AndyM108

Your take about Sybil's being in the wrong studio at the wrong time is in part another way of restating my comment about Shirley Temple's mother. Beyond that, Sybil never had the fierce ambition to remain in movies after she came back to the U.S. after the war. She was content in her newly found domestic life and seems to have lived a long and happy life subsequently, judging by her two published memoirs. I got introduced to Sybil during TCM's 80th birthday tribute to her back in 2009, and like a fool I hadn't realized how much I was going to like her, and so I didn't record The Captain's Kid , which was on YouTube but has since been taken down. I don't like it overall as much as Little Big Shot , but the scene where she gives Guy Kibbee a giant knife and a gun with instructions about how to use them on the judge and jury has got to be one of my favorite comic moments ever. I wish they'd show that one again.

Yeah...a little over the top. There's a reason Sybil Jason did not become 'another' Shirley Temple. Jason was good but....Temple was in another league. Well, there's no way of really knowing that, since Shirley Temple's mother pressured Darryl Zanuck into putting the kibosh on Jason's career, and she never got any good roles after that. It's a credit to both of the child stars, though, that they remained close friends for life in spite of Mrs. Temple's studio politicking.

If anyone hasn't seen Sybil Jason in Little Big Shot , they're missing the best Runyon adaptation that Hollywood's ever produced, as well as the most charming child star imaginable. Her impromptu sidewalk renditions of "I'm Rolling in Money" and "I'm a Little Big Shot Now" make Shirley Temple look like a rank amateur. I know this sounds over the top, but if anyone's reading this, turn on your set immediately. Edited by: AndyM108 on Apr 9, 2012 10:09 AM

*I'm always amused at how often people in the movies tell the bad guy they're going to the police. How dumb can you be. Yet they keep on doing it. I guess the characters in movies never go to movies.* This is so common in so many films, gangster and cowboy films. One unarmed guy telling the armed gangster or outlaw and his gang, "You'll never get away with this! I tell everyone what you did." And then, POW, POW, and the potential informer falls dead in the street. And then there's the greatest unarmed confrontationalist of all time, the mighty *Mark Trail* , who brings armed villains to justice with his trusty right to the jaw about every four weeks on the comics pages, and never emerges from battle with a single blue hair out of place. I've always wondered what he'd do if he caught Little Rico planting marijuana in Lost Forest, but I'm sure Hollywood could figure out a way to keep him alive for the sequels.

*I don't recall what happened at the end of Refer Madness* The film's real title is "Tell Your Children" (1936) If I recall correctly, one of the girls, faced with a long prison term and realizing she has ruined her life, jumps out a window to her death at the end of the film. Before NORML and New Line Cinema started showing that film all over the country, my old GF and I took it to many college campuses at a dollar a pop, courtesy of a print that the Library of Congress made for us for the bargain price of $300 after a copyright search found that it was in the public domain. By the time it had run its course, we must have sat through it close to 100 times. I still put it up there with the great cinematic comedies, but then maybe that's because we made so much money off of it. First, Tell Your Children was the one-time alternate title, but every print I've seen just uses Reefer Madness . Second, while the defenestration scene does take place right near the climax, along with Ralph being carted off to a prison for "the criminally insane", the actual ending shows the high school principal pointing his finger first to the left, then to the right, then straight at the camera, and saying *"Remember, this could have happened to your child---or yours---or yours---OR YOURS!"* Since the movie's heyday in the early 70's, whenever I see it again I notice two things right away. First is that *"Play faster! Faster!"* Ralph is played by the same actor (Dave O'Brien) who stars in all those "Pete Smith" comic shorts about how to torture your wife / husband / etc., that are shown nearly every day on TCM. The second thing I can't help but notice is the uncanny resemblance of the Mad Piano Player to Michael Richards' Kramer character in Seinfeld , especially in the scene where he ducks into the back room and lights up with a maniacal look on his face. He's got the same build, the same unruly hair style, and a passing facial resemblance to go with his identical degree of hyperactivity. But the best scene is when we finally meet "The Boss", and find him engaged in the rather unglamorous task of counting quarters with the help of an adding machine, one "Ka-ching" at a time. When one of his henchmen voices a certain amount of moral unease about "selling hops to kids", The Boss replies with great eloquence, *"There are millions of quarters out there just begging to be taken---don't be a dope!"* And when the underling persists in his qualms, The Boss says *"You know my policy. When one of the boys isn't satisfied, I'm always willing to let him retire----RETIRE PERMANENTLY...."*

