AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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I enjoy Lansbury as well as Williams but I'm still not sure they should get one of the 10 slots in a year when I see all the others that have never been SOTM, like Leslie Howard or Joel McCrea (just two that come to mind as being a higher priority in my opinion) .
I can see McCrea, but Howard made only 34 films, and the great majority of them are either played all the time anyway or aren't really all that special. McCrea makes much more sense, since there are many more movies of his that don't get much TCM play.
But OTOH if you had to rate the three of them on a scale of fascinating characters, Howard would be down at the bottom, McCrea would be stuck in the middle somewhere, while William would be off the charts. Howard's most widely known roles---let's be real, folks---were basically playing pantsywaists. Whereas with a few exceptions like Gold Diggers of 1933 and Three on a Match , William played nothing but characters with tricks up their sleeves and / or larceny in their hearts. You can't help but love the man.
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I remember AMC back before TCM came along, and while it was never even close to being on the same level as TCM is today, compared to everything that had gone before it seemed like heaven on Earth.
As to the cause of its decline, I'd venture a guess that as soon as TCM showed up and started getting rave notices from all over**, AMC saw the writing on the wall and decided that rather to try to compete with TCM, it would go another route. I definitely noticed a drop in the quality of AMC's selection as soon as TCM started adding more cable providers, though even then it was still several years down the road before they began the commercials and really piled on the schlock. I haven't watched it for nearly 10 years, and every time I look at their schedule and think of those commercials, I know I'm not missing a thing.
**There was one article in the New York Times in the 90's that practically drooled over a typical week's TCM lineup, noted the distinct inferiority of the AMC selection, and lamented the fact thatTCM was still unavailable in New York City. I personally switched from Comcast to DirectTV solely because of the fact that at that time (early 2002) Comcast still didn't carry TCM. (Of course about two months after I'd switched, Comcast added it.)
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Just curious, does anyone know the types of arguments would be made against the career of Warren William if he were Star of the Month? I have to ask because I would really like to see him get a month and I just wonder where and why some would object.
I'd love to see a Warren William month, but here are the sort of objections I think he'd encounter:
---Died too long ago and no cult ever developed around him the way it did around Valentino. To be a SOTM it helps to have one or the other of those two attributes.
---With the exception of his Lone Wolf series, his best work was all made within a very short period of just over three years before the Breen code hit with full force and took the edge off his screen persona.
---And unlike many of the SOTM, his character roles were relatively limited: Cad; good but boring husband; raffish detective. There were a few movies of his that didn't fall into these categories, but not a whole lot of them.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to see William as a SOTM. It'd sure be a lot better than Doris Day, if only for a break from all this wholesomeness. But I'm not sure how many of the TCM suits would agree. Maybe if we added George Sanders and Ricardo Cortez we could supplement *"The Battle of the Blondes"* with *"The Clash of the Cads"* . I'd *LOVE* to see a month like that, and I suspect so would a lot of other people.
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Slightly off topic, but I've always thought that Marked Woman had one of the greatest endings ever, with Davis and her friends walking off silently into the night, their 15 minutes of fame having just ended with the reporters all pursuing Bogart. It was reminiscent of the final shot in 42nd Street , with Warner Baxter leaning against a fire escape by the stage exit, wearily dragging on a cigarette while the departing audience is making cracks about how "lucky" he was to have a hit like Pretty Lady just drop into his lap. Sometimes the greatest final lines don't have to be spoken.
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And desks, of course. Let's not forget the power of a desk against an atom bomb.
Hey, don't laugh. My John Eaton elementary school classmates and I ducked under many a desk in our day, and nary a bomb even grazed us. The turqoise ink in the inkwells might have scared off the bombs the way that the sight of a Yankee uniform used to put the fear of God in the Brooklyn Dodgers.
OTOH the hard candy in some of those public fallout shelters could get pretty rancid. But that may have been part of a much subtler Communist master plan-----they get you when you least expect it.
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This is like trying to pick the 10 most beautiful women in the world, but WTH....
My *favorite* 10:
Angi Vera (far and away---I'd pay a hundred bucks to see it on TCM)
Pixote
Come and See
Open City
Kapo
The Battle of Algiers
Pandora's Box
High and Low
The Blue Kite
Scars of Womanhood
My *favorite* 10 Hollywoods, no particular order:
The Killers
Out of the Past
All About Eve
The Lady Eve
So Big (Stanwyck version)
It's a Wonderful Life
Time Limit
A Star Is Born (Garland version)
Short Cuts
42nd Street
And my *favorite* 10 comedies (not counting The Lady Eve ):
The Sheep Has Five Legs
Animal House
Bombshell
Libeled Lady
Reefer Madness (unintentional category)
Children of the Revolution
The Women
Easy Living (Sturges version)
The Producers
Bringing Up Baby
And an honorable mention to the W.C. Fields segment of If I Had a Million , which may be the best of them all, even if it's barely over 11 minutes long.
