AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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..so it's not really a twist. Maybe we can go to Chubby Checker for a ruling.
Me, I go to the Chubster for his tasty Peppermint Lounge patties, but I'd still say that the ending to Black Angel would qualify as a twist. It's somewhat predictable only if you've seen a thousand noirs and can begin to pick up on plot patterns. Depends on how high a standard you'd be holding it to.
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Thanks, Andy. For those who want to see Dan Duryea as a flawed hero, Black Angel is on YouTube.
Just watched it, and while it's not quite up to Too Late For Tears, it's still a shame that it's a Universal that TCM hasn't yet gotten a hold of. Nice little plot twist at the end, even if it isn't too hard to figure out well before that.
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Play ball! A clip of Dan Duryea, along with Winchester 73 co-stars Jimmy Stewart and Shelley Winters, meeting the Cleveland Indians.
Watching Shelley's form at bat, it's apparent that she was wise to stick to her Hollywood career.
[media]
[media]Nice clip. That old guy in the Indians uniform was none other than Hall of Famer Tris Speaker.
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Black Angel, one of the few films of the '40s in which Dan Duryea was the lead.
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Reading through this thread I was shocked Sanders was never chosen. And he never had a SUTS day either?
Well I hope TCM is inspired by this thread.
At this point I'm half wondering if some unknown Sanders hater isn't blackmailing some unknown TCM programmer, since there's no rational reason for ignoring an actor of Sanders' stature for these many years. But hope springs eternal.
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This movie is chock-full of your favorite WB lead and supporting actors. Warren William at his fast-talking, unprincipled, manipulating best. One of the few actors who could play a complete rogue you can't help admiring. A young--a very young Bette Davis, firey and astringent. Guy Kibbee at his bumpkin-best (even denser than his 42nd Street gull).
None of the movies of the post-code era exceed or even match it for its depiction of the political process as a corrupt fake. While the ending doesn't do justice to the rest of the movie, it still packs a lot of clever rat-a-tat dialog, flawlessly delivered.
Wasn't Bette Davis slinky?
The Dark Horse is one of my all time favorite "political" movies, light years above sentimental fluff like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. The best line in it came from William, when speaking of Guy Kibbee, he said "Every time he opens his mouth he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge".
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Thank goodness for DVRs, right..? One thing we have to keep in mind is that TCM airs 24 hours of classic films every day of the year. A channel like FXM Retro only spends part of its day broadcasting a limited library of films (from one studio).
I use a DVD recorder rather than a DVR, and it's safe to say that the overwhelming majority of great films I've gotten off TCM have been between midnight and 8:00 PM the next day, probably well over 90%. Their prime time movies are a great introduction for new TCM viewers, but after a year or two it seems that they're nearly 100% repeats, with a few sterling exceptions like Too Late For Tears. The only upside to this scheduling pattern is that I've never had to miss many prime time ballgames in order to catch a movie for the first time.
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Two other films with the "loot scattered to the winds" are TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE and ITS A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD (I know I am stretching the concept here)
There must be some other scenes of a similar nature, any thoughts?Treasure of the Sierra Madre, of course. Haven't seen the other movie.
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Whenever we discuss films about the film industry, FINGER OF GUILT is never mentioned. Maybe it should be. Very good film.
I mentioned Finger of Guilt in part because I'd never even heard of it before its recent 8:15 AM showing just 9 days ago. One of the very few problems I have with TCM is the way it too often relegates little known gems like Finger of Guilt to the daytime or overnight hours, while showing endless prime time repeats of the same old movies.
Of course the chief culprit here is "The Essentials", but this dubious practice also extends to the other six evenings as well. If I weren't retired and able to escape a normal workday, there's very little chance that I would've ever discovered Finger of Guilt, or many other hundreds of forgotten movies of similarly high quality. In many ways TCM is a bit like our health care system: You don't really get full value out of it until you turn 65.
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One other nice little feature to note about Too Late For Tears: With the brief close-up of Liz Scott lying dead outside her hotel after she'd fallen off the balcony, it joins The Killing and Armored Car Robbery to complete a holy trio of noir endings where the loot is scattered to the winds, even if in this case the visual effect wasn't quite as dramatic.
