AndyM108

Okay, here goes. It's a picture of me and my college sweetie. Outstanding, and thanks for the simple and elegant suggestion.

Can I interrupt for a technical question? In this new "improved" website format, how does one post a picture? Used to be easy: Copy and paste. Problem is that that doesn't work any more, at least not for me on either Chrome or Firefox. Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

That was a very good analysis, Frank, particularly your take on why newer people often don't return. I'd copy it for emphasis if it weren't right there a few posts below.

Was this the first film that featured four "A" list stars as co-leads, in which all the characters interacted with one another? (unlike, e.g. GRAND HOTEL) It may or may not have been the first one, but I'd like to know of a better one. It's one of a tiny handful of TCM's endless repeats that will never, ever get stale, with all four of the leads *AND* Walter Connolly at the very top of their game. *"THAT'S ARSON!!"*

TCM Web Administrator, Two words: *THANK YOU*

I believe you are entering in to a realm of discussion that you should address on another chat forum. There's no place for this here. Amen. I have no idea where this character's coming from, but the sooner he goes back there, the better. I flagged that original comment of his under the category of "General Abuse", which is the first time I've ever flagged a comment on a TCM board. This is exactly the sort of derailment that takes place routinely on other sites in the absence of a monitor, and it's a perfect example of the point I was making last night.

I also salute Andy's take here especially the part about the moderator. Every other forum that doesn't have an active moderator gets taken over by racist or ugly partisian politics. Doesn't matter what the topic is. Thanks for the kind words, and if anyone seriously doubts the point, I'd invite them to visit the "Comments" that follow nearly every news story or opinion piece on the Washington Post's website. The Post is one of the three worthwhile print papers left in the entire country, and yet the "Comments" on its website invariably devolve into a neverending duel of angry liberal and angry conservative talking points, usually only a sentence or two long, and often filled with misspellings, third grade grammar, and thinly veiled racism. There are more intelligent and worthwhile comments posted here in any given hour than there are on the Post's website in any given week, because the lack of an active moderator on the Post site causes the bad to drive away the good. This is great for the Post's page hits, but it's not so great for any sort of rational discussion.

The distinction among "Hispanics" in the world of Hollywood movies past isn't hard to understand, and can be explained by a simple baseball analogy. If the Hispanic (or Latino) was "white" enough to have played Major League Baseball prior to Jackie Robinson, he was probably light skinned enough to be considered white by Hollywood. The "Latin lover" stock figure was always considered a suitable if somewhat exotic romantic partner to white women in movies dating all the way back to the silent era. OTOH if the Hispanic / Latino was too dark to have slipped by Kenesaw Mountain Landis and made it into Organized Baseball before 1947, then he would have had an equally impossible chance of finding any romantic movie roles outside the "race film" circuit. Nobody was going to pair off someone who looked like Alfonso Bedoya with a white woman in any matchup other than rapist and victim.

When it came to the then screamingly touchy subject of relations between a black man played by a black actor and a white girl played by a Caucasian, it looks like it wasn't until Guess Who's Coming in 1967 that that huge barrier was finally broken down. That's true only if you restrict yourself to Hollywood blockbusters. One Potato, Two Potato, a far more realistic movie about a marriage between a black man and a white woman, was released in 1964, three years before the Poitier film. And while it didn't deal with interracial marriage, don't forget the French movie Zou Zou, co-starring Jean Gabin and Josephine Baker, which dates from all the way back in 1934. http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/17716%7C0/Zou-Zou.html And then there was the relationship between a white man and a black woman portrayed in John Cassavettes' Shadows, a 1959 release. Both Shadows and One Potato, Two Potato have shown on TCM.

That's ironic, since although next to Eugenia H, I may be Stanwyck's biggest fan around here, General Yen is one of her *very* few movies I don't like at all, and I've seen over 60 of them. I've tried to watch it all the way through twice now, but I can't overcome my distaste for the casting of whites in "Oriental" parts, at a time when cross-casting of racial minorities in white roles would have resulted in the mass closing of theaters. It's the racist double standard in cross-casting that fuels my disgust, not cross-casting per se. And since in for a dime, in for a dollar, I also think that A Majority of One is the most embarrassingly miscast movie ever made, and I say this in spite of my eternal love of Rosalind Russell and my overall admiration for Alec Guinness. I doubt if an all-star cast of parodists taken from Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, The Daily Show and The Onion could ever have come up with anything worse.

