Sprocket_Man
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Posts posted by Sprocket_Man
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> {quote:title=ClassicViewer wrote:}{quote}
> Is there such a thing?
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> Some of the early Technicolor films look too washed out...as Technicolor expert Natalie Kalmus warned the studios back then, the directors and cinematographers needed to use a proportionate amount of neutral tones to balance the bright colors. Some filmmakers did not do that, so we have really flaming red hair or glowing lipstick on the starlets...the yellows and oranges are sometimes way too shiny and distract the viewer.
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> Obviously, there was a learning curve involved and we have to accept these films as products of their times. But since some studios have colorized old black-and-white prints...couldn't they do the reverse and darken up some of these super washed out prints?
The early concern was that audiences' eyes would grow fatigued after watching Technicolor for extended periods of time (a misplaced fear, as it turned out; modern viewers' eye-strain and headaches from watching the new crop of 3-D movies is real, however).
Still, one must remember that two-strip Technicolor had been in use, on a limited basis, from 1919, and that three-strip was introduced for use in live-action shorts and animation from the early 1930s. Many cinematographers had had experience shooting three-strip Tech by the time it was first applied to a feature film, 1935's BECKY SHARP, though most of them were veterans of studios' "B" and shorts units.
Oddly enough, the Technicolor company's dictum that color should be used as accent, and not motif, is frequently ignored today, and not just in movies. Every time I enter, or see photos of, a house in which the walls of this room are painted some ghastly color, and those of that room are an even more dreadful shade, I wonder if the people living there have any idea as to how they've misused color. Color does lose its drama when it's everywhere, glaring in the viewer's face (a bit of advice: if you absolutely must have your walls radiate color, use colored ]lights. It's a thousand times cheaper than paint, and you can change it whenever it strikes your mood -- with no drop-cloths needed to protect the furniture).
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Ironically, Gregory Peck's widow is also named Veronique.
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It's an MGM film, now owned by Warner Bros. TCM should show it on a fairly regular basis.
I remember first seeing it as part of an invitational screening in New York when I was in college. The film was followed by a panel discussion with Jeff Bridges, Andy Griffith, producer Tony Bill and director Howard Zieff.
It's a cute little movie, but even then it was emblematic of the decline of MGM, a studio that couldn't marshal resources to make movies any bigger than HEARTS OF THE WEST, which saddened me because, over the previous several months the Museum of Modern Art had been running a series of screening commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of MGM. The contrast between a half-century's worth of glories and a little, little movie like HEARTS OF THE WEST couldn't have been more, well, disheartening.
Granted, the studio did turn out the grander THE WIND AND THE LION and LOGAN'S RUN over the next few months, but the handwriting was on the wall. Now, MGM is barely a memory, with a couple of corporate raiders essentially picking over its bones.
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It does make you wonder how Jett Rink managed to cap that first oil-well gusher in GIANT, since he apparently hadn't a single roughneck to assist him.
That he lived to be a middle-aged man and get into that knock-down, drag-out fight with Bick Benedict at the hotel is something of a minor miracle.
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> {quote:title=MamieD wrote:}{quote}
> It sure would be nice to see the film the way it first appeared in Riverside, CA at the first premiere
It's not a scene, but what's called a "trim."
What one and all must understand about the language of film is that it's fundamentally all about the editing process, a process that begins with the writing, continues through the shooting of film, and concludes with the formal editing of that film.
Cinema is, therefore, as much a matter of what's left out, as what's put in. David Selznick had this little bit trimmed out because it does nothing to advance the story or shape the characters. All it serves to do, then, is attenuate the story-telling process, and that's the antithesis of what good filmmaking is all about.
Just because you love the movie doesn't mean that every bit of footage shot belongs in it. It wouldn't make GONE WITH THE WIND a better movie; in fact, it would probably make it just a tiny bit worse.
