AndyM108

Thanks so much for responding. That is interesting. What made you chose Barbara Stanwyck? What made you decide to watch her movies? Two reasons, one major and one minor. Main reason: IMO she was (and is) the greatest actress who's ever walked the face of the Earth, and right up there with Toshiro Mifune and Jean Gabin as one of the three greatest actors. Never typecast, always interesting, capable of portraying every conceivable human emotion in the most naturalistic manner. She was as good at listening her lines as she was at speaking them, a very underrated skill in an actor. She's not the only actress who's played a wide variety of parts, but there's no other actress with her emotional range, from tender and vulnerable to hard boiled murderous, with every stop on the way in between. Minor reason: With only a tiny handful of exceptions, her movies are set in the present, and she never did costume dramas, which I hate with a passion. Some might see that as a limitation, but for me it's a feature, not a bug. And one final reason: TCM has access to just about all her movies, and shows nearly all of them on a fairly regular basis. Of the 65 or so films of hers that I've seen to date, I've been able to record 61 of them from TCM. One more reason TCM has my eternal gratitude.

That's an interesting quest. About the only one I've got that would match it in intent if not in scope is my goal of eventually seeing every movie by Barbara Stanwyck. I'm up to about 65 so far, but there are still some that are yet to come.

OK, AndyM108, you were a little older than me when these films came out so maybe you were a little more cynical and/or a little more sophisticated as to how movies, and those who promote movies, try to manipulate us, Don't get me wrong, I'm not against all forms of generational pandering. In fact one of my favorite adverts of all time was the radio spot on the DC soul stations of the late 60's that proclaimed Mogen David wine (AKA The Jewish Rotgut) to be "as modern as a peace demonstration". How can anyone not love a company like that? and I'll certainly grant you that, expecially with THE GRADUATE. So point taken but I still say that BONNIE & CLYDE work even though the slo-mo has been done to death since. This was a big deal when it first came out and considered controversial, violent and not boring. Of course, B&C look great - much better than in the real-life pix I've seen - the filmakers figure the audience would be more interested in Beatty and Dunaway than in a more pain-looking couple. Plus, they could act. Since I'm straight, I'll let you appraise Warren Beatty, but for a Lady Gangster I'd definitely be wanting Barbara Stanwyck by my side rather than Faye Dunaway. Never trust a blond while doing business, not even a brunette wearing a blond wig.

So any other questions? Yeah, I got one, Andy! Seein' as how there's a particular lady around here who thinks "bad boys" are really hot AND sometimes no matter their looks...well...do you think she might find Mr. Floyd there kinda hot TOO??? (...or maybe I should just ask her, huh!) L I dunno about Pretty Boy Floyd, but if you combined the real Clyde Barrow's looks with the Warren Beatty movie character's er, performance, I think the lady in question might be better off getting her hand-me-downs (or maybe we should call them mount-me-ups) from Catherine the Great rather than from Faye Dunaway.

AndyM108, just curious: is it the soundtrack on THE GRADUATE that you find "gooey" and the slo-mo ending on BONNIE & CLYDE that you don't like? Yes and yes. Two of my least favorite movies out of the 3000 or so that I've seen. They're like chalk on a blackboard to me, especially The Graduate. I came of age around the time of these films so I don't mind the gooey soundtrack on THE GRADUATE. I have always really liked the film, especially the first half. However, I have read on the threads that some posters can't stand the soundtrack and as I have gotten older I understand why they might not like it. I was 23 when The Graduate came out, and although I was fully immersed in "my" generation's political and social causes, I'd already become quite cynical about the way that the part of popular culture that was controlled by adults was so incessantly trying to pander to and flatter the sensibilities of their upcoming audience, of which I was a part. The message I was getting was "You young people are so hip, and we're so square. Please forgive us for screwing up everything, and here, have a Pepsi." Me, I was much more attuned to the sensibilities of The Realist.... Of course other parts of that adult culture were at the same time just telling us to cut our hair and take a bath, but those aren't the adults I'm talking about here. However, re' BONNIE & CLYDE, I must respectfully disagree. That ending was very powerful and innovative at that time and I still think it works. I don't think time has dimmed BONNIE & CLYDE's appeal at all. Interesting, indeed, not boring at all. It's possible that the reason I loathe Bonnie and Clyde as much as I do is because that slo-mo ending quickly became the most tiresome and overplayed visual cliche in film history, as recognized by the beautiful parody of it in "The Race" episode of Seinfeld. But beyond that, I like my gangster movies to be less dependent on Ralph Lauren faces and sexual undercurrents, and more populated with lunchpail characters like Bugs Fenner or Duke Mantee or Tommy DeVito. And in that respect, Bonnie and Clyde was an epic fail. In real life, even "Pretty Boy Floyd" was rather a homely mug. So any other questions?

