in JACK AND THE BEANSTALK were separated at birth! You're barking up the wrong banyan tree; Meyer in SHANE is a dead ringer for Lee J. Cobb in GREEN MANSIONS:

The only two heads on a pillow I can think of belong to Ray Milland and Rosey Grier: "G'night, Ray." Goodnight, Rosie." PS: The earlier Liberty Productions shouldn't be confused with Liberty Films, formed after World War II by William Wyler, George Stevens and Frank Capra, a company that managed to release only one film: IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

>Why is it that I confuse Glenn Ford with Cliff Robertson? Do you have two stars that confuse you too? I never confuse them. I like one, and can't stand the other.

Korngold didn't "steal" from Liszt, he simply used some passages from Lizst's music where he thought they were appropriate. While the film's credits don't acknowledge Liszt, if you'll look at them again you'll see that the Main Title carries no music credit whatsoever, in spite of the fact that CAPTAIN BLOOD features Korngold's first original film score. Because Korngold -- who was not the least bit dissatisficed with the music he wrote for the film -- was uncomfortable at the thought that anyone might think he wrote the passages of Liszt's music, he insisted that his name not appear in the credits or in any of the film's advertising. Korngold was, as you may imagine, a man of great integrity.

*...UNIVERSAL STUDIOS OF TODAY: SYNONYMOUS WITH LAMELY* Thelma'd probably get better results by threatening to shoot a dog.

> I recently saw the “Word of Mouth” segment with Arlene Dahl discussing an incident at a party at Mickey Mantle’s home at which Marilyn Monroe was in attendance. The segment relates an anecdote of Marilyn overhearing a conversation about Walt Whitman, and entering the discussion assuming, according to the anecdote, that the topic is Whitman’s Chocolates. Arlene describes this as a “gaffe” with the obvious implication that Marilyn didn’t know who Walt Whitman was and embarrassed herself and the entire party with her ignorance. Dahl's reminiscence makes it quite clear that Monroe was guilty of only overhearing the name "Whitman" and jumping in with her two cents before taking in the context of which Whitman the parties to the conversation were discussing. Whether Monroe knew who Walt Whitman was or could quote his verse is irrelevant, and her "gaffe" (a poor and inaccurate choice of words on Dahl's part) more of a failure on Monroe's part to absorb a bit more of the conversation before deciding that it could only have been about chocolate (and, had Marilyn lived long enough, she might've been faced with a third choice: the sniper who, in 1966, gunned down scores of innocent people from the tower at the University of Texas). Still, Dahl was there...and you weren't.

> It was, without a doubt, Pat Boone in MAIN ATTRACTION. He was the main attraction as far as I'm concerned. Before or after he started wearing that skin-tight leather outfit that got him in hot water with his right-wing, born-again Christian constituency?

>I think they must show 1000 different movies in a year, it may be more like 1500. It's typically between 3500-3800 movies a year. TCM devours content. There really aren't enough films available for them to not repeat popular titles.

>One final tidbit of Entwistle trivia: from 1927 to 1929, she was married to an actor named Robert Keith whose son from a previous marriage would grow up and himself become an actor ... known as Brian Keith. And Brian Keith also committed suicide -- ten days after his daughter, Daisy, killed herself -- though it was largely due to Brian Keith's being terminally ill.

>As mentioned here by others, he was no longer playing weak characters by 1950, the year after he hit stardom in CHAMPION. Actually, in 1950, Kirk was under contract to Warner Brothers, not Paramount, so that was another reason he most likely would not have done, or would have been unable to do, NO MAN OF HER OWN with Stanwyck. Kirk had been offered the lead in SANDS OF IWO JIMA, but turned it down in order to do CHAMPION (the part in SANDS then went, of course, to John Wayne, who later became a good friend of Kirk's), which he felt was moore challenging for an actor and a better showcase for his talents. He was right on both counts. And Kirk was never under contract to any studio, Paramount or Warner Bros. At that stage of his career, his contract, non-exclusive and for a limited number of pictures, was with producer Hal Wallis, who was based at Paramount.

> When a man is driving a convertible at 60 m.p.h., why doesn't his hat blow off? Because it would then fly back and hit the rear-projection screen behind the car. > When someone is looking through binoculars, why does he see a figure 8 pattern? That would indicate that the two lenses are too far apart. He should adjust them so that he sees just one circle. Very few movies get this right. No, the movies actually get it right. The whole point in using binoculars is to have a field of view nearly as wide as that of an unaided pair of eyes (in addition to magnification, they're also rated according to their field of view, something that's actually stamped right on the casing). If binoculars were meant to have a circular field of view, there would be no advantage to using them instead of a telescope.

The infurating part of it is that the Army treated German prisoners with more respect than black U.S. service members.

