Sprocket_Man

You must have had a black-and-white TV when it aired, because it was the 1975 ABC-TV movie, The Night that Panicked America, which starred the late Paul Shenar as Orson Welles.

It's a really good movie, and I've been a fan of it for years, but calling Walter Pidgeon "an Englishman" is like calling a pork chop a blueberry pie. Yes, the character's English, but studios had the unfortunate habit of casting Americans (or, in Pidgeon's case, Canadians) as Brits, with atrociously unconvincing results: Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone, Robert Montgomery, Spencer Tracy (at least in EDWARD, MY SON they changed his character to a Canadian resident in Britain, but he was often cast as a Brit), Clark Gable, Hurd Hatfield. There were several genuine British leading men working in Hollywood from the mid-1930s into the 1950s: Ronald Colman, Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Robert Donat, Stewart Granger, David Niven, Cary Grant (obviously, one can also compile a long list of American leading ladies who were also shoe-horned into ill-fitting British roles); while that probably wasn't enough to go around, considering how enamored Hollywood has always been with British subject matter, it really would have served the studios well if they'd held up production on their films until the right actor was available.

> {quote:title=edonline wrote:}{quote} > *Is Ben Mankiewicz turning TCM into a worker's paradise?* You should be lucky enough to work there and find out for yourself. > {quote:title=barrym wrote:}{quote} > He has insulted at least half of TCMs audience! We have a linguistic problem here that has distorted the original, and only logical, intent beyond recognition. It should have read: "You have insulted all the half-wits in TCM's audience!"

> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote} > However, the fact that he was a Viennese-born emigre who came here because of the war surely must have been a large part of what drove him to direct movies like A Foreign Affair and One, Two, Three - how could he not have been fascinated by what became of German-speaking Europe after WW2? Wilder never missed an opportunity to puncture the Teutonic-Prussian mind-set. He grew up in Vienna; he was born in relatively far-off Sucha, a city in the then-Austro-Hungarian Empire that's now a part of Poland. And he arrived in the U.S. from Berlin (where he'd gone to seek his fortune working in the German film industry) in 1933, long before the beginning of World War II, though it can be said that he was fleeing Hitler, who'd just come to power, and about whom Wilder had no illusions. Wilder's first stop after leaving Europe was not Hollywood, or even New York, but Mexico; he was forced to wait for months on the other side of the U.S.-Mexican border, until there was room in the yearly quota of Austrians admitted by the U.S. During his interview with a U.S. immigration official, the man asked Wilder what he planned to do if he was permitted entry to the United States. "Write movies," was Wilder's reply. According to Wilder, the official hesitated, looking him up and down for what seemed an eternity. He suddenly reached for a rubber stamp and pounded the word "Approved" on Wilder's entry application, adding, "Write some good ones." Wilder took these experiences and used them as the basis of his and Charles Brackett's script for 1941's HOLD BACK THE DAWN.

> {quote:title=barrym wrote:}{quote} > This guy is an angry idiot who has no place on this channel > he needs to be fired , or i call for a BAN on TCM! He's an angry idiot? If you like Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck so much, you have my permission to buy a large supply of plaster and lumber (and lots and lots of tin) and build a shrine to them. You also have a responsibility to tell us why Ailes and the rest aren't like Lonesome Rhodes in A FACE IN THE CROWD. If you can't, or won't, then you have only one choice left to you: Shut up.

> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote} > I don't want to be argumentative, but I know Five Graves to Cairo has played on cable within the last couple of years. I remember it far to well for it to have been longer. Guess I should check my DVD and SVHS collection, and see if I can tell who showed it. I don't want to be argumentative -- well, you, I do -- but you're wrong. It's been at least ten years since it was last shown of television in the U.S.

Rather than reprinting the schedule here, it'd be better if you'd just post a link to TCM's own page.

> {quote:title=lzcutter wrote:}{quote} > *FGtC is a fine film, and gets shown pretty regularly. I think TCM is where I've seen it before. Are you sure it's a premiere? Great title!* The old AMC used to show it quite regularly, but it hasn't been broadcast anywhere in North America in at least ten years. TCM has never shown it, so this is, indeed, a premiere for the channel. I remember how long it took for Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE to finally make its way to TCM (another title that had been absent from the airwaves for many years). On the heels of those TCM showings came the Criterion DVD of ACE. One can only hope that the pattern repeats, and that Universal, or Criterion, also issues a disc of this film.

> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote} > By the way I was wondering, in the 451 movie, if the firemans only job is to burn books, who do you call when your house is on fire??? The book and movie state very clearly that in the future all buildings are completely fireproof, so the only job for firemen is to burn books. It's a wonderful concept, of course, but it really doesn't make a lot of sense when examined closely. Firstly, no technologically advanced society can function without the written word. It's impossible. Second, a ruling elite doesn't maintain its power by banning all expression of thought, but by controlling the content of those expressions, including the written word. By eliminating books, the state is merely hobbling its own efforts to control society. Lastly, burning books, as the Nazis did, would only be for show. The state's power would inevitably be maintained by hoarding the very thing they profess to ban; the Soviets had immense libraries and warehouses full of forbidden books, tracts, publications, all available to high Communist Party and Politburo members. The Soviet state knew perfectly well that one's power is magnified when one has access to information others do not. > {quote:title=Capuchin wrote:}{quote} > Widescreen dates back to 1931 -- Widescreen cinema dates back to at least 1927, with the three-panel triptyches for parts of Abel Gance's NAPOLEON. Single-projector widescreen is at least as old as 1930's THE BIG TRAIL, in which director Raoul Walsh employed Fox Films' 65mm "Grandeur" process.

Most of the shooting at Indio was the arrival of the "German Afrika Korps" and the newly-triumphant "British Army," involving a lot of extra and vehicles, but none of the principals. The only scenes utilizing Tone were he's crawling through the desert sands after falling from his out-of-control, exhaust-fume-filled tank; reaching the road; stumbling into the Empress of Britain Hotel; Bramble's return to the Hotel and conversation with Generale Sabastiano (Fortunio Bonanova); and laying the parasol on Mouche's grave with Farid (Akim Tamiroff). Oops, that's five scenes. Erich von Stroheim was spared a visit to the desert location entirely.

Dick Cheney.

You sound like a really rabid fan of this movie.

> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote} > In the future it turns out there was no need to burn books, we simply stop reading them. Everybody in the future will just read from their Amazon Kindles, a product named, ironically, for what one uses to start fires.

> {quote:title=fredbaetz wrote:}{quote} > Howard Hawks was not the only one who disliked "High Noon", John Wayne despised the film as "Un-American" and they did team up to make "Rio Bravo" as an answer to the Cooper film. But ironically it was John Wayne who accepted the Academy Award for his good friend Gary Cooper when Coop won it for "High Noon" and could not attend the awards... Wayne's views of the film, and politics in general, were half-formed, like most people's. It's rather unfortunate that Wayne thought that it was appropriate for Cooper's Will Kane to be so utterly lacking in self-respect that he'd stay on as marshal for the very people who'd abandoned him in his time of need, since he'd so often saved their bacon in the past. Cooper was politically conservative, too, but to his great credit he wasn't a rabid Red-baiter; he had the integrity as actor and man, and nuanced-enough politics, to understand and accept the dramatic necessity of Kane's turning his back on the town, without which the film's whole point would have been gutted.

> {quote:title=fredbaetz wrote:}{quote} > According to Billy Wilder, the main reason Cary Grant wouldn't do "Five Graves to Cairo" was that Grant said "Paramount didn't have enough money to make him spend a month in the desert", the film began shooting just outside of Yuma and then to Indio, Ca. Probably about 97% of the film was filmed on Paramount soundstages. Only four very brief scenes were shot on location that involved Tone's character of J.J. Bramble. I doubt that the actor was actually out in the desert for more than two days. Paramount surely had enough money for that.

> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote} > The scene of the parked 1950 Ford might be from "Naked City". Finding a 1950 ford in THE NAKED CITY might be rather difficult, in that the film was shot in the summer of 1947 and released in March, 1948.

