Sprocket_Man

> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote} > Scopes attorneys were essentially ACLU attorneys. They were trying to gain control over all the school books in the US and the curricula of all the state school systems, so their lawyers could set the standards for what was taught in US public schools, and take that legal right away from the separate state legislatures. > > This battle is still going on today regarding various public school topics, such as history, anthropology, civics, multiculturalism, and various science subjects. Typical "answer" that gets things exactly backward. Firstly, the Scopes trial had nothing to do with Tennessee's school curriculum, but the criminal law on the state's books that made it a crime to teach Evolution. Secondly, as regards school curricula, the problem is not one of state legislatures having control, but allowing local school boards that may be stacked with unqualified individuals and those far less interested in educating the community's children than the are in advancing their own religion to set it (and what, exactly, is your agenda in misinforming the people here, Fred?). Of course, this can also happen at the state level (one need look no farther than the current textbooks approved by the Texas Department of Education, though the department's latter word really does need to be written in quotation marks), but that inevitably invites more scrutiny and involves more checks and balances between proposals and enactment of policies. In INHERIT THE WIND, Henry Drummond knows that a criminal court at its lowest level cannot determine or even consider the justness of a law, which is why the Judge -- who is clearly sympathetic to the defendant -- keeps ruling against the admissibility of Drummond's witnesses who have come to testify as to the validity of the Theory of Evolution, and the workings of science, in general. The only thing this court can do is determine whether Bertram Cates broke the laws of the State of Tennessee on the date he was accused of having done so. Drummond only called the witnesses he knew would be disallowed because the courtroom was filled with representatives of the press and radio microphones. He was, then, appealing to the court of public opinion, because he knew it was the only thing that could get the state legislature to revisit such an unjust and parochial law. He was counting on pressure from both inside and outside Tennessee that would force the state government to overturn the law, which in the case of the real Scopes case, is what happened (Scopes's conviction -- in which he was fined the relatively token sum of $100 -- was also overturned on appeal).

> {quote:title=scenario81 wrote:}{quote} > The Hospital was a horrible movie with a horrible script. I saw no humor in it at all and the "rape" scene was just plain revolting. George C. Scott's character was a walking hemorrhoid with no purpose. Where shall we send the refund for your monthly cable bill, doctor...?

> {quote:title=scenario81 wrote:}{quote} > The Hospital was a horrible movie with a horrible script. I saw no humor in it at all and the "rape" scene was just plain revolting. George C. Scott's character was a walking hemorrhoid with no purpose. Where shall we send the refund for your monthly cable bill, doctor...?

> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote} > Leave the gun. Take the calzones. Clemenza actually said take the canolis.