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However, I think my favorite has to be Them! .
Absolutely. That movie had the whole nine yards: Impossible plot, cold war paranoia, and great special effects. The only invasion movie I'd put up there with it would be the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds .
And between those two, if I had to go before my time, I'd much rather tell the children of my reincarnated existence that my ancestral soul's body had been eaten by giant irradiated ants than zapped by some run-of-the-mill Martian. Wouldn't you?
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Actually they do have the monthly schedules in a scroll-down format that you can access from this page:
http://www.classicfilmpreview.com/tcm-monthly-schedules/
The problem is that while these new monthly schedules bear a superficial resemblance to the "classic" format of pre-June 2011, it's impossible to copy them onto a Word document that lets you edit it without the font sizes jumping all over the place. Under the old format you could create a personalized schedule for the entire month within less than an hour, complete with links to each film's individual page, and without the need to use any function on your keyboard other than the delete key---you'd just select and delete the films you didn't want to see, with the great bulk of the time consisting of thinking about which films you wanted or didn't want to watch. Now it takes so long to do this that I don't even bother attempting to do more than a few days at a time. You have to copy the title and the description separately, and then type in the actors and the directors manually, unless you want to have to keep adjusting the font size over and over. And when you delete one film, there's a big blank space in its place that can't be deleted, which means that if you have a personalized schedule that would have been 7 pages under the old format, it's now closer to 77 pages. It's an absolute disaster of a format, and there's still never been any explanation as to why it was necessary to destroy a perfectly good existing format. It's the TCM version of those Pentagon wizards who "won" the Iraq war with their spreadsheets and power point presentations: They never bothered to see how their plans might actually work out in practice.
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Okay, Tomboy, whaddya want? Wild Boys of the Road? Sylvia Scarlett? We should be able to arrange that.
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And while I tried a quick search, I couldn't find a list of past SOTMs. If anybody's got a link to one, it'd be interesting to see who has been chosen SOTM, how long ago, who hasn't, who's been chosen more than once, etc.
*Complete list of SOTM from the beginning up through 2011, plus the first two lists of SUTS:*
*STAR OF THE MONTH:*
May 1994: Greta Garbo
June 1994: Glenn Ford
July 1994: Greer Garson
Aug.1994: Edward G. Robinson
Sept.1994: Barbara Stanwyck
Oct.1994: Angela Lansbury
Nov.1994 John Garfield
Dec.1994: Best of ‘94
Jan.1995: Esther Williams
Feb.1995: Ronald Reagan
Mar.1995: TCM Salutes the Oscars
Apr.1995: Doris Day
May 1995: Myrna Loy
June 1995: Errol Flynn
July 1995: Gene Kelly
Aug.1995: Paul Muni
Sept.1995: Jane Powell
Oct.1995: Clark Gable
Nov.1995: Barrymores
Dec.1995: Best of ‘95
Jan.1996: Deborah Kerr
Feb.1996: Robert Young
Mar.1996: 31 Days of Oscar
April 1996: Irene Dunne
May 1996: James Stewart
June 1996: Rosalind Russell
July 1996: Fred Astaire
Aug.1996: Ann Sheridan
Sept.1996: Van Johnson
Oct.1996: Kathryn Grayson
Nov.1996: Robert Mitchum
Dec.1996: Best of ‘96
Jan.97: Humphrey Bogart
Feb.97: Eleanor Parker
Mar.97: 31 Days of Oscar
Apr.97: Ava Gardner
May 97: George Brent
June 97: June Allyson
July 97: John and Walter Huston (also Director of the Month)
Aug.97: Cary Grant
Sept.97: Ida Lupino
Oct.97: Walter Pidgeon
Nov.97: Katharine Hepburn
Dec.97: Best of ‘97
Jan.1998: Lana Turner
Feb.1998: Charlton Heston
Mar.1998:31 Days of Oscar
April 1998: Red Skelton
May 1998: Olivia de Havilland
June 1998: James Cagney
July 1998: Lucille Ball
August 1998: Joan Crawford
Sept.1998: John Wayne
Oct.1998: Cyd Charisse
Nov.1998: Claude Rains
