AndyM108

The entire day is packed with gems that we've all seen a million times. If only I could pop an Alzheimer's pill that let them all seem new again. If I were new to TCM, this whole Summer of Darkness series would be far and away the highlight of the year. One that doesn't show up all that often, though, is The Hollow Triumph (AKA The Scar), an indie studio production which is the one you mentioned. You're right that the plot is kind of farfetched, but Henreid and Bennett somehow manage to pull it off. It's also nice that it's on in prime time so that people without recorders can watch it.

That's great, but where did you see this information? Has the September schedule been posted?

Kevin Johnson, a book dealer friend of mine in Baltimore, published a two volume set of books called The Dark Page and The Dark Page II, which have full page illustrations of first edition dust jackets of hundreds of classic noir novels that were made into films. Obviously first editions of the likes of Nightmare Alley are going to be beyond the budget of 99% of us here, but the two Dark Page books should be part of any noir lover's library. There's nothing else out there even remotely like them. P. S. Yes, the paperback edition is still in print, part of the New York Review of Books Classics series. New copies begin on Amazon at $7.29.

"Mr. Grindle? Dr. Ritter here. I'm sorry to hear that you had to be hospitalized after your unfortunate encounter with that charlatan who bilked you out of $150,000 with rumors of my assistance, but it was all necessary to expose him, even though I only read about it in the newspapers.... "Well, yes, it's true he got away. Yes, it's true that you were on life support for a few days after your lifelong dream had been crushed with what scurrilous gossipmongers have said was with my help.... "You say how did this lowlife grifter know about Dori? That's an interesting question, but you see Mr. Carlisle was also a patient of mine, and to give you that information would be violating the ethics of my profession. "You must realize that there's ethics in this business, the same as any other." I'm Don Costello, and I endorse this message.

Well, I'd accept that as a reasonable compromise to the ongoing February problem.

Personally I'd like to confine Shirley's movies to Leap Year's Day, giving them a 24 hour tribute that would also serve as a break between the 28th and 29th days of Oscar. We'd be killing two birds with one stone.

This sounds terrific, and hopefully it won't be topheavy with the same old films we've seen a hundred times over, but rather will feature lots of newer works that TCM has never had before. I'm sure there'll be some snoozers and duds in the mix, but better to try and fail than never to try at all.

Reading the recent posts in this thread, I'm beginning to think that there's some sort of immutable internet law that proclaims that all discussions, no matter what the original subject, will eventually wind up being about gays. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Widmark's "problem" is that to much of the public who's even heard of him by this time, his Tommy Udo image is so permanently affixed in their minds that it crowds out everything else he did. Like Robert Ryan, an equally gifted and underrated actor, the fact that he was so convincing in his psychopathic roles made him all too easy to typecast. Since the first three Widmark films I ever saw were Kiss of Death, Night and the City, and No Way Out, I fell into that sort of trap myself. But the movie that made me realize just how mistaken I'd been in my typecasting was Time Limit, a 1957 court-martial hearing drama involving a Korean War veteran (Richard Basehart, who's also perfectly cast) who's being tried for cooperating with North Korean propaganda efforts. Since Basehart confesses and seemingly just wants to get the trial over with, Widmark (an investigating officer) could take the easy way out and please everyone, but instead he digs deeper and yada yada yada we get a powerful ending that turns our expectations upside down. Widmark is so far removed from his psychopathic archetype role that he might as well be Spencer Tracy, though even Tracy himself couldn't have topped Widmark's performance.

Well, if The Sound of Music had stuck to its original casting of Lizabeth Scott as Maria and Robert Ryan as Captain von Trapp, I think you might really have been onto something.

I've never seen these two upcoming overnight movies, but I cant imagine how I'd go wrong in recording them: 2:15 AM Zero Focus (1961) A new bride tries to find her missing husband. Cast: Yoshiko Kuga, Hizuru Takachiho, Ineko Arima (Ineko Arima). Dir: Yoshitaro Nomura. BW-95 min. 4:00 AM Castle of Sand, The (1974) Two police detectives set out to solve the murder of an old man who was beaten to death. Cast: Tetsuro Tamba, Go Kato, Kensaku Morita. Dir: Yoshitaro Nomura. C-143 min.

I can think of plenty of actors with more charisma, but I can't think of a single movie I've seen with Edmond O'Brien in it that wasn't markedly improved by his presence. One of my all-time favorites. Perfect example: The Killers. While he's nominally the lead, in the sense that his character is the one who keeps the plot moving, he's competing not only with the glamour couple Lancaster and Gardner for our attention, but with a whole stable of secondary characters that fill the screen, from William Conrad and Charles McGraw to Albert Dekker to Sam Levene to the unforgettable Jack Lambert. And yet O'Brien is the glue that holds the film together in his own persistent way, right down to the final scene where his boss hears of his many near brushes with death, just to reduce the upcoming year's life insurance premiums by a tenth of a cent, and rewards him by giving him the weekend off! It's the perfect understated line delivered to the perfect lunchpail actor, who hears his "reward" and greets it with an appreciatively ironic smile, as he exits the scene and ends the movie.