> {quote:title=MovieProfessor wrote:}{quote} > One issue as to why the film was somewhat fictionalized was due to John T. Scopes, the real school teacher, being very much alive in 1959. No, the real reason the film changes the names of the characters is because (drum roll)...those are the names of the characters in the 1955 Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee play whose film rights Stanley Kramer purchased. Kramer wasn't about to change the names and situations in the property he'd purchased (even if his rights had included the freedom to do so, which I doubt). It was a very successful play and, while it hews to, and distills the basic facts surrounding the Scopes trial, a significant amount of what's in the play and film is fictionalized for largely dramatic purposes, and not to coddle the sensibilities of John Scopes. > {quote:title=MovieProfessor wrote:}{quote} > There is one very, very important historical viewpoint to this film that seldom ever gets mentioned. Originally, there was talk to have Tracy costar with Humphrey Bogart, but this deal probably would have never worked out. Once before, Tracy and Bogart were supposed to costar in the 1955 Paramount crime drama, ?The Desperate Hours.? Although Spence and Bogie were close friends, they couldn?t agree on of all things, as to the issue of getting top billing! So, Spence bowed out and Bogie remained with the project. He would get top billing over the replacement, Fredric March! From that time on, Spence and Bogie continued taunting each other with the idea of making the film version of ?Inherit The Wind.? Sadly, Bogie wouldn?t live long enough to ever reconsider the idea of the movie. Wrong again. Director William Wyler had already cast March as Dan Hilliard when Bogart, who'd co-starred in Wyler's DEAD END eighteen years earlier, approached him about playing fugitive Glenn Griffin. Wyler told him that in writer Joseph Hayes's novel Griffin and Hal Griffin were brothers of similar ages. Bogart asked why the brothers ages couldn't be a couple of decades apart and, after a protracted deliberation, Wyler agreed that there was no pressing dramatic reason. It was at that point that Bogart was cast. While Tracy would have been terrific in the part (especially if the script could have been re-worked so that his daughter was played by Elizabeth Taylor, with the whole family in the middle of wedding preparations. Comedy ensues), Wyler knew that Bogart, one of the biggest stars in movies at that time, would be the film's top drawing card. Both Wyler and Paramount weren't at all keen on the idea of having him billed below Tracy. > {quote:title=traceyk65 wrote:}{quote} > I wonder how much of the Scopes trail focused on the eugenics angle and how much on the evolution angle? I'll have to find a copy of the book you referenced and read for myself, I guess. > {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote} > I was shocked at what I learned. This was a very popular racist biology textbook early in the 20th Century, and by today?s standards it?s quite shocking, because it taught the eugenics theory as being a fundamental part of the evolution theory. This is redolent of the current Republican/Fox News tactic of, well, just making stuff up, such as the current claim on the right that the Founding Fathers, especially southerners like Jefferson and Washington, were opposed to slavery, and that the "3/5 rule" placed in the U.S. Constitution mandating that the Census would count each blacks as 3/5 of a human being was actually an attempt to end the institution of slavery when, in fact, its appallingly cynical purpose was to inflate Southern states' populations so that they received more seats in Congress without their having to acknowledge blacks as equal to whites. The core of Darwin's On the Origin of Species is the concept of natural selection, with the emphasis on natural. This is the diametric opposite of eugenics, which is the deliberate, arbitrary and, ultimately, self-serving and aggrandizing actions on the part of humans in selecting the traits in their own species they deem most appealing. What's merely called breeding in the creation of superior livestock or show dogs is called eugenics when applied to one's own species, though most in our society would be loath to make that comparison. The whole argument, then, is a philosophical one as to whether pets and beasts of burden have souls like humans, something George Orwell touched on in his Animal Farm. The sad fact is that, St Francis of Assisi aside, Western religions' unshakable belief that humans are the center of the universe because of their belief in God also institutionalizes the belief that selective breeding of animals is not a form of eugenics. In the end, the only form of eugenics in which we should be allowed to indulge is in the selection of a mate based on his or her physical characteristics (excessive emphasis on which will typically doom a marriage). Beyond that, the idea of shaping the human race according to a generally accepted or government-mandated idea (see entry on Lebensborn, the system of maternity homes, financial assistance and encouragement of those with approved "Aryan" traits to produce offspring established by Nazi Reichsminister and SS head Heinrich ****) is, and should forever be, repugnant.

The fine for my first traffic ticket, given me in my small home town north of New York City in the late 1970's, was, literally, two dollars (granted, I wasn't accused of driving dunk, but I still contested it in court, won, and had it dismissed). Taking into account that NORTH BY NORTHWEST was made in 1959, when a dollar was worth a dozen of today's, and that Roger Thornhill's ticket was issued by the police in similarly sleepy Glenn Cove, Long Island, east of NYC, the figure mentioned by Clara Thornhill, Roger's mother, could easily be taken literally.

> {quote:title=Scottman wrote:}{quote} > You are correct (I was only including Disney's use of the three strip Technicolor (1932) to the end of major American studio use c.1955). Three-strip and IB are not interchangeable terms (the former refers to a filming process; the latter to the print-making technology, which didn't change when monopack color negative was introduced in 1953). Any discussion of this topic must make that distinction.

