AndyM108

Here's what I said in my first comment on the subject: And while I agree that it'd be nice to have them all available On Demand.... Perhaps I should have emphasized that more strongly, but of course I think that these movies should be on the TCM streaming page. I apologize if I seemed to indicate otherwise. As for working people's choices, I said that they'd only be able to see the two prime time movies on most weeknights. I based that on a 9 to 5 or 10 to 6 working day, with enough time allowed for dinner and sleep. I can't see any other time frames during the course of a normal weekday where a working person could watch an entire movie uninterrupted.

I bought my Toshiba DVD recorder/player for about $150 new nearly six years ago, and I've recorded well over 4000 movies on it without any breakdown other than the occasional power outage or disk failure. It may not have all the bells and whistles (God, I hate that cliche), but other than not being able to record on a channel you're not tuned into, I can't think of any particular feature it's lacking. And that $150 was recouped within a matter of weeks, making it a terrific bargain for any TCM junkie on a fixed income.

Absolutely, especially since for most working people it's hard to see more than the two "prime time" films live on weeknights.

I think there's at most 2 or 3 premieres in the entire lot, but whoever did the programming did a fantastic job of mixing the very best of noirs with some of the more obscure ones. There's not more than a tiny handful of clinkers in the entire carload. And while I agree that it'd be nice to have them all available On Demand, I'd have two responses to that: ---You can buy a cheap DVD recorder and put 6 hours worth of films on one disk for about 30 cents + the price of a jewel case. Even if you don't like them, you're only going to be out chump change. You spend more on a month's rent of a DVR box than you would on an average month's worth of DVD+R's. ---And 24 hours of noirs to many of us is a welcome respite from all those insipid "family fare" movies that usually dominate a high percentage of TCM's days. Musicals, animal movies, Andy Hardy tales, "adventure" films with colorful savages, and all those Breen romantic dramas that all have the same code-enforced righteous endings complete with wedding bells and women on the nest. Just look at it as you would the weather: If you don't like it, there's always the next day.

The car chase indeed was filmed in Washington, but to any Washingtonian it's a hoot. The call from Walker to Van Heflin was inferentially made from a location somewhere near Scott Circle at 16th & P Sts,, and when Walker's cab passed down 16th St. heading south, a black limo pulled out of the old Soviet Embassy just below Scott Circle, and started tailing him. Now the fastest way from that point to the then Justice Department building* at 9th and Pennsylvania would be to turn east onto L St., shoot downtown to 9th St., and then turn right (south) and go straight to the destination, where presumably a phalanx of straight-jawed FBI agents would immediately rush our newly turned patriot informer straight up to Van Heflin for a debriefing session. But instead, the cab decided to go in the opposite direction, heading west before turning south, and somehow wound up on Rock Creek Parkway headed towards Independence Avenue. But unfortunately, that big black Commie limo had enough gas in it to make it to the part of Rock Creek Parkway where it passes the steps where they used to stage the Watergate concerts, and with a few rat-a-tat-tats our hero was dispatched to his reward, quite a bit further away from the FBI headquarters than he was when he began his cab ride. Perhaps the cab driver was in on the conspiracy, although he may just have been trying to straddle the taxicab zones in order to jack up the fare. I was once a cab driver myself, and they can be a devious lot. As I've said before, this was one strange movie, but then that was one strange time. * Which is where the FBI was located at that time.

Yeah, the combination of the plot and Bette being Bette makes Storm Center a pretty forgettable movie, but then Hollywood never minded jumping on any political bandwagon as long as it's on the right side of a relatively safe subject where the opposition can be easily caricatured. OTOH there were plenty of easy targets to caricature back then. Just two years before Storm Center, the Illinois American Legion cut off all ties with the Girl Scouts because of "un-American influences" in the Girl Scout Handbook and other Girl Scout literature. Think I'm making this up? Seeing is believing. Herblock said it better than Storm Center with one little cartoon.

John Wayne starred as a Congressional Commie hunter in Big Jim McLain, another 1952 movie in the redhunting genre, this one set in Hawaii. Compared to My Son John, it's practically a documentary. There was also Frank Lovejoy's I Was A Communist For The FBI, and Robert Ryan's The Woman on Pier 13, and several others along those lines, but for pure hysteria, My Son John was in a class by itself. It's the Reefer Madness of anti-Commie films, and then some. P. S. Those User Reviews on the TCM site are indeed a hoot.

