AndyM108

I've probably told this story before on another thread, but those scenes have a particular resonance for me. Back in the early 70's, my former GF and I were returning to Washington from a fairly long trip where we were showing bootleg 16mm prints on college campuses, charging $1.00 per head and averaging over 1000 people per weekend. Most of the take was in small bills, and we stuffed them all into a 20 year old canvas suitcase that by the end of the trip was fairly bulging at the zipper. Yada yada yada our car broke down only a few blocks from our house, which wasn't in the greatest of neighborhoods, and while we were running down the street, one of us dropped the suitcase, it burst one of the seams, and about five or six thousand bucks came spilling onto the sidewalk. Lucky for us it was well after midnight, the street was deserted, and even luckier for us that we'd wrapped tight rubber bands around the bundles of bills. So no harm, no foul, but I'm telling you every time I see The Killing or Armored Car Robbery, my mind goes back about 40 years, and at least in the former case of Sterling Hayden I really start to feel the pain of the robber.

Ya know, there's just something about the sight of a suitcase full of loot flying all over an airport runway that arouses the artist in me.....

Actually I wasn't really trying to correct you so much as I wanted to be able to make a "translation" from one year's box office receipts to another's. I was surprised how easy that turned out to be, with a little assistance from the IMDB and an inflation calculator.

Actually $5.2 million in 1953 is the equivalent of $46.31 million in today's dollars, not $100 million, or about $70 million if you adjust for the fact that movie ticket prices have risen since 1953 at a rate of 51% greater than the CPI. According to the IMDB, that would have made Magambo the 51st highest US-grossing film of 2014, and way below that if you include the rest of the world. OTOH in 1953 Mogambo was the 8th highest grossing film in the U.S. I'll let the experts around here offer their theories on this discrepancy. Today though, it is really hard to believe people lined up to see it because it is a snooze and any greatness Ava's performance could've had is tamped down by her having to appear opposite Grampa Gable and Grace "the human popsicle" Kelly (the latter was also, rather inexplicably, nominated for an Oscar for her work in the film as well.) You're a lot better off watching RED DUST (1933)- the original of which MOREGUMBO is a remake. Agree 100% with you there. Gardner was one of the top screen beauties of all time, but when you take in the total picture she was no Jean Harlow. Gardner made several memorable movies, but Magambo sure wasn't one of them.

What's also great about Armored Car Robbery is that it's a showcase for the talents of William Talman as the chief thug. McGraw is the good guy cop this time, while Talman gets to play a variant of a poor man's Tommy Udo. Nobody can play pure evil quite like Richard Widmark, but Talman does a pretty good imitation of it, along the lines of a Jack Lambert or a Rudy Bond.

Every time I think I've got a movie down cold, a new look at it after a year or two makes me realize how much I can forget. That said, these are hard for me not to remember pretty much everything from start to finish. In all cases, there's one or two memorable scenes or lines that triggers all the memory devices: The Battle of Algiers - The torture scene at the beginning and the haunting soundtrack Open City - Anna Magnani gunned down; the priest shaking his fist and shouting "You will be crushed to the dirt, like vermin" Casablanca - everything The Killers - "Bright boy" and "It's Friday---Don't come in until Monday" What a pair of bookends! The Asphalt Jungle - "Don't bone me" The Big Heat - The scalding coffee toss All About Eve - "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" The Lady Eve - "I positively swill in their ale", and "The fish was a poem" Laura - the theme song Bay of Angels - Jean Moreau nervously flicking her ashes at the roulette table It's a Wonderful Life - Jimmy Stewart singing "Buffalo Gals" Kiss of Death - Richard Widmark's relentless laugh Nightmare Alley - everything Out of the Past - the theme song and Jane Greer's transcendent beauty 42nd Street - "Must've been tough on your mother, not having any children" The Sheep Has Five Legs - Fernandel sweating his life's savings on which sugar cube a fly was going to land on Breaking Away - The start of the race when the crowd breaks out singing "Indiana". I've only been to IU a few times, but that scene still breaks me up in a sentimental way A Star Is Born (Garland version) - "The Man That Got Away" and "This is Mrs. Norman Maine" Libeled Lady - (what else?) "THAT'S ARSON!" Bombshell - The scene where Harlow realizes that Tone's parents are nothing but actors Reefer Madness - "GOSH! HOT CHOCOLATE! THANKS, MRS. LANE!" Baby Face - The panning of the skyscraper windows as Stanwyck sleeps her way to the top The Color of Money - "It's like a nightmare, and it keeps getting worse". This line resonates for me because I've played "Grady Seasons" (Keith "Earthquake" McCready in real life) many times in pool tournaments, and indeed, it's always been a nightmare! The Producers - "Springtime for Hitler" (again, what else?) Tin Men - the entire film from start to finish, a plot obviously inspired by the W. C. Fields short Short Cuts - The chain-saw destruction of Frances McDormond's entire living room furniture, and when she comes home and sees the shambles, her boy calmly sits on the floor and just starts watching TV, totally oblivious to everything.

