AndyM108

I've never met any serial killers, but I used to gamble in pool with two guys who later were convicted in well publicized murder cases. They couldn't have been more unalike. One of them was a congenitally violent type who once threatened to get a gun out of his car if I quit when I was ahead, even though I'd told him two hours earlier when I had to pull up, win or lose. A year or so later, this guy thought his girlfriend was cheating on him, so he followed her from Virginia to Oregon and carved her up with a knife. The other one was a mild mannered guy who was always super friendly to everyone and a total gentleman on the pool tables. But at daybreak one morning he went broke for the umpteenth time on a bad matchup, and later that day agreed to a contract murder of a government bureaucrat's wife. It was the bureaucrat's idea to use the insurance money to set up an after hours gambling joint in southern Maryland, with the pool player as his manager. He'd been trying for months to get the pool player to go along with his scheme, to no avail before. After a nationwide manhunt, the murderer got the death penalty imposed on him by future Watergate judge John Sirica, but the Supreme Court threw out the death penalty a few months later and yada yada yada he's back in the pool room today. Nobody who didn't know him from "then" (the early 70's) would have a clue that he'd ever been involved in a ghastly and gruesome murder. Oh, and the bureaucrat broke down in court during his own trial, claimed he'd found Jesus, and got off with a few years. Never mind that he was the one who paid for the murder of his own wife. I guess it goes without saying that he was white and the pool player was black. Not that either of these guys were serial killers, but they would have both made interesting if opposing types of movie criminals.

That still you're showing is sublime, though it looks more like a composite than an actual scene. But Burr is definitely on his game in this one, and his whole hulking persona is indeed quite reminiscent of Cregar. But if you want the real counterpart to Cregar in I Wake Up Screaming, you don't need to go any further than Richard Boone's rendition of the Cornell role, in the 1953 remake of IWUS known as Vicki. I couldn't see how it could be humanly possible for anyone to match Cregar's performance, but somehow Boone pulled it off.

Rope isn't bad, but Richard Fleischer's Compulsion was a much better take on the Leopold-Loeb case. Orson Welles' rendition of Clarence Darrow's final summary for the defense was a performance for the ages. In real life, Loeb wound up being murdered by a fellow inmate in jail after allegedly making sexual advances. This resulted in a memorable newspaper lead, written by Ed Lahey in the Chicago Daily News: *"Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition."*

Don't know what the problem might have been, but in any case it's now been fixed. http://www.tcm.com/schedule/monthly.html

A good friend of mine who used to be an AFI programmer and who currently writes the notes for New York's Film Forum said that September's TCM schedule blew his mind. Given at how this guy has probably seen well over 10,000 movies in his life, I took that as a pretty impressive tribute.

The more Kirk Douglas movies I see, the higher my opinion of him gets, in spite of the fact that he performed in several of my least favorite genres. You might call him the male counterpart of Barbara Stanwyck, in that he's both a "star" *and* an "actor", and like Stanwyck (but very few others), he excelled in every type of film he played in, from noirs to westerns to serious social drama. Definitely one of the very best..

I wouldn't say [Raft] was "good looking", gangsters usually are NOT good looking, but he did have a 'certain look' about him. As I mentioned before, he did look like a typical gangster, that's probably what got him the roles, not his acting skills. Well, don't forget he *DID* flip one hell of a quarter. ;-)

MacLane didn't have either the looks or the charisma to be an A-level star, but he was perfect for playing a certain type of rough but slightly dimwitted gangster or lawman, highly reflective of millions of such types you find in the real world both then and now. I must have seen him in at least 40 or 50 movies by now, and I can't think of any that he hasn't added to in some way. Can't say the same thing about George Raft, who was basically a good character actor who was way over his head in nearly all of his miscast A-level leads. They Drive By Night was about the only one of those A movies where he didn't come across as a cigar store Indian.

I've bought dvd's from LovingTheClassics and have found them fairly reputable, but what I can't figure out is this: With most if not all of those movies supposedly in the public domain, why don't they run on TCM? I've just looked through their 54 noir titles, and I've seen only a relative handful of them show up on TCM over the past 4+ years. Just to take two outstanding examples: Sterling Hayden's The Naked Alibi, and Scott Brady's Undertow. If LTC can make copies and sell them, why can't TCM play them?