It's an absolutely hilarious "blue" cartoon that is probably from the late silent or early sound era, part of the "Everready H a r t o n" series, though that's the only one I've seen. I first saw it at the AFI in 1971 or 1972, and since it was obviously in the public domain, I asked the AFI programmer where it came from. Turned out it was loaned to the AFI by the owner of a (pause for irony) religious film outfit in Detroit, and he kindly lent me the copy for me to duplicate. From there it achieved a brief fame on a few dozen college campuses east of the Mississippi, at first in the aforementioned "Sex, Drugs, and Treason" festival, and later in a much more elaborate program entitled "An O r g y of Cartoons: 69 Years of Sex, Violence, and General Bad Taste in Animation". That one had everything from Melies' Trip to the Moon to Lenny Bruce's Thank You Mask Man, and even if the description in most of these cases was what we might call poetic license, it still drew huge crowds everywhere it played. And in spite of the stiff competition from the Bugs and Donald cartoons in the mix, P e c k e r Island was definitely the howler of the lot. This You Tube version below is the same film, but with a different title and soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG55JmqYcSs&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGG55JmqYcSs&has_verified=1

Is there a way to post a picture from one's Flickr page, or from a Word document file? Using the image tab doesn't seem to work in either of those cases. From my Flickr page, all I get is this when I paste the URL into the image box: A message reading "You are not allowed to use that image extension on this community." (BTW what does that message even mean? It's my own Flickr page, and the image is the farthest thing from "adult" in content.) And when I copy the image from my Word file, I get nothing when I try to paste it here. It seems I remember being able to do that a year or so ago, but not lately.

I used to show My Son John in a "Sex, Drugs and Treason" festival on college campuses in the 70's, along with P e c k e r Island and Reefer Madness. To call it an "interesting" look at the Red Scare is like calling Ty Cobb an "interesting" baseball player. If you ever wanted to see a Greatest HIts compendium of every last bit of paranoia and phony piety that was smothering Hollywood during the Korean War era, all you need to do is to watch My Son John from beginning to end in all its Bizarro World splendor. It makes Jack Webb's propaganda short Red Nightmare seem positively sane by comparison. And Robert Walker! I've seen him as Bruno in Strangers on a Train, but in this movie he's if anything ever weirder, although in fairness to him it's mostly the surrounding atmosphere. If he's not literally swearing over his family's Bible that he's "not now, and have never been" a Commie, then he's calling up the FBI to warn them that the Commies are tapping their phones.* And if he's not being machine-gunned down by Commies in a big black limo on the Watergate steps, with a grin and a "They got me" as his final words, he's giving a posthumous tape recorded lecture about "stimulants" (i.e. liberalism) leading to "narcotics" (Communism) to a commencement gathering at his alma mater, with the spotlight shining on the tape recorder and the students sitting in absolute silence. After which John's parents (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) file out of the auditorium, and Jagger's parting sentiment is more or less that he was asking for it. Yeah, all in all it's one lovely movie, and in many ways every bit as evocative of the mood of its era as 42nd Street or Wall Street are of FDR's first year or the Reagan era. It's a film that everyone should see at least once, and forget whatever the contemporary critics were saying. You have to look at it with the perspective of an anthropologist, not a film critic. * Er, it was usually the other way around back then.