In fact, since Too Late For Tears was released prior to both of those other movies, I almost wonder whether those other two filmmakers didn't borrow the idea and take it up to a higher level, first in Armored Car Robbery and then even more dramatically in The Killing. In any case, it was a nice little touch.
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Great post. I hadn't thought of it quite in the way you describe-- but yes, if Sanders is selected as Star of the Month on TCM, I agree that it will pave the way for other second leads to be so honored.
As well it should. And after watching Richard Basehart give another first rate performance in the largely unknown Finger of Guilt, his name popped into mind as another underrated actor who's most deserving of a SOTM treatment. Not only is he in many memorable noirs, but I just now see that he once played the lead role in a movie called Hitler! Great googamooga!
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Lets hope that Mother Nature is a noir fan and gives everyone a break for those couple of hours on Friday night. I get my viewing through a local cable service but they get many of their feeds by satellite and TCM is one of those channels. So heavy rain/snow storms can mess up my picture as well.
That's exactly why I switched five years ago from DirectTV to Verizon Fios. Now if I can only figure out how to block those monthly "Emergency Test System" reports, or whatever they call them, that cut out two big chunks of Wanda the other night.
Right now looking at the TCM scheduling this is a one time viewing, but hopefully the film will be available for many future viewings (maybe TOO LATE FOR TEARS can become the "new" NORTH BY NORTHWEST)
That'd be like a dream come true. Anyone who's never seen Too Late For Tears is missing both Liz Scott's and Dan Duryea's signature performances. The film that precedes it (The Racket) also has Scott, but she's too much the Good Girl in that one, and Robert Ryan's Nick Scanlon walks away with the show. Scott's only really "Scott" when she's playing pure evil, as in Too Late For Tears or Dead Reckoning.
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Thank you, but I dunno....while I will claim "Christ on a cracker" as an LHF original, it's entirely possible someone has said it some time before me.
"Sweet Fancy Moses" though is pure genius. I'm not in that realm. Also genius was the term "full body dry-heave" to describe Elaine's dancing in that episode. It's one of the few episodes and quotes I remember from SEINFELD.
I dunno that it's the only one worth remembering....
"You gotta question? You ask the 8-ball!"
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If you ask me, there ought to be a minimum two year moratorium placed on tributes to the following people on TCM:
Bette Davis
Joan Crawford
Cary Grant
John Wayne
Katharine Hepburn
Barbara Stanwyck
I like the work of all of those people and some of them appeared in my favorite movies, but there are other very worthy performers whose careers merit the attention of TCM
I completely agree with this thought, even though I'm a big fan of all of those names except for Wayne. Too much of a good thing is still too much.
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See if this link works. It did when I previewed it and tested it:
http://www.tcm.com/schedule/monthly.html?tz=est&sdate=2015-10-01
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yup, that worked
Thanks!
Not for me. They must know that I don't approve of Niven. Maybe they'll get around to Sanders on the 100th anniversary of his death, after they've honored Al Jolson and every member of the Mickey Mouse Club.
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Well, that is an interesting point and I agree with you there. But my comment was meant to remind the OP that there are several things wrong with the casting and portrayals of these characters-- it is more than just anglos in yellow face that makes the film as problematic as it is.
Completely agree. The contrast between A Majority of One and the terrific film that preceded it (Bridge to the Sun) was like night and day. Imagine if James Shigeta's role had been played by Marlon Brando or Alec Guinness. All the great acting in the world wouldn't have made up for the disconnect that would have resulted from a white Englishman or American trying to portray a Japanese diplomat married to an American woman in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. In A Majority of One, Hollywood once again took the all too easy path of going for Big Names rather than any semblance of authenticity, not to mention believability. By contrast, the casting in Bridge to the Sun enabled us to concentrate on what was a very powerful (and true) story. And having Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well and Scandal immediately preceding it made for one of the best 1-2-3 punches I've yet to see on TCM.
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Wiki has an article on Cosmo Kramer, yada yada yada,
quite informative on his employment and financial
situation.
That's a fabulous wiki piece, telling me everything I knew about Cosmo's work history in pieces but never put together.