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As far as I'm concerned, the best pairing that never was is Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in the production of The Man Who Would Be King, that John Huston tried to mount around 1950.
At the same time, it's just as well that that particular film never got made, as Gable and Bogart (wonderful as they might've been together in the right project) would've been dreadfully miscast as Kipling's 19th Century British Army veterans hunting the fortunes in far-off Kafiristan (Cary Grant and Errol Flynn, now that would have been ideal, memorable casting in those parts. Too bad I wasn't around back then to suggest it to Huston).
Of course, Huston did manage to make the film a quarter-century later, with Michael Caine and Sean Connery as a pitch-perfect Peachy and Danny. Still, one wonders what a couple of the screen's greatest lights might've given us in the right piece...
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> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> Oh, and by the way. I watched the documentary The making of Gone With the Wind today, and it shows the OHara family arriving by carriage in the wide shot that shows the long lane with all the oak trees on each side.
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> It is the OHara carriage that turns into the drive during that scene. Scarletts father is riding his white horse, and hes dressed in a gray suit and top hat. A black servant is driving the carriage. Mammy is sitting to the left of the driver in the front seat.
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> Scarletts mother is sitting in the first rear seat, facing backwards. Scarlett and her sisters are sitting in the second back seat and facing forward. The horses are brown.
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> This scene cuts to the medium shot of the carriage arriving at the front door of the house, and it shows the father getting off of his horse and stepping up to greet Mr. Wilkes.
I suspected that's where someone's memory of this might come from, if the scene existed, and your description confirms my assertion that there was no logical reason for Gerald O'Hara to be driving the carriage.
Besides the aforementioned previews, there were never any alternative versions of GONE WITH THE WIND exhibited to the public. I think this pretty much puts the original poster's question to rest.
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Isn't one query about this sufficient?
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Isn't one query about this enough?
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> {quote:title=lzcutter wrote:}{quote}
> Not necessarily. MrCutter works for a division of Fox that is off the lot (not Fox News) but occasionally gets called to meetings on the lot. I will have to tell him about the men's room so he can check it out.
It's in an open area a few doors down (to the south) of the Little Theater.
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> {quote:title=DachsieLady wrote:}{quote}
> John Wayne as hero in any movie he was in.
Especially when he played Genghis Khan.
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If this scene ever existed, why would Gerald O'Hara drive the carriage? The very reason that Southerners like the O'Haras and Wilkses owned slaves was that they wouldn't have to perform menial tasks like the one you describe.
I'm not saying such a scene never existed, especially if it's in the novel (though you wouldn't be the first person who, having read a novel, conflated an incident in it into a scene that was actually never filmed), but if it did you would have had to have attended a preview of the film in 1939, before it was released. There weren't too many of those held, and even if you were in your mid-teens then you'd be in your mid-eighties now.
So, how old are you?
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> {quote:title=lzcutter wrote:}{quote}
>Thank you for all the info, especially about the Fox bathroom and Paramount!
Well, you may eventually get a chance to see the Paramount Film Archive, but the Fox men's room is off-limits.
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The plan is predicated on the unfortunate realization by the Academy's Board of Governors that, with ten Best Picture nominees, an Oscar telecast beginning in early January just might be over by early March.
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> {quote:title=lzcutter wrote:}{quote}
> The buildings on the Warners lot are still there but some of them are now called different names and have different offices in them.
Very few of the old film vaults on studio lots are still in use for that purpose, as they were always woefully inadequate, having little, if anything, in the way of climate control (in fact, one film vault, on the far west end of the 20th Century-Fox lot has been turned into a couple of very pleasant...lavatories. A wall of one of the toilet stalls in the Men's Room is actually the door to a vault, complete with locking mechanism. When in there I've often wondered how many current visitors to that lavatory realize what it was once used for). That's one of the reasons there's been so much deterioration and destruction of irreplaceable picture and sound elements.