So far I'm only up through the 10th, because transferring the info to Word now takes a lot longer than it used to before mid-2011. Of course if I didn't have nearly all of those Dark Friday noirs already, I would've recorded every one of them, but some like The Killers and The Glass Key are so great I always like to get a backup copy, or pair them with another movie. 1 Monday 8:00 PM Long Hot Summer, The (1958) A drifter with a past brings a wealthy family's problems to a head. Cast: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tony Franciosa. Dir: Martin Ritt: C-117 min. (Power outage killed this one.) 12:15 AM From the Terrace (1960) A financial wizard is tempted to sacrifice his career for an affair. Cast: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Myrna Loy. Dir: Mark Robson. C-149 min. 4:45 AM Drowning Pool, The (1975) A private eye's investigation of an anonymous letter leads to murder. Cast: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tony Franciosa. Dir: Stuart Rosenberg. C-108 min. 2 Tuesday 8:30 Squall, The (1929) A gypsy beauty sets the men of a farming family to fighting over her favors. Cast: Loretta Young, Myrna Loy, Alice Joyce. Dir: Alexander Korda. BW-102 min. 3 Wednesday 2:00 AM Killers, The (1946) An insurance investigator uncovers a string of crimes when he tries to find a murdered boxer's beneficiary. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien. Dir: Robert Siodmak. BW-102 min. 4:00 AM Glass Key, The (1942) A hired gun and his gangster boss fall out over a woman. Cast: Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Brian Donlevy. Dir: Stuart Heisler. BW-85 min. 4 Thursday 8:00 PM Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937) Captain Drummond becomes a prisoner when he intents to protect a beautiful heiress of an espionage organization. Cast: Ray Milland, Sir Guy Standing, Heather Angel. Dir: James Hogan. BW-67 min. 9:15 PM Bulldog Drummond at Bay (1937) A rock thrown through his window sets a gentleman adventurer on a search for enemy agents. Cast: John Lodge, Dorothy Mackaill, Victor Jory. Dir: Norman Lee. BW-74 min. 10:45 PM Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (1937) An old enemy kidnaps Bulldog Drummond’s fiancée. Cast: John Barrymore, John Howard, Louise Campbell. Dir: Louis King. BW-59 min. 12:00 AM Bulldog Drummond's Revenge (1937) Captain Drummond travels to Switzerland in order to marry his girlfriend but the disappearance of a dangerous cargo of explosives makes him delay his plans. Cast: John Barrymore, John Howard, Louise Campbell. Dir: Louis King. BW-55 min. 1:15 AM Bulldog Drummond's Peril (1938) Bulldog Drummond hunts down an assassin after a priceless diamond. Cast: John Barrymore, John Howard, Louise Campbell. Dir: James Hogan. BW-66 min. 5:00 AM Bulldog Drummond's Bride (1939) Bulldog Drummond postpones his wedding to track down a band of bank robbers.. Cast: John Howard, Heather Angel, H. B. Warner. Dir: James Hogan BW-56 min. 5 Friday 8:00 AM La Bete Humaine (1938) A railroad engineer enters an affair with his friend's amoral wife. Cast: Jean Gabin, Jacques Berlioz, Fernand Ledoux. Dir: Jean Renoir. BW-97 min. 8:00 PM Nora Prentiss (1947) An ambitious singer ruins a doctor's life. Cast: Ann Sheridan, Kent Smith, Bruce Bennett. Dir: Vincent Sherman. BW-112 min. 10:15 PM Woman On The Run (1950) A woman searches for her husband, who ran off after witnessing a mob hit. Cast: Ann Sheridan, Dennis O’Keefe, Robert Keith. Dir: Norman Foster. BW-78 min. (The only one in this entire series I don't already have.) 6 Saturday 10:00 AM Batman: Eight Steps Down (1943) Episode 13 of the Batman serial. Cast: Lewis Wilson, Douglas Croft, J. Carroll Naish. Dir: Lambert Hillyer. BW-14 min. 7 Sunday 6:00 AM Runaway Bride, The (1930) A criminal gang goes after the jewels their dying leader stashed in a woman's handbag. Cast: Mary Astor, Lloyd Hughes, David Newell. Dir: Donald Crisp. BW-66 min. 4:00 AM Sanjuro (1962) A wandering samurai recruits younger fighters to help him battle corruption. Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Takashi Shimura. Dir: Akiro Kurosawa. BW-96 min. 8 Monday 8:00 PM Man Hunt (1941) An Englishman goes behind enemy lines to assassinate Hitler. Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders. Dir: Fritz Lang. BW-102 min. 9 Tuesday 2:00 AM Mean Streets (1973) A small-time hood must choose from among love, friendship and the chance to rise within the mob. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Richard Romanus. Dir: Martin Scorcese. C-112 min. 10 Wednesday - nothing

The percentage of people in each country who have rented classic documentary films about shooting elk or kangaroos or gray squirrels.

Especially if you grew up as a baseball fan. Between 1947 and 1956 New York teams played in 7 subway Series (6 against Brooklyn and 1 against the Giants), and 2 other Series against outlanders. For 10 glorious years, that Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover bore a fair resemblance to the truth, at least on the baseball diamond. Unfortunately I was kidnapped by my parents in 1951 and forcibly removed with them to Washington, which was like being taken from a circus to a rest home.

Actually it would have been. since he was approaching from my right and my momentum would have knocked him in the direction I was heading. And wait, there is a Hollywood connection there, now that I think about it. Does anyone else remember that Barry G. once signed a contract with 19th Century Fox?