I think that to *keep* participating in this forum, you have to have a few common traits. 1. You have to love the movies, or at least a lot of them. 2. You like learning new things and perspectives from other participants. 3. You have to be comfortable with the general level of civility. Or, failing those, you have to just love to "hear" yourself talk, and are oblivious to what others might think of you. I like the TCM forums for all of those reasons, but one I'd emphasize is the hidden hand of the TCM Administrator. I've been to many websites where the "Comments" moderator seems to be on a permanent vacation (Hello, Washington Post), and as a result the terminal lunatics quickly take over the asylum and utterly ruin it for all the sane lunatics. That almost never seems to happen here, and the contrast in tone and substance is striking. As for why many people seem to put in a toe in the water and then retreat, I think it's relatively simple: Most people aren't comfortable about having to defend their opinions with facts and logic rather than just doubled down opinions, and they also often see strong disagreement as some sort of personal attack. In many ways forums like this are a bit Darwinian, in that the congenitally meek and the merely quarrelsome are winnowed out by natural selection.

Here's a question I'd pose to everyone who kvetches about "Too many new movies", "Too many silents", "Too many foreign movies", "Too many kitschy musicals", "Too many westerns", "Too much Mickey Rooney", "Too many beach movies", etc., etc., etc.: Say that one day the Denture Fairy came along and granted you a wish, and that your wish was "I wish I was a wishing well." No, wait, that was Cagney's line. Let's try again. Instead, let's say that your wish was "I wish that I could program TCM according to my own impeccable taste, 24 hours a day / 365 days a year." My question is: *When in the hell would you ever sleep?*

I really wanted to like this series, but part 5 was just about the last straw. I can live with the Scootish accent, but I wish he'd give us more clips and less theory. Much too academic a slant for my taste. OTOH since along with Cousins we're also getting a ton of films (YAY, SILENTS! YAY, FOREIGN MOVIES!) that almost never get shown on TCM, the sacrifice of about 65 minutes a week has been well worth it.

Glad to oblige, Fred. I just did as you requested, and I'll catch up with any other comments tomorrow.

Fred asked me to copy this from another thread in order to keep everyone on the same page. Glad to oblige. What is it about "Mississippi Burning" that you don't like? It took an organization (the FBI) that did nothing whatever to help the civil rights movement and did much to hinder it*, and made it into some sort of a white knight crusader for racial justice, which is about as far from the historical truth as possible. The civil rights movement itself was rendered virtually invisible throughout the film. The movie took one specific case of racially motivated murder in a state with dozens of such murders, and made it into a generic Hollywood cop movie, scarcely distinguishable from scores of others. It's not just about the movie that was made. It's about the many movies about Mississippi Summer that Hollywood chose *not* to make. You can defend the slant of Mississippi Burning on purely commercial grounds, I suppose, but it doesn't make the movie any better. In terms of historical reality, it was a pure embarrassment. *Ignoring countless well documented reports of violence and intimidation; using the narrowest possible interpretation of the law to refuse to act when they saw federal laws being violated right in front of their eyes; compiling dossiers of civil rights workers (I was one of them) and in some cases (like with Hoover and King) attempting to blackmail them. The best thing you can say about J. Edgar Hoover is that in 41 years he hasn't yet managed to rise up from his grave. The review in The Guardian put it quite succinctly: *"Mississippi Burning is written, acted and filmed with flair, but its history and politics are as murky as a Mississippi swamp."*

What is it about "Mississippi Burning" that you don't like? It took an organization (the FBI) that did nothing whatever to help the civil rights movement and did much to hinder it*, and made it into some sort of a white knight crusader for racial justice, which is about as far from the historical truth as possible. The civil rights movement itself was rendered virtually invisible throughout the film. The movie took one specific case of racially motivated murder in a state with dozens of such murders, and made it into a generic Hollywood cop movie, scarcely distinguishable from scores of others. It's not just about the movie that was made. It's about the many movies about Mississippi Summer that Hollywood chose *not* to make. You can defend the slant of Mississippi Burning on purely commercial grounds, I suppose, but it doesn't make the movie any better. In terms of historical reality, it was a pure embarrassment. *Ignoring countless well documented reports of violence and intimidation; using the narrowest possible interpretation of the law to refuse to act when they saw federal laws being violated right in front of their eyes; compiling dossiers of civil rights workers (I was one of them) and in some cases (like with Hoover and King) attempting to blackmail them. The best thing you can say about J. Edgar Hoover is that in 41 years he hasn't yet managed to rise up from his grave. The review in The Guardian put it quite succinctly: *"Mississippi Burning is written, acted and filmed with flair, but its history and politics are as murky as a Mississippi swamp."*

I usually consider the person or the forum I'm addressing when I mention a movie I don't like, partly out of respect and partly because I know there's a difference between personal taste and critical judgement. Posting on a TCM forum, I try my best (really) to acknowledge differing tastes. I might say that Yankee Doodle Dandy or The Birth of a Nation drive me up a wall, but I wouldn't pretend that those were objective critical comments about the skill involved in the making of those two films. OTOH in a casual conversation I'm likely to say things like " Last Tango in Paris? That pretentious piece of perversion?" Or " Mississippi Burning is the best argument I can think of for celluloid abortion." (Which I might also say here, but never mind.) But that's because when I come out with lines like that, I'm almost always talking to friends who know that such comments aren't meant to be taken as attacks on them, even if *they* know that *I* know that *they* like those movies. And they'll be just as likely to talk like that about movies they can't stand themselves, knowing that *I* like them. Of course some of the best critics in history have mastered the art of taking criticism to the level of near-vendetta without always losing their critical faculties. John Simon or Pauline Kael, for instance. But that's a lot easier to do when you've got a guaranteed contract in your pocket.

