AndyM108

As for me? Well this thread really is just another ?who is the best looking one?, since none of us know what it really would be like to be married to any of these stars. True, but the reason I'd named Joanne Woodward and Judy Davis is in part because both of those women had (or have) a long-running first marriage without any need for a do-over. So at least there's that to go on. If Barbara Stanwyck's real life persona had matched some of her less black widow spiderish screen roles, I might have gone for her instead, but that didn't seem to be the case.

As I mentioned before Johnny Mathis singing A Certain Smile is lovely, and whether anyone feels it's hokey or not I LOVE Thee I Love from Wyler's Friendly Persuasion just a touching, beautiful song that also fits this film perfectly. As I remember both of those songs with a certain amount of fondness from the days of AM radiio, I'm kind of glad I never heard them in the context of a movie I probably wouldn't like for other reasons.

And don't forget, most movies teach us that the best way for a driver of a car to get into the car is from the passenger's side, and then he slides over to the driver's side. Which actually made a lot of sense before bucket seats in the front became universal. The driver didn't have to be standing in traffic to get into his seat.

I remember liking some of Frankie Laine's songs BITD, "Moonlight Gambler" in particular. But IMO the movies in the 40's got it right when they wanted to introduce music: They simply showed a singer performing in a night club. Totally believable in a real world context, and not in the least bit annoying. For me Westerns and music just don't mix.

I have to admit that "Don't Forsake Me" at the start of High Noon is every bit as grating on my ears as any other song that leads into a Western. In another context I can bear it, but why start an allegedly serious drama with *any* song, especially a hokey one? It just kind of hangs there in the air for no apparent reason. And it's just plain stupid. Contrast all those Western openings with the one from Walk On The Wild Side, which is the gold standard of long introductions: No words, just a slowly building *instrumental* theme accompanied by the sight of a black cat stalking his prey. Total understatement until it explodes into a catfight that leads into the plot. The Brook Benton vocal comes on only at the end of the movie, when it's in context with the denouement of the plot. Another film that uses a musical introduction to maximum effect is the "Dragnet" theme at the start of The Killers, which provides the perfect lead to William Conrad's and Charles McGraw's nighttime approach to the small town diner with a contract murder on their agenda. But movies that start out with a vocal are just. . . well, they're just trying too hard, that's all. They're like Ali La Pointe in The Battle of Algiers, who's told to shoot a French policeman in the back, but instead spins him around and makes a speech before he discovers that there aren't any bullets in his gun. The moral of that incident, and of the music in Walk on the Wild Side, is a good one: Shoot First, Talk Later.

Funny you should mention My Dinner With Andre. That movie caused me to establish my personal all-time record for quickest time for leaning to the exits, but I wound up sticking around and watching the whole enchilada for the same reason that some people like to watch train wrecks. Not that I don't like dialogue-centered movies. One of my favorite directors is Eric Rohmer. And to take it back to the thought of circling the block for 20 minutes looking for a parking space, there's a scene in Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle where the two girls seem to spend about 20 minutes haggling with a waiter over whether they can pay for their coffee with a large denomination bill. The scene actually works quite beautifully, though of course it helps that neither of the actresses has much resemblance to Wallace Shawn.

What mostly drives me up a wall with those musical intros to Westerns isn't the music, it's the words. Or put it this way: Most of the 1950's Westerns I've seen make me fear I'm about to be plunged into another version of Paint Your Wagon, and I react like Homer Simpson. It's more or less totally killed my appetite for the entire genre.

Well i dont know that i would consider Sophia as a " big fat woman",.ever Didn't say that I would, either. Hey, I may be crazy, but I'm not blind.

*it'd be kind of neat for them to make a film where James Cagney or Robert Redford spends 20 minutes circling the block trying to find a parking space.* Gripping stuff for sure. Well, for an occasional stroll down Reality Road it'd sure beat those six-shooter duels where they don't run out of bullets for about 30 shots each.

In real life? Probably Joanne Woodward or Judy Davis. But as a screen persona? Easy: Barbara Stanwyck. There's more depth to her infinite variety of screen characters than the next ten actresses put together. Though Ida Lupino wouldn't be that far behind. Edited by: AndyM108 on Nov 13, 2013 11:59 PM

I read something about this just a few weeks ago. The trend was suppsosed to have been started by the success of the High Noon theme song, I was going to suggest that possibility, but the truth is I've seen relatively so few Westerns that I was afraid someone might jump in and cite 50 before that. And movieman, what dramas are you thinking about? I do seem to recall a few of them like Blackboard Jungle starting out with a song, but other than those godawful widescreen spectaculars I can't think of a lot of others. I can think of plenty of dramas with instrumental music that permeated the movie, but few which bopped you upside your head with the Happy Sappy Machine (vocal version) right at the start the way those Westerns did. By far the best musical introduction I can think of is the "Walk on the Wild Side" introduction to the 1962 movie of that same name, accompanied by a black cat walking through the streets at night. The jazz organist Jimmy Smith had a two sided hit of the title tune, one side vocal and the other side instrumental, which got up to #21 on the Billboard charts later that same year.

