AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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Tierney also had a major role in the 1992 gangster movie Reservoir Dogs. He was the same old Lawrence Tierney that we all have come to love (and keep our distance from).
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I think the notion that is getting people's blood flowing on this subject is the sense that tcm programmers are not programming for the vast cable-viewing audience but for a small eclectic-minded few.
Given that you don't have the slightest idea of what movies "the vast cable-viewing audience"
prefers, all you mean by this is "Why doesn't TCM let me make up its schedule?"
I'm sure there are plenty of other people like me who are sick of seeing endless showings of Mickey Rooney and John Wayne and Rock Hudson, not to mention those unspeakably trite and boring "Teen Idol" and "beach party" movies, but we know better than to project our tastes onto "the vast majority" of TCM viewers. Plenty of viewers obviously find Elvis Presley and Annette Funicello movies their cup of tea, and more power to them, but it's a big world out there, and not everyone has tastes as narrow as yours seem to be.
Now maybe at some utopian point, TCM will open up its vast holdings and let people personalize their own schedules, but until that glorious day, I'm afraid you're going to have to live with the occasional "Frenchy" film just as people with differing tastes have to put up with all the goo-goo "family" fare that takes up far more slots on TCM than all the foreign movies put together.
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I wouldn't be opposed to giving Marion Davies a SOTM tribute, but not until first there's one for Lon Chaney.
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I always thought they blended together into one big old Barbie Doll.
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Andy,
The City of Angels PBS station (KOCE, Channel 50) ran Freedom Summer this evening. It is a subject near and dear to my heart and one reason why I also find the time to vote. I agree wholeheartedly with you about Mississippi Burning and would love to hear your thoughts about Freedom Summer after you view it.
I was out last night and recorded two TCM movies in my absence, but Freedom Summer is being replayed on the Washington PBS affiliate (WETA) at 4:00 PM today and again at 2:30 PM on Sunday. If it's half as good as the documentary on the Freedom Riders, and Spies of Mississippi (on the infamous Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission), it'll be well worth watching.
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Freedom Summer was excellent, so much I didn't know (i.e., the LBJ revelations) or had forgotten with time. Documentaries (for me at least) are often so much more compelling than the films based on the actual events, though the films certainly have their place.
I'd love to see a mainstream movie about the civil rights movement that conveyed the day-by-day reality of the American South in the Jim Crow era, from the perspective of African Americans who were living through it, in the manner of 12 Years a Slave about the slavery era. The problem is that at present there is no such movie. Certainly not Mississippi Burning. The idea of reducing Mississippi Summer to a "thriller" centered on the FBI is frankly obscene. Once again the black people of Mississippi were reduced to bit players while the white folks came in to clean up the mess. We've seen this film before.
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From the 40's through the 50's through the early 60's and the mid/late 60's
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I've never quite understood the "accusation" (if you'd call it that) that Katharine Hepburn wasn't glamorous. Other than a tiny handful of actresses like Loretta Young, Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, it's hard for me to think of too many who had classic features quite on Kate's level. And other than Young or Lilli Palmer, it's hard to think of many who kept those features almost right up to the end. I could flood this page with examples of what I'm talking about, but hepclassic's already done that for me.
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Arturo,
Thanks for the list of Powell, Colman and Baxter movies. I'd only seen the two Powells with Harlow but didn't think much of them, and out of sight out of mind. But were these really romance movies on the same level as Funny Face? That's not a rhetorical question, since I'm familiar only with their titles but not their plots. Most of these films seem rather forgotten today, but saying that isn't a refutation of your point.
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I'm with speedracer. The library is an excellent source to see if the book is worth owning. Many star/charactor actor biographies come from small independent publishers and aren't available elsewhere. While sometimes interesting, I find these too are often poorly written (by fans with little writing credentials?) and generally not worth the high purchase price.
One bio put out by McFarland is an exception to that general rule: Franklin Jarlett's Robert Ryan: A Biography and Critical Filmography. Unfortunately, McFarland is one of those publishers that almost never overprints or remainders its books, so you're generally stuck with paying nearly the full list price, but I read this book straight through from cover to cover and couldn't put it down. The only problem for me is that it's only available in paperback, a format that I usually avoid like the plague, but in this case I had to make an exception. You'll note that all seven reviewers gave it the full five star rating.