As far as there not being any Blacks shown in STORM WARNING, I look at it this way - if I were Black, I would not be living in such a town. With most of the population apparently involved or in approval of the ****, the "boundaries" would have been loud and clear. That's logical in theory, but in the real world of the Jim Crow South, the Klan was usually most active in places where the whites were either a minority or a small majority. What shows Hollywood's true colors is that every mainstream movie prior to Intruder in the Dust that centered around a lynching always had a white person as the victim, which is a completely false portrayal of reality.

They put black actors in movies based in the South, and usually all-white actors in movies based in the North. Though Warner Brothers in the 30's often had at least one or two black prisoners in their jail movies (e.g. Ladies They Talk About ), and sometimes ( The Petrified Forest ) they even had a black man in a criminal gang. And then of course there was the Our Gang comedies. But as far as casting a black actor in a non-stereotyped role, that would have to wait till actors like Juano Hernandez and Sidney Poitier began to break the mold. The Lucas Beauchamp character that Hernandez portrayed in Intruder in the Dust may have been the first black person in any Hollywood semi-leading role who wasn't either a servant or a buffoon. Fredi Washington's role in Imitation of Life was memorable, but even that was but one more version of the "tragic Negro" stock character.

> {quote:title=C.Bogle wrote:}{quote} > > I thought Ginger was being held by two Klansmen while she was > being whipped, not tied to a post. > That is correct. At least, that's how it looked to me. > > > > > > > > I counted 4 or 5 whippings, all but the first one to her *face *. Kind of made me wonder why her face didn't look like a bloody pulp at the end of her ordeal. A sustained whipping like that should have left her disfigured for life. > I also love the way that the Reagan character walks into this enormous Klan rally and greets the hooded nightriders with casual remarks like *"Hi, Joe, how's business?"*, as if he had nothing to fear from them, in spite of the fact that he'd repeatedly announced his intention to arrest the murderer of the news reporter and drive the organization out of business. The contrast between the Klansmen's violence and the way they treated their main nemesis (Reagan) with kid gloves was one of the many features that gave this film an almost surreal quality. It was great entertainment, but about the best you can say about its depiction of reality is that it wasn't as bad as Mississippi Burning . EDIT: I wrote that last italicized paragraph, not C. Bogle Edited by: AndyM108 on Apr 6, 2012 9:45 AM

(Hayward) had the top pick of the dramatic roles at Fox in the 50s That "Fox" part probably explains why I haven't seen most of those movies you list, although if you look in their respective filmographies Lupino was actually in slightly more (66 to 59) feature films than Hayward and also had quite a bit longer (55 to 34 years) career span. I love both of them, but I'll admit my bias is towards the noirish or heavy urban or suburban drama roles that are set in the present day, rather than films set in ancient times or in exotic foreign settings. Lupino had more of those parts, at least among those that I've seen, which is why I tend to favor her reportory. But I do wish Fox would let us see more of Hayward.

*Sign me up for a Susan Hayward day, too. Terrific actress who's grown on me the more I've seen of her movies, much like Ida Lupino.* Funny, Andy. I was just about to say the same thing! I wondered why and then decided: * both are not gorgeous * both are dames * both are tough (or seem as if they could be tough irl) * both are smart (or seem as if they could be smart irl, I hope they were empowered) * I know Ida took care of her future by working off the screen, I'm not sure about Susan * I liked them both, but liked Ida's movies a bit more Maybe it's just a sign of inattentiveness or senility, but when I came in a minute or two late the other night on They Won't Believe Me , it wasn't until the movie was nearly over that I realized that the femme fatale was Hayward and not Lupino. This in spite of the fact that I'd seen Hayward's name right there in the program guide. I agree that Lupino's got a bigger and better overall repertory than Hayward, but when Hayward got a meaty role ( I Want to Live! or I Can Get It For You Wholesale ), she always delivered. And while she's no Hayworth or Loretta Young when it comes to beauty, she's still most definitely easy on the eyes.