Native Americans always got an ambivalent treatment from Hollywood, somewhat akin to Latinos: On the one hand they were "savages"*, while on the other hand intermarriage between whites and Indians was also depicted not all that infrequently. And beyond Hollywood, contrast the often semi-boastful proclamations of "Indian blood" on the part of whites who would've considered it a blood libel to suggest that their great-great-great-great grandfather had had even a single drop of "black" blood in him. * Though Latinos weren't depicted as "savages", but rather as either loafers, lovers, bandits, or corrupt public officials. And unlike Indians, you seldom saw "noble" applied to them.

I think with critics you have to allow for their genre biases and figure accordingly. For example, Maltin gives top ratings to just about every technicolor musical spectacular, but if that's not your cup of tea, what good are those 4 stars to you? Slowly I'm emancipating myself from recommendations altogether. I assume everyone else here already has. Best advice of the day.

Beyond any particular month, I've always found many of the month long "Spotlight" features far more interesting than the SOTM selections, which truthfully often seem pedestrian and filled with the Same Old Same Old. The tribute to Hitchcock that you mention was one outstanding example, as were similar tributes to Kurosawa (March 2010), Truffaut (July 2013), and of course our ongoing Summer of Darkness series.

One of these days someone should start a thread on truly evil femmes fatales, one with various subcategories that allow for different class types and m.o.'s. If there were an "intellectual" subcategory, then Helen Walker would be right up there at the top of the list, much as Ann Savage in Detour would head up the Trailer Trash heap and Barbara Stanwyck would contend for the Bored and Restless Housewife honors for her role in Double Indemnity.

You've said a lot and said it very eloquently. And since Nightmare Alley ranks right up there with The Killers and Out of the Past in my noir pantheon, I was glad to read your comments. One minor point about the movie that I'd add is to note the somewhat sympathetic role of Taylor Holmes. I mention him only because the first time I saw Nightmare Alley on the Fox Movie Channel several years ago, it was right after I saw Holmes as a mob lawyer in Kiss of Death, a film that was released just two months earlier in 1947. Let's just say it was rather fascinating to first watch Holmes as the smarmiest possible shady mob mouthpiece, as cynical as can be, and then see him as a sucker supreme who falls hook, line and sinker for Power's slick seance setup. It's hard to imagine two more completely opposite types.

Basinger was just a name to me when I first saw L.A. Confidential, and all I really knew about her was a vague recollection about her buying an island off Georgia, and having some sort of relationship with Alec Baldwin, or maybe it was some other actor who looks like him. But Nadine! What a revelation. That girl can act! I'm a total sucker for southern accented women, but Basinger's performance in Nadine went far beyond that, and rescued what otherwise was a pedestrian movie whose only other saving graces were Rip Torn and a cameo by Jerry Stiller. I'd see it again just for her.

Totally agree on all counts, and I'm glad you mentioned the soundtrack. I've had that CD in my car for the past week and I've just about worn it out, especially Betty Hutton's fabulous take on "Hit The Road To Dreamland". NOBODY can resist the lure of this song. It was divine, but the rooster has finally crowed....

Funny, but when I see your thumbnail, it occurs to me that if Laura Hunt's unrequited suitor had been cast in Rain, he might have tried to kill Sadie and throw her into the ocean, rather than pulling a Norman Maine and wading in there himself.

That may be part of it, but there's also the fact that Rain was one of the major cases that was cited in the push to tighten up the Production Code. It's hard to imagine a film with a more cynical message aimed directly at the phony pieties of organized religion, and I'm sure that Joe Breen and his followers took that ending as a slap right in their collective faces. Being a very intelligent woman when it came to all aspects of her career, Crawford very well might have stuck her finger in the wind and adjusted her opinions accordingly. She wouldn't have been the only actor or actress to perform such a midair spin.

If you want to see Huston playing two of the most loathsome pre-code characters of all time, try his pious preacher in Rain, and even more so (if that's possible), in his role as an uber-corrupt judge in Night Court. He isn't exactly "dear old Walter Huston" in either of those.

Henson's known by most people today for The Muppets, but to many of us who grew up in the Washington area in the 50's and early 60's, he'll mainly be remembered for a series of sublime commercials he made for Wilkins coffee. I could watch these a hundred times over and never get tired of them.

I guess I should've gone past the introductory paragraph of their Wiki page, which read: Daisy Hilton and Violet Hilton (5 February 1908 – 4 January 1969) were a pair of English conjoined twins or Siamese Twins. The corrected dates were at the bottom of the article, as you rightly noted. My bad.