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I bought the Wilson book when it came out and have read the first half dozen or so chapters. My only reservation would be its length, but if you're willing to take the time it's definitely worth the price. Stanwyck is far and away my favorite actress, but my problem is that I have too damn many interests and there's always a newer book to entrap me. Books along with blank DVD disks and jewel cases probably account for 75% of my discretionary spending.
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The source material for Love in the Afternoon was a 1920 french novel called "Ariane, jeune fille russe" which involved an older man and a younger woman. The male lead wasn't made older in the movie to suit an aging star. The novel was first brought to the screen in 1932 as a french film.
This is just the first title I've researched. Other titles mentioned thus far may also have come from source material that featured the May-December element quite apart from the actors who later dramatized it.
Its an idea as old as literature. I'm stunned it is suddenly sparking so much discussion.But though the May-December idea dates back forever in literature, it only began to flourish in Hollywood in the late 40's with Bogie and Bacall, and didn't really take off full force until the 50's, when all those formerly young leading actors coincidentally started to turn into their 50's. That was my only point. The literary sources of those movies have nothing to do with it.
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Bogie and Bacall were 25 years apart... With the exception of To Have and Have Not, they were a married couple, so perhaps it lessens the May/December romance aspect.
I believe I originally dated the coming of May-Septembers in the late 40's. Bogart and Bacall first appeared together in 1945, so that was a year or two off. But even though they were also a "real" couple, I'd still consider them part of the pool, maybe the first ever under my definition.
Dark Passage was probably the most intensely romantic of the four----we all (meaning men) would have loved to have been in that little South American cafe by the bay when the piano began playing "Too Marvelous For Words".
.Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn were also 25 years apart in Charade.
Right. That was in 1963, and I'm not sure when the practice ended, if in fact it even has. I've watched very few romances from later years, and the ones I remember usually involved Meg Ryan and an actor who's roughly her age.
There's always James Mason and Sue Lyon who were 37 years apart in Lolita... But that's kind of the point of that movie... so perhaps it doesn't count.
Yeah, I wouldn't count that, either, since it was more a perversion than a true romance.
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Sorry but MOVIES does have commercials. Now they do NOT cut their movies to fit into a, say, two hour time slot and they cut to their commercials between scenes (unlike say AMC which will cut to a commercial right in the middle of an actor's lines).
So yea, the commercials stink but I found myself watching both of the movies you mention as well as many other noirs, comedy films and series (e.g. Mr Moto movies), since TCM was showing something I had already seen multiple times.
Thanks for letting me know, and if I see something there that I don't have already recorded I may watch it "live". So far in looking I haven't seen any movies that meet that description, but then I was recording off the FMC for several years when they were showing films like Thieves' Highway and others that TCM doesn't ever seem to get. Clara Bow's fabulous pre-code Call Her Savage is just now beginning to get some TCM play come this September, but I must have seen that movie on the FMC a dozen times a few years ago.
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I guess you missed my earlier response to this. I tried to cut an paste it here, but was unable to, and I don't have the time right now to reply fully. Scroll down to June 20 @ 1:23 pm. I mention several mature male stars in the 1930s that were often paired with substantially younger female costars.
Here's that earlier reply:
Andy,
The trauma to the careers of many stars that was the coming of sound pretty much cleared the decks of established stars. But a few men survived, even thrived. By the end of the 30s and into the 40s, mature male stars like Warner Baxter, Ronald Colman, even William Powell were still being cast with younger female love interests. It would have been the same with John Barrymore had his alcoholism not been soadvanced. So the pattern had been around before the 50s,, and most definitely continues to this day.Well, sort of, but not really. Powell/Loy were 13 years apart, but didn't really seem that much so in their many films together, when he was in his 40's and 50's and she was in her 30's and 40's. And anyway, those were mostly comedies, or mysteries with a distinctly comic air. Romances they weren't.
Baxter and Loy were 15 years apart, and I suppose you might call Penthouse a romance of sorts, though it sure seemed mostly a gangster movie to me. And you can probably cite a few more examples.
But here's the question: How many of those earilier romantic pairings matched couples with a thirty year difference in ages? In Love in the Afternoon, Cooper was 28 years Audrey's senior. In Funny Face, Astaire lapped her birth certificate by 30 full years. In Vertigo, James Stewart was 25 years older than Kim Novak. If you can think of any early sound era films with that sort of age gap in movies that featured either romantic endings or romantic obsessions, and not just gold diggers and sugar daddies, please let me know. I can't think of any.