Dec.1998: Best of ‘98
Jan.1999: Elizabeth Taylor
Feb.1999: William Powell
March 1999: 31 Days of Oscar (probably)
April 1999: Dennis Morgan
May 1999: Bette Davis
June 1999: Mickey Rooney
July1999: Natalie Wood
August 1999: Peter Sellers
Sept.1999: Norma Shearer
Oct. 1999: Gregory Peck
Nov. 1999: Ginger Rogers
Dec. 1999: Burt Lancaster
Jan. 2000: Debbie Reynolds
Feb. 2000: Robert Ryan
March 2000: 31 Days of Oscars (probably)
April 2000: Spencer Tracy
May 2000: Alexis Smith
June 2000:Wallace Beery
July 2000: Judy Garland
August 2000: film debuts
Sept 2000: Jane Wyman
October 2000: Dick Powell
Nov 2000: Frank Sinatra
Dec. 2000: Lauren Bacall
Jan. 2001: Elvis Presley
Feb.2001: Jean Hagen
March 2001: 31 Days of Oscar (probably)
Apr.2001: Knighted Actors
May 2001: Jean Harlow
June 2001: W.C. Fields
July 2001: Ann Sothern
Aug.2001: James Garner
Sept. 2001: Robert Taylor
Oct. 2001: Lana Turner
Nov.2001: Glenn Ford
Dec.2001: The Marx Brothers
Jan. 2002: Marlene Dietrich
Feb. 2002: Kirk Douglas
March 2002: 31 Days of Oscar
April 2002: Barbara Stanwyck
May 2002: Edward G. Robinson
June 2002: Greta Garbo
July 2002: Sidney Poitier
Aug. 2002: Joan Crawford
Sept. 2002: Van Heflin
Oct. 2002: Final films
Nov. 2002: Shelly Winters
Dec. 2002: Montgomery Clift
Jan. 2003: Doris Day
Feb. 2003: John Garfield
Mar. 2003: 31 Days of Oscar
Apr. 2003: Harold Lloyd
May 2003: Olivia de Havilland
June 2003: TV Actors in Films
July 2003: Lee Marvin
Aug. 2003: 1st Summer Under the Stars
James Stewart, Clint Eastwood, Peter O'Toole, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Robert Mitchum, James Cagney, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Katherine Hepburn, Steve McQueen, Gene Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Myrna Loy, Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Paul Newman, Doris Day, William Holden.
Sept. 2003: James Mason
Oct. 2003: Boris Karloff
Nov. 2003: Shirley MacLaine
Dec. 2003: David Niven
Jan. 2004: Katherine Hepburn
Feb.2004: 31 Days of Oscar
Mar.2004: Charles Chaplin
Apr. 2004: Judy Garland
May 2004: Greer Garson
June 2004: Cary Grant
July 2004: Stars That Died Before Their Time
Aug.2004: 2nd Summer Under the Stars
John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, Bob Hope, Debbie Reynolds, Sidney Poitier, Lucille Ball, Katherine Hepburn, Clint Eastwood, Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda, Jean Harlow, Laurence Olivier, Doris Day, Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Peter Sellers, James Stewart, Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, Charles Chaplin, Shirley MacLaine, Claudette Colbert, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Esther Williams, Kirk Douglas.
Sept.2004: Myrna Loy
Oct. 2004: Peter Lorre
Nov.2004: Clark Gable
Dec. 2004: James Stewart
Jan.2005: Canadian Actors
Feb. 2005: 31 Days of Oscar
Mar. 2005: Claudette Colbert
Apr. 2005: Errol Flynn
May 2005: Orson Welles
June 2005: Ingrid Bergman
July 2005: Audrey Hepburn
Aug. 2005: 3rd Summer Under the Stars
Sept.2005: Greta Garbo
Oct.2005: Robert Mitchum
Nov.2005: Joan Fontaine
Dec. 2005: Bing Crosby
Jan. 2006: Robert Montgomery
Feb.2006: 31 Days of Oscar
Mar.2006: Nelson Eddy & Jeanette MacDonald
Apr.2006: Deborah Kerr
May 2006: Bette Davis
June 2006: Anthony Quinn
July 2006: Elizabeth Taylor
Aug.2006: 4th Summer Under the Stars
Sept.2006: William Holden
Oct.2006: Child Stars
Nov.2006: Lucille Ball
Dec. 2006: Gary Cooper
Jan.2007: Jean Arthur
Feb.2007: 31 Days of Oscar
Mar.2007: Gene Kelly
Apr.2007: Rita Hayworth
May 2007: John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn
June 2007: Ida Lupino
July 2007: Randolph Scott
Aug.2007: 5th Summer Under the Stars
Sept.2007: A Star is Born (starmaking/breakthrough performances)
Oct.2007: Henry Fonda
Nov.2007: Guest Programmer Month
Dec.2007: Irene Dunne
Jan.2008: James Cagney
Feb.2008: 31 Days of Oscar
Mar.2008: Acting Dynasties
Apr.2008: Hedy Lamarr
May 2008: Frank Sinatra
June 2008: Sophia Loren
July 2008: Rosalind Russell
Aug.2008: 6th annual Summer Under the Stars
Sept.2008: Kay Francis
Oct.2008: Carole Lombard
Nov.2008: Charles Laughton
Dec. 2008: Joseph Cotton
Jan. 2009: Jack Lemmon
Feb. 2009: 31 Days of Oscar
Mar. 2009: Ronald Reagan
