AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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So if you had a very tall center who was good at jump balls and a good ball tipper, the team could almost keep control of the ball for the whole game. What were they thinking
Not very much, apparently. But in their defense, when Jim Naismith invented the game back around 1892, he didn't have George Mikan or Yao Ming in mind when he instituted the rule. It took quite a few decades, well into the 1940's, before basketball evolved to the point where it became almost completely dominated by big men.
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I'm very lucky, in that I can read a long plot summary and often use it to detemine whether to give the movie a shot, but my short term memory is so poor that fifteen minutes into the film I've forgotten how it's supposed to turn out.
Of course it often takes me several re-watchings of a good movie to remember it all, anyway----I'll probably be able to watch The Killers or Out of the Past another half dozen times before I really absorb everything that transpires between the opening and the closing scenes. Hell, I can barely figure out The Lone Wolf plots the first time around (and I love every one of them), that's how dense I can be.
And The Big Sleep or L.A. Confidential ? Ha! Those'll take me another 30 years!
BTW I'd love to see someone try to give a plot synopsis of My Dinner With Andre---the short version would be about one sentence, and the long version would be almost as long as the movie itself....
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Yes, probably staged. Based on typical speeches he often gave to his full team.
That newsreel was definitely staged. No team would've allowed cameras in their locker room like that. It would have been far too much of a distraction.
He says, "If we receive..." and "If we kick off..." and that implies it is a pre-game speech. It could have been filmed before a real game, after a real game, or on a day off.
Not necessarily, since in Rockne's time it wasn't that unusual for a team to choose to kick off to start the second half, even though they'd kicked off in the first half. If Notre Dame had won the pre-game coin toss, they wouldn't necessarily have known for sure whether their opponents would choose to kick or receive to begin the second half. In Red Grange's most famous game, the one where he scored four touchdowns against Michigan in the first quarter, Michigan chose to kick off back to Illinois every time Grange scored, even after the strategy kept blowing up in the Wolverines' face.
It seems strange today, but then in this same era in basketball, every time a basket was scored they had a new center court jump ball to determine the next possession. That rule didn't change until 1937-38.
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Definitely Eugene " What future is there in being a Chinaman? Let's have a drink. " Pallette, and of course a definite thumbs up to your earlier suggestion of the one and only Jeanne Moreau, who was in my original list and who'd deserve a full SOTM treatment if enough of her films were available for TCM's use. The Bride Wore Black , Jules and Jim , and Elevator to the Gallows have all been shown here in the past few years, but I'd love them to come up with The Lovers and Bay of Angels , to this day the finest depiction of a compulsive gambler I've yet to see.
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There's no question that anti-semitism permeated every western country in the 1920's. Hell, right here in the good old USA, Henry Ford was selling (and giving away) copies of The International Jew , a four part collection of anti-semitic diatribes that were largely based on The Protocols of Zion and had been originally published in Ford's Dearborn Independent newspaper.
But that said, there's little in Pandora's Box that goes much beyond the sort of "normal" pre-Nazi anti-semitism that you make reference to. And I still would note that the "Aryan" stereotypes in the next film Pabst made with Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl , were far cruder than a few strategically placed menorahs, or a "Jewish" character who almost certainly wouldn't have been out of place in the normal Weimar "underground" life. To leave out all references to Jews in a film centered in the sort of milieu depicted in Pandora's Box would have been just as false a note as giving Louise Brooks a hook nose and a Yiddish accent.
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I love character actors too, and can't believe I forgot Edward Arnold AND forgot my all time favorite character actress, Thelma Ritter! Six time Oscar nominee and never won, unbelievable!
I also can't believe I forgot the great Thelma Ritter, the living embodiment of Brooklyn. Another addition to my SUTS want list would be Sylvia Sidney, the "Proletarian Princess" with the most soulful eyes this side of a Margaret Keane painting.
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More noirs, pre-codes, silents and foreign films, especially those from France, Italy and Japan.
Oh, and more premieres.
Fewer costume dramas, biohagiographies, musicals, westerns, and teenage romances from the saddle shoes era.
I'll leave the details to the programmers. Just a 10% increase in the first set of categories and a 10% drop in the second set of categories would be the best Christmas present we could have. TCM is the world's greatest network, but there are times when it gets a little stale and very bland.