Many studios now store much of their materials off lot, some of them, mainly negatives and color separations, deep in Kansas salt mines where temperatures and humidity are always ideal and constant. The biggest on-lot facility is at Paramount (behind the "Blue Sky" cyclorama at the center of the lot, that's visible to passing cars on Melrose Avenue). It was a state-of-the-art building when it was opened about twenty years ago, but it became apparent that it was already becoming dated. Upgrades have been done, but film-storage and preservation has proven to an ongoing challenge.
> Watching the restored film it was obvious from the beginning that James Mason had been the one most robbed by the truncated version. As the love story played out across the screen we were all shown for the first time in almost twenty years, just how nuanced, tragic and moving his performance really was.
I think you really meant thirty years.
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> As I am watching "Life With Father," I realize that when I get humorously frustrated at times, I will say or write, "Gad!" as Clarence Day would bellow.
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> What expression(s) from movies do you use in your everyday life?
In the original Howard Lindsay-Russell Crouse play, Clarence Day was given to uttering "God!," as many others are. When Warner Bros. purchased the film rights they were informed by the Breen Office that all these exclamations of the Deity were unacceptable, and so "Gad" was inserted as a suitably evocative replacement.
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> {quote:title=Arturo wrote:}{quote}
> Ronald Colman actually played that year a similar role to Powell's in LIFE WITH FATHER. This was in THE LATE GEORGE APLEY, made at Fox, another turn of the (last) century family comedy where he was a Bostonian opposed to his daughter marrying. It would have been a logical role for Fox's own Clifton Webb, but was probably not used because Zanuck needed a box-office name (once the originally announced Anne Baxter was out as the daughter and Peggy Cummins took over); and Webb was still one year away from his breakthrough performance as Mr. Belvedere, which made him a top star. Of course Webb went on to successfully star as another stubborn paterfamilias in 1950s CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, which bears more than a slight resemblance to these other two films.
Sorry, but none of the above is true. Webb was already immensely popular after his supporting roles in Fox's LAURA and THE RAZOR'S EDGE, even though he'd yet to be top-billed in a vehicle of his own. By contrast, Ronald Colman's career had been fading since the late 1930s, with a brief resurgence following the tremendous success of RANDOM HARVEST (even that somewhat limited by virtue of his co-star's being under contract to MGM, and not he).
Comparing Colman to Webb is like comparing the proverbial apples and orange; where Colman's screen persona was warm, wise an cultured, if a bit hidebound, Webb's was prissy and intolerant, which was the essence of all his screen characters from Waldo Lydecker to Lynn Belvedere to TITANIC's Richard Sturges to Victor Parmalee in BOY ON A DOLPHIN.
Director Joseph L. Mankeiwicz cast Colman as George Apley because he was the right actor for the part, period, and it's a credit to Darryl Zanuck that he didn't try to push Webb, or anyone else, on him (though William Powell would have been a logical choice).
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If it hasn't already been noted, [i[THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN[/i] was the film whose 1932 engagement inaugurated Radio City Music Hall as the nation's premier cinema venue.
The film wasn't very successful, owing to its subject matter (oddly, few seem to point to it as a pre-Code film that, by 1934, couldn't have been made in its current form), but its very failure at the box office, and his fascination with the Oriental, led Frank Capra, at least in part, to urge Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn to purchase the film rights to James Hilton's novel, Lost Horizon.
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Well, I felt that Nick Meyer and his remarks deserved a thread all their own.
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About two weeks ago, the Motion Picture Academy presented Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler's DOUBLE INDEMNITY as part of its spring/summer-long Film Noir series of screenings.
In the program's five weeks, the opening remarks, typically by some semi-luminary that someone though was tangentially related, or had some particular relevance, to les Films Noirs, have ranged from mildly interesting to interminably obtuse.