Did anyone catch The Baby last night? I just finished watching it, and it's almost impossible to describe. Kind of a combination of Freaks, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Night of the Living Dead, and Die! Die! My Darling!, with the weird sensation that the bloated Liz Taylor of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or maybe it's Divine from Pink Flamingos, is inhabiting Ruth Roman's body! And what an ending! I'm still cracking up at the denouement. Bottom line, though, is that it's a camp classic, even if it's probably more suited for a repeat on Hallowe'en than on Mother's Day!

Which is pretty much my point. In the end, all that really matters is whether we like a movie ourselves, not whether critics or a mass audience tell us we should.

That might be true. But Americans relate to America, not France - and American situations, not European, and presentation in the language they understand - English, not French. So, it's highly unlikely that many people will agree that the French films you think are better than 'The Graduate' are really better. No question about that, but what of it? On the TSPDT 1967 critics' list, there are three French films (Le Samurai, Week-End and Belle du Jour) that outrank The Graduate, as do seven other films from that year, including our own Titicut Follies, Point Blank, and Don't Look Back. Obviously this doesn't "prove" anything, either, but I'd certainly rely on the collective judgment of several thousand critics from all over the world before I'd limit myself to relying on an American mass audience that cringes at the thought of almost anything they see as "artsy" or "foreign".

I would also say that the performers in the classic era were a more talented bunch than most of the performers in Hollywood today. I'd call that an apples to oranges comparison, since studio era actors had far more opportunity to create a consistent screen persona, while today's best actors are afforded a much wider variety of scripts whose plots aren't so rigidly circumscribed. To cite an example that's recently been discussed on the "Taxi" thread, it's impossible to "rate" two actors like Cagney and DeNiro without getting completely subjective about it. My take is that there have been great actors in every era, and that if a TCM 2 were to saturate us with as many post-1970 films as it has those from the previous half century, we'd be far more likely to recognize this.

Even the classic-era B movies have more charm and personality than most modern films. I wouldn't argue with that, but that's largely because the near-total reliance on an extremely limited number of basic genre plots gave all of those films the cachet of a familiar friend. It was one of the upsides (if you want to think of it that way) of the constraints forced upon movies by the Breen Code. Beyond that, it's also due to the fact that with a relatively small number of exceptions, the stars of that era had such narrowly drawn screen personae that it added to the predictability of the product. The usual way it's put is that "We always knew what we were going to be getting." And so we did. And it's still much of what draws many of us to these movies even today.

But as you say, this was 1954, and the only thing that would have gotten Pope Breen's attention would have been if Bo and Marilyn had announced that they were going to skip the wedding ceremony, and were heading off to live a life of UNMARRIED SIN. Actually, Bus Stop came out in 1956 (and fits in nicely with the theme of the year which was BIGASS MOVIES), but I like everything else you wrote...even though I like the movie very much and would actually say, yes, it is an essential and possibly Marilyn's finest performance. You're right about the year, and my only defense is that I was simply repeating the year that the person I was responding to had said it was made, and didn't bother to check it for accuracy. My personal Marilyn favorite is when she was with Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft in Don't Bother to Knock, but then I'm almost always partial to the urban noir genre over any other.

There have been many times while watching a film in which I sense the director is attempting to push the narrative toward the "artsy"(for want of a better term) and done by staying much too long(IMO) with a particular scene and long after the "point" of the scene has been grasped by the audience, and as if the director wants us to grasp every little significance from it. I've always felt this sort of thing begins to slide toward pretentiousness by calling attention to itself and also needlessly slows down the pacing of an often otherwise interesting story premise. IMO the two biggest culprits here are the repeated overuse of gooey soundtracks and slow motion takes, with two perfect examples being The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde. They're not generally considered "artsy" films, but they surely share some of that genre's supposedly worst characteristics, and unfortunately those two cinematic "breakthroughs" quickly became the dinner guest that Hollywood still can't get to go home. OTOH many if not most of the allegedly "artsy" films shown on TCM (translation: foreign films) are refreshingly free of such artifice. Perhaps that's because the filmmakers realize that the audience doesn't need such blatantly manipulative gimmickry in order to get the point.