*Sign me up for a Susan Hayward day, too. Terrific actress who's grown on me the more I've seen of her movies, much like Ida Lupino.* Funny, Andy. I was just about to say the same thing! I wondered why and then decided: * both are not gorgeous * both are dames * both are tough (or seem as if they could be tough irl) * both are smart (or seem as if they could be smart irl, I hope they were empowered) * I know Ida took care of her future by working off the screen, I'm not sure about Susan * I liked them both, but liked Ida's movies a bit more Maybe it's just a sign of inattentiveness or senility, but when I came in a minute or two late the other night on They Won't Believe Me , it wasn't until the movie was nearly over that I realized that the femme fatale was Hayward and not Lupino. This in spite of the fact that I'd seen Hayward's name right there in the program guide. I agree that Lupino's got a bigger and better overall repertory than Hayward, but when Hayward got a meaty role ( I Want to Live! or I Can Get It For You Wholesale ), she always delivered. And while she's no Hayworth or Loretta Young when it comes to beauty, she's still most definitely easy on the eyes.

Did anyone catch this sleeper? I tuned into it after reading the brief synopsis and wondering how on Earth they'd ever cast Reagan as a Klansman, only to discover that an entire Kornfield Krowded with Kluxers was no match for the Gipper and the Hoofer. I have to admit I thoroughly enjoyed it in spite of the sheer impossibility of the Reagan role and the general implausibility of the entire plot. But taken as sheer drama, it was a winner, even if poor Doris bit the dust in the end. I only wish that Day had been in more straight dramas and fewer comedies and musicals. The one before Storm Warning ( Midnight Lace ) wasn't too bad, either.

Sign me up for a Susan Hayward day, too. Terrific actress who's grown on me the more I've seen of her movies, much like Ida Lupino.

I also saw *Fear on Trial *in which William Devane played John Henry Faulk. I had seen Faulk speaking about his life experiences on the afternoon talk shows, playing the Southern Senator in *The Best Man *and my mother was a fan so I definately wanted to see this. Again I was outraged at how people used all this to "get" folks they disliked or their family members-even children-not really giving a damn if they were really Communists or not. If you really want to see a movie that shows how fear and suspicion can terrorize a nation, check out Le Corbeau , a wartime movie made in France that somehow eluded the Nazi censors, probably because it didn't have any explicitly political content. But in the film, one anonymous letter writer has the entire town suspecting everyone else----suspected either of the actual deeds mentioned in the letters, or suspected of being the letter writer. The movie hit so close to home that it was denounced as a slander to the French nation by both Right and Left, and the director was blackballed for many years afterwards.

Yeah, I still liked the movie in spite of the cuts, but when Robert Young jumped out the window at the end, I couldn't help thinking of a similar scene near the end of Reefer Madness , where Mae the "marihuana addict" makes an identical flying move after receiving her sentence. The trouble in both cases is that the production code didn't give the screenwriters any room to maneuver, and the heel had to be punished one way or the other.