The Story on Page One plays on the Fox Movie Channel every once in a while, I think the last time was in May. That probably explains why it doesn't show up on TCM. It's a passably good noir, but with an all-too predictable ending.

I'd love to see Molly Haskell return to TCM to do something besides narrate those 3 minute mini-biographies that get repeated about 600 times a week. But I'd also be grateful if we got another round of Muller's critiques. No need to disparage Eddie in order to praise Molly. But if we want to get some more women up there with Bob, a sentiment I'd second, I'd suggest two great bloggers: Farran Smith Nehme, AKA "The Self-Styled Siren", and Jacqueline T. Lynch, who does "Another Old Movie Blog". Either of these would be a terrific addition to the TCM lineup. http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/ http://anotheroldmovieblog.blogspot.com/

Well, I'm not going to mention the name of my cable provider but the network (or station) is called MOVIES! To Hibi's question their fare seems to be 4:3 full screen *with commercials...* Well, so much for that channel. Here's someone who can't be bothered to read subtitles, but he doesn't mind commercials in the middle of the movie. Takes all types, I guess.

*It looks like, Andy, that you're not getting finance's point. He wasn't referring to any age difference between Blair and Borgnine's characters. He was referring to how AGE was displayed in movies in that era.* I get all that, but 50=ready for the glue factory is hardly a theme that's unique to Chayefsky films, whereas the serious way that the age difference is dealt with in MOTN *is* definitely unusual in Hollywood movies of almost any era. That's what distinguishes this movie IMO, whereas the 50=glue factory bit is something I've seen in many other films of both that period and other periods as well. What we're really doing here is feeling two distinct parts of an elephant and drawing different conclusions about its nature depending on whether we're feeling the tusk or the tail.

*But Marty's mother and aunt were both in their fifties, and they were portrayed as old ladies.* As was Glenda Farrell (age 55) in MOTN, but the point is that the age difference between March and Novak was central to that movie, whereas whatever tiny age difference there might have been between the Borgnine and Betsy Blair characters in Marty was insignificant in terms of the plot, and of course both of them were in their 30's, not their 50's. If the point is that all the characters in their 50's in those two films were portrayed as candidates for the glue factory, that's true, but you could find a hundred or a thousand movies that fit that description back in the Golden and Classic ages of Hollywood. In that respect there's little that's unique about either of the Chayefsky films.

*In this Chayefsky film, just like in MARTY. people in their fifties are portrayed as having one foot in the grave.* Except that in the film version of Marty, Marty was 34 and Clara was about the same age. In many other ways these two movies were similar, but only Middle of the Night portrayed the couple's age gap as a central point of contention. A minor point I noticed in MOTN was the casting for two of the sadder characters in the movie, Albert Dekker as the skirt-chasing dirty old man Lockman who later tries to kill himself, and Rudy Bond as Gould, who's also thrown in the towel. For those who remember Dekker as the arch-villain in The Killers, and Bond as the gleefully sadistic hit man in Jacques Tourneur's classic noir Nightfall, the sorry sight of these two actors is almost as disheartening as the characters they portray in this movie.

Couldn't disagree more, Fred. In fact along with Vertigo, this may be the *ONLY* May-December pairing I found somewhat convincing, compared to (for example) those inane fantasy films with Audrey Hepburn paired with Gary Cooper or Fred Astaire. The reason I found this movie compelling is that it *WASN'T* about some Dream Factory BS with Hungarian violinists or musical numbers, it was about two real people.dealing with the very real problem of age difference. And the more I see of Kim Novak, the more I respect her as an actress and not just as a piece of eye candy. I found her performance in Middle of the Night totally believable, given her background and family situation. Now realistically, the chances for any long range success between those two probably wouldn't have been all that great, given March's anxieties and given the backstabbing and kvetching from their respective families and so-called "friends". But to dwell on that is to completely miss the point. To me this movie is in many ways a lot like another of Paddy Chayefsky's great works, the much- and justly celebrated Marty: A story about two lonely people who face up to life and have the courage to love.

*ALSO, STOP SHOWING MORE 'THINGS' WITH SUBTITLES.* Leo, there are always plenty of remedial reading class available in most cities and towns in this great country of ours. And now thanks to the miracle of this "internet", you can even find them online!!! http://www.time4learning.com/reading-programs.shtml