Max Steiner One of the few composers who knew the difference between honest sentiment and schmaltz.

And this means that TCM has to adapt even more to the new formats and audience migration. AMC did not go away-- we saw it change radically. Of course, we may not see TCM change that way, but it is still going to have to adapt even more than it already has. So for people to say TCM is not changing, well that is something that I do not agree with-- because from most authentic vantage points, TCM is vulnerable to competition if it does not evolve and grow. Of course if TCM were truly going to "adapt to the times" in ways beyond modern media strategies like streaming and such, it would probably be more likely to try to lock up the better more recent movies than to double down on vintage B&W's. After all, there are far more non-current TCM viewers under the age of 50 who remember Robert DeNiro's Taxi Driver than there are those with fond memories of James Cagney's Taxi. In short, people might be careful about what they ask for, because they might not like what they might be getting.

With the name "Pat O'Brien", what would you expect? That about the only thing he'd be remembered for by TV viewers of the 70's is that he knew how to spell "natureS" backwards?

Bo strikes me as a socially re tarded, sexist a-hole who in real life would've gone to prison - and it would've been a better movie if he had. But this was 1954 and the idea of a woman being able to make her own decisions about her life when there was a man available to own her was wrong to a whole lot of people. Marilyn is the only one I like in 'Bus Stop' and I'll always be disappointed in her character's eventual capitulation to the kidnapper. It came off as a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome, and I couldn't agree more. I could barely sit through Bus Stop the first time I watched it, and having viewed the last half of it again last night, there was nothing in it to make me change my mind. It may have only been Cave Man / Cave Girl Lite as opposed to Lee Marvin-scale misogyny, but the whole undertone was positively creepy. But as you say, this was 1954, and the only thing that would have gotten Pope Breen's attention would have been if Bo and Marilyn had announced that they were going to skip the wedding ceremony, and were heading off to live a life of UNMARRIED SIN. OTOH this is one of the many reasons I love to watch a wide variety of films from past decades, even a piece of c r a p like Bus Stop: There's no better way to see what the cultural assumptions of Production Code America really were, underneath the pious platitudes. For that reason alone, I'm glad I didn't simply pass it up.

I don't quite understand why people are more interested in talking about labels than in what's underneath. Many people have written that there is no such thing as love, only evidence of it. I think we might say the same thing about "classic" films. Trying to define it is like trying to sew a button onto a melody.

1944: Ernő Rubik and I were born, in Budapest and New York respectively. He invented the Rubik's cube, and I'm still trying to solve it.

Or is "classic" a film that is timeless and memorable? That's what the TCM programmers would have us believe, but we know better. We know that by definition, a classic film can only have been made in USA! USA! prior to 1970, with no confusing "subtitles", no "unappealing" characters, and above all, nothing "artsy". Take it from our spokesman below------

(I apologize for this muddled post. I had some trouble expressing my thoughts.) Not at all, and in fact it was I who muddled the point I was attempting to make. Mitchum's "preacher" character in The Night of the Hunter may not have been statistically likely, but he was certainly well within the realm of human believability, given our rich and varied history of religious quacks and con men. And Mitchum played the part to perfection in a most "interesting" way. An even better example would be Lee Eun-Shim's title character in The Housemaid, the classic 1960 South Korean psychological horror film that TCM showed just the other evening. Her character was farfetched but not impossible, and if she'd cut it just a bit shorter (i.e. skipping the poison and the violent scenes), she would've almost been a recognizable archetype from millions of bad relationships. And once again, it was the extraordinary acting that brought the viewers along for the ride without simply rolling our collective eyes and saying "Yeah, tell me another one!" Beyond that, of course, there's a lot of subjectivity that comes into play, and my general preference for "realistic" movies doesn't mean that it's the only one. But the sort of "realism" you're talking about ("tears in the predictable places, music to tell the audience what to feel") is diametrically opposite to the sort of realism I like to see in a movie. The sort of "realism" I'm talking about is represented in films ranging from Bicycle Thieves to Goodfellas, with movies like The Night of the Hunter and The Housemaid most definitely included.

