AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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Nice to see that Susan Hayward is the September 2015 Star of the Month.
My hometown girl Carole Landis has an evening on the 21st-- so stoked about that!
That's great, but where did you see this information? Has the September schedule been posted?
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Is the novel still in print, I wonder? I should check my local library. I agree, most people at the time would see the ending as hopeful, though its open ended enough for me to draw different conclusions depending on one's mindset. I hadnt thought of the Zena redux with Stan and Molly, but that makes perfect sense too.....
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.
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I had never seen Nightmare Alley until I checked it out on Watch TCM. I think Tyrone Power got exactly what he deserved in this one. He used women to achieve his fame and credibility, but he would ditch them once he felt they were no longer useful to him. His character goes full circle, which made for a great picture. Credit to the makeup artists too in the final scenes; the handsome and dashing Tyrone Power with messed up teeth and a uni-brow?
I would take a bit of an issue with the thought that Dr. Ritter "got away" with anything. It seemed clear from the outset of her introduction in the film that she thought Stanton Carlisle was a fraud and a charlatan. When she couldn't expose him as easily as she intimated to her dinner party in her first scene, I think she realized she had to put a lot more effort into her task. Even though not stated, I think she had the moral compass to return the ill-gotten money to Mr. Grindle.
"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.
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If only...right, Andy? I'd like the Oscar mumbo jumbo to be crammed into Leap Year Day, freeing up and giving us back 30 days on the schedule.
Well, I'd accept that as a reasonable compromise to the ongoing February problem.
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You mean you're not a fan of little Shirley? Personally, I think her films with their innate wholesomeness work better around the holidays. I don't know why they are doing this tribute in the dead heat of July. Unless it's to provide a relief from all the crime stories airing during Summer of Darkness..?
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.
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Beginning this October and continuing each October for the next three years, TCM will be presenting a new series of programming lamenting the lack of gender equity in Hollywood and celebrating the achievements of female filmmakers. This series will be presented in conjunction with Women in Film.
For more on this new programming initiative, visit http://deadline.com/2015/06/turner-classic-movies-tcm-gender-inequality-film-women-in-film-1201445747/.
More information on Women in Film is available at the organization's website, http://www.wif.org.
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.
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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.
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Yes ! I say yes to anything Richard Widmarkian ! Not only a great actor, but a sexy one. (I know this opinion will not be shared by many, but it's mine. Opinion, that is.)
There was an energy to Widmark that few actors possessed. Good guy, bad guy, or - better yet, complex human character guided by both "good" and "bad" impulses - Richard Widmark's presence fairly jumped off the screen.
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.
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Richard Widmark may be one of the greatest most underrated actors and I wish that TCM would program more of his films. I've been hoping that they would have Widmark featured in the Summer of Darkness or Summer Under The Stars festivals, but not yet. I've been told that due to his movies being made by Twentieth Century Fox they are not all available for TCM programming. Well, I would love to see as many Richard Widmark films as possible e.g. Night And The City (film noir), Panic In The Streets, Road House (film noir), Pickup on South Street (film noir), No Way Out, Yellow Sky (great Western film noir), Madigan, Backlash, The Last Wagon, Garden of Evil, Kiss of Death (Film Noir -- Great), Alvarez Kelly, Time Limit, Down to the Sea in Ships, the list goes on. Richard Widmark deserves being recognized as one of our finest and diversified actors. Hopefully we'll see more Richard Widmark films on TCM.
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I feel The Sound of Music is a film noir. After all, Captain von Trapp is an alienated figure, full of angst, isolated from society. The nuns are the gang from which Maria flees, the seven children the new gang Maria forms in order to subversively control their father.
And look at all the night scenes.
The song of the Lonely Goatherd is the equivalent of Maria singing a torch song in a seedy nightclub.
Yodal-ay-hee-hoo.
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.
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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.
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Does anybody else really like Edmond O'Brien?
I think he's so underappreciated. I've enjoyed him immensely in everything I've ever seen him in. I know a lot people say he's a very “wooden" actor, but I don't agree with that; I've always felt that he had a very quiet intensity. There's always something a bit mysterious about him, like he has more going on inside than he's letting on. I just find him very interesting
Some of my favorite films of his are “The Hitchhiker," directed by the great Ida Lupino; also, “The Bigamist," in which he again worked with Lupino, as she both directed and co-stared in the film, along with Joan Fontaine and a terrific Edmund Gwenn. And, of course, D.O.A. is a terrific film noir and O'Brien is magnificent in it, he really sold the franticness and anxiety that the role required--it's a classic of the film noir genre, and it's probably O'Brien's most popular movie in which he's the leading man.