The Big Parade isn't in the top 200. Look for yourself: http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm Of course while that list reflects constant (2013) dollars, you also have to realize two other important factors: The growth in population; and the increase in ticket prices well beyond overall inflation. This is why nearly all of the top grossing movies are of more recent vintage, and why GWTW's #1 position in spite of all its disadvantages is an even more stunning testimony to its popularity. The first factor is obvious, but the second factor is just as important. For instance, the average ticket price in 1956 was 50 cents, which with inflation is still only $4.29. But in the real world of 2013, the average ticket price is $8.16. This means that for a typical 1956 movie to gross as much as a typical 2013 movie, it would have had to have sold 90% more tickets, at a time when the U.S. population was only 53% of what it is today. And in fact, most of the money made by Fantasia, Pinocchio and Bambi has been taken in after 1980 in re-releases. That's where the real money often lies.

This factoid tells us more about movie ticket price inflation than anything else, but though GWTW is the #1 grossing movie of all time in inflation adjusted dollars ($1,648,684,100), the only other pre-1945 films to make the top 50 are Fantasia (#22), Pinocchio (#29), and Bambi (#49). Other than GWTW there's not a single other pre-1945 movie in the top 200 that features human actors.

Sorry, but I have to say it just one more time... *GLENDA!!!!!* And as a bonus, Barton MacLane and Tom Kennedy in all the Torchy movies. But most of all.... *GLENDA!!!*

*GLENDA!!!* She's not my favorite actress by any means. Too much concentration in B movies, few really meaty dramatic roles, and not a long enough peak. But dammit, I can't think of any actress not named Barbara Stanwyck whose name on the billing draws me like a fly to a honeycomb. Even that euphonious name of hers adds to her appeal. It rolls off the tongue like that poetic fish in The Lady Eve. Other than Deneuve day with its plethora of premieres, Glenda day is definitely my highlight of the month. And it was about time.

*Of course the rights to the music are probably easier to get than for movies, but imagine!* *A special channel for "Screwball Comedy", or "Film Noir". Or possibly by decade, like "1930-40" and so on.* *I know we already have "Starz" and "Encore" that show uncut movies for free, but the age and types of movies are mixed, with some movie from last year possibly being followed by some flick from the '80's.* *Logistically speaking, from a business standpoint, such a thing would be far fetched, I realize. But, doesn't it sound HEAVENLY?* In a word: *No.* Much as I love to complain about the insufferable Mickey Rooney and too many musicals and westerns, I prefer the current version of TCM for the same reason I enjoy living in an integrated neighborhood, and for the same reason I'd rather participate in forums with a variety of views rather than forums where everyone is just reinforcing each other's opinions. If we started shuffling the many TCM genres into separate channels, I'm sure I wouldn't have seen The Naked Spur or The Violent Men, because out of inertia / force of habit I'd usually gravitate to the Noir / Gangster channel and avoid the Westerns channel altogether. And since I would almost certainly screen out the Musicals channel, I'd likely have missed The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and heaven forbid, 42nd Street and Footlight Parade. And yet my ability to summon up Jimmy Cagney's version of "Shanghai Lil" in my mind at any time I want to has undoubtedly improved my overall quality of life by at least 2%. There is, however, one channel I'd like to see established as a supplement rather than as a breakway, and that's a channel for foreign films. Of course the rights issues would make that impossible to sustain, but given that TCM probably averages no more than 3 or 4 foreign movies a week, and given the vast number of classic foreign films out there that we never get a chance to see, a Foreign movie channel would be a real addition to what we have today.

Not having watched The Fugitive on TV when I was growing up, David Janssen was a first time experience in Twenty Plus Two. I kind of enjoyed it mainly because I'll go for any film with the arch-villain Brad Dexter in it, but other than that nice little bonus, it struck me as kind of a low budget James Bond. Not so much in the plot, but in the buttoned-down look of the hero, and as you say, in the overall emotionless portrayal of the characters. But then I was never much of a James Bond fan, either.

*Ah shoot! These premieres almost all occurred during the day. Must.check.days.more.often.* Here's a hot tip: The overwhelming majority of the more interesting and unusual movies that TCM shows are nearly always scheduled between midnight and 8:00 the next evening, and particularly from about 2:00 in the morning until 6:00 the next afternoon. Prime time is generally reserved for the time tested and true (like "The Essentials"), which means in practice that it's mostly all repeats. When I was working full time, and all I had a chance to see on TCM was its prime time offerings, it struck me as a very good but not great station, with very few movies that I hadn't seen many times over at old time repertory theaters. It wasn't until I had the time to go over my Now Playing guide, and got a good DVD recorder to cover movies that I couldn't watch "live", that I was fully able to appreciate the wonders of our beloved network.

ltguid, I agree with you that it'd be great to have a Mastroianni Day, and I can also live without Ramon Novarro. *BUT.*.. if you've never heard of the great *GLENDA FARRELL,* I'm going to recommend you for a good Hollywood re-education camp. If you like Joan Blondell, you'll love Glenda. And if you've never heard of Joan Blondell, that re-education camp will not be providing you with popcorn.

