AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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Well isn't it kind of hard to judge an actor if you only seen one of their movies? Like I said, I understand the genre factor but as others have pointed out O'Hara did make movies outside of Pirate \ fantasy type pictures and westerns. I have seen these and O'Hara is very good in them.
But I'm not judging O'Hara as an actor, for the simple reason that I have no interest in the movies she was in. For all I know she may be the greatest actor in history, but as long as all I see her acting in is the sort of genres I don't like, I'll never know one way or the other. I did see her in The Quiet Man, but the movie turned me off (I don't find John Wayne or Barry Fitzgerald particularly charming) so completely I tried to put it out of my mind as quickly as possible. In this case O'Hara was mostly an innocent bystandress.
And Allyson is about as close to a cipher as I can imagine, a programmer-level actress who happened to be in a few movies I liked. She played Holden's wife well enough in Executive Suite, and maybe if O'Hara had been in a movie on that level I'd have an opinion of her as an actor.
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I've read this entire thread and I don't think I've missed anything.
I find it very telling that not one person has mentioned the most famous and popular (for her time) child actress of all, Shirley Temple.
No, I'm not really a fan, but I don't loathe her either. I neither hate nor like her.I just think it's interesting that she was, as I said, overwhelmingly the biggest child star ever, in terms of popularity and fame, and she's not been cited once here, not even in a negative way.
I don't have anything against our curly haired wonder, but she was never one of my favorites, either. Give me Sybil Jason any day. Shirley would probably be somewhere around 20th or 25th on my all-time list of child stars.
(So there, I've mentioned her.)
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There's a great article about FOR THE DEFENSE at the TCM database. The writer mentions her masculine haircut which I think looks great. She's chic, feminine and androgynous in this picture. Glad the story does not take place in a moral universe. It's a work of fiction about people who exist in grey areas, and the article writer goes over some of that.
http://www.tcm.com/t...e/articles.html
FOR THE DEFENSE will air again on September 12th.
Good tout, TB. Read the article, and I agree that it not only does the movie justice, it does a very good job of framing it in context. I watched For The Defense on Monday night and enjoyed it anyway, but this TCM piece added to my appreciation of it.
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Forget abiut her movies. Are you saying that Allyson herself is more bearable than Williams or O'Hara?. If so, that leaves me scratching my head to the extent that my scalp may just disappear.
Bearable as what? Pin-up girls? I've never seen any Williams movies, and the only O'Hara I've seen (The Quiet Man) I loathed. Again, both of them were used almost exclusively in my least favorite genres, and so their personal charms are irrelevant. OTOH I've seen at least a few Allyson movies that were either great (Executive Suite), very good (Right Cross) or at least uncringeworthy (The Reformer and the Redhead), which means that in this particular comparison, the one eyed woman is Queen.
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Here's one I can't believe I forgot. Anyone who was a kid in the New York City of the 40's through the early 60's would identify with Richie Andrusco. I can't ever remember seeing it on TCM.
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I strongly suspect there are more than a few TCM fans out there who might also remember the 90's TV series set in Cleveland, the one that was introduced every week by one of Johnny Mercer's most beloved compositions.
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Hmmmm...kinda sums up the feelings I've had for a certain Christmas perennial about a guy who wishes he was never born and since I first started watching it YEARS before NBC jumped on the bandwagon and purchased the rights to show it every year!
(...yep, I ALWAYS knew Capra was doin' what he was doin', but DANG IT, I fall for that flick of his every single time 'cause it's done SO darn well)
I love It's a Wonderful Life more than almost any Hollywood movie I know, and I think it's because in this movie, Capra shows that he knows the difference between "honest" sentimentalism and the phony kind. Can anyone think of a film that better blends the spirit of a strong personality with the spirit of community? Of course the whole thing is aspirational rather than statistically realistic (not even mentioning the Angel bit), but it's one of those movies that beautifully expresses the possibilities of what we stupid humans can accomplish if we'd only open up and listen to our better selves and tell the Mr. Potters of the world to take a hike. I only wish that NBC hadn't bought it up and stuffed it with commercials, but fortunately there are still plenty of inexpensive DVDs floating around to provide an alternative.