It's unfortunate, though, that he was only allowed to be leading man in B movies, and was relegated to supporting and character roles in A- list movies Like “Julius Caesar," “Birdman of Alcatraz," and “The Barefoot Contessa," for which he at least won a best supporting actor Oscar.
I suppose he didn't have the leading man “good looks" for A- list films, but was better suited to B noir movies because of his everyman quality. At any rate, I suppose he was luckier than most B movie actors, for his ability to crossover into A list movies-- and get Academy Award recognition for his efforts-- while most other B movie actors didn't fare so well.
Anyway, I think he deserves far more credit than he gets-- he was a great actor, who left a terrific body of work in several different genres. I'll watch anything, A- list or B- list, that has Edmond O'Brien in it!
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.
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Call Her Savage is very interesting--and another example of the casual racism of those 30's films--Bow is "savage" becasue she's half Native American? Really? But she's fun to watch...
She's also fun in her last film, Hoop-la, where she plays a chooch dancer in a circus sideshow who casually bets that she can make the owner's sheltered son fall in love with her.
Clara in one of her costumes:
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.
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And being told a film is good or bad has just made me more skeptical of reviews- like what happened with me and Maltin. Usually I'd read his reviews fairly, and then he gave four stars to a film I found quite laughable (moreso than usual) and I've not trusted a critic since.
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.
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It's always interesting to see what sort of films TCM airs and what sort of stars TCM honors during the fall months.
About two years ago, there was a great spotlight that focused on Alfred Hitchcock during the month of September. Almost every one of his sound features were broadcast (with the exception maybe being JAMAICA INN).
A September or two before that we had the TCM premiere of THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE-- and even better we had a month-long spotlight on Merchant-Ivory, which I loved.
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.
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I keep reading about what a great performance Power gives.
But for me, it's Walker who makes the film truly worth watching. She's perfection. Too bad the movie flopped at the box office - it should have made her a star (kind of like 'Cuckoo's Nest' did for Louise Fletcher).
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.
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Hi Kay;
I'm surprised there aren't more comments about Nightmare Alley. For one thing, it's a comparatively rare noir, one doen't see it aired all that often, and for that alone, it deserves some attention.
For another, it's an exceptionally strange and sad story, even for noir; there's a lot to say about it.
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.
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Kim Basinger is extremely underated as an actor.
She excels in both dramatic and comedic roles.
Did anyone catch NADINE on TCM when it aired during the Robert Benton tribute?
She cracks me up every time she says "Vernon Hightower" in that movie .
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.
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I just watched LA Confidential that I recorded last week during the noir fest. Wow! What a great movie. It had all the elements of noir and was a compelling story about police corruption in 1950s LA. The leads were excellent-- I especially liked the performances of Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger.
This movie, while definitely having more graphic scenes and language than the other noirs it was paired with last Friday evening, had all the noir elements intact. It featured cynical characters who were not only trying to solve a crime but also engaging in some questionable behavior themselves. There aren't really any "good" characters in this film, Basinger is a "good guy" but is also employed as a prostitute. The main cops, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, are good cops but also engage in unethical behavior like having sex with Basinger. Kevin Spacey is always fantastic in everything he does and this movie was no exception.
Not that I was around in 1950s LA, but I feel that the filmmakers did a great job re-creating what LA would have looked like during this time period.
I also loved the soundtrack.
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....
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Actors are seldom the best judge of their performances. Now I am intrigued to see Rain.
Lydecker
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.
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I don't guess I'll ever understand why Joan hated Rain because she's really very good in that movie. Maybe it's because she's a little "tacky" in that film. It certainly was a change from the shop girls & heiresses that she was playing at that stage of her career.
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.
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For sheer perversity in a pre-code, Kongo gets my vote. Who knew dear old Walter Huston could
be such a sadistic pig?? Like a train wreck, you can't take your eyes off of it.
Lydecker
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.
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By the way, May 16th was the 25th anniversary of the deaths of Sammy Davis, Jr. and Jim Henson. It's so hard to believe they've been gone that long!
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.
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According to Wikipedia, the Hilton twins did not die on the same day. January 4, 1969 is the day their bodies were discovered in their home in Charlotte, where they worked as grocery clerks, both having succumbed to the Hong Kong flu. According to an autopsy, Daisy died first, followed by Violet two to four days later.
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.
Is there anything worth watching tomorrow?
in General Discussions
Posted
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.