Why does seemingly *EVERY* Western film of the 1950's have to begin with the sappiest imaginable song? I'm watching Gunfight at the OK Corral for the first time tonight, and once again I got sucker punched by the opening soundtrack. Less singin' and more shootin', podners!

Interesting once more, Fred, and your explanation makes sense. Kind of like the strange abundance of parking spaces on New York City streets right in front of everyone's building, back in nearly every movie up through the 60's. I always thought it'd be kind of neat for them to make a film where James Cagney or Robert Redford spends 20 minutes circling the block trying to find a parking space.

*I'm with Joe Tex in my preference for non-Rubenesque female body types* So you'll take her "Skinny legs and all!"? Sepiatone Let's just say....."Don't want to *bump* no more with no big fat woman. She knocked me *on the floor*...right down into a foxhole, on my knees...But then that skinny woman gave me so much strength...I reached up and shot me two more enemeees." (Yeah, I realize that may seem a bit incoherent to those who weren't fans of Joe's BITD.)

I am watching SUNDAY IN NEW YORK (1963). I'm trying to find some black people in the street scenes in New York, also at the airport, and in Central Park. I don't see any, except maybe one in a skycap's uniform in the distance at the airport, but he was so far away from the camera, I couldn't tell for sure. Were there no black people on the streets of New York, or at the airport, or in Central Park in 1963? When I went there in 1965 I saw thousans of them all over the place, just like everyone else. This amuses me every time I see a 1940s to mid-60s Hollywood film of street scenes, offices, parks, airports, stores, and public buildings in New York, especially with famous all-white casts. It is as if black people didn't exist back in those days. Pretending they don't exist is awful. The studios went to a lot of trouble to clear them off the street and out of the background of these New York-based movies, but I guess that's what New York and Northern audiences wanted. That's a very interesting comment, Fred. I've heard it before from others, and it doesn't surprise me. It's a variant in a way of some of the pre-code Warner Brothers' movies that seemed to make a point of including *one* or *two* black characters as part of a group- - - one or two but never any more. The box car kids in Wild Boys of the Road, for instance, or Duke Mantee's gang in The Petrified Forest. And of course in The Little Rascals. But do you have any specific sources you might cite? I'd like to delve into the subject and would appreciate any leads you might have.

So your preference for Audrey IS related to her body, not her face. ....Though I am rather slim myself, I always prefer females that are a bit more substantial. Can't do any better than Sophia Loren, who also has better legs than just about any other actress. I'm with Joe Tex in my preference for non-Rubenesque female body types ("Don't wanna bump no more...."), but it takes more than a slim figure to be a true gamine. It also takes a combination of a pretty face, lots of joie de vivre, and a soulfulness that's hard to put into words, but I know it when I see it. Audrey had it all, Louise Brooks had it, Loretta Young had it in a few of her pre-codes like A Man's Castle, the young Meg Ryan had it on occasion, and so on. It's not that uncommon a type, but I never saw it in Marilyn. And anyway, I don't like the Dumb Blonde type, no matter if she wasn't all that dumb offscreen. But then YMMV and all that.

The authors of this book are highly trained historians and economists with no set agenda. Of course their findings are not politically correct and that's a big problem in today's world. http://www.amazon.com/Time-Cross-Economics-American-Slavery/dp/0393312186 Since we're talking about a 39 year old book, here are the remarks of a few other historians: *In 1975, the historian Herbert Gutman criticized the authors' reliance on evidence from a single, unrepresentative plantation. He also noted the authors were extremely careless in their maths, and often used the wrong measurement to estimate the harshness of slavery (for example, estimating the number of slaves whipped rather than how often each slave was whipped). In Slavery and the Numbers Game (1975), Gutman argued that Fogel and Engerman also routinely ignored better, readily available data. He criticized Fogel and Engerman on a host of other issues as well, including the lack of evidence for systematic and regular rewards, and a failure to consider the effect public whipping would have on other slaves. He argued that Fogel and Engerman had mistakenly assumed that slaves had assimilated the Protestant work ethic. If they had such an ethic, then the system of punishments and rewards outlined in Time on the Cross would support Fogel and Engerman's thesis. Gutman conclusively showed that most slaves had not adopted this ethic at all, and that slavery's carrot-and-stick approach to work was not part of the slave worldview.* *Gutman and others' critiques were so thorough that in 1975 Thomas Haskell wrote that Time on the Cross appeared to be "severely flawed and possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars.".[1]* *In American Slavery, the historian Peter Kolchin suggests that the economists did not fully consider the costs of the forced migration of more than one million slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, where they were sold to cotton plantations.[4] He wrote that the book was a "flash in the pan, a bold but now discredited work."[5]* *[1] Haskell, Thomas L. "The True and Tragical History of 'Time on the Cross'", New York Review of Books, 22:15 (October 2, 1975), accessed 8 January 2012* *[4] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1865, New York: 1992, p. 97* *[5] Kolchin (1992), p. 492*

Yes, nothing honors the values for which American veterans have fought like an open display of crude xenophobia.

