AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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Just finished watching Storm Warning for the second time, one in a very good run of Ginger Rogers' movies that have been running all day and will continue up to prime time.
I've always loved Ginger in almost any role, but I've gotta say that in Storm Warning she must have had a makeup artist who worked faster than Billy the Kid could draw a gun.
Five whips right to the face, and afterwards not a mark! Holy Moley and Great Guggamugga! No blood, no seared flesh, and as far as the camera could reveal, not even a bruise!
Jeez, five whips like that and most of us would've been passed out and disfigured for life, but not Ms. Rogers. Margaret Thatcher may have been the Iron Lady, but my girl Ginger sure had an iron puss.
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Eli Wallach is older than Olivia deHavilland? I thought he was a good decade younger........
I was going straight from the IMDB list. If I'm wrong, so are they.
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Hell, that swill they were slopping wasn't even pasteurized. The scandal!
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1939 had way too much schmaltz and fantasy for my taste. 1950 had far more great films of a much more realistic nature, from All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle and all the way through the rest of the alphabet. I'd take those two alone over anything made in 1939.
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Something that has always puzzled me, is why we hate real people who cheat, rob, murder, and steal, yet we are so willing to like them and adore them when they do it in movies. I always feel sorry for Bogart up in the High Sierras, hiding out from those mean old cops who what to kill him, and I would love for him to escape, with the jewels, and live happily ever after with Ida.
That's probably because in the movies we're allowed to see a more complex and human picture of the "bad guy", whereas in real life we often don't get "the other side of the story".
OTOH I'm not sure too many people were rooting for Tommy Udo in the final shootout scene of Kiss of Death! So there are limits to our forgiveness.
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And I'm always so willing to forgive the mean crooked killer, Kathy Moffitt, if she would just date me.
Hell, in Ava Gardner's case I'd even testify that Kitty was innocent!
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I think that TCM should honor Mickey Rooney in the same way that baseball is honoring Jackie Robinson after Mariano Rivera's retirement.
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So what's the earliest movie with a still-living cast member?
For the record, the oldest living actor / actress is Luise Rainer, who will be 104 in January.
The oldest currently active actor is Eli Wallach, who will be 98 on Pearl Harbor Day.
And the oldest living "big name" star is Olivia deHavilland, who was born on the first day of the Battle of the Somme: July 1, 1916. Kirk Douglas is close, as he's just 5 months younger than Olivia.
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I'm sure they'll be some other great choices, including Wilder, Hitchcock, etc., but my money's on "The K", Akiro Kurosawa. These 20 films alone lap the field of any other director:
Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
Drunken Angel (1948)
Stray Dog (1949)
Scandal (1950)
Rashomon (1950)
The Idiot (1951)
Ikiru (1952)
Seven Samurai (1954)
I Live in Fear (1955)
Throne of Blood (1957)
The Lower Depths (1957)
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Yojimbo (1961)
High and Low (1963)
Red Beard (1965)
Dodes?ka-den (1970)
Kagemusha (1980)
Luckily TCM played them all back in March of 2010, because otherwise except for Seven Samurai, the viewings here are few and far between.
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When you watch a movie, do you lose interest in the character if they behave in a way you deem to be morally repugnant? And what, in your view, constitutes "moral repugnance"?
That's a very tough question to answer. Generally I'd say no, but when a character seems to become little more than a vessel for making an overblown point, it can sometimes color my view of the actor. Best example that I can think of off the top of my head was in The Caine Mutiny. When Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer) made that over the top speech following Keefer's acquittal, placing a loon like Queeg on some sort of a pedestal and absurdly making him into some sort of a victim, it took me almost forever even to think about watching any movie with Jose Ferrer in it. It isn't as if the smarmy Keefer didn't deserve the tonguelashing, but it's as if Ferrer was totally dismissing the chaos with which Queeg had wreaked upon his crew, relieving Queeg of any personal responsibility.
The irony is that it was only after seeing Ferrer brilliantly play an unadulterated villain in Whirlpool that the spell was broken, and I could once again appreciate his acting skills, which at least in Whirlpool were quite considerable.
As for what constitutes "moral repugnance", that's also not always easy to pin down, but any act of *gratuitous* cruelty, either physical or psychological, unprovoked and undeserved, will certainly turn me against a character, though it doesn't make me turn against the actor, or even lose interest in his character. My problem with Ferrer in The Caine Mutiny was that he wasn't just acting like a prig with a rivet up his ###, he was doing it in an overly melodramatic and yet almost rote-like manner. Put Barbara Stanwyck in a Navy uniform and she could have played it infinitely better.
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Easy: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Given my general opinion of musicals made after about 1933, that must have been a 100 to 1 shot entering the starting gate. But I loved it the first time I saw it in the 70's, and I loved it even more when TCM ran it on Catherine Denueve's SUTS day.
But I don't think that that sort of openmindedness is ever going to work with Jerry Lewis.
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It is interesting that you being this topic up of Scott as the femme fatale because my gut reaction would be that she was mostly that, when the actual facts are different.