Dangerous Crossing has shown on the Fox Movie Channel about 30 times this year, but for those who haven't seen it, it's definitely one of the best offerings of tomorrow's tribute. I'm also looking forward to Twenty Plus Two and Apartment For Peggy, both of which are also TCM premieres and neither of which I've seen. Too bad we're not getting Letter to Three Wives, but that one's played several times in recent years and I'm sure we'll be getting it again.

*<< "QUITE A LOT OF PEOPLE DIDN'T LIKE NEWER MOVIES " >>* *TRUE!!* *That's WHY They Subscribe to TCM* Personally my devotion to TCM has *nothing* to do with any dislike of new movies. It's got everything to do with the absence of commercials, and the fact that they screen movies from every conceivable genre, and from every era from the 1890's right up to the near present. It would be a terrible move on TCM's part to restrict itself to films from only two or three decades, simply because a small number of people have a bee in their bonnets about movies after 1960.

*Can't wait to see what happens at the start of September when certain people find out TCM is showing a film from 2011!* I sure won't be among the complainers. I've just mapped out the schedule, and September is *by far* TCM's best month of 2013, at least up to now. The Story of Film commences, Kim Novak is SOTM, and there's a humongous Hitchcock retrospective with many of his newly re-released silent films,. And best of all, there are lots and lots of TCM premieres, *AND ONLY ONE MICKEY ROONEY!* I'm looking at it as the anti-31 Days of Oscar, and counting it as a blessing.

*Every time I do a search from the search engine, I get taken to a page with Charlie Chaplin's picture which says "404 Page Not Found".* Clearly that was a sly tribute to the 1942 version of The Gold Rush. ;-)

Almost by definition, SUTS is going to seem less exciting with each passing year, since the longer we watch TCM, the more and more we're seeing movies we've seen many times before. Short of sending amnesia pills along with Now Playing subscriptions, I'm not sure what can be done about this. Doesn't it really come down to the fact that once we've seen all the usual suspects for the third and fourth time, what we really want are more and more premieres? The best SUTS days for me were Gabin, Mifune, Chaney, and Deneuve, because unlike with the tributes to *all* the big Hollywood stars, we got to see a lot of movies for the first time on TCM. Same with those monthly directors' retrospectives, which are almost always much more interesting than the largely repetitious SOTM films. The Kurosawa, Truffaut, Hitchcock, and Hal Roach Studio shorts retrospectives all gave us (or will be giving us) films we hadn't / haven't seen before. It's much harder to do that for almost any Hollywood star or character actor from anytime in the sound era. Even the best of this year's Hollywood SUTS days, Glenda Farrell on the 29th, is running almost nothing but films that have been shown in the past year or so. I'll be glad to see them again, but sometimes there's too much of a good thing.

TikiSoo, you're absolutely right. The age of a movie is the least important thing about it. The great ones transcend their era, but even the lesser ones help us to *understand* their era. Since I'm most interested in the years I don't remember, I tend mostly to gravitate to films from the 40's on back, but on the other hand many of the BEST movies I can think of are much more recent. And I'm glad you mentioned The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. I saw that movie a few years after it came out, just before it disappeared from sight, and I was thrilled to be able to catch (and record) it on TCM when they played it on Joanne Woodward's SUTS day back in 2011. As far as I'm concerned, that film holds up in dramatic terms as well as nearly any movie from the "Classic" or "Golden" eras. It's one of those rare "slice of life" pictures that managed to be poignant without being cloying, and the acting of Woodward, Nell Potts and Roberta Wallach was absolutely extraordinary. Too bad they can't seem to bring it back on a more regular basis.

The last time that The Little Rascals shorts were featured was in January of 2011, when they ran 52 of them in a row from 8:00 one night to 8:00 the next night. I'm sure that TCM would love to show them again, but as was pointed out earlier, the Roach estate is tough to deal with.

November will mark the 50th month that I've been following TCM like a hawk with DVD recorder always on alert, and I think it's finally beginning to dawn on me that from this point forward amnesia would be a big advantage. I can't recall seeing a schedule with so many great movies on it, but also with so few great "classic" movies that I haven't seen on the TCM schedule countless times before. The continuation of The Story of Film series looks good, and of course the foreign movies are always a respite from the Same Old Same Old. But though the offering of "Classic era" films is nearly as good as any month I can remember, just about the only one that really jumps out that I can't remember seeing on TCM before is the 1937 Easy Living with Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold. Even with Burt Lancaster as SOTM there aren't many new ones, and still no Criss Cross. If only I could pop an amnesia pill and start all over again. ;-)