AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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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.
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Ryan stated on many occasions that he deliberately sought out the most challenging and unsympathetic leading roles. He said (correctly, IMO) that it takes a lot more skill to play a complex villain than it does to play a typical leading "good guy". I'm sure that the studios were more than glad to accommodate him, given that finding great actors for "bad" roles isn't that easy, but if Ryan had tried to get more traditional leading roles before he began to be typecast by Crossfire and Act of Violence, I don't see any reason why he couldn't have gotten them. He certainly had the talent, the screen presence, and the rugged good looks to carry many of the parts that were given to actors like Gable and Wayne and Cooper.
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The next time TCM shows The Salesman, it should combine it with a premiere showing of Glengarry Glen Ross, one of the great movies of the 90's. They'd be perfect complements to each other.
LOL. Well Ross would have to be shown early in the morning due to the language. (I think it may hold the record for the use of the F word, but I cant be sure......)
Not even close, though I would've thought so myself. In fact, according to one scholarly study, it doesn't even make the top 100. Other than a documentary on the word, The Wolf of Wall Street's 569 uses easily tops the runner-up Summer of Sam's 435. And poor Goodfellas is way down at 11th place with a mere 300.
The above information has been brought to you by the Joseph I. Breen Memorial Society, and I approve the message.
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It was also considerate of TCM to schedule the Francis evening on a night when baseball is on its All-Star break.
Trouble in Paradise and Jewel Robbery may be Kay's two most entertaining movies, and I Found Stella Parrish is one of the all-time great soapers, even if the thought of a world famous actress ever being married to Barton MacLane kind of stretches one's imagination well past the breaking point.
Never seen For the Defense, and so that's the one I'm really looking forward to.
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Okay, I just found the Olive version online, although I'd already ordered the Bonanza copy. The Olive edition is $18.71, so I still probably would have gone with the cheaper version. I am so looking forward to actually seeing this movie, given that I've read about it in about half a dozen different books.
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Just some questions. Which "classic" films stars would be your selection to the questions:
All answered Rorschach style, i.e., these were the first answers that popped into my head. Ask me again tomorrow and some of them might well be different.
1. If you could invite 6 classic film stars to your home, who would you invite?
Robert Ryan, Richard Widmark, Bette Davis, Sybil Jason, Edward Arnold, Katharine Hepburn. I'd have said Barbara Stanwyck, but my understanding is that she never liked to talk much about herself.
2. If you could only keep 1 DVD classic film - which would it be?
Assuming you mean "classic" American films only, either Vertigo or The Search
3. Which classic film actor/actress do you feel is overrated? Which person is underated?
Overrated: Gary Cooper.
Underrated: Robert Ryan and Richard Widmark
4. Who do you think was the most handsome classic film actor?
Either Clark Gable or Robert Taylor, depending on your definition
5. Who do you think was the most beautiful classic film actress?
Loretta Young for career value, but Jane Greer for peak value in Out of the Past
6. Who is your least favorite classic actor?
Gary Cooper, no contest.
7. Who is your least favorite classic actress?
Can't think of any offhand, though I'm not particularly thrilled with Katharine Hepburn's pre-Stage Door career. But then she stepped it up radically after that, and became one of my favorites.
8. If you could star in a classic film, which film would you want to be in and what character would you want to play?
Either Jack Carson's part in Roughly Speaking, Humphrey Bogart's part in To Have or Have Not or Dark Passage, or Fredric March's part in Middle of the Night. All for obvious reasons, at least to me they're obvious.
9. What is your favorite line in a classic film?
Either "That's arson!" (Jean Harlow in Libeled Lady), or "Do come again, Mrs. PROWLER" (Joan Crawford in The Women), or "He'll never see sixteen!" (Humphrey Bogart in The Roaring Twenties)
10. If you were stuck in an elevator, which classic film star would you want to be stuck with?
Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, assuming I could get an occasional word in edgeways.
11. Do you have a favorite biography or autobiography of a classic film star?
I'd go with my signed first edition of Bette Davis's Mother G o d d a m
12. What critically acclaimed classic film do you not enjoy watching?
West Side Story, or pretty much any other stage-transferred cornball musical that was targeted at the tourist crowd.