When I had three book shops in the Washington area, I had a fair number of "name" customers, but the only time I literally "brushed" with a household name was when I almost knocked over Barry Goldwater in the late 70's when I was jogging on a crowded sidewalk on Connecticut Avenue. But in terms of movie associations, other than Larry McMurtry, who also had a book shop around the corner from mine, the closest I came to Hollywood was when the man who later got hold of a nuclear warhead and destroyed civilization* came in one time and bought a few books---though strangely, none of them were from my military section. * At least that's what Woody Allen was told in Sleeper

The late 1940's was a great time to live in NYC even if you weren't rich. My parents rented a 2 bedroom apt.on the Upper West Side in 1950 for $40 a month, and cheap entertainment was everywhere. You could even buy a fair sized row house in Greenwich Village or Chelsea as late as 1959 for the equivalent of $250,000 in today's dollars. New York's always had its unaffordable neighborhoods, but until the late 90's they didn't encompass pretty much the entire city.

H e l l, I still use just about every one of the expressions mentioned in this thread, and always with a deadpan face. Sometimes I get a quizzical look in return, but most of the time people get what I'm saying in spite of the anachronisms. Of course you can't overdo this sort of thing or it becomes just another schtick. Speaking of anachronistic deadpan expressions, when was the last time anyone ever heard the classic "I only drink when I'm around company, unless I'm alone"? That was a conversational staple in the late 60's among many of the 50-something gents I knew back then, mostly in pool rooms, but I can't remember hearing it for at least 40 years now.

"What's the gag?" "The little shaver" a fin and a saw "Ripped from the headlines" "crooner" "Don't bone me"

Jack Carson in Mildred Pierce: ----What were you doing in there, pal? Picking up souvenirs? ----No, pal. Nothing petty. This is a pretty big night for you. Lots of excitement. There's a stiff in there. Or many characters in many movies: He's croaked... Or: That's white of you (Cary Grant, William Powell, many others) Or Groucho in Go West: Red man, you're a white man... Or Dick Powell talking about his BVD's in 42nd Street Or comebacks like Must've been tough on your mother, not having any children (Ginger Rogers in 42nd Street---you could fill this entire topic with lines from that movie, like Getta load of Minnie the Mountaineer) Many more, but the hour is late....

And as a Bizarro World followup to my original post, The Drowning Pool is now back to its "original" listed time of 4:45, after the 3:00 showing of Rachel, Rachel!! These programmers really need to make up their minds, and I know one thing: I'm checking the program guide on my TV before I go to bed tomorrow night!

I like Novak in every movie I've seen her in, but other than Vertigo the two that always grabbed me the most were an early noir of hers (Pushover), and a drama (Middle of the Night) where she plays a young woman who gets attracted to the middle aged Fredric March. Pushover usually gets overlooked because it suffers in comparison to the somewhat similar Double Indemnity, but IMO it's nearly as good. And Middle of the Night is an ultra-rare case where a May-September romance doesn't seem like a mere conceit to satisfy the male actor's ego, but rather seems quite believable and is presented in all its complexity. And in this case Novak's "stiffness" is in great part what makes her character believable; if she'd played her role in a more relaxed and "natural" manner, the pairing of her with the nervous and insecure March would have simply caused eyes to roll.

I've mentioned this before, but one of Hollywood's nice little ironies is that three of the more stable marriages it ever produced were those of Robert Ryan (one wife, 33 years until her death), Richard Widmark (1st wife, 35 years until her death; 2nd wife 9 years, until his death) and Dan Duryea (one wife, 35 years, until her death), three of the more memorable borderline psychos of the silver screen. So if any of you ladies ever get a time machine and can figure out a way to snatch any of them first, you probably won't have to worry about them running out on you.

You haven't lived until you're an Orioles fan stuck right in front of a group of Pittsburgh Pirates' wives singing "We Are Fam-i-LEE" over and over in the upper deck of Memorial Stadium, while your beloved O's are blowing a 3 games to 1 World Series lead to the husbands of those would-be Sisters Sledge. And did I mention it was raining the entire time, and that the upper deck wasn't covered? I shudda stood in bed watching Shelley Winters movies---even that would've been less of a torture.

It's a tossup between the breathtaking beauty of Loretta Young and je ne sais quoi of Sylvia Sidney, the once and forever proletarian princess of the silver screen, whose real life Republican politics I put in the attic and try to forget.

The real killer is when they schedule two movies in the middle of the night with overlapping times, which does happen every so often. Sometimes the first movie is really shorter than its listed time (though you'd have no way of knowing that for sure), and sometimes the first movie would barely end before the second movie begins, but they're not allowing time for the introduction, which makes the second movie begin as much as 3 or 4 minutes late. I HATE having to record two feature movies on the same track, but in these cases that's about the only way to avoid the possibility of chopping off either the ending of the first movie or the beginning of the second. Not to mention that sometimes the schedule lists the shorts between the features, and sometimes it doesn't, but that's a whole other story.