AndyM108
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Posts posted by AndyM108
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Movie decency when I was growing up was dictated by the state. Only movies which were approved by the state could be shown.
Sexual content was of little importance in approval. Major standard for approval was adherence to: "good people work for the common good and bad people want material objects."
So in which country did you grow up?
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So, did anyone set their recorders for an ultra-rare opportunity to get this small but quite special movie?
Hey, do birds eat worms? I wouldn't have missed it for anything.
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I did. And I think it would make a perfect double-feature with the Joan Crawford picture A WOMAN'S FACE.
I see the connection, but a better pairing for that movie would be Dark Passage, since both of them involve criminal coverup plots rather than public shunning. Face of Fire is more of a variant of The Scarlet Letter, or other movies where the real shame is in the community's reaction to an event rather than anything that the protagonist has done.
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I think winning an Oscar, which for members of the film community is their highest award IS meaningful to them.
True.
Now, maybe not you or me,
And even more true, at least for me. I doubt if more than a small fraction of my favorite movies ever won a non-honorary Oscar. Nor did Barbara Stanwyck or Cary Grant. Oscars are little more than a popularity contest and a marketing gimmick.
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If anyone ever wanted to see death portrayed realistically, they should check out Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955), which just played on TCM earlier this month. That's a movie that should be played in prime time during each and every war movie festival.
But that's a documentary. When it comes to the usual fictional depiction of death other than in Itchy and Scratchy cartoons, I think a little bit of gore goes a long way, and beyond that it's mostly a case of the filmmaker trying to draw attention to himself. The final shootout in Bonnie and Clyde and the many depictions of wholesale mayhem in The Wild Bunch come close to crossing that line between honesty and exhibitionism, especially considering the extreme improbability of the "losing side" being able to hold out as long as was the case in either of those movies. The shootout scenes in those two films were more like those Hollywood fistfights where two middle aged men are somehow able to spring up to their feet instantly after being hit with thirty hard rights to the jaw and a few flying chairs. It makes for great drama but not much for realism.
OTOH when it comes to "real" war movies like Come and See, or Letters From Iwo Jima, then Hollywood exaggeration isn't necessary to get the point across, while at the same time there's no need to hold back for the sake of disturbing the kiddies. Films like those really hit the sweet spot.
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And Andy, while I got the feelin' your post here was offered up in sort of a tongue-in-cheek fashion,
Don't shoot, mister, ya got me!
And yes, my initial list was just a bit of fun I was having, a combination of shooting first and thinking later, along with a few of my own biases. It wasn't an attempt at any serious consideration of the Western or neo-Western or revisionist Western genres, a discussion for which I'm completely unqualified both by lack of knowledge and lack of interest. Apologies to anyone who feels that they need one.
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I don't disagree with your premise but the idea that there are only Cowboys AND Indians disqualifies a lot of great westerns. Same for color films but I get that it is like WWII films in color. After seeing so many films, real footage and Hollywood, to see it in color seems distracting.
Well, you'll note that I said "real" Westerns, by which I meant "classic" Westerns that those of us of a certain age use to devour on Saturday afternoons for 35¢. You know, the kind where villains who got shot full of holes only grunted and said "just grazed an artery".
But okay, now that I think about it, neither of my two favorite Westerns (The Naked Spur and The Violent Men) have any Indians that I can remember. And uh, oh, they're also both in color. Guess we have to scratch that requirement as well.
So much for writing off the top of my head. But it must feature horses. No exceptions.
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Did Rock Hudson ever make a good movie?
Sure, though not as many as about 100 to 200 other actors or actresses, from the silent era to the present day. I could probably take a deep breath and list about 30 or 40 of them before coming up for air, but I don't want to be snarky.
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A "real" Western has to have these characteristics:
1. Cowboys and Indians
1a. In case of a final showdown shootout, the cowboys have to win.
1b. Alternately, the good guy Indians help the good guy cowboys foil the bad guy cowboys.
2. Transportation solely by horse
3. Black and white film only
4. Any character known as a "dude" is by definition a villain
5. Girls can be either frightened pacifists or six-shooting tomboys, but if they're under 30 they also have to be eye candy. But if they're over 40 they're allowed to smoke cigars or spit tobacco. This is for the purpose of arousing cigarjoe.
In addition, a "real" Western must have one of three endings:
---Cowboy rides off into sunset
---Cowboy kisses or marries girl
---Cowboy kisses horse
And all traces of moral ambiguity are to be wiped out before the final shootout. No exceptions.
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There is an even more outrageous nuke PSA shown on TCM, don't recall the title. It makes the claim that having your house in good condition, including the paint, can help it survive a nuclear blast! I guess that people were ignorant about nukes enough then, that they could believe that stuff.