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Since you're not a fan of musicals I'm somewhat surprised by your Allyson comment. I'm also not a big fan of musicals (other then the WB gritty ones and the Astaire\Rogers films from the 30's). So even if I was to like Allyson as an actress there would still be few her movies that I would list as favorites. I agree 100% about Esther Williams, but O'Hara was in some fine films and a few great ones (discounting the pirate films which I know you're not a fan of).
Here's my take on SOTM choices that leave me less than thrilled, a category that would include June Allyson, Maureen O'Hara, Esther Williams, and about half of the choices in any given year:
If I read the synopsis of one of their movies and decide it's not likely I'll want to see it, I just don't watch it and hope that others will enjoy it. In the case of O'Hara, it's not O'Hara herself that I have anything against, it's the sort of genres that she was always cast in. In the entire month, she doesn't appear in a single contemporary urban drama set in the United States. Let's just say that's not the sort of star that I gravitate towards.
Anyhow it is likely that O'Hara was SOTM as a tribute to her coming to the TCM event last year (not that I feel she didn't deserve to be SOTM but her being alive and all could of pushed her ahead of others).
Live and let live, I say. I don't have any problem with Maureen or June or Esther or even (holding my nose with an atomic powered clothespin) Mickey Rooney being SOTM, as long as (1) they only get chosen once a decade, and (2) The people who love them don't p & m when TCM at other times shows "obscure" or "artsy" movies that they don't like.
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My heart will always be with Sybil Jason in Little Big Shot and The Captain's Kid, but there are a starting eleven of ohers that come to mind, in a mix of brutally realistic and more typical Hollywood roles:
Mohamed Ben Kassen as the boy Omar in The Battle of Algiers
Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis
Ivan Jandl in The Search
Virginia Weidler in The Philadelphia Story
Edmund Moeschke in Germany: Year Zero
Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon
Jean-Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows - He never should've grown up
The entire cast of Our Gang, AKA The Little Rascals
Fernando Ramos da Silva as the title character in Pixote
Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz
Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver
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Ok that was funny but the real question here is; why is it taking so long for TCM to lease additional Hayward films so they can give Hayward the STOM treatment she deserves.
Don't get me wrong. If I had a free hand in choosing the upcoming SOTM, I'd put Hayward second in line, behind only George Sanders. But I also don't have anything particular against Allyson, whose movies are a lot more bearable to me than SOTM honorees like Esther Williams or the current Maureen O'Hara.
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Love the way Jerry pushes Kramer's head around with the golf club.
And the way that Newman and Kramer so quickly and willingly go along with being the props in Jerry's mocking "re-enactment".
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1942 wasn't great, but it wasn't as bad as 1943.
1942 Top 10:
1. The Hard Way (my favorite Lupino movie)
2. The Glass Key
3. This Gun For Hire
4. Casablanca
5. In This Our Life (Bette Davis as pure evil)
6. Johnny Eager
7. Tales of Manhattan (another movie that TCM needs to get from Fox)
8. Moontide (I'll take Gabin and Lupino over any screen couple)
9. Orchestra Wives
10. Rings on Her Finger (another great Laird Cregar performance)
Best of the rest: Now, Voyager, Juke Girl, The Man Who Came to Dinner, To Be Or Not To Be, All Through the Night (dirty Nattzis and Fifth Col-yoo-mists!)
Underrated: Everything from 5 through 10 on the above list
Worst Movie: The sound version of The Gold Rush. What on Earth was Charlie Chaplin thinking? It's as if he took a perfect prime rib and dunked it in cold brine and mayonnaise.
Best Actor: Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca)
Best Actress: Ida Lupino (The Hard Way)
Supporting Actor: Laird Cregar (This Gun For Hire)
Supporting Actress: Joan Leslie (The Hard Way)But 1943 was like jumping off a cliff: Even if you moved Casablanca from 1942 it wouldn't change things very much.
1. Old Acquaintance - the only movie of 1943 I'd have put on a top 10 list in any other year.
2. Crime Doctor - the first of the highly enjoyable Warner Baxter series
3. Mr. Lucky
4. Stormy Weather - a piece of fluff, but what a cast!
5. Frank Capra's Why We Fight series - propaganda, but at least it was up front about it and hence much more interesting
6. The Dark Tower
7. After Midnight With Boston B l a c k i e - another great comic detective series, featuring one of my favorite B-movie actors (Chester Morris)
8. Heaven Can Wait - damn, did Laird Cregar ever die way too young!
9. Thank Your Lucky Stars - no plot whatever, but of course that wasn't the point for this all-star cast
10. What a Woman! - only because of Roz Russell's performance
Best of the rest: none
Underrated: none
Overrated: Shadow of a Doubt
Best Actor: Cary Grant (Mr. Lucky)
Best Actress: Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins (Old Acquaintance)
Supporting Actor: Fats Waller (Stormy Weather)
Supporting Actress: can't think of any that stood out
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...and June Allyson is Marv Throneberry.