> *while the gutless opportunists like Cohen and McCarthy didn't get their a**** kicked back to Brooklyn, where my Babs would have ripped them a new one.* You too apparently do not know that Cohen and McCarthy had absolutely nothing to do with the House Committee, since McCarthy was a Senator and Cohen worked for him on the Senate, and the House Committee was a committee of the US Houses of Representatives, not the Senate. True history is important, and that's why I post links to real documentation, since so many erroneous stories and fables are told on the internet. People can make up anything and say anything they want, even if it isn't true, and that is why I like to post links to real historical documents so people can read the true facts of history. Okay, let's set the record straight once and for all. First, the part you just quoted about "Cohen" and McCarthy wasn't written by me. I was responding specifically to the part about "Babs" (Barbara Stanwyck), and wasn't concerning myself with the rest of the comment. Of course I know that Roy *Cohn* worked for McCarthy, and that neither of them had anything to do with HUAC. At the time of the HUAC Hollywood hearings in the late 1940's McCarthy was an unknown first term Senator whose nickname was "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" for his lobbying efforts on behalf of Pepsi, and who had actually been *endorsed* by the Communists in his 1946 Senatorial campaign. McCarthy's "interest" in Communist infiltration didn't begin until early in 1950 when a Georgetown University Jesuit named Edmund Walsh suggested it as a possible issue to help him in his 1952 re-election effort. The "McCarthy Committee" (actually a subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee) didn't even begin operations until 1953, when the Republicans had taken over control of the Senate. As for Roy Cohn, at the time of the "Hollywood hearings", it's highly likely that he and McCarthy had never even heard of one another, since one was an obscure first term Senator from Wisconsin while the other was an even more obscure assistant D.A. in Manhattan. If anyone wants to get a good read on McCarthy, he or she should look into Richard Rovere's Senator Joe McCarthy , written in 1959, just two years after alcohol did its final damage to the Sentor's liver.** And for HUAC, it's hard to go wrong with Walter Goodman's The Committee , supplemented by the exhuastive transcripts provided in Eric Bentley's Thirty Years of Treason . The latter book includes much testimony from the Hollywood hearings, while the former is a caustic but objective look at the Committee's work from its origins in the 30's to the middle 60's, when it was gradually being seen for what it really was. The real trick in looking back at this sorry period is to know how to distinguish the real victims (like Garfield) from the phonies (like Lillian Hellman), and to know the difference between principled anti-Communism and the use of "anti-Communism" as a crude political club to bash liberals with. That's not always easy to do if you restrict your information to just one side of the story. **I should add to this an earlier defense of McCarthy written by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies . They make as good a case for the Senator as can likely be made, but Dwight Macdonald probably put it best when he described it as *"a brief prepared by Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft on behalf of a pickpocket arrested in a subway men's room."*

Careful, C. Bogle, these are fightin' words for those who backed the monsters behind the HUAC who ruined the lives of John Garfield and so many others in the entertainment industry while the gutless opportunists like Cohen and McCarthy didn't get their a**** kicked back to Brooklyn, where my Babs would have ripped them a new one. I only wish that our favorite actress would have done something like that, but unfortunately she and her hubby Robert Taylor were squarely in HUAC's corner during this unfortunate time. Stanwyck wasn't exactly outspoken about it, but her name is right there on the members list of The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. And she and Taylor were hardly the only ones. Cooper, Gable, and Ginger Rogers were right alongside them as well, among many others.

Forgive me for my subtlety. By "that overrated (albeit talented) actress from Brooklyn," I was referring, not to Joan Blondell or Mae West or Helen Westley, three great actresses from Brooklyn; but to an actress whom I like but who has seduced many on this board into thinking she is far greater than she is. In the interest of continued subtlety, I will give only her initials: BS. I'll let Eugenia H speak for me on this one, and I see that she already has. Nuf sed.

This is one of the few films that I dissolve into and become part of, every time I see it. I've seen inside black Southern cotton-farmland nightclubs on lively Saturday nights, just like the one in the movie, and those scenes in the film are very historically accurate. I've been to black funerals of murdered loved-ones, and the singing and mourning/moaning in the film by the women and some of the men is also historically accurate. The term mourning/moaning is pronounced as one word that means both words, and the moaning/singing/praying is accurate too, as are the sermons that are both spoken and sung. I was in a rare position back in the old days, as a journalist covering the early civil rights movement, and that's what allowed me to go places where white people who were not journalists were not allowed to go. Some of these were very emotional events and allowed me to experience an old-fashioned culture. Interesting take, Fred. If it's not getting too personal, what paper(s) were you associated with? I was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in 1963-64 as a student volunteer for SNCC in Cambridge, MD, and in fact during part of that time stayed in the home of the lady who was the leader of that movement. AFAIC both you and I were extremely fortunate to be a firsthand witness to history in the making. But while I went to many a mass meeting inside churches, where gospel-based freedom songs were the order of the day, and went to more than one funeral in those same churches, I've always found movie scenes of plantation workers happily singing in the cotton fields a bit too much. Perhaps it's just the difference between Maryland's Eastern Shore (which was George Wallace territory back then) and the Deep South, but whenever I visited the factory farm fields that supplied the produce for the canning plants, the main "songs" I heard were complaints about the working conditions. And I've never eaten another pickle after seeing what many workers there used for improvised bathrooms. Nuf sed about that. In terms of an accurate depiction of everyday African American life in the South during the Jim Crow era, I'd take Michael Roemer's Nothing But A Man over anything I've seen from any major Hollywood studio, either in 1929 or any other period.