I've often wondered the same thing about where Scott got the reputation of being nothing but a femme fatale. I can think of a few of her roles like that ( Too Late For Tears, Easy Living, Bad For Each Other ), but it seems as if more often she's playing either a "nice girl" or at worst a victim of circumstance.
As for her acting; I view her like I view George Raft. There is a certain style and look that really fits the movies they are in, but their acting ability is limited. But they could be effective when the director understood their limitations.
Spot on observation. Both Scott and Raft were as good or as pedestrian as the script permitted. Scott was very good in those femme fatale roles, but to watch her be the "good girl" alongside Jane Greer's "bad girl" in The Company She Keeps is almost embarrassing.
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I'm assuming that Reservoir Dogs will be scheduled at whatever hour the late Lawrence Tierney will find most convenient for his viewing pleasure. Or else.
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A thread like this shouldn't be without a mention of perhaps the greatest mid-career "type" transformation of all: Dick Powell.
Powell first became known as "one of Broadway's better known juveniles" in musicals, and then made a mark in light comedies like Christmas in July. But then he did a 180 in Murder, My Sweet, (Dir: Edward Dmytryk) and wound up playing cops and criminals in some of the best noir movies ever made. He also went to to play in more than a few non-noir dramatic roles like The Bad and the Beautiful, and never returned to any lighter roles.
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Fred Astaire's movies all just kind of run together in one big fuzzy blur, but to each his own. And after getting Alfred Hitchcock, Kim Novak, Vincent Price, Burt Lancaster and the Story of Film series along with tons of great silents from September through early December, at this point I wouldn't complain if the SOTM were Annette Funicello.
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It doesn't look like IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is being shown this December.
Did TCM air it last December? I don't remember.
NBC owns the exclusive TV rights to It's A Wonderful Life for the next gazillion years. About the only way to see that uncut and commercial free until about the fifth or sixth coming of Jesus is to buy it or to rent it.
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*Your take on things stuns me sometimes, Dobbs.*
ROFL
Lemme guess here, Helen....it's stuff like how Fred put this little nugget down HERE as just ONE example, isn't it!
*FredCDobbs wrote: There were a lot of Jews on early TV but as a kid I think most people didn't realize they were Jews, but thought only that they were "white", such as Milton Berle, Sid Casear, Jerry Lewis, and others.*
LOL
In defense of Fred, I know exactly what he meant by that. He's a few years older than I am, but when I was a kid and watched Sid Caesar and Sgt. Bilko with the faithfulness only a kid can have, I couldn't have told you their religion on a bet, and my parents certainly never mentioned it. OTOH it wasn't too hard to tell that they weren't black.
Of course if I'd been raised Jewish, it probably would have been brought to my attention and pointed to with pride, but since our "religion" consisted solely of reading the Sunday newspapers, Caesar and Silvers might as well have been Catholic or Coptic for all I knew. You also have to remember that this was the age where the word was assimilation, and as far as ethnic groups making a public display of their distinctions that anyone outside the group even noticed, that was pretty much restricted to the St. Patrick's Day parades of the Irish. Identity politics as we know it today was something that barely registered on the mainstream radar.
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In fact a former GF and I (she's now a prof at Brooklyn Law School) were the first people to show Reefer Madness outside the AFI in the early 70's, before NORML and New Line Cinema picked up on it. We saw it at the AFI as part of a propaganda festival and were so taken by it we got the Library of Congress to make us a print, and then took it around to college campuses to packed houses. So yeah, I'm well aware that it originally wasn't supposed to be a comedy.
Between 1971 and 1972 I saw it so many times that I can recite my favorite lines in my sleep. . . .*"Gosh! Hot chocolate! Thanks, Mrs. Lane!!"*
"Tell me, was the person killed?
"Fortunately he wasn't, but that's still no excuse for hit and run driving!"
"Why don't you get over that mother complex?"
"There are millions of two bit pieces just begging to be taken. Don't be a dope!"
" All right, Pete. You know what my policy has always been. If the boys aren't satisfied, I'm always glad to have them retire. . . .retire *permanently.* "
"Yes. I remember. Just a young boy... under the influence of drugs... who killed his entire family with an axe."
"What do you want?
" *Bring me some reefers!* "
And while Dave O'Brien later achieved mini-fame by playing in all those Pete Smith shorts, what also strikes me is the uncanny resemblance between "Hot Fingers Pirelli" (the permanently stoned piano player) and Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld, at least during some of his zanier moments.
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I had a classmate in the mid-1950s whose grandfather owned a TV store, and he said black people were buying TVs and watching most of the main white programs, since those were the only ones on the air.
I also heard rumors that black people generally didn't like the Amos 'n' Andy show, but they did like the white shows, which is a little difficult to understand. Do you have any theories about that?
My main theory about that is that it's a small sample size you're talking about, but it's also likely that Amos 'n' Andy would polarize black opinion in ways that Milton Berle or Sgt. Bilko never would.
Another problem was that blacks were only about 12% of the population, and TV producers made shows for the majority race so they could get the majority of the viewers and make money with their majority sponsors.