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Andy, what you mention about variety is a key point and valid as it relates to the title of this thread. Do other stations like Me-TV offer films that TCM does NOT? As I noted stations like MOVIES do offer American Studio era films, mostly from Columbia and Fox that TCM does NOT offer.
I've just gone over the MOVIES! network schedule for the next two weeks, and it looks a lot like the old Fox Movie Channel before it went completely into the tank. Didn't see any movies I care about that would qualify as TCM premieres, but there were a fair number of noirs that only show up on TCM once every year or two. Absence of Malice and Dead Reckoning were the two highlights, though I've already gotten both of them on DVD via TCM.
Key question: Does MOVIES! interrupt its films with commercials? If so, forget it. But if not, it's great to know, since it's included in my FIOS package, and I'll start checking it out more carefully. Glad you mentioned it.
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Actually Singing in the Rain is one of the few musicals between Footlight Parade and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that I can watch without falling asleep or groaning in agony. I like the Garland version of A Star Is Born even more, but maybe that's because I don't really think of it as a musical in the same way.
Really? Even with that wall-hitting vanity number (Broadway Melody) that stops the film dead in its track?
This isn't probably the best way to express what I'm trying to get at, but the reason I don't think of Garland's A Star Is Born as a typical Hollywood "musical" is that in A Star Is Born the songs are all within the context of a realistic setting, i.e. an after hours jam session or a production. Same goes for the three great Berkeley musicals from 1933, all of which I could watch a hundred times over. While there are exceptions like Singing in the Rain and (even more) My Fair Lady, for the most part I can't stand movies where the actors just start breaking into song for no apparent reason.
And then there's also the fact that Garland's Vicki Lester character is one of my many Platonic ideals of what a woman should be like. Solid, down to Earth, loving, understanding, and not incidentally brimming with talent and spontaneous enthusiasm for life, all distilled within that final line that still wells me up every time I hear it. Norman Maine was a bleeping idiot.
Also, you don't get even the slightest bit droopy-eyed by the thousandth time you've hear "I Will Wait for You", in CHERBOURG?
Nope, that film will never be old for me. Can't really explain my love for it, other than that it melts my heart and charms my socks off, in spite of its sad ending. Not that Catherine Deneuve's presence exactly hurts the cause, either. It's the exception to almost every rule I have that I can think of in terms of my movie likes and dislikes, but you know what Wiki says about what Emerson said about consistency and hobgoblins.
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Now, don't you think referring to French foreign films as "obscure Frenchy flicks", and making the erroneous assumption that people don't want to see them on TCM, is also a "put -down", if only of obscure French films.
Besides, they're not that obscure.
Personally I'd love to see a month where Eric Rohmer were given the Truffaut or Hitchcock treatment, or at least be given a SUTS day for directors. It'd sure beat another SUTS day for Katharine Hepburn's top 10 movies that get played all the time anyway, but the point is variety.
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And I think the reason for the advent of all those May-September films of the 40's and 50's was simple: Here were all these box office proven leading men, and here was this new crop of young leading women. Why not pair them together and hope that moviegoers will suspend reality and just enjoy seeing their familiar characters with beautiful young women?
Never mind that few women in their early 20's in real life were likely to be chasing men in their 50's for anything other than mink coats and tickets to riches. This is Hollywood, and they don't have to show us any stinking badges----I mean, reality.
Well, those characters played by the older actors in the '50s weren't exactly poor. Cooper's character in LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON didn't have a job as a night watchman or dishwasher.
I never said that he was poor. He was basically an aging self-styled ladies' man living the Hugh Hefner dream with a few "refined" touches, such as a string quartet substituting for a jazz trio. But the difference here is that in real life the Hepburn character would have been a gold digger, not a virgin looking for romance from a man who was more than old enough to be her father, especially one with as weird a set of habits as Cooper's.
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I think that misses the point Andy was making. In LITA I don't get the impression that the Audrey character was after the Cooper character because he was rich. She wasn't looking for a sugar daddy. She wasn't even looking for love. It just happened.
But the point is that such an improbable "romance" never would've happened in a 30's movie. The entire premise would've been considered laughable, because the young leading ladies in the 30's almost always, if not 100% always, wound up with young leading men. You never saw such unlikely pairings as Audrey had with the likes of Cooper or Astaire, both of whom were 30 years her senior.