Then there were the observations by writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose sharp eloquence summed up the form as few I have ever read, or heard, have. Judge for yourself:
Double Indemnity ? Film Noir, American Opera
By Nicholas Meyer
We?re going to see ?Double Indemnity? in about four minutes so I am not going to deconstruct the movie in advance. After all, there may two or three fortunate souls here who haven?t seen the film, and we wouldn?t want to spoil any surprises.
In his justly celebrated essay, ?On the Name and Nature of Poetry,? the poet A.E. Housman conceded that he couldn?t define poetry, but he knew it when he heard it. Similarly, there have been many attempts to define Film Noir, many of them contradictory. In a 1972 essay brought to my attention by my daughter, Madeline, filmmaker Paul Shrader insisted that Noir was not a genre but rather a movement of film described by qualities and tone. More recently, novelist Megan Abbott countered that Noir is indeed a genre. Noir has variously been described as a reaction to the post war letdown; exclusively to be found in black and white (though there are Noir films in color); almost exclusively set at night; something peculiar to Los Angeles, (though potent examples can be cited in San Francisco as well as the Mid-West). Is Noir the aesthetic embodiment of Murphy?s Law? That if a thing can go wrong, it will? Is it even purely American? It?s worth noting that Jules Dassin, who directed such Noir exemplars as Brute Force and Naked City, fled to France during the blacklist, where he directed his masterpiece, Rififi, proving that Noir works, even in translation. Film Noir is, after all, a Gallic coinage. And so the debate as to what Noir is and what constitutes it, goes on.
(Parenthetically, any conversation about film noir ought to acknowledge as well, the literature of Noir, oftentimes the springboard for those self-same films and equally vast. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Leigh Brackett, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith; even Ernest Hemingway ? all contributed to lit noir).
Noir, whether written or filmed, has been characterized as the literature of Eros and Despair, the sinister and vertiginous intertwining of erotic frenzy and doom.
To paraphrase A. E. Housman, I can?t define Film Noir, but I know it when I see it ? and the film you are about to view, in my opinion, personifies Noir. ?Double Indemnity? seems to be almost trapped within itself, preserved in amber in a dream world of its own creation, an all-American nightmare of sex and death.
The movie was adapted from the novel by James M. Cain. Cain was an unabashed opera lover. Was Bizet?s ?Carmen,? the first film noir and Don Jose its first hapless ? if not altogether innocent ? victim? Cain was surely aware of Puccini?s one act opera, ?Il Tabaro? ? almost certainly the opera noir blueprint for Cain?s classic, twisted, love triangle, ?The Postman Always Rings Twice.?
The screenplay based on ?Double Indemnity? was co-written by another Noir stalwart, Raymond Chandler, who gave the world private eye Philip Marlowe and all his modern day approximations.
But it was Chandler?s co-writer, who also directed the film, who, one suspects, was chiefly responsible for the cinematic triumph it became. It is an odd instance that the most successful Hollywood movie in every genre turns out to have been directed ? and in many cases co-written ? by the same man. The best POW escape movie? ?Stalag 17.? Best flat out comedy? ?Some Like It Hot.? Best courtroom drama? ?Witness for the Prosecution.? Best movie about a drunk? ?The Lost Weekend.? Best social comedy, ?The Apartment.? Best movie about Hollywood? ?Sunset Boulevard?; The most dyspeptic look at the media? ?Ace in the Hole.? Best film Noir?... Well, some might make a case for ?Out of the Past,? but then again...
Of course, these are matters of taste and opinion. But with such a string of hits, one does have to concede what all these films have in common, (besides being in black and white). It has to be their striking American-ness. All these films, good, bad, comic and ugly are preoccupied with the subject of America ? which is ironic, because each of these masterpieces was made by the same foreigner, that Austrian ?migr?, Billy Wilder. It is perhaps significant that Wilder, with his background of European sophistication and tragedy ? (some of his family perished in the death camps) ? was not a born English speaker. But like those other non-English masters of English prose and English idioms, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, Wilder?s love affair with America and especially American English, (English, as someone characterized it, with its sleeves rolled up) ? rendered him acutely sensitized to double entendres the rest of us take for granted and to the poetry buried in every day slang. Who could know that murder smelled like honeysuckle? In this sense, all of Wilder?s films, even those set abroad, seem ultimately to be hymns and valentines to his adopted country ? even if they are nasty, cynical valentines.