Even they weren't as bad as those early Formica ads that claimed that they repelled radiation.
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Regarding Eva, you become a good friend of TCM, you get to be SOTM. That's the way the world works.
Obviously true, and it probably explains quite a few marginal SOTM selections. And it's kind of hard to interview George Sanders or Lon Chaney.
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Very early this morning TCM aired the 1950s short "Duck and Cover" that was intended to teach kids what to do to survive an atomic bomb attack, specifically to "duck and cover."
I wonder if this was taken seriously at the time or was considered humorous by the audience.
Well, it was supposed to be taken seriously, but in my 50's elementary school in Washington, we took it about as seriously as those mandatory Bible readings we were forced to roll our eyes through every day. We went through the motions but that was about it. The truth is that the only time during the Cold War where we ever really felt any imminent danger of a possible nuclear attack was the week of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
BTW if you ever want to see a great comedy set during that week of terror, check out the 1993 John Goodman flick Matinee.
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George Sanders. Stop making excuses for why the most distinctive Hollywood actor who's never had even a SUTS day is being left out in the cold once again. TCM could easily fill a month with movies had major roles in.
Nothing against Eva Marie Saint, but her film repertory pales in comparison. I get the strong feeling sometimes that Sanders gets bypassed simply because he wasn't a traditional hero or a particularly charismatic / sexy anti-hero, and in part because he's also not around to be interviewed. He just happened to be a supreme craftsman with a talent for enhancing every movie he was in, but for whatever reason that sort of actor doesn't seem to appeal to any particular sub-demographic of the TCM core audience. Pity that.
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By coincidence, I finally got around to watching The Wild Bunch just the other night. Terrific acting, especially by Ryan and Borgnine, very good character development, and an absolutely perfect final resolution with the human vultures riding off into the sunset. The irony was ladled on pretty thick, but the look on Ryan's face as he got up to join them made the entire movie worth the viewing time. That was one great actor.
BUT-----once you've seen one 10,000 round shootout you've seen em all. Influential, maybe, but not in all that interesting a way.
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John Simon is a horror of a human being.
But wouldn't George Sanders have been perfect portraying him in a biopic?
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I only wish that TCM would make Judy Davis a SOTM. It seems as if the only movies of hers that ever gets shown here are My Brilliant Career and A Passage to India, whereas in terms of talent she's right up there with her American namesake Bette.
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Glad you said "I'm talking about the influence a movie has had in shaping the look of other movies, and the themes and ideas they address," because otherwise The Birth of a Nation would be a no-brainer for its combination of technique and influence on public events.
But by the standards you're using, the first two films that would come to my mind would be Metropolis and Bonnie and Clyde. You've already stated the case for Metropolis, but Bonnie and Clyde was very influential in both technique (the use of slow motion as a cinematic cliché) and its unashamed presentation of a pair of murderers as some sort of cultural heroes.
To the above I'd add that while both of these films were strong reflections of the specific society in which they were produced, in the real world there was almost a visceral public backlash against the values that were implicit in the two filmmakers' visions. Just a few years after Metropolis, the Weimar culture had been forced into exile along with Fritz Lang, and just a year after Bonnie and Clyde had been released, we had Nixon and George Wallace combining for nearly 57% of the national popular vote.
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Then, there's Pauline Kael, who is the fancy restaurant on top of the hill. You know the kind, where you book reservations months in advance. A place where you really get something to chew on.
I used to love to chew on Pauline Kael for her writing and her encyclopedic knowledge of films, but I'd usually leave her recommendations on the plate along with the bones. Too many Last Tangos for my taste.
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To me, Leonard Maltin is first and foremost, a Disney historian, who "backed into" into a broader base of film criticism via Entertainment Tonight and his books of "mini reviews." I don't think he truly has the depth of knowledge of classic films that one might wish he had but he sure is asked to render his opinion by the mass media more often than not.
Leonard Maltin's but one more example of the sort of credentialed maven that TV shows often call upon. With these type of "experts", you quickly discover that the more you happen to know about the subject on hand, the more you realize how little they know. But when you're a complete rube on the subject under discussion, they can seem like positive geniuses.
There was a "book expert" I used to know who once had an NPR show called "The Book Guys". He's probably never read anything much beyond a Classics Illustrated comic book from cover to cover in his entire life, and at one point he thought that "Swiss" was an actual language like French or German. The bottom line is that a bit of media presence and a lot of surface self-assurance can go a long way in today's world.
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Categorizing can be tricky; does INTERNATIONAL HOUSE go into "musicals" or "pre-codes"?