April 2009: Funny Ladies and 15th Anniversary
May 2009: Sean Connery
June 2009: Great Directors
July 2009: Stewart Granger
August 2009: Summer Under the Stars
Sept. 2009: Claude Rains
Oct. 2009: Leslie Caron
Nov. 2009: Grace Kelly
Dec. 2009: Humphrey Bogart
Jan. 2010: “The Method”
Feb. 2010: 31 Days of Oscar
March 2010: Ginger Rogers
April 2010: Robert Taylor
May 2010: Donna Reed
June 2010: Natalie Wood
July 2010: Gregory Peck
August 2010: Summer Under The Stars
September 2010: Vivien Leigh
Oct. 2010: Fredric March
Nov. 2010: Ava Gardner
Dec. 2010: Mickey Rooney
Jan. 2011: Peter Sellers
Feb. 2011: 31 Days of Oscar
March 2011: Jean Harlow
April 2011: Ray Milland
May 2011: Esther Williams
June 2011: Jean Simmons
July 2011: Singing Cowboys
August 2011: Summer Under The Stars
Sept. 2011: Kirk Douglas
Oct. 2011: Buster Keaton
Nov. 2011: Battle of the Blonds
Dec. 2011: William Powell
Now if anyone can tell me where to find pre-2009 issues of Now Playing , I'd be extremely grateful.
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Sepiatone, you might want to consider that your description of Ted Turner as some sort of right wing wingnut is several decades out of date. How many "right leaning moguls" would have
---consisistenly supported a woman's right to choose abortion, at one point calling right-to-lifers "bozos"
---spoken out repeatedly on global warming, and against offshore oil drilling and strip mining
---spoken out in favor of Obama's health care plan, saying "“We’re the only first world country that doesn’t have universal healthcare and it’s a disgrace"
---donated over $1 *BILLION* to United Nations causes
---and married *Jane Fonda* ?
(Now that last bit may have been due mostly to testosetrone and / or temporary insanity, but it's still hard to imagine any hard core wingnut going *that* far in the service of either of those imperatives)
I think you're confusing the old Ted Turner with the one who's been around for the last 20 or 30 years. The truth is that he's one of the not so few public figures who's shed his political rigidity as he's grown older and more exposed to reality, and even if he hadn't produced TCM as his (to us folks here) crowning achievement, he'd still deserve a bit more credit than you're giving him.
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Since most everything that I liked on TCM during the holidays has been movies I've seen many times before, I didn't watch all that many.
The best (or at least the ones I enjoyed the most):
Evelyn Prentice, Shaft (about time they showed this classic), and Panic In The Streets , as good a medical thriller as there is.
The least of the lot: Fail-Safe
BTW a *BIG* vote for many more foreign classics from all decades, and many fewer bubble gum and other sickenly "wholesome" movies from the 40's through the early 60's: Mickey Rooney, Doris Day, Annette Funicello, Sandra Dee, etc. Those films were the Cheez-Whiz of the Hollywood production line, as bland as a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread, and the one real gripe I have about TCM is that we keep getting flooded with *WAY* too many of them.
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TCM could resolve this whole "star" question quite easily by expanding the definition to include the major character actors and actresses whose presence often contributes far more to a movie than all but a handful of Big Name "stars". AFAIC a month that featured Nat Pendleton or Joan Blondell would be infinitely more enjoyable than another set of endlessly recycled Rock Hudson or Doris Day movies. This is especially true when the "star" in question has a body of work that's so slim that you have to dig down to the very bottom of the barrel to fill out the normal quota of the SOTM's films on the schedule.
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Robert Osborne mentioned last night that the SOTM for April will be Doris Day....
I sure hope that this was some kind of an early April Fools' Day joke. Please someone tell me that it was. What's next, Pat Boone or Ricky Nelson?
EDIT: She was SOTM in 1995 and 2003, and part of SUTS in 2003 and 2004. I have to assume that 2003 was her 100th birthday or something.