But there is also, as we have noted, an operatic sensibility at work in ?Double Indemnity.? I don?t know what Wilder thought of opera ? it?s easy to imagine a devastating put down from him of fat ladies shrieking in Europe ? but it is hard to watch the film you are about to see without conceding its operatic properties, and by operatic, I mean larger than life, life as it were, on lsd. What was the point of making ?Sunset Boulevard? a musical when it was already deliriously an opera? As for ?Double Indemnity,? for starters, listen to the music itself, the evocative and patently operatic score, written by the Hungarian, Mikl?s R?zsa, who composed no fewer than five movies for Wilder. Indeed, before segueing into his remarkable series of historical epics, (?Ben-Hur,? ?Ivanhoe,? ?El Cid,? ?Quo Vadis,? etc), R?zsa made substantial contributions to the world of Noir for other directors in such films as ?The Asphalt Jungle,? ?Naked City,? ?Brute Force,? ?The Killers? and ?The Red House.?
One could go on and parse ad nauseum the components that make ?Double Indemnity? what it is. We could talk about the harsh yet atmospheric lighting by cinematographer John S. Seitz, or discuss the three unsentimental performances by Fred McMurray (taking his good guy career in his hands), by Barbara Stanwyck (grabbing his balls by hers) and the astonishing Edward G. Robinson. But I promised not to do this. Besides, would our observations, however astute, explain or enhance alchemy? ?Double Indemnity? is magic ? not legerdemain ? but real magic and real magic is hard to explain. It is hard if not impossible, to account for the effect of the sum total of ?Double Indemnity?s? parts. These things must and will speak for themselves. Murder, as the man says, will out. The debate about film noir will go on, not, I suspect because it is important, but because it is fun.
Enough! Speeches before the movie is like listening to the pilot before the plane takes off. As someone else once said around here, Fasten your seatbelts.
You may also wish to hear some of Meyer's additional thoughts:
http://www.oscars.org/video/watch/ev_noir_interview_04_meyer.html
Edited by: Sprocket_Man on Jun 20, 2010 7:37 PM
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> {quote:title=misswonderly wrote:}{quote}
> Thought of another! This one's British, and comes from a slightly different angle: this time it's the union that's causing problems for the creative product inventor: *Man in the White Suit* 1951, starring Alec Guinness (delightfully young!) and Joan Greenwood of the fascinating throaty voice. Alec develops a chemical -or a material made from this chemical, can't recall which exactly - that renders clothing permanent and perfect -never any stains, holes, threadbare patches, etc. Your suit will last forever!
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> But wait -who wants that? If a set of clothes lasts forever, there will be no need for people to ever buy new ones. Thus the union - and eventually the clothing company business heads, too - want to prevent Alec's invention from production. Much confusion and husky-voiced cajoling (on the part of Miss Greenwood) ensues.
> I don't usually go into plot synopsis (plural= synopsi?) like this, but it's fun describing this movie. Plus, it does fit with the "nasty greedy business philosophy" theme we're talking about.
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> (ps-If you want guidance on spelling corrections, I suggest you consult finance.)
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> Edited by: misswonderly on Jun 17, 2010 8:43 PM
One of the most celebrated and prototypical of Alec Guinness's Ealing Studio films, it almost didn't get made in this form, or even as a comedy. Originally conceived as a semi-drama about the effect of cheap, limitless nuclear power on the British economy (if you're old enough to remember, that was the electric companies' selling point when the push to build N-plants got underway in the late 1950s), the concept slowly metamorphosed into the more whimsical realm of textiles. The film's final gag, that the supposedly indestructible and un-stainable fabric from which inventor Guinness's suit is made suddenly and irreversibly begins to disintegrate of its own accord -- after nearly turning British society upside-down -- actually served to mirror the then-unknown reality of nuclear power, and practically everything else that was ever over-sold: if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't.