Gardner also makes for a very convincing homewrecker in the underrated soaper East Side, West Side, where she reaches a level of brazenness about her intents that rivals Joan Crawford's Crystal Allen in The Women. That film has an All-Star cast supreme (Stanwyck, Mason, Heflin, Charisse, etc.), but Gardner's performance still manages to stand out above the crowd.

I haven't done this myself for years, but can't you still request TCM to send you an e-mail reminder for any movie you wish?

The best example of spontaneous singing in a movie I can think of is Alan Hale's rendition of "Young people in love are very seldom hungry", as sung to Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert after he's picked them up hitchhiking in It Happened One Night. Of course Hale then spontaneously tries to steal their luggage as soon as their backs are turned, but we all know you can never trust a traveling troubadour.

What distinguishes Guys and Dolls from the other Runyon film adaptations is that it seems to be the only one where the actual "Runyon" manner of speech is employed throughout the movie, most notably in its complete absence of contracted words. After a while all these "I am going"s and "he is strong enough"s seem more than a little tedious, but that's the way Runyon wrote, so you can not say it's "inauthentic". Runyon came up with some terrific characters, and Lady For A Day seems to capture the Runyon spirit quite well, but give me A. J. Liebling's slightly less fictionalized versions of those characters any time. I'd love to see some indie studio make a movie out of Liebling's classic series of Manhattan sketches that made up his book, The Telephone Booth Indian, along the lines of Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth.

Well, by the time The Bad Seed came around, li'l Shirley would have been too old for the Patty McCormack role. Not to mention that her many fans might not have liked to have seen her electrocuted by an act of God.

That's a point that sounds better in the abstract than in any real world comparison. City kids in the 30's often approximated the speech patterns of Jimmy Cagney, even if sometimes only in imitation. I've heard plenty of people affect conversation along the lines of William Powell or Cary Grant, even if only amateurishly. Many people, at least in the past, strove to emulate the rigid mores of the code era films. And gunfights, murders, and domestic and corporate intrigues are part and parcel of everyday civilization, even if they don't always mimic the movies. All of this may not be "realistic", but at least it's being presented as such. But in all my years, I've never yet heard a single person spontaneously burst out into song as a way of continuing a conversation, and never mind the choreographed arm waving a la Judy Garland or Al Jolson. The only real comparisons to the absurdity of singing dialogue are the special effects (car chases, super hero duels, any animated movies, etc.) you get in certain genres aimed at adolescents of all ages, and even there that's more a wildly exaggerated version of real life than anything that's completely foreign to it. None of this means that some of those musicals can't be fun to watch and brilliantly conceived, but that's a completely different matter. Let's just call them delightful absurdities.

Of course that's the "reason". I was only making a rhetorical point. But the whole concept is an artificial gimmick that demands virtual perfection to make it come off well. Obviously this is nothing but a matter of opinion, even if it's one I hold rather strongly. Not that there aren't some perfectly enjoyable musicals of that sort---Singing in the Rain, Damn Yankees, etc., and to take it to the extreme, the utterly charming Umbrellas of Cherbourg, where every line is sung. But all I was doing with my original comment is distinguishing this sort of musical from the Busby Berkeley / 42nd Street variety, which as a sub-genre I find far less eye-rolling in general. And as for West Side Story, I'd rather hear Lina Lamont accompany a castrati glee club in "Old Man River" than to have to watch that movie all the way through.