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The thing about the Library Of Congress, is that IF you are giving them something that is in the public domain and which is viable for video release, then any third party can go there, have a copy made, copyright their copy and start making a buck for themselves, all compliments of your "donation"! This is what happened with *Reefer Madness*. Someone back in 1971 found a copy of it in LOC, made a transfer and started making moolah! People are still making "lettuce" off of that "public domain" film! Whoever it was, must have made hundreds of thousands, if not millions off of it!
Thelma, you may or may not appreciate this, but my ex-GF (who's now a law prof in Brooklyn) and I were actually the first people to get the LOC to make a copy of Reefer Madness . They charged us 300 bucks (about $1,665 in today's dollars), and we did make quite a few thousand bucks (maybe ten thousand) off it by showing it on college campuses and renting it to a few theaters---- *UNTIL* New Line Cinema got the same idea, and with their financial resources, had many multiple copies made and left our little cottage enterprise in the dust.** But it was fun while it lasted, and before it was all over, we showed that film so many times that I can still recite every line in my sleep---- *"GOSH! HOT CHOCOLATE! THANKS, MRS. LANE!"*
**NORML actually had the same idea, but for some strange reason they cut their version by about 10 minutes, and it never caught on like our (and the New Line Cinema's) unabridged version.
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Thanks, Helen, and I'd also second your Zachary Scott mention, as well as clore's Aline MacMahon and VP19's "Triple-C" trio of Cobb, Connolly and Cortez---to which I might also add Richard Conte, many of whose best films like Thieves' Highway are unfortunately locked up by Fox.
When I made that list, I tried to be inclusive, but to be honest, with the exception of the foreign stars who seldom make it onto TCM, I'm mostly partial to the great character actors, which is why I was so thrilled to see Ann Dvorak and Joan Blondell get their SUTS days this year.. I've seen plenty of duds featuring some of the biggest names in Hollywood, but it's very hard for me to think of many movies with Edward Arnold, Guy Kibbee, Charles Coburn or Louis Calhern that I didn't thoroughly enjoy. AFAIC the stars are what draw the crowds, but the character actors are what make us want to see those films over and over again.
My favorite example of this is one of my all-time favorite screwball comedies, Libeled Lady . Now there's a movie with three of my all-time favorite stars (Harlow, Powell, Loy) all together, and even my not-so-favorite Spencer Tracy was pretty damn good in this one.
An all-star cast for the ages, indeed. But let's be honest: Don't you all remember Walter Connolly's exasperated complaints and general confusion just as much as any of the big names? And wasn't it fitting that the movie ended with Connolly throwing up his arms and looking as if he were headed to Bellevue, as if Jean Harlow had committed "arson" to his torso?
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This year's SUTS was the best in recent memory, with Gabin, Chaney, Dvorak, Blondell, etc. In that same spirit I'd nominate the following actors for 24 hours of recognition. A few of these deserve the full SOTM treatment, but you have to start somewhere:
Dana Andrews
Edward Arnold
Richard Barthelmess
Anne Baxter
Wallace Beery
Clara Bow
Louis Calhern
Jack Carson
Charles Coburn
Paul Douglas
Marie Dressler
Glenda Farrell
Glenn Ford
Kay Francis
Susan Hayward
Van Heflin
William Holden
Walter Huston
Guy Kibbee
Myrna Loy
Ida Lupino
Adolphe Menjou
Toshiro Mifune
Robert Montgomery
Jeanne Moreau
Chester Morris
Edmund O'Brien
Jack Palance
Nat Pendleton
Vincent Price
Ann Sheridan
Lizabeth Scott
Franchot Tone
Lee Tracy
Richard Widmark
Warren William
Hey, I can dream, can't I?
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I'd be more likely to believe in some cryptic anti-semitic message in Pandora's Box if it weren't for the fact that in Pabst's next movie (also starring Brooks), Diary of a Lost Girl , the two main villainous characters (the rapist who impregnated Brooks and the overseer of the reform school she was exiled to) were both so Aryan in their features** and mannerisms that it seemed far more like an "anti-Aryan" bit of propaganda than Pandora's Box had the air of anti-semitism. I think the much more likely explanation about Pandora's Box is that Pabst was just trying to depict a realistic cross-section of underground life in the Weimar era, and to do that accurately you'd have to have at least some references to the fact that this sexually liberated milieu wasn't exclusively Aryan, but rather was famously polyglot.