That's a bit mean. I'd say she's more like Freddy Lindstrom or Rube Marquard, not terrible players but decidedly marginal honorees.
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Joe Cocker and the Cockettes has a nice ring to it.
And their rendition of "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me" is to die for.
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Nobody is claiming that Hayward surpassed Bette Davis, but she still exceeds the SOTM qualification cutoff by a wide margin.
Bette Davis is Ty Cobb or Walter Johnson. Susan Hayward is Al Simmons or Andre Dawson. Like baseball's Hall of Fame, the SOTM honor isn't restricted to only the top dozen people in the game.
(Of course Barbara Stanwyck is Babe Ruth, but then we all knew that.)
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Actually, I know you guys are just kidding, but that's a great example. Seinfeld was never boring.
And why? Because it was smart. And it assumed its viewers were smart, too.
Bingo.
What else did it have? Brilliantly clever and funny dialogue, genius story-lines that all connected at the end of each show, characters who were both hilarious and yet believable. And best of all, it was wickedly funny. It literally made us laugh out loud.
I'd add one more key ingredient: Larry David's maxim of "No hugging, no learning". The disregarding of that rule has killed more sitcoms than Putin has killed dissidents.
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Do you think any current films will ever be considered "classic"? I can't think of any off hand.....a film of today that will long be remembered many years from now?
I don't see many current movies, but here are a dozen 21st century movies that I think will hold up very well, in no particular order. Obviously I'm not a big fan of animated or other fantasy/escapist movies:
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Twelve Years a Slave (2013)
Mystic River (2003)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
The Wrestler (2008)
City of God (2002)
The Three Burials of Malquiades Estrada (2005)
Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)
The Gangs of New York (2002)
The Human Stain (2003)
The Lives of Others (2006)
The Departed (2006)
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I can't honestly say that I hate Dr. Zhivago, because I've never been able to stay awake for more than a reel or two of it. I'm just not a fan of Big Time Epic dramas, especially with Omar Sharif. Because of Sharif, I probably slotted it into my hated "swashbuckler" category, and that finished off whatever interest I might have had in finishing it. I would take a lot of money to make me sit through a "swashbuckler".
But since it's the 8th highest grossing movie of all time, there must be a few people out there who like it, and they buy sneakers, too.
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Did anyone else start thinking about Paper Moon when they were watching the Salesman documentary the other night?
Just a year or two before Paper Moon came out, I had a slightly degenerate college friend living in Berkeley, who was telling me about this idea he had about selling Bibles to recently widowed women, using the same scheme that O'Neal employed in the movie that had yet to be released. It cracked me up just thinking about it, even more so because I knew he'd never actually do it. He was a con man at heart, but he had a slightly higher code of ethics than your run of the mill grifter.
But every time I see Paper Moon, I think of my long lost friend and that long conversation about Bible selling. It still cracks me up.
Any chance that your long lost friend had a connection to certain Holywood screenwriters?
Not that I know of, but his partner in his marginally legitimate "film society" business he played hit-and-run with on the UC/Berkeley campus was a guy named Mark Lester, who did produce an underground classic called
, featuring the Cockettes. If there's a better candidate for the TCM Saturday night Underground time slot, I'd be hard pressed to think of it. Here's an example of a flyer my friend had made up for his off-campus showings of that "CLASSIC" film:
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Oh, this is what I get for being coy (an annoying trait.) I was not referring to our exchange about "the treatment of women in old films", james. My most recent post was about the silly story I'd told about the inspiration for the Hollies' hit song, Bus Stop. I guess I should have added a winky emoticon or something.
A few thought I'd actually read the story somewhere, and was posting it in good faith.In fact, I was indulging in a proclivity I sometimes give in to, which is to totally make something up, but make it sound just plausible enough that it sounds believable.
Just for the record, there's at least one person here who enjoys those flights of fancy. It's one of the ways that some of us try to retain our sanity in a world that often can't distinguish seriousness from solemnity.