I think you're all missing the point about digital technology. When a CCD (charged coupled device) is struck by light, the pixels are sent to the camera's microprocessor that translates those impulses into digital information, all expressed as "0"s "1"s, "0" meaning "off," and "1" meaning "on," and then stores them on tape, optical disc, or solid-state flash drive. Hundreds of thousands or millions of these tell the device created to reconstitute those long sequences of on-off flashings what the digital file is: it could be sound (such as music), or data (such as a text file), or images (both still and moving), and in what form. This is what digital is: everything reduced to only two quantities, "0" and "1." Traditional photography, like LP records or ink on paper are analog, meaning that they deal in subtle gradations, whether they be the density and distribution of silver grain on film, the cut, frequency and depth of the sides of grooves in a record, or the darkness, lightness and direction of ink marks on that paper. Digital came into existence and was thought to be superior because its irreduceable mathematical basis allows for perfect, loss-free reproduction, though as most know by now that doesn't preclude information loss through aging and corruption of the storage medium.

> {quote:title=finance wrote:}{quote} > Lionel Stander did a massive spit-take in MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936). Were there any movie spit-takes prior to that? Anyone know the first one in film? Is there a spit-take scholar in the house? The first film was, of course, "Spitting Pretty," starring Clifton Webb (1948).

> {quote:title=PrototypeArtist wrote:}{quote} > In my searching for lost films, I discovered a gangster film based on the life of Dutch Shultz, a Jewish-mobster. The film is entitled "Portrait of a Mobster," and is based on the book of the same name by Harry Grey, the author of "The Hoods," which was turned into "Once Upon a Time in America" by Italian director Sergio Leone. > Thanks. Schultz wasn't Jewish; he was of German descent.

> {quote:title=Scottman wrote:}{quote} > I'm with you on this! > I am a big fan of the IB Technicolor process (1932-1955). Color films from that era have a more vibrant larger than life quality to them, which is something that even modern colorization technology cannot reproduce. Colorized films have more of a two color Technicolor look to them. The colors are generally softer and duller than what one would see from a dye transfer Technicolor print. Actually, (three-strip) IB Technicolor's tombstone should read (for feature films; shorts came earlier) 1935-1990 (or so, if one includes the prints made by the processing equipment Technicolor, Inc. sold to China).

Greatest act of revenge in the history of cinema: Judah Ben-Hur's triumph over Messala in the great chariot race (though Judah then has to listen to the sermon to pay for the "free" meal by enduring five reels of additional suffering until he finds redemption).

Yup, THE MINISTRY OF FEAR sure takes the cake.

> {quote:title=rosebette wrote:}{quote} >Rathbone in Captain Blood with his campy fake French accent and excellent swordsmanship is a better villain than smarmy Henry Daniell. Hate to go to the sex appeal thing, but Captain Blood is a sexier story, maybe on the edge of the old precode days -- two guys duking it out over a woman's virtue? A handsome guy being bought by a spoiled and lovely rich girl at a slave auction? How can I resist? You must remember that Rathbone's Capitaine Levasseur isn't the villain of the piece, but only one more obstacle -- albeit a serious, life-threatening one -- standing between Peter Blood and Arabella Bishop's finding happiness together. The real villain is the British Crown under James I, as represented by his loyal subject, Arabella's uncle, Col. Bishop.

CAPTAIN BLOOD has a stronger story, but THE SEA HAWK is the better, more polished film. It can even be argued that THE SEA HAWK is a better film than THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, but ROBIN HOOD is far more heart-felt: it engages the emotions to an extent that THE SEA HAWK does not (it also helps that the earlier film is, frankly, the perfect fairy-tale, one that Hollywood has never bettered). This also holds true of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's scores for the two films: THE SEA HAWK is more virtuosic, perhaps Korngold's crowning cinematic achievement, but less touching. A more interesting comparison is between CAPTAIN BLOOD and THE SEA HAWK and Fox's THE BLACK SWAN (all nominally adapted from novels by Rafael Sabatini, though THE SEA HAWK was from a largely original story, "Beggars of the Sea," by Warner's staff writer Howard Koch). Like ROBIN HOOD, CAPTAIN BLOOD and THE SEA HAWK are, at their core, about what most Warner Bros. swashbucklers are about: fights against tyranny. It's what makes them involving and timeless, always available as allegories for modern political situations and struggles. By contrast, THE BLACK SWAN is about....(no, not ballerinas) pirates being pirates. For all its technical polish and pretty Technicolor, it concerns nothing bigger than a bunch of loutish, self-indulgent men trying to get rich. It doesn't even have the right villain. The film isn't as well remembered as its Warner's counterparts, and doesn't deserve to be, but it does point to the proclivities and priorities of two different studios at their height of their powers. What is hard to fathom is how Fox, a studio that invested heavily in socially-conscious filmmaking with movies like THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, THE SNAKE PIT and PINKY, could fail to find the deeper underpinnings in swashbucklers that was seemingly in Warner's very DNA.