If I were categorizing that film, I'd call it a W. C. Fields, since it shows up in nearly all of his retroplex retrospectives.
I had to combine Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis & Joan Crawford movies in the same box too-wouldn't they hate that?
OOOOHHH, CATFIGHT!!!!
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How about SOTM "Character Actors in Leading Roles"?
Well, there are many so-called "character actors" who often were in leading roles, if not always on the top of the credits. Just to take two names that jump right out: Edward Arnold and Charles Coburn.
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I do have three (of the four) Hepburn-Grant films on a disc-- I put the fourth one, SYLVIA SCARLETT on a disc devoted to the woefully underrated Brian Aherne. I am hoping to get the Ladd-Lake noir when TCM broadcasts them in August for Ladd's day. My favorite of those is THE BLUE DAHLIA, which I could easily include with my 'Produced by John Houseman' theme.
Some of the Thin Man movies I have scattered across other themes, like I do with the Andy Hardy ones. But if they wind up on Saturdays, where TCM is going through different movie series, then I will probably re-record them and make specific discs for them.
My only prayer for both of us is that our surviving spouses and / or children can make sense out of any of our filing systems.
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Actually, that is one film I do not have in my collection. So it's funny you pick that one as an example. If I chose to include BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, I would probably put it as part of a Spencer Tracy theme, since he seems to dominate the picture and he is the first thing I think of when I think about that particular film. That would be easy to remember. And in case I forget, then I go back to the master list on my computer.
Also-- sometimes I will intentionally make a duplicate recording if a film seems like it can work as part of more than theme. I do this so I do not have to guess where to find it-- and because it may be a film I like so much I don't mind having more than one copy of it (as a back up).
Okay, I'm just glad to know that your memory is only human, and I'll never object to making duplicate copies of movies I particularly like. In my case I like to have all of my "favoritest" movies on separate SP disks, but then I also like to group them into a mini-theme on one LP or EP disk. Examples of that would be the Rossellini war trilogy, the three Grant/Hepburn comedies, the three Ladd/Lake noirs, all three versions of A Star Is Born (beginning with What Price Hollywood?), or the entire Thin Man series, which I have on two EP disks with three movies each. This way when I feel like seeing an entire mini-theme at once, I don't have to dig out multiple disks from multiple boxes.
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When I switched to DVD recordings, I figured that it made better sense to organize the DVDs by theme and then organize the themes alphabetically. As I said in an earlier post, all my westerns are under 'Out West with ________,' so I just go to the bin with the 'O' discs in them, and I can quickly find any western I want. I don't even have to go to my master list on the computer, to try and find out which number it is. It saves time.
The only problem I'd have with a system like that would be that in many cases there's a fine line between themes, and I'd often have trouble trying to remember which category I'd put the movie in.
To take but one example: Bad Day At Black Rock. Is that a "Western" just because it takes place in the West, even though the setting is after World War 2, and it has nothing to do with cowboys and Indians or cattle rustling?
But if it's not a Western, then what category (or theme) would you place it in? And more to the point for me, how would I remember a year down the road what category I put it in?
All I can say is that your memory must be a lot better than mine.
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Interesting response, primosprimos, and it makes perfect sense, given your preferences. My take is based on several factors:
1. DVDs are dirt cheap, and a good DVD recorder is a relatively inexpensive one time expense.
2. DVR monthly charges are not cheap at all, at least not with FIOS.
3. I'm a very impatient person, and the extra step of having to transfer films from a DVR to a DVD would kill my patience and dampen my enthusiasm.
4. I do like owning movies and gradually building up what is becoming a fairly coherent collection of both classic and (somewhat) modern films, about 3000+ in number so far.
5. Since I maintain a constantly upgraded Excel file of my DVDs, finding them is quick and easy.
The real criticism is implied in the question "Am I really going to watch all those movies?" Since I usually make it a point to watch what I've recorded within a day or two after recording it, I can truthfully say that the answer is mostly "yes". And for the same reason I have a personal library of about 8000 books, I like the idea of having access to my favorite movies without having to rent them one at a time. (I do rent, but not that often.) I'm not a fan of reading books on a kindle or watching movies on my computer, and I'm not interested in connecting my TV to my computer so that I can take full advantage of streaming.
Obviously this isn't for everybody, but for someone in my situation the difference between a DVD recorder and a DVR is like night and day. I probably spend less on all the DVDs I use in an average month than I'd be spending on those FIOS monthly DVR charges alone, without having anything to show for it in the end with that DVR box.
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The Priggishness of the AutoCensor
in General Discussions
Posted
I doubt if the autocensor would ever approve Edward G. Robinson's original dying line in Little Caesar:
M##########r of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?
Nah, didn't think so.