Of course on the other side, there's also the allusion in several episodes ("The Andrea Doria" among them) to the opening of various rent controlled apartments, which if you got one of those before 1988 (when the show began with Kramer already moved in) might have been going for as little as a few hundred dollars a month. I don't think it was ever explicitly stated that Kramer had inherited a rent controlled apartment, but in any case New York City in the 80's bore little resemblance to the New York City of today. There were still lots of (relatively) affordable apartments to be had, with only small year-to-year rent increases allowed.
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Great story. Add The Ladykillers (1955) to this list!
I'm glad you mentioned that film. I recorded it way back in 2010 but it got buried under an avalanche of Kurosawas that I was fixated on that month, and I never got around to seeing it. But reading the plot summary, it sounds definitely worth watching.
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Agreed. Plus everything was in b&w on the home television - at least in my house.
The first show I ever saw on a color TV was the 1964 World Series between the Cardinals and the Yankees. The colors were blue and red. The effect wasn't that much of an improvement over what you could have gotten by putting one of these colored plastic sheets over your black & white TV screen.
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I can do it with many "Seinfeld" episodes.
By this time I think I can recite every line from every Seinfeld episode. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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Other hugely successful adventure films in the early 50s set in Africa include THE AFRICAN QUEEN, THE SNOWS OF KILIMAJARO (also with Ava Gardner), and WHITE WITCH DOCTOR (the last two with Susan Hayward). Yes, exotic locales in Technicolor (and soon, in widescreen) was one of the ways movie moguls hoped to lure back the audiences they were then losing to tv, by giving them spectacle they could not find on the small screen.
I think just the fact that these films were in Technicolor explains a lot of their appeal. I know that when I first started going to movies as a small child in the early 50's, seeing that "Color By TECHNICOLOR" imprint during the opening credit lines made it seem like a special event, and not just one more movie. Of course the irony is that nearly all of the films from the 20's through the 50's that I cherish today were shot in black and white, while those Technicolor movies mostly seem like cotton candy fluff, but at the time the sheer newness (and beauty) of it all was far more important than anything as pedestrian as an interesting plot. Plots were for grownups.
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Just curious, could you have been arrested for what you were doing?
Let's put it this way: At one point we were renting the first episode of The Lone Ranger, along with an episode of The Mickey Mouse Club (including the original "Brusha, brusha, brusha" Ipana commercials) and 4 other half hour TV shows, to the ABC-Paramount theater chain, as part of a package we called "An Evening of Nostalgia". The manager of their Greensboro theater asked me in delighted wonder, "Where did you ever come up with these things?" It might have interested him to know that The Lone Ranger and the Mickey Mouse Club both originally aired on the ABC network! Small world, indeed.
I suppose that whoever held the copyrights might have made a stink and issued a cease-and-desist, but fortunately this was at a time when few studios were hiring million dollar lawyers to put a stop to a harmless pair of temporary hustlers who weren't costing them a dime. That sort of paranoia came later.
And in fact, just a few years later, there was a mention of what we were doing in either Time or Newsweek, even though no specifics were given. And within a year or two after that, we were seeing all of "our" most popular shows being shown once again in re-runs, after they'd mostly all dropped out of sight by the late 60's. So in a way you might say that we'd presented the copyright holders with a free bit of extensive market research and product testing, but in any event nobody ever complained.
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Kay Starr is still alive? So glad to hear that! Here's her biggest hit:
I've probably heard Starr's version of "Wheel of Fortune" 20 times in the past month, ever since the soundtrack from L.A. Confidential began its occupation of my car's CD player and announced it had no intention of leaving. That may be the greatest movie soundtrack of all time, at least if you don't count adaptations from plays like My Fair Lady.
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Too Late For Tears
in General Discussions
Posted
Lizabeth Scott is really two actresses, not one. As a "good girl", as in Martha Ivers or The Company She Keeps, she runs the gamut between maudlin and pedestrian. But as a femme fatale, as in Too Late For Tears or Dead Reckoning, she's virtually unequaled as a character of Pure Evil. And that's the Liz Scott I choose to remember.