**positively "Heydrichian" in their evil-looking blondness, you might even say
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Pandora's Box was last shown on TCM at the end of January, so this recent screening made two times in the past 10 months. Not up to Splendor in the Grass levels of exposure, but since I had my DVD recorder running both times, I won't complain.
Like many others here, I'm totally captivated both by Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box , which has already vaulted into my top 20 or 25 films of all time and may go even higher the next time I watch it. I only wish that TCM could play her other great Pabst film, Diary of a Lost Girl , and her French feature Prix de Beaute . Of all the great radiant beauties in film history, Loretta Young is the only one I'd compare to Louise Brooks, and even there, it's a comparison that's a bit of a stretch, since Young never projected Brooks's worldly and "modern" qualities as were on display in spades in those two Pabst films.
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This wasn't the strongest of weeks, although there were some that I would've caught if I hadn't seen them half a dozen times already, particularly The Lady Eve and A Foreign Affair .
But the unquestionable highlight was Bardot's And God Created Woman . I saw it many years ago, but I liked it much better this time around. Bardot's Juliette seems like a slightly more erotic version of the Jeanne Moreau character in Jules and Jim , the eternal femme fickle, even though at the end she seemed to realize she'd married the right guy after all. It had enough of the classic elements of French New Wave films to keep me hooked from start to finish.
The other highlight was also French: Truffaut's Stolen Kisses . I absolutely hated that movie when it first came out, but this time it somehow improved from about a 1 to a 7 or 8, and I have a feeling that the next time it'll be even higher. Too bad that TCM resists showing more than a relative handful of foreign films and keeps running second rate musicals and third rate westerns into the ground, but I guess that's what most people apparently want. What we really need is a TCM International Network that has a balanced schedule of the best movies from all countries and all eras---Hey, I can dream, can't I?
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I'm of course thankful for TCM, most recently for showing And God Created Woman , but this year I'm also thankful to Eugenia for all the work she's done on the Barbara Stanwyck thread. It's also great to see that so many others here have such appreciation for the greatest of all actresses.
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Rita Hayworth is to the rest of these pretenders what Secretariat was to the rest of the 1973 Belmont field, and what the 1998 Yankees were to the rest of baseball.
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Yes, those are great essential pre-codes. But they've each been on dozens of times already. I'd like to see them break out more of the many never-shown other Fox films from 1932 & 1933 & 1934.
You and me both. And yes, FCM has been showing both of them over and over for the past half year or more. But for those like Mr. 6666, who may have given up on FCM with disgust and missed these two, I thought they might be worth noting. Me, I could watch Call Her Savage in particular another 2 or 3 times without getting tired of it, in spite of the rather hokey ending.
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There's an excellent book I picked up through amazon called City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. It talks about all aspects of Hollywood, not just its stars:
Eugenia strikes again! When I had a book shop I must have sold 20 copies of that title when it was remaindered, but since I wasn't systematically collecting film books at the time, I never took home a copy. But I am SO looking forward to getting it now, and I just found a VG copy in a VG DJ for only $5.00 + postage. Thank you once more, Eugenia.
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FMC may be going up in flames, but on Friday morning, at least, it'll be a glorious bonfire. If anyone here hasn't seen this pair of beauties, they're definitely not to be missed. Bow is at her absolute fire-eating best, and Loretta Young has never been more pre-codey, raising her boy to be a crook and not repenting until about the last 15 seconds of the movie.
*25 Friday – nothing worth recording on TCM*
*{color:maroon}7:30 AM {color:blue}(FOX)*{color:blue} [Call Her Savage|http://www.tcm.com/processors/search/TCMTitleClick?docid=70082&url=/tcmdb/title/70082/Call-Her-Savage/&query=call%20her%20savage&title=Call%20Her%20Savage%20%281932%29] *{color:blue} {color:blue}(FOX) {color:maroon}(1932) Sexy Texas gal storms her way through life, brawling and boozing until her luck runs out and she learns the errors of her ways. Cast: Clara Bow, Gilbert Roland, Thelma Todd. Dir: John Francis Dillon. BW- 87 min.*
*1:00 PM [born_To_Be_Bad|http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/69417/Born-to-Be-Bad/] {color:maroon}(1934) {color:blue}(FOX) {color:maroon}Letty, a young woman who ended up pregnant, unmarried and on the streets at fifteen is bitter and determined that her child will not grow up to be taken advantage of. Cast: Loretta Young, Cary Grant, Jackie Kelk. Dir: Lowell Sherman. BW-70 min,*
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One of the weirdest things in the old days that I personally witnessed as a journalist was watching FBI agents (usually 2 at a time) observing white **** beating up blacks during civil rights demonstrations, and the FBI guys could do nothing about it, as the local **** police looked on and did nothing about it. As a matter of fact, we members of the press looked on and did nothing about it. Of course we did our news stories, the FBI guys wrote up reports about what they observed, and the Justice Dept. used those reports when deciding how to word the complexity of the proposed new upcoming Civil Rights law, which wasn't passed until after JFK was killed.