As such, the movie's as much a cautionary tale about making promises that can't be kept, based on research that hasn't been done, as it is about anything else. And it's hard to imagine anyone other than Guinness in the role of boffin Sidney Stratton.
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It'd only really be "Ralph Bellamy Night" on TCM if the only people who watched this evening were men (his reputation as a second lead being that his characters never ended up with the girl).
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Had Pleasance played only one role in a feature film, his Blythe in THE GREAT ESCAPE would have embodied much of his greatest strengths as an actor. In many ways, he exemplifies what the film is about (and one of the movie's great strengths is that it doesn't belabor the issues that underlay the war and the Allies' reasons for opposing the Axis): the decent way of life in a Britain besieged by German ambitions for world domination.
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> {quote:title=JackFavell wrote:}{quote}
> I could have used more Anthony Zerbe, and less Donald Pleasence. The relationship between Heston and Hackett was very sweet and very well acted. Don't tell anyone I said so. Not a Heston fan.
I agree with you about Zerbe; he's a splendid actor, and also added a needed human dimension (if you can call a zombie "human") when he worked with Heston in THE OMEGA MAN (something sadly, and critically, missing in the recent Will Smith version.
While I've always been an admirer of Donald Pleasance's (several years ago I wrote a biography of him for the bonus materials of some DVD whose title I've since forgotten), whom his fans accorded the honor of being called "the Man with the Hypnotic Eye" when he first became popular in British television in the 1950s, his performance in WILL PENNY is part and parcel of the film's veering into melodrama. It's not his fault: as good as the script generally is, "Preacher" Quint and his loose family of "rawhiders" are little more than a deus ex machina, a force of nature there to menace Will, set in motion his isolation in the high country, and then to threaten him, Catherine and Horace.
As I said, it was a good script, but probably not as good as it might've been with a surer, older hand in charge of the film. When Tom Gries's script was sent to Heston, he wanted to buy it outright and then entice William Wyler to direct the project. Gries, who'd only directed some television episodes up to then, was adamant that the script was for sale only if he were attached to direct. Heston was so enamored of the property that he acceded to Gries's demand.
Would it have been a better film with Wyler in control? Just as with EL CID, which Heston felt might've been the greatest epic film ever made had Wyler directed it, it's almost a given that Wyler, who cajoled, bullied and encouraged writers (as necessary) to give their best in the same way he did to actors (resulting in 14 Oscars for actors in his films, a record no one else comes close to), wouldn't have been satisfied with the script and wouldn't have shot the movie till he was.
Right now, though, there's only one thing in the film that I find utterly unbelievable: Will and Catherine's leave-taking in the cabin after Quint and the "rawhiders" have been dispatched. The audience is, I guess, expected to forget that only minutes earlier Will had poured twenty pounds of pure sulfur onto the hearth's fire. That would have rendered the interior of the cabin uninhabitable and intolerable for the next hundred years. If you've ever been around pure sulfur, in any quantity (never mind also burning it), you know how the merest whiff makes even the strongest person want to puke.
Name of a song in The Snake Pit
in Information, Please!
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> {quote:title=FredCDobbs wrote:}{quote}
> "Going Home" ?
It's actually an old American folk tune around which 19th century Czech composer Anton?n Dvoř?k wrote the first movement of his Symphony No. 9, Aus der Neuen Welt ("From the New World").
Almost as interesting, in THE SNAKE PIT's last scene, the film's composer, Alfred Newman, re-used the melody from the Renaissance Venetian song he'd first employed in his score to THE PRINCE OF FOXES the year before.