> {quote:title=fredbaetz wrote:}{quote} > For joy, For joy, let happiness run through the streets. They are going to air "Five Graves to Cairo". I love this film. I wanted to see it on DVD for a long,long time. Is it Billy Wilders best work? No, is it a hoot. yes. The hoot of the film is Eric von Stroheim. He steals every scene he is in. The others are good, Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter and the wonderful Akim Tamiroff all turn in good performances, but the star is von Stroheim's General Rommel. As New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther said in his 1943 review of the film "Mr. von Stroheim has all the other Huns backed completly off the screen, he is still the toughest German of them all" > Billy Wilder wanted Cary Grant for the Franchot Tone role of the British Officer who gets left behind, but as he did on several other occasions Grant turned him down, the most notable being "Sabrina" with Audrey Hepburn Stroheim doesn't steal the film because it really was his from the very beginning. I own a lot of publicity material from the film and Stroheim's image dominates all the artwork. On most of the posters, Franchot Tone, the nominal star of the movie, is nowhere to be seen, other than his name in the credits, which was mandated for contractual reasons. It's all Stroheim, Anne Baxter and Akim Tamiroff. Grant would have been a fine J.J. Bramble, though at 39 rather too old to play a corporal (even if he is made a lieutenant by film's end). Ray Milland, now there's the perfect actor for the part and, like Grant, a real Brit, not the phoney-baloney Tone was. Milland had starred in Wilder's first film as director, THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR; I can't imagine that Wilder wouldn't have wanted to work with him again (especially since he cast Milland in THE LOST WEEKEND two years later), so it was probably a matter of the studio's preferring to put their contract player in a different film. Had either Milland or Grant played Bramble, it certainly would have elevated FIVE GRAVES to major-film status, guaranteeing that it would now be widely seen and loved as the great classic it is.

> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote} > Just found a photo of her - doesn't she look good? > > Of course, the photo was taken at the Hollywood Wax Museum.

> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote} >Jeffrey Jones' character is _great_ comic relief! Yeah; every convicted pedophile should be so funny.

It sounds like George Cukor's WHAT PRICE, HOLLYWOOD?

> {quote:title=msbisonnet wrote:}{quote} > The Greatest Show On Earth" and Broadway Melody 1929" were the two worst best picture winners. Cecil B Demile was a corny showman, just like the movie. Broadway Melody won to make MGM happy. At least now a days, they come with a real winner, such as No Country For Old Men. Occasionly, however, it is like the old days. THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, absolutely. And THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD was robbed of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1938 by YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. There's also the little matter of Yul Brynner's Oscar for THE KING AND I. Kirk Douglas deserved it for LUST FOR LIFE -- after all, Brynner had 1248 performances of the show on Broadway to rehearse the role. Just as there are separate Oscar categories for screenplays adapted from another medium, and adapted musical scores, there should be a distinct acting category for actors who played a role on stage before they recreated it on film. The playing field is hardly level when actors who play a role only on film have to compete with those who have been able to fine-tune a part over hundreds of stage performances (even if one does have to rein in those theatrical performances to make them suitable for film).

> {quote:title=sineast wrote:}{quote} > Charles Dickens was too busy being dead during the second half of TYOOL > 1870 to do much writing. Fortunately for Tiny Tim, he had completed +A Christmas > Carol+ many years before. True; I meant to write 1843. By 1870 he was hob-nobbing with the Ghost of Christmases Past.

I shgould have added that the film was released in Great Britain under Twain's original title, THE MILLION POUND NOTE.

> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote} > "Its a Wonderful Life" was easy to follow, its the review that is not. I think Frank Capra was ahead of his time showing people alternative realities long before Gene Roddenberry came along. As has been pointed out since the film's release sixty-three years ago, Charles Dickens was doing it in 1870, when he wrote A Christmas Carol, the real inspiration for the Philip van Doren Stern short story that Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich adapted into IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. > {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote} > "a certain movie rental place in Woodland Hills" > > LOL! She's a Valley Girl, and sounds like it. I managed to get all of two paragraphs into the "review," and was driven back by the raging fires of the reviewer's appalling grammar and inept sentence construction. Calling this ditzy woman a "Valley Girl" is a mortal insult to Valley Girls everywhere.

> {quote:title=HollywoodGolightly wrote:}{quote} > You might want to try the "Information, Please" forum, chances are you'll get a quicker answer there. > > Could the movie you're thinking of be Man with a Million, perhaps? TRADING PLACES was a thinly-veiled amalgam of two Mark Twain stories, The Prince and the Pauper and The Million Pound Note, the latter filmed as MAN WITH A MILLION.