I'm talking about the entire concept of gang members breaking out in song at the drop of a hat, complete with arms thrusting in the air as if they were ballet dancers or Judy Garland parodies. I know I'm in a minority here, but that just ain't my cup of tea.

I'd say West Side Story is very much a comedy, even if it's a comedy of the unintentional variety. There are two basic types of musicals: The ones where the actors break out in song at any point for no apparent reason (West Side Story; Singing in the Rain; etc.), and the ones that are basically dramas or comedies centered around the production of a show, with the musical numbers being openly a part of the show itself (42nd Street; A Star Is Born; etc.). Which type are you referring to?

Yeah, I pretty much agree with all that, even though there are still plenty of movies from that period I still enjoy, mainly the noirs and a handful of others where the sincerity is genuine rather than stamped on with a branding iron from the Breen Ranch. Not that the period that followed wasn't often in the thrall of its own focus group-driven story lines and fantasies: See The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider for a few prime examples of that.

That's a good distinction. If I had to pick my personal "Golden Age" it'd probably be 1946-1958 for the noirs and other dramas, with 1927-1933 as a backup for the gangster films and the debauchery, but even my least favorite era (1935-45) has great character actors and the best years of screwball comedy. I always look at movie eras in the same way as I look at categories in a book shop, meaning that while there are some subject I care for more than others, there are always going to be books in nearly every section outside "How to Get Rich", "How to Get Laid", and "How to Find Jesus" that I'll consider buying. The only real problem with movies (and books) is that we're only given one life to enjoy them rather than the necessary 50 or 100.

And about 80% of them ended with either a marriage proposal, a couple re-united after a film-length quarrel, a criminal (or enemy soldier) gunned down, or a criminal sentenced to Old Sparky. "The Golden Age of Breen-approved final scenes" would have been a more accurate description for movies from mid-1934 to the end of World War 2.

Just to be clear, when you say "Golden Age", what specific years are you referring to? I ask only because I've seen some people limit it to a range as narrow as 1934-1948 (from the beginning of the Breen code to the breakup of the studios' vertical monopolies), while others include films all the way up to The Sound of Music. I get the feeling that all some people mean by the term is movies that revel in their escapism. As far as I'm concerned, there's never been a "Golden Age" of film, since there have been transcendent movies and hopeless schlock produced in every era from the early silents to the present day. Quality correlates with a film's production date about as well as intelligence does with a human being's age: Not at all.

Where to begin? But if you also include movies where a midpoint or the ending of the movie serves as the first scene, you've got High Wall The Killers Out of the Past Detour The Killing I Wake Up Screaming Vicki Dead Reckoning Mildred Pierce Possessed Blue Gardenia Casablanca (if you can call that a noir) Nightfall D.O.A. Etc., etc. It's almost harder to name noirs without flashbacks than it is to name noirs that have them.

You're right, although if you hadn't mentioned it I never would have remembered it.

The reason for the high price is that its publisher (McFarland) is noted for two practices: Virtually never issuing hardback editions; and tightly controlling the print runs. They don't issue so-called "limited editions", but in practice it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. They also almost never dump any titles into the remainder clearing houses, and give only short discounts to retailers, which also helps to maintain the price. They specialize in books on baseball and movies, and even years after publication you'll almost never see any of their books going for much less than 80% of the original cover price.

To that I'd only add McGraw's gangster role in The Threat, and his role as a police lieutenant in Armored Car Robbery, with William Talmon playing the part of the psychopathic criminal. Not that these movies as a whole were as good as those other two, but McGraw was every bit as convincing on either side of the law. He was sort of like a B-movie version of Sterling Hayden in that respect, and he's one of the many reasons that some of us would rather watch many of those B-noirs over many feature movies.

The first time I ever heard a woman use that expression was in 1964, and she was talking about this guy:

After reading all these comments, I can't tell whether this movie (which mercifully I didn't watch or record) is more like Pink Flamingos or Springtime For Hitler. Is it really as delightfully campy as those two, or is it just flat out horrible?