1 pound = 20 shillings (s) 1 shilling = 12 pence (d) £1 = 240 pence. When spoken, the denominations are commonly left off, so £3, 10s and 5d is, "3 pounds, 10 and 5." 2s and 9d is, "2 and 9." Also: Crown = 5 shillings (4 to a pound) Half-crown = 2 and 6 (8 to a pound) Quid = 1 pound Florin = 2 shillings (also called "2 bob") Bob = 1 shilling Sixpence, also called a "tanner" Three pence - "thrupence" Two pence - "tuppence" Penny, also called a “copper” Half pence – written “ha’penny”, pronounced “hape-knee” Farthing = 1/4 pence And finally: Guinea = £1 1s (21 shilling You neglected to mention one thing: under the old British monetary system, "d" (for the Latin denarius, the smallest unit of ancient Roman currency) was the abbreviation for pence; after 1971 the abbreviation for pence became the more sensible "p." The old British currency wasn't too terribly complicatedf, but still more complicated than it needed to be. Still, it pales next to the nearly incomprehensible fact that the U.S., the nation that gave tghe world decimal currency, refuses to replace its idiotically ancient Imperial system of miles, feet, inches, gallons and pints in favor of the simple Metric System.

Yeah, but a Super Nova is a Chevy with a 450 cu. in. supercharged engine.

Lansbury's performance in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE -- simply the scariest thing ever committed to film. Hard to believe that Frank Sinatra had to be talked out of insisting that Lucille Ball be given the part (though Lucy would have been pretty damn scary, too).

> I always figured that General de Gaulles would not sign a travel permit on behalf of the Vichy government or for any of the Nazis, so the permits must have been signed for use by free Frenchmen and other special allies. You're still treating it as though it makes sense, but it doesn't. PS: The name was de Gaulle, not "de Gaulles."

>I believe your reply was to a post about I Walked Alone but that movie isn't anything like what you describe below. I Walked Alone is noir with Burt, Douglas, Corey and Liz Scott. The movie's called I WALK ALONE, not "walked" (if you want to walk in the past tense, you're going to have to do it with a zombie).

Gestapo was a typical German contraction of the tongue-twisting Geheime Staatspolizei -- Secret State Police. The wearing of any uniform, therefore, was self-defeating, since one's employment by the organization is no longer a secret. The character of Major Strasser was meant to be, in a sense, SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard ("The Hangman") Heydrich, the recently assassinated Nazi governor of Bohemia, in all but name, a far more exalted and powerful figure than a mere Gestapo functionary. Much of CASBLANCA 's exquisite execution (if you'll pardon that word in this context) is in its casting, and the choice of Conrad Veidt, surely one the cinema's most elegant actors, was a masterstroke. Compare his understated menace with the more ham-handed brutality of Raymond Massey in Warner's DESPERATE JOURNEY, or Helmut Dantine in EDGE OF DARKNESS, and you have one more reason why CASABLANCA rose above its worthy contemporaries.

>The movie is Idiot's Delight, with Clark Gable and Norma Shearer. The only problem being is that the movie was released nine months before World War II began, and almost three years before the U.S. entered the war.

> Ok, i have talked to a lot of people and they all seem to remember a movie about children getting in white pods,and the white pods send kids down from heaven. You're recalling the long-suppressed classic "Invasion of the Bobby-Soxer Snatchers." How you ever managed too see it at all is a minor miracle in itself.

> I remember a theme song for this movie. I believe recorded by Frankie Laine. Wasn't the movie released WITH the song playing during the credits? Yet, that's not the music that was playing with the movie on Saturday's broadcast. What happened? I remember it was a very catchy song. The score is credited to Cyril Mockridge, a composer often employed by Alfred Newman when Newman was Head of Music at Fox. Mockridge, a musician of limited gifts, was well known as an alcoholic, and much of his Fox output was clearly ghost-written by Newman, who also seems to have written much, if not all, of the music to THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. What's rather puzzling, however, is that whoever wrote the score, LIBERTY VALANCE's main title melody was obviously stolen from, of all things, Victor Young's main title to Paramount's 1955 STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND. Go figure.

>Now, would it not have been easier to just ask in one line what I meant instead of going off on one of your aren't-I-so-clever-wth-my-headers, long-winded attempts to "educate" us all? No, not really, because the real reason for forums like this to exist isn't to ask others' opinions but to take a statement by someone else and use it as a jumping-off point for a riff of one's own. Beyond this, I think you're wrong about the actors in THE CINCINNATI KID; the big problem with films like THE STING, and just aboout every period film made since, is that filmmakers' slavishness to period details has made such films into insufferably self-conscious and mannered museum tableaux at the expense of allowing those films to present a representation of living, breathing characters living an approximation of real lives within the parameters of the world that's been created for them. As dismissive as I can be about the acting styles of the 1930's, if one examines the physical representation of earlier eras as presented in Hollywood period films of the 1930's and '40's, you'll notice that the trappings are anything but slavish reproductions of the past; if anything, those representations are cursory nods to the earlier era, with a lot of the details glossed over.

>The 132-minute restored print of "Lost Horizon" is original cut that aired in theaters in 1937, and which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in that format. No, it is not. The 132-minute version restored by UCLA, available on home video, is merely an approximation of what Frank Capra and Columbia Pictures showed to preview audiences in the weeks before the film's scheduled release. Because of the decidely negative response from those audiences, Capra and his editor, William Hornbeck, trimmed the film to 118 minutes. No paying audience ever saw the 132-minute cut.

>Years ago I had the good fortune to meet both Welles' scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Welles' last cinematographer, Gary Grabber. You should've asked him his name, then: it's Gary Graver, not "Grabber."

>Using a ' as a replacement for certain letters is a well known principal to those who are learning English. Principle, not principal.