I was in SNCC at that time (Cambridge, MD), and while the incident that you describe might have taken place almost anywhere in the South, there was a very famous version of it in Selma, Alabama, in the Fall of 1963. A whole group of SNCC workers were on the steps of a federal courthouse, holding up signs encouraging blacks to vote (almost no blacks in Selma were registered then, due to both the laws and intimidation), and right out of the blue, Sheriff Jim Clark and his Dallas County police went up and dragged them right off the steps of the *FEDERAL* courthouse, tearing up the signs and arresting them. There were photographs of this incident all over the country.
All during this time, FBI agents were standing around taking notes, otherwise doing nothing. Kennedy's assistant Burke Marshall said "We're not running a police force".
I don't have anything particular against The FBI Story, since that film was standard issue sort of stuff for the Hollywood of the 50's, and wasn't partiuclarly political, but for a film made in the late 80's, Mississippi Burning was a seriously bad rendition of history. Not only was the FBI completely indifferent for the most part to countless civil rights violations, but as we all know, J. Edgar Hoover not only waged a relentless vendetta against Martin Luther King, but he'd gone out of his way to praise Mississippi state officials when in fact they'd been among the main culprits in establishing the entire climate of racial oppression in that state.
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I've got these Lone Wolf films lined up like ducks in a pond, and IYAM Warren William is worthy of a SOTM treatment. He had a short career, but I can't think of a more quintessential pre-code male actor. (Funny how several actresses fall into that category, however.)
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Giant
in Hot Topics
Giant is the one James Dean movie I really like, but yeah, the idea of Liz Taylor at 23 playing a grandmother is a bit ridiculous.
Hmm, I see that this thread has been around for while. It's even lasted longer than Giant .
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Terrific movie, but it's played at least 2 or 3 times in the past 2 years, and it's scheduled again on December 15th, during William Powell month. That may be rare by Splendor in the Grass or Some Like It Hot standards, but I only wish that a few hundred other movies like The Lady Gambles or Double Indemnity would show that often.
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Well, do remember that when Harlow first got a pair of scripts that enabled her to show off her true talent level --- Red-Headed Woman and Red Dust ---she was all of 21 years old. And if there's ever been a better pair of gumsnapper comedies than Bombshell and Libeled Lady, I've yet to see them.
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What a great site! Of their 38 noirs, only a few of them show very often on TCM, and there are a few gems like The File on Thelma Jordan and Too Late For Tears. I've been waiting for years to see that Stanwyck either here or on Netflix, with no success. Thank you, Mr. Rickey.
The vast majority of the March 2012 schedule
in General Discussions
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Of course the more you watch TCM, the more that endless repeats like Some Like It Hot , NBNW and the godawful Splendor in the Grass are going to annoy you. But when I see that they're going to show the rest of the Lone Wolf series and then begin with Boston **** ( *PLEASE* show them all), I won't complain too much about yet another screening of Natalie Wood's sexual frustrations.
And to put things in a bit of perspective, in the 26 months since I've had a DVD recorder, and counting what's on tab through March, I'll have over *two dozen* Warren William movies. So yeah, I wish they'd lay off the old chestnuts and give more air to rare noirs, foreign flicks and pre-codes, but all in all I can't really complain about a network that's helped me build up a film library of many Warren Williams for the tiny outlay of cash that it's costing me. TCM is definitely going to be in my will.
What *would* be greatly appreciated by many of us long-time watchers, though, would be if each new schedule release could be accompanied by a master list of TCM premieres, or at least a master list of those films that haven't shown for at least 3 or 4 years. That would enable us to focus on the movies we're least likely to have already seen over and over. I'd bet for the vast majority of us LTVers, these films are the highlights of every month.