George Herriman, My Patron Saint.
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So while I hope you get what you're asking for, the truth is that everyone can't get what they are asking for as it relates to TCM's programming.
Bingo.
If TCM shows more movies from category X, they need to show less from category Y.
The only way to get around that in a way that might please everyone would be for TCM to pare back its multi-repeats in favor of more premieres from categories like low-budget sci-fi AND "obscure european and french films". And maybe even a few films from some other countries as well.
Problem is, as gets pointed out repeatedly by Rey and many others, TCM is under contractual obligation to repeat many of those Same Old Same Olds if they want to get the rest of the package. So it's not as simple as just dropping the 7th and 8th showings of North By Northwest and substituting those cult movies that show up on ME-TV. Bottom line is that you can't please all the people all the time.
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I guess what I'm always gettin' at is my belief that tcm has decided to more or less disregard the lifelong couch potato / space cadet crowd like myself. So if we want the 1950s science fiction B classics like the creature films, we gotta look elsewhere.
Am I really so outta line simply because I would like to see them shown here on tcm without commercials?
I don't think anyone is outta line for expressing their genre preferences. I only get annoyed when people start pretending that they represent any specific percentage of the TCM audience, in some sort of effort to denigrate the followers of other genres.
Classic science fiction films whether they be the George Pal classics or the low-budget saturday matinee variety are a part of american mainstream filmdom and they always have been. Yet tcm has decided to consign them to the weekends and tcm underground. Some of these films deserve to be in the spotlight too. At least as much if not more so than many obscure european and french foreign films.
See, here's the problem: What's "obscure" to you is "mainstream" to plenty of other viewers, and what's "mainstream" to you may be just as marginal to those viewers as "obscure european and french foreign films" are to you.
Believe it or not, many of those "obscure european and french foreign films" took in a lot more money in American box offices than most of those low-budget sci-fi movies you seem to love. Those low-budget sci-fi movies movies were usually relegated to Saturday afternoons (and later to midnight showings) for a very good reason, the reason being that they seldom attracted enough full price (i.e. adult) viewers to show them during the evening hours.
That doesn't mean that TCM shouldn't show these movies. But I can't see why on Earth they'd have any sort of preferential time slot claim over some of those "obscure european and french foreign films" that are universally acknowledged by critics and audiences to be among the finest movies ever made.
And BTW those "obscure european and french foreign films" are themselves seldom shown in prime time, but you don't see many of us fans of those films complaining about the time slots, even though some of us would sometimes rather see Children of Paradise or Touchez Pas au Grisbi in prime time once in a while, rather than the 500th showing of Adam's Rib or West Side Story. We're just grateful that they're shown at all, and when they're shown overnight, well, that's what recorders were made for.
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LMREO. Well it was for me.............
Should we transfer that reply to the George Brent thread?
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As for the comment of "who always said that he'd spent his entire career portraying the sort of people he'd fought against in his offscreen life". To me that doesn't say he passed up on lead parts offered to him to instead play a secondary 'bad guy'. What that says to be is that producers knew he was great at playing certain type of roles and they cast him in those roles.
I see the distinction you're making, but I remember Ryan specifically saying he didn't choose to go after more conventional roles at the point of his career when he had the leverage to do so. Of course he was under a contract, but that didn't stop other stars from using various tactics to get their way when they really wanted to break out of typecasting.
TCM Programming
in General Discussions
Posted
I was watching today's programming since it is Barbara Stanwyck's birthday but am disappointed that all the movies of her they are showing are from 1950's!
While her best movies belong to 30s and 40s period
I mean best movies came from mid 30s to mid 40s (beside the silent/20's films like Chaplin or Keaton etc. era which were fantastic) the films made after 48-49 were mostly junk.
In the 50s they mostly glorified crimes and murder along with gangs and mobs street crimes etc...
in the 60's they glorified sex and so in the 70s +murder, & 80s ++murder and a lot more horror films and in 90s more of the same etc...
The good scripts were and are mostly thing of the past.(few 50s and 60s exceptions)
I wished the TCM programmers showed little more better taste in selecting movies.
why couldn't they show Meet John Doe or Stella Dallas or other fantastic Stanwyck movies?
"I'm Joseph I. Breen, and I approve this message."
PS I think it is a disgrace that she never won an Oscar for any or all her performances!
Well, on that I think we will all agree.