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And I think the reason for the advent of all those May-September films of the 40's and 50's was simple: Here were all these box office proven leading men, and here was this new crop of young leading women. Why not pair them together and hope that moviegoers will suspend reality and just enjoy seeing their familiar characters with beautiful young women?
Never mind that few women in their early 20's in real life were likely to be chasing men in their 50's for anything other than mink coats and tickets to riches. This is Hollywood, and they don't have to show us any stinking badges----I mean, reality.
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I have the same problem with Mississippi Burning as I used to have with Amos 'n' Andy.
Amos 'n' Andy was a terrific show, and it featured some of the best comic talent of its time: Tim Moore, Spencer Williams, Ernestine Wade, Amanda Randolph, Alvin Childress, and so on.
And for production values, Mississippi Burning was an excellent movie.
The problem with Amos 'n' Andy wasn't the show itself. The problem was the fact that Amos 'n' Andy was the ONLY representation of African American life featured on TV at the time. Great a show as it was, and as human as its characters were, it contributed mightily to stereotypes about blacks in the absence of competing images that reached the mass audience.
Similarly, the problem with Mississippi Burning lies in the fact that Hollywood has yet to produce any movie that fully portrays the reality of Mississippi Summer, and as a result the misrepresentations and omissions in Mississippi Burning come to be conflated with reality among those who never get exposed to the many first rate documentaries that reach only a limited audience.
For anyone interested in that reality, I'd strongly suggest tuning into the Freedom Summer documentary that will be airing on PBS TV at 9:00 Eastern time tomorrow night, with several repeats later in the week.
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I don't have anything against the TCM database per se, but like many others here, I'm not exactly sure what counting its results might mean. Some of us only use it to look up unfamiliar titles or people. I use it for that, and also to see an actor's full filmography if I'm trying to place a movie that I've partly forgotten. Others may well be using it to look up fun facts about a favorite of theirs. I have no idea how we're to distinguish among these motivations. I'm only glad that it's there, but I wouldn't dream of using search numbers to influence programming choices.
Hell, if TCM ever wants to know what to program and not to program, just ask me and I'll be glad to tell them. I guarantee that at least one steady viewer will be pleased.
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Nobody seems to want to advance the point that ME-TV and other channels are competition for TCM. Doesn't it seem odd that this whole point is being overlooked? I think it's a valid point.
Given the enormous variety of the TCM repertory, and the extremely limited repertory (and commercial interruptions) of any other movie channel, I think it wouldn't be too far-fetched to say that the only real competition for TCM is Netflix.
The only other non-commercial station that's remotely competitive with TCM's vintage offerings is Fox, and they're only non-commercial from 3 AM to 3 PM. Not to mention that they keep running the same movies over and over again, and cutting more and more of their best movies from their lineup. At best they've got about 1/50th of what TCM will offer in any given month or year.
Bottom line is that for most of us who won't watch movies with commercials and who like a wide selection, it's either TCM or Netflix. Those other networks are the 1962 Mets or 1916 A's of cable movie channels.
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LOL. It's true Bette still played leads in her Baby Jane phase, but they werent romantic leads that so many older actors played (including Matthau). I agree there are exceptions......
I've made this point before, but I think it's still worth pointing out that casting older men in romantic roles, regardless of their looks, only started to happen when the original crop of male sound era stars (Cooper, Stewart, Astaire, Gable, Grant, etc.) turned into middle age in the 40's and 50's. Prior to that, you'd see May-September "romances" portrayed as taking place primarily between golddiggers and dirty old men, with the true romantic pairings almost exclusively reserved for couples of roughly the same age, with maybe a 10 year gap a most, rather than one of 30 years and counting.
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I agree that it is good to see what Osborne said at the beginning, but I do not think as many people watch TCM to see the more current and watchable stars as they do to see the earlier watchable stars.
Right, and this is reflected in TCM's schedule, which features far more vintage American films than films from any other time and/or place. There has never been, and never will be, any "lack of studio era movies on TCM". That's little more than a baseless canard, no matter how many times some people (not you) like to repeat it.
Lawrence Tierney Tonight!
in General Discussions
Posted
Wow, that was a GREAT vintage clip, mr6666. It must have been from TCM's very early years, no? I sure don't remember it over the past few days.