I recorded a bunch of Wheeler and Woolseys a few years ago, and with Doris Day and "Spring Break" month driving me away from TCM prime time and towards baseball, this may be a very good time to catch up on the many W & W's I haven't yet had a chance to watch. And so far I've liked what I've seen.

Not counting the many I'd already seen, the best "new movie" of the week was Dana Andrews' Zero Hour! , though apparently it helps that I never saw the 1970's parody of it. They Won't Believe Me was also pretty damn good, although I think I may have seen it earlier in one of my past lives. But it was a treat to see Susan Hayward and Jane Greer in the same film, even if Greer's screen time apparently was severely cut. The worst? No real clinkers on a grand scale, but Hallelujah! is going to take at least one more viewing for me to get over the early scenes of the happy darkies singing in the cotton fields and the inevitable fight over a craps game. Perhaps it improves towards the end, but by that point I'd already given up on it. OTOH the virtue of that DVD recorder is that there's always a second chance for a fresh perspective.

But I'm curious. Who's from Brooklyn, Andy? You mixing him up with someone else, and if so, the grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat Garbo is from Brooklyn?????????? You must be referring to Swithin's comment, since I haven't mentioned anything about Brooklyn in this thread. Swithin wrote *"Andy, I'm so pleased that you are taking time out from your worship of that overrated (albeit talented) actress from Brooklyn to sing the praises of the great Roz"* , so he must be referring to the greatest screen actress ever, whose claim to that title is so evident that there's not even a need to name her.

What time is it on? 5:00 PM EDT

I have to admit that I've never found noirs, even the ones that deal with ambiguity, very complex. After one gets used to the stereotypical themes and characters, it's pretty smooth sailing, as it is with many genres. Much as noirs are my favorite genre, for the most part I'd have to agree with that. But when you had an industry controlled by a code that more or less dictated happy endings, that could put a straitjacket on the best of screenwriters and directors. The truth is that as with all genres, while there may be hundreds of noirs we enjoy and would want to see again, the ones that meet the highest standards of "art" are few and far between. And even the greatest of noirs have their limits. Films like The Killers and Out of the Past may reach the highest levels of entertainment value with their ambiguity, their atmosphere and their treacherous mantraps, but if you're looking for a movie that transcends "entertainment", I wouldn't confuse even those two all-time classics with a Time Limit or a Kapo .

I'm glad you brought up boxing. The drama, pathos, and atmosphere of boxing, IMHO, is ideal for black and white films. Filmmakers have agreed, and that accounts for the huge number of boxing movies in the Golden Age. Boxing is also particlarly appropriate for noirs, e.g., THE SET-UP. For some reason wrestling does not seem the same, whether we're talking about show wrestling or real wrestling. To me, wrestling has the element of buffoonery about it, which it had in NIGHT AND THE CITY,which detracts from the noir feel. It's not a noir, and it's not black and white, but Mickey Rourke's The Wrestler is about as good as any boxing movie I've seen, and I've seen plenty of them. IMO the real contrast is between the abundance of great boxing films and the almost complete lack of comparable baseball films. Other than Eight Men Out , Cobb , and Bull Durham ,they're all either comedies, musicals, fantasies or schmaltzfests, and there's hardly a single one of them in which any actor bears even the slightest resemblance to a real ballplayer. The few really great ones are camp classics ( Death on the Diamond ) or Joe E. Brown's comic trio of Fireman, Save That Child / Elmer The Great / Alibi Ike . Whereas you've had at least a dozen terrific boxing movies all the way from The Prizefighter and the Lady all the way up to Million Dollar Baby . Thus endeth another proclamation from The Lord Of Objectivity.