I prefer a beautiful face and style over body shape. E.g. Audrey Hepburn over Monroe. But most men I know think I'm crazy! Not me. I'd take Audrey over Marilyn any day. Love them gamines.

Hey, what's wrong with Joan Fontaine's looks? I would've chosen her (looks wise) over Joan Leslie any day........... Will that be a potato and tomato salad, or a potahto and tomahto salad? (Well, as long as Louise Brooks or Loretta Young comes on the side, who cares?)

"The Best Years of Our Lives"(1946) is the best way to honor our veterans if one don't want combat films. Couldn't agree more, and if you wanted to honor them with a double feature, you could do a lot worse than The Search:

That last post was aimed at everyone and no one in particular. The format of these forums requires that every comment beyond the thread opener has to be addressed to an individual, but that was only a required formality in this case, and I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that you or Jake or anyone else were saying that slavery was preferable to freedom. (EDIT: And anyway, I see now that I was "replying" to jamesjazzguitar, not you.) Beyond that, the facts I quoted speak for themselves, along with the sources at the bottom of the page, and need no further embellishment.

I agree that Joan Fontaine wasn't exactly Ava Gardner or even Joan Leslie when it came to looks, but I still liked Born To Be Bad. What most interested me about it is the many ways in which Fontaine's Christabel seems like a forerunner to Anne Baxter's Eve Harrington in the much better known All About Eve, which was released just three months later. The latter movie is far more memorable in many ways, but there's still that one similarity that's hard not to notice.

http://teachers.greenville.k12.sc.us/sites/ksherril/2nd%20semester%20am%20lit/What%20Was%20Life%20Like%20Under%20Slavery.pdf *What Was Life Like Under Slavery?* *Under southern law, slaves were considered chattel property. Like a domestic animal, they could be bought, sold, leased, and physically punished. Slaves were prohibited from owning property, testifying against whites in court, or traveling without a pass. Their marriages lacked legal sanction. During the nineteenth century, in response to abolitionist attacks on slavery, southern legislatures enacted laws setting set down minimal standards for housing, food, and clothing -- but these statutes were largely unenforced.* *Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists charged that slaves were overworked, poorly clad, inadequately housed, and cruelly punished; that slavery was a highly profitable investment; and that far from being content, slaves longed for freedom. Apologists for slavery, in turn, accused abolitionists of exaggerating slavery's evils, asserting that slaves were rarely whipped, that marriages were seldom broken by sale, and that most slaves were able to maintain stable family lives. They maintained that paternalism and public opinion protected slaves from cruelty; that slave insurrections were rare because most slaves were contented with bondage; that slavery was an economic burden that planters bore out of a sense of responsibility; and that slaves enjoyed a higher standard of living, a better diet, superior housing, and a greater life expectancy than many free urban workers in the North and in Europe.* *Recent historical research has largely confirmed the abolitionist indictment of slavery. We now know that slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age. Between 1830 and 1860, only 10 percent of U.S. slaves were over 50 years old.* *A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slaveowners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, providing pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive field work even in the last week before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or what we would today consider to be severely underweight.* *Infants and children were badly malnourished. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to eat vegetables soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions. These apparently stemmed from beriberi, pellagra, tetany, rickets, and kwashiorkor, diseases that are caused by protein and nutritional deficiencies.* *Squalid living conditions aggravated health problems. Chickens, dogs, and pigs lived next to the slave quarters, and in consequence animal **** contaminated the area. Lacking privies, slaves had to **** and **** in the cover of nearby bushes. Such squalor contributed to high rates of diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, respiratory diseases, hepatitis, typhoid fever and intestinal worms.* *Deprived of an adequate diet, slave children were very small by modern standards. Their average height at age three was shorter than 99 percent of twentieth-century American three-year-olds. At age 17, slave men were shorter than 96 percent of present-day 17-year-old men and slave women were shorter than 80 percent of contemporary women.* source: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/black_voices/voices_display.cfm?id=20 Interpreting primary sources: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us16.cfm

The problem with TCM's war movies is that they keep recycling the same titles over and over and over and over and over. How many times can they show From Here To Eternity and The Bridge Over the River Kwai? As long as we're engaging in fantasy wish lists, here's mine: What TCM should really do is to run 24 hours straight of foreign-produced war films ( Kapo, Come and See, Katyn, Days of Glory, etc.) so we can get a respite from the Same Old Same Old.