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There's something, I think, that is extra-commendable about a performer who invests his or her self into being true to a role, even if that role is someone who the audience might not like, because life is full of fascinating people who aren't necessarily likeable.
Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding is a good example of this.
An even better example would be Robert Ryan, who always said that he'd spent his entire career portraying the sort of people he'd fought against in his offscreen life. With his talent and looks, he easily could have been a "star" on a much higher level than he was, but instead he continued to choose roles that would challenge both him and his audience.
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And one final reason: TCM has access to just about all [of Barbara Stanwyck's] 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.
Have you seen No Man of Her Own (1950) ? It is my personal favorite Stanwyck film; it never airs on TCM (it's Paramount, I think.) It is on DVD through Olive Films though and sometimes it shows up on youtube.
Highly, highly recommended.
That's been on my "Saved" line at Netflix for several years now. One of these years they'll get around to releasing it. But in the meantime, I just found it on Bonanza for $6.79, so thanks for the heads up about the DVD.
P.S. Right now there are only short clips of it on YouTube.
P.P.S. There are so many of my "favorite" Stanwyck movies that it's almost impossible to narrow it down, but if I had to take five, it'd be So Big, Baby Face, Stella Dallas, Double Indemnity, and These Wilder Years. And even though I usually can't stand westerns, I loved her in The Violent Men with Edward G. Robinson and Glenn Ford. She could play evil with the best of them, and not just in Double Indemnity or The File on Thelma Jordan.
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Picked up the uncleanliness, but not the abortion-love, huh.
I guess for the tiebreaker we'd have to learn Stalin's position on allowing cucumbers on pizza.
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That's a shame, since not only has the Shearer version of The Last of Mrs. Cheyney been shown at least twice in recent years, it's distinctly inferior to the 1937 Joan Crawford / William Powell / Robert Montgomery remake. I sure hope that The Trial of Mary Dugan gets re-scheduled sometime soon.
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I wonder how intelligent a person needs to be to drive their unwashed toilet hands into the pizza dough.
I think it was a habit that Poppie picked up from the Communistas. You know, these guys:
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AndyM108, Regarding actresses: When it comes to women who commit crimes (and women who don't) across the entire movie spectrum, I will certainly go with my all-time favorite, Barbara Stanwyck.
To that sentiment I can only quote the Poppie character in Seinfeld:
"On-a this issue, there is-a no debate, and-a no intelligent person can-a think-a differently. "
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Well, since other than Ruth Roman I wouldn't recognize any of those other actors or actresses if I tripped over them in a time machine, those flaws only add to the movie's camp qualities. Roman's wigmeister and fluctuating measurements reminded me of one of those Liz Taylor photos from the National Enquirer of the 1980's, and they also added to the fun. The only scene that I thought was a bit over the top was the one with the baby and the babysitter, which fortunately for all concerned seems to have been mostly left to the imagination.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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!
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All opinion is debatable for those who don't agree with it.
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.
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I would say that The Graduate is somewhat overrated. Sure the performances are fine particularly Anne Bancroft's, but the French were doing similar films at the same time that were better than The Graduate.
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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
Bus Stop
in General Discussions
Posted
Even Bogie had to take secondary role after secondary role since Cagney, E.G. Robinson and George Raft were given first crack. If Raft wasn't such a fool, Bogie might be known today as only Bogart.
Well, that was one of the more fortuitous breaks imaginable for us movie buffs, wasn't it? Imagine a wooden stiff like Raft in Casablanca, running the gamut of emotions from "Thanks" to "Thanks a lot".
I completely agree that Ryan had the talent. But one would really need to study what other stars were available at the time, who was offered each part first in specific movies, etc... to know if Ryan really pass up lead roles to take secondary ones.
I don't mean to brush you off here, but that sort of detail is beyond my pay scale of research ability. All I know is what I've read that Ryan said himself, and accepted that at face value. Since he was one of the more famously non-ego driven actors in Hollywood, I can't imagine he would've been making this up.