There were a lot of Jews on early TV but as a kid I think most people didn't realize they were Jews, but thought only that they were "white", such as Milton Berle, Sid Casear, Jerry Lewis, and others.
During TV's early years one of the most popular shows was The Goldbergs, which to this day is still often described as "the most 'Jewish' show ever on TV". Though on a related note, it's also been observed that movies with identifiable Jewish characters and themes (like the beautifully made Symphony of Six Million, which TCM runs every year or two) disappeared almost completely after the early 30's. The glorification of the American Melting Pot didn't really revive itself again until World War 2, when it was a sub-theme in about every other war movie featuring American soldiers.
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This doesn't have anything to do with either of the movies on this thread, but I've just been watching Road Gang, and I noticed that the judge (Edward J. LeSaint) who sentenced Donald Woods in that movie also played the judge in Reefer Madness. Since that's one of the great comedies and a longtime favorite of mine, I checked out his filmography and discovered he'd played judges in *26* different movies! I've got to believe that that's some sort of a record.
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Days like this are what makes some of us keep coming back to TCM over and over, even when all of the movies have been shown before. If I were thinking along the lines of a 1920's Old Gold cigarette ad, my pitch for this lineup would be "Not A Clinker In A Carload." The Muni film was the highlight, but I can't think of any of them I'd mind seeing again.
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That's a very good take on the two movies, slayton. As you note, the Muni movie was based on a true story, I Am A Fugitive From A Georgia Chain Gang!, written by Robert Burns, and it stands out as a movie for *NOT* forcing a contrived happy ending on the story. *"I STEAL!"* is an unforgettable last line, uttered in darkness as Muni steals off into the night, and you don't have to have seen the movie half a dozen times to remember it forever. You can count on one hand the number of Hollywood endings with that sort of final note.
Up until the end, the Dix movie is just as brutal and realistic, but then Hollywood steps in. The movies I'd compare Hell's Highway to even more than to Fugitive would be Wild Boys of The Road and Heroes For Sale. Those may be two of the best social dramas made in the entire history of movies, but both of them have those "now that FDR is in the White House, things like this will soon be a thing of the past" messages grafted onto the ending. In both cases you can see the filmmakers' motivation for not wanting to leave their audiences feeling nearly suicidal as they walk out of the theatre, but it does tend to lessen the impact of the message somewhat.
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Fred, you're right about the fact that the radio version was the initial lightning rod, but even the TV show was "controversial" right from the start. Whites loved it, but blacks were split, because of the fact that this was the *only* show on which black actors played leading roles. The main stars on the TV version, Spencer Williams (Andy) and Tim Moore (The Kingfish), had been staples in black produced films and in comedy routines for many years, playing essentially the same sort of roles they did on Amos 'n' Andy, but since those shows were pretty much shown to black audiences only there wasn't the same sort of objection.
Think about it: Whites in general never took much offense to shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, but just imagine if all the *other* shows on TV portrayed nothing but black people in leading roles, depicting them in all walks of life and with all degrees of intelligence, while at the same time the *only* show with an all-white cast was that one. It's a lot easier to laugh at yourself when much of the rest of the world isn't viewing you as some sort of an exotic semi-human species.
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I saw a very interesting show on PBS once about the controversy over "Amos and Andy". There were some who felt that the comic genius of Tim Moore got lost in the shuffle and others who were against it ever being shown again.
I used to show bootleg 16mm prints of Amos 'n' Andy in the 70's as part of a mini-festival we called "An Evening of Nostalgia" that featured six old TV shows from the 50's. We varied the program from campus to campus, but one of the main constants we discovered was that whenever we showed Amos 'n' Andy, the African American percentage of the audience skyrocketed. And if you could judge their sentiments by their laughter and their comments as they were leaving the auditorium, they *loved* it.
What I think people often forget is that the main objection to Amos 'n' Andy wasn't so much the way the characters were portrayed. After all, characters like Andy, Sapphire and the Kingfish were a longstanding part of the Chitlin' Circuit tradition. And yes, Tim Moore was an absolutely sublime actor, as were Spencer Williams and Ernestine Wade.
No, the real objection to Amos 'n' Andy wasn't so much the show itself. It was the fact that this was the *ONLY* way (other than as servants in white dramas and sit-coms) that blacks were being portrayed on television. This wasn't anything like The Birth of a Nation, which for all its cinematic brilliance was little more than a racist diatribe hiding behind a thin veil of artistry, Griffith's protestations to the contrary.
Movie Characters You Want to Bundle Up & Take Care Of
in General Discussions
Posted
Oh, please. It's gotta be Sidney Fox in The Mouthpiece. 4' 10" and with a Kentucky accent that would melt the ice in a thousand mint juleps. No wonder even the ubercad Warren William finally shed his villain's cape at the end and repented on her behalf.
Yes, I know she was really born in New York City, and may never have even planted a toe in the Bluegrass State. But to me she's my Kentucky dream and I'm sticking to it.