Edited by: AndyM108 on Jan 2, 2012 1:49 PM
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March 6 looks like a celebration of Guy Kibbee's birthday with a day full of his films.
I have just officially died and gone to heaven. It starts out with *TEN* straight pre-codes I've never seen, and even when the Kibbee movies end at 8:00 PM, in the ten subsequent hours it serves up only *THREE* old chestnuts. It's got to be the best day on TCM since the all-Gabin day last August.
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Karl Malden is the SOTM, and is *that* ever an improvement over January and February!
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OTOH Panic In The Streets had a rather heartwarming ending, and it was over just before the stroke of midnight.
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Personally my ideal Easter Sunday would consist of 100% film noir with an Easter bunny or an Easter egg worked into each and every plot.
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What always fascinates me about the music used in films of the 30's and 40's is that so many of the background melodies were previously used in other movies from the same studio. I've lost count of the number of Warner Brothers' films from that period that had "You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me" casually playing in the background, either in nightclub scenes or on a radio in someone's living room. Alex North's theme that was first used in the 1931 Street Scene (at the 00:01:00 mark) was recycled so many times (most prominently in I Wake Up Screaming ) that it became unofficially known as "the Fox Anthem". And if I had a dollar for every time I've heard "La Marseillaise" or "The Volga Boat Song", or "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in movies between 1939 and 1949, I'd be a rich man today.
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Welcome aboard, Rosalynd. To help ease your transition from the normal world around you to the more (ahem) focused world of TCM addicts, here are our two most important rules to remember:
1. Barbara Stanwyck is our Official Goddess. No backtalk on this one.
2. And remember that beyond that one point of no dispute, everyone's always right.
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If there's ever a matter of pure subjectivity, it's got to be questions like this. Personally I'd take Kurosawa any day of the week and twice on Sunday, and I'd throw in Hitchcock, Rohmer, Hawks, and more than a few others on top of that. But it really boils down to of what sort of movies you like the best, doesn't it?
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After reading all the raves here on this thread and then finally getting around to watching The Widow From Chicago after three weeks, all I can say is (1) thank God for DVD recorders, and (2) Leonard Maltin is crazy with his 2-star rating. This movie may not have had the epic narrative of Little Caesar , but it's still one of the better pre-code gangster movies out there. Robinson is as great as ever, and along with others here, I also wonder why Alice White and Neil Hamilton didn't make it to a higher level.
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When it comes to "bigotry" or snobbery directed towards other parts of the country, including New Jersey, New Yorkers aren't much worse than anyone else. These days the Garden State is mostly known to outsiders all over the world mainly by that TV show and by the stink emanating from the Turnpike as you approach New York. And in olden times it was associated with an extended tribe of criminal imbeciles from the Pine Barrens known as "the Jukes", who were studied by anthropologists as if they were some exotic South Sea islanders who worshipped Henry Ford.
But when it comes to insularity, tell me this: Why is it that along with residents of San Francisco, Manhattanites refer to the place they live simply as "The City"? And in the case of New York, they're not even talking about the city as a whole, but only about one 23 square mile borough! Long before New Jersey was the butt of New Yorkers' stereotypes and jokes, there was Brooklyn.
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Andy, I can agree to disagree with you about the great Marlene but as a native New Yorker there's one thing I cannot tolerate: comparing her to New Jersey! As you may know, New Yorkers are a pretty broad-minded, non-judgmental bunch -- except when it comes to New Jersey !
Well, you might want to mention that for a native New Yorker (and I was born in the same NYC hospital as Loretta Young's baby in Life Begins ), "New Jersey" pretty much encompasses the entire country west of the Hudson. Anything north of the city is "Connecticut", and anything south of it is either "Mississippi" or just "down there somewhere"..
Btw, "creepy" is ok. Loretta on the other hand would thrive in today's films: bland, pretty, boring, and a feeble attempt at realism. Marlene towers above that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sCmbDtx_k
Well, I'd love to watch Blonde Venus in its entireity (it's been awhile since it's been on TCM), but I'm not sure how far Marlene towers above "realism" in that "Hot Voodoo" bit!
Angela Lansbury?!?
in General Discussions
Posted
> *{quote:title=AndyM108 wrote:}{quote} (Leslie) Howard made only 34 films, and the great majority of them are either played all the time anyway or aren't really all that special* .
A couple of years ago Grace Kelly was SOTM. She made somewhere between 12-14 films, one of which ( Fourteen Hours ) features her for less than five minutes .
That seems to me to be less of an argument for Howard than it is an argument against Kelly, who's much more of a SUTS candidate than she was for a SOTM. It's not that Kelly or Howard didn't make some very good films, but those are the same films that get shown all the time anyway.