Interesting movies feature interesting characters who aren't always predictable archetypes. Interesting movies feature good actors (not necessarily "stars") who make their characters believable. Interesting movies don't depend on syrupy soundtracks or cinematic gimmickry or pretty faces to be interesting. We get enough of that during Super Bowl commercials. Interesting movies are usually (though not always) set in the present, because filmmakers are able to at least recognize the present much better than they understand the past. When interesting movies present a strong point of view, they do it in a manner that makes you say to yourself, "I never thought of it that way." Boring movies hit you over the head with that POV, usually with protagonists who are either too good or too evil to be real. Interesting movies make you think, even if it's about nothing more than trying to remember who did what in the first reel. A truly interesting movie can't be half slept through or picked up after missing the first five minutes. Interesting movies introduce you into other cultures without romanticizing or demonizing them. Interesting movies age well. This may be the truest mark of all.

I think Finance is correct that TCM's programming doesn't treat all decades the same; For the older decades, especially the 30s, TCM shows many movies that are only OK in quality (programmers and cheap pictures that were made to be viewed once and then forgotten). When TCM shows films from more recent decades they are mostly the high quality ones (e.g. Oscar winners or nominations) or 'art' pictures; films with a certain standing by so called film experts. (Expect for the TCM Underground since the focus there is cult films). I agree that TCM's films from the "recent" and "Import" categories (and also their silent films) are generally of a much higher quality than the "average" film TCM shows from the studio era. You can see this by noting how many of the films from those first three categories that are part of the ultra-selective Criterion Collection have also been shown on TCM, whereas a much smaller percentage of TCM's studio era movies are part of that collection. If TCM was go show LESS movies from the early decades and MORE from the recent decades, I assume TCM would cut out most of those only "OK" films. This would be a major change in their brand. I assume most long time TCM viewers like these programmers even with their lack of quality, because they represent a certain style or era of filmmaking. Of course others may welcome that TCM doesn't show those cheaply made films with their insane plot twist, quick to the chase endings and played to death plots. In spite of what I wrote above, I think that TCM is wise to keep its focus on the films of the 20's through the 60's in the proportion that it does now, because by doing so it gives viewers a unique opportunity to immerse ourselves in a world that relatively few of us lived through as adults. In many ways, the quality of many of these films is almost incidental to the fact that they're such perfect representations of the cultural assumptions of their era. It's like one painless history lesson after another, and as a bonus, these "lessons" are often presented by some of the best actors and directors ever. As for "market share", IMO that should be a minor consideration at most. Stick to showing as many pre-1970 films as can be found, and supplement these with only the highest quality films that can be found from the 70's up through the present, and the market share will take care of itself.

Also while the Cagney character is a hot head the basic reason for that isn't because he had some prior trama, but just because he was Irish (i.e. a certain type of man). Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and Pat O'Brien could easily have built up respectable repertories based on that stock "Irish" character alone: Hotheaded, always more eager to talk than to listen, somewhat egomaniacal, etc. Cagney and Tracy were eventually able to transcend the "type" (though Tracy showed remnants of it right up to the end), but Pat O'Brien was more or less stuck with it throughout his entire career, as was the character actor Frank McHugh.

I think THE KING OF COMEDY really should have been on your list, one of his most eerie performances.t That's one I've yet to see, though it's somewhere on my Netflix queue. In truth that DeNiro list is made up of nearly every DeNiro movie I've seen, as the only one I truly disliked was Bang The Drum Slowly.

It's interesting, too, that decades before De Niro so memorably portrayed a loner with deep psychopathic disturbances in Taxi Driver, Cagney's character in Taxi also demonstrates hot headed, at one point even murderous, rages that give a hint of a possible psychological disturbance. Of course, the screenplay of Taxi does not play up those darker aspects of his character's anger. He is, after all, the urban "hero" of the film for whom audiences members are expected to cheer. I enjoyed Taxi immensely, but that film is typical of the sort of constraints that Hollywood "stars" (and Cagney was surely in that category) labored under even in the pre-code era. It's not just all those forced happy endings and final scene marriage proposals, it's the way that once a certain persona became established for a "star", the studios kept pressing them to stay within that screen character in all subsequent films, with little variation or room to breathe. Many "stars" like Muni and Davis fought back and kept pressing for less typecast roles, but with a few exceptions (Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson being among the more prominent ones), once that "persona" was set in place, it proved very hard to escape from. Cagney was lucky he was also a hoofer and a street Irishman*, because otherwise he might have been stuck in a gangster rut forever, entertaining as that comfort food "rut" may have been. *Which made his tough guy character transferable to roles on the other side of the law, in an movie era where Irish priests and Irish lawmen were the perennial Good Guys of urban dramas, tough guys with a heart of gold.