AndyM108

The Seahawks and the Bucs were expansion franchises that began in 1976, with the Seahawks in the NFC and the Bucs in the AFC. In 1977 they traded conferences, but Seattle returned to the NFC in 2002 when the Texans came into the league to bring it to its current level of 32 teams.

I don't believe the "F" word was in everyday usage 70 years ago the way it is now. I don't have statistics to back me up, but when I lived as a 6 year old on Cathedral Parkway across from Morningside Park in NYC back in 1950, that "F" word was used by my contemporaries in just about every other sentence. I doubt if there ever was a time when city kids (boys, at least) in crowded neighborhoods didn't find that word to be one of life's most constant (and cherished) companions, even if we had to check it at the front door of our apartments.

Seeing once again the Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras movies (The Battle of Algiers and Z) back-to-back is the highlight of the stretch for me. Two of the best historical "docu-dramas" (for want of a better word) ever, with the former being one of my top 10 films of all time.

I can understand and sympathize with your complaint about the Wayne and Doris Day movies being crammed into one week. But I can't figure out where the "bias" is supposed to be. It certainly can't be a political bias, since scores of Republican actors have been given SOTM treatment with "normal" scheduling. And anyway, I didn't even know that Doris Day was a Democrat. And if it's a bias against stars who are "popular in the heartland", then why weren't other "heartland" stars such as Elvis, Jimmy Stewart, Mickey Rooney, or Esther Williams given similar treatment when they were SOTM? The more I read similar complaints about programming "bias", the more I get the sense that the people voicing these complaints don't ever bother to acquaint themselves with the facts of TCM's programming history.

Welcome to the Forums, Susan. What are some of your favorite movies?

Interesting about how TCM featured Mitchum. I was starting to buy-into Andy's idea that by 'pushing' all the movies of a star into a shorter time span they were trying to 'get it over with' (i.e. make it a second rate tribute), and it might have to do with the limited acting ability of Wayne or the fact many Day movies were silly productions (I like her early work). James, just to be clear, that was voranis's explanation for the schedule format, not mine. I was only giving my tongue-in-cheek reaction as to how I might have scheduled Doris and The Duke if I'd been looking to minimize their exposure, but since I'm mostly home during the day and can record overnight, I don't really care one way or the other how they schedule their SOTMs, as long as their don't bunch their premieres together between midnight and 8:00 AM and force me to use the SLP setting.

I'm mostly a Ravens fan as long as Dan Snyder is alive, but I'm rooting for Seattle because back in 1997 the Broncos were the first team to call in Nike to jazz up their uniforms, taking them from their classic "Orange Crush" look: to this cluttered monstrosity: And even though I know that since then many other teams have copied their Fancy Boy fashion trend, I'm still steamed at the original offender.

Hell Yeah! You do support the premise all views, diversity, should be allowed even if you might find some of it unsettling for you, don't you? Jake in the Heartland As long as they keep showing plenty of movies I like (noirs, pre-codes, foreign, silents, underground, general dramas), I won't complain about Doris or the cowboys. I may snark a bit , but I realize that my own tastes aren't universal. TCM should be about *all* points of view, not just yours or mine.

Actually, I think Midnight Cowboy has the best shots of the old Times Square. It's actually kind of historical in a way. That's a great movie, but an even better one in terms of depicting the New York of that period is Al Pacino's first feature film, The Panic in Needle Park.

Hmmm...Doris Day and John Wayne... I'm wondering if, although popular enough to warrant programming as SOTM, these stars aren't as popular with TCM staff as others, so they minimize their "pain" by cramming them in a week to "get it over with." Well, if it'd been me, I might've run them all back-to-back at fast forward speed, just to get them out of the way even more quickly. Guess I'm not that much of a fan of cowboys or virgins. OTOH January (Crawford) and March (Astor) have been good enough to make me a bit more willing to take 31 Days of Repeats and a month of John Wayne. And after all, we've gotta give Jake in the Heartland a reason to keep coming back.

*Instead of being outraged by the criminal activities being depicted, children identified with the criminals.* In later years, some called it the "Ron O'Neal effect". Yeah, and it was sure hard to tell why those stupid kids would've ever wanted to emulate that lowlife: OTOH that Super Fly movie did have one positive impact, at least in the eyes of some conservative politicians and the local conk jockeys: It started a mini-trend away from Afros and back into hair straighteners.

Would you rather go back to the Times Square of the 1970s? Of[/i]TimesSquareinThe1970s+(16).jpeg] Just point me to the nearest time machine, and I'll jump aboard in a New York minute. McGirr's and the 711, here I come!

Patchin Place is mentioned in the movie Reds, by one of the "Witnesses." Jack Reed and Louise Bryant lived there, or near there, in the early days. Oh, God, yes. Marnie was witness to several shouting matches between Henry Miller and Djuna Barnes, the Patchin Place writer and famous recluse whom Miller would yell at from the street in a vain attempt to get her to come outside. And while their offices weren't on Patchin Place, the old radical feminist magazine The Masses was located just a few blocks north on W. 15th St, and Reed wrote for both that magazine and its successor The Liberator. It was in the latter magazine that excerpts from "10 Days That Shook The World" were first published. I own several dozen copies of those two magazines, and Marnie used to practically inhale them when I took them up from Washington to show her on my visits. Like many others from the Village of her time, she was active in many liberal and radical causes, which was one of the reasons she became close to so many of the similarly inclined theater people. She had also told me of the reason that Gussow never got that last step up at the Times, and it matched the reason you're giving. I think it upset her even more than it upset Mel.

My argument is when people see characters OVER use foul words (most often the F or MF versions) like every other sentence, it normalizes these words. In other words, it loses impact for the viewer and therefore loses impact for the movie character as well. I see what you're trying to get at, but I don't have that reaction at all, because that's like saying that if an actor wears a leisure suit for the entire length of the movie, the "impact" of seeing a leisure suit is lost. But what I get out of seeing that leisure suit - - - or out of hearing Joe Pesci drop f-bombs and m-f missiles at the rate of about 10 a minute - - - is that *this is an essential part of who these characters are.* The point isn't to show off leisure suits or f-bombs. The point is to use these traits (clothing and language) to help delineate the character, and to distinguish them from some of the other characters (Ray Liotta's Henry Hill in Goodfellas, for example) who were stone cold criminals but nowhere near as psychopathic as Pesci's Tommy DeVito. Without these small but significant character trait differences, the characters would be far less memorable. *when people saw the violence and murder in old films it was fairly clean, and the villains almost always were punished for their crimes. So the audience members identified with the victims but not the criminals.* Good point, Fred. The two of you should read a bestselling book from 1933 called "Our Movie-Made Children", which argued that the movies of that era had exactly the opposite effect: Instead of being outraged by the criminal activities being depicted, children identified with the criminals. And yet this was when these criminals were last seen dying in gutters, or being machine-gunned to death, or having their mummified corpses unceremoniously dumped on their mother's doorstep. Which is pretty much the same fate that movie criminals usually meet with today.

I never met Tony Harvey, but both from what you say and from what my late aunt used to say, he sounds like a straw that's stirred a lot of drinks. The only other "big name" I ever heard her mention quite as often as him was the late theater critic, Mel Gussow, another dear friend to her. Good old Patchin Place! I still have my teapot from the Patchin Place Emporium. If there's a single factoid that shows the extent to which life in Greenwich Village has changed, it's this: Marnie died in May of 1989 while still living at 9 Patchin Place. Her final month's rent was $99.56. The only current listing in that building is for a 500 sq. ft. studio at $2,295 a month.

Swithin, if you know Tony Harvey, ask him if he remembers Margaret "Marnie" Cook, a dear aunt of mine who lived on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village for nearly 50 years before she passed away in 1989. She used to speak of him as a dear friend, and told me of his many kindnesses to her after she went blind in the early 1980's. She was one of the more remarkable people I've ever known - - - she also knew Katharine Hepburn and many stage performers such as Vinie Burrows and Diana Sands - - -, and I wonder whether she made the same impression on Tony as she did on everyone else.

Hell, they would've had to shoot The Caine Mutiny with an all-female cast to get me to watch that overrated piece of tripe again. (Come to think of it, that would have made for a far more compelling bit of drama than the original. In fact just substituting Margaret Hamilton for Jose Ferrer would have brought it up several notches. )

So TB, are ya NOW sayin' the movie THE HUSTLER wasn't "exciting enough" for ya here??? I get the dig, but that's actually a perfect example of a movie that developed the female character well beyond the book's scope, in what must have been an attempt to appeal to women with a limited interest in pool. Whereas from a pool player's perspective, nearly everyone I know wishes that the Piper Laurie role had been eliminated from the movie entirely, since it detracted from the overall story, and added nothing but a touch of phony melodrama. Bottom line for me is that while most movies should be gender mixed in order to reflect reality, there are some cases where the gender mix adds nothing substantive and actually can detract from the story. And IMO two such examples would be The Hustler and - - - if the advice of some people here had been followed - - - The Women.

I just can't imagine any guy finding [The Best of Everything] engrossing. About five times I have tried to get through it, but the sandman has always grabbed me. The title song is the best thing about it. Well, you might also say it's hard to imagine any real guy liking Johnny Mathis, which makes about as much sense as your first comment. Or for that matter, liking Fred Astaire or Bing Crosby movies. But why should appreciation for movies have to fall along gender lines? Hell, I've even known women who like John Wayne movies. I don't think TBOE was the world's greatest movie, but if you like films that get behind the scenes of working life in the 50's and depict how people related to each other in the workplaces of that era, it's more than worth a watch, in this case for the Crawford character alone. Of course there was soap to spare, but you could say the same thing about virtually every movie with a man and a woman in it during the Code era that showed them falling into each other's arms and deciding to get married in the final 30 seconds before the closing credits. This is just the way that Hollywood was back in the day, and if that sort of thing puts you off, you're best sticking to movies where the hero just marries his horse.

I've gotta agree with Fred here. To me the complete absence of men from the 1939 film version of The Women added emphasis to the whole point of the movie, which was to show women as they are when wholly among themselves, out of hearing distance from their husbands and paramours. Of course it's also a movie filled with stereotyped cliches and exaggerations, but that's usually what comedies are all about, and there's a reason that it's held up so well after 75 years. *"Do come again, Mrs. PROWLER".* Best line Joan Crawford ever came out with in the 50 movies of hers that I've seen, a line which caused Rosalind Russell to sputter her way right into a clothes hamper. Claire Boothe Luce was one of the more celebrated acid-tongued wits of her time, and the dialogue in The Women+ certainly doesn't harm her reputation.

I may just be a sucker for 1950's corporate dramas, but I loved The Best of Everything, which I'd never seen before until tonight. Okay, the final scene was a bit too obvious, but in this case there was credibility to the cliche, along with a nice mix of younger stars like Hope Lange and Diane Baker to complement the old warriors Crawford and Brian Aherne. I'm sure it's been said many times, but there was a lot of Mad Men in this movie, only the movie was a lot less self