> {quote:title=MyFavoriteFilms wrote:}{quote} > And Alan Hale appears in THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN with Fredric March as the title character. The way the script is written, I have a feeling it was intended for Flynn. I can't agree; what terrible casting that would have been. In the mid-1930's Hale became a Warner Bros. contract player, his first film with Flynn being THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER (the only film in which Flynn's character kills Hale's). Hale also played Flynn's father exactly once, in GENTLEMAN JIM. Off-camera they were friendly, but not the sort of buddies who hung out together, in no small part due to the seventeen-year difference in their ages. It's hard to imagine Flynn's best films without Hale, a man who could do more with a single reaction shot than most actors can with a soliloquy.

> {quote:title=MovieProfessor wrote:}{quote} > > johnm 001 . . > > Liz might have felt more comfortable with her close friend, Monty Cliff being handed the role of Brick. But, this was out of the question. Cliff had also been faced with a few personal problems, when he nearly died in a car crash in 1957, just down the road from the home of Liz, where Monty had drink (sic) too much during a party at the house. His name was Montgomery Clift, "Professor," not "Cliff." Moreover, the car accident in which he was severely disfigured occurred during the filming of RAINTREE COUNTY in 1956, not 1957. Everybody's an "expert"...until they prove definitively that they aren't. Crikey.

I was born and raised in the U.S. -- never lived anywhere else -- and I hold the fork in my left hand, and knife in my right, never putting down either. Like so many other things, the "American" way of eating has never made any more sense than the U.S fondness for doorknobs over the easy-to-turn doorhandles that're ubiquitous in Europe and elsewhere.

I think the Travel Talks are rather amateurish; even those made in the late 1940's and early '50's look and sound as though they date back to the earliest days of sound film (it doesn't help that FitzPatrick's droning narrations sound like the most humorless old teacher you ever had in school). Still, they certainly do have value, chronicling at least some of the sights that have vanished with the modern world, especially in locales that were changed irrevocably -- or destroyed -- by World War II

It's Lawrence Tibbett (two "t's at the end).

As strained, and outright hostile, as the relationship between Davis and Flynn (the former had wanted Laurence Olivier to play the Earl of Essex in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX; Jack L. Warner refused to accede to her demand), Flynn and Robson got on splendidly during the latter's time making THE SEA HAWK. Of course, being a freelance actor -- and one who was in Hollywood only intermittently -- Robson didn't have to deal with studio politics the way Davis did. Being the "queen of the lot" carried with it certain territorial imperatives, along with prerogatives, and Davis guarded hers jealously. Flynn was more easy-going: he rarely if ever saw himself in competition with Cagney and Robinson and, a bit later, Bogart, as the lot's "king"; in fact male contract players at the various studios were far less interested in pecking orders -- except when it came to pay. No big star wanted to be in the financial shadow of a colleague at the same basic level of fame.

I'd hardly say that, as great a film as it is, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS was the "highlight of her career," or that THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN was "acclaimed" -- by anyone (well made, but trite and not particularly dramatic).

John Clements (THE FOUR FEATHERS, GANDHI) and Alec Guinness (their speaking voices even sound similar). Clements was four years Guinness's senior, though his film career began eleven years earlier (if you don't count Guinness's work as an extra on one film in 1934).

Even allowing for the fact that Hollywood was still finding its way, searching for a tone and style, in the early days of the sound film, 1928-1934, William is the most pompous, mannered actor I have ever seen. Quite ludicrous in everything he did. He obviously couldn't make the distinction between the stage and screen, and paid the price by quickly becoming obsolete.

> {quote:title=finance wrote:}{quote} > I'm glad you didn't mention University Of Texas mass murderer CHARLES Whitman. (What is it about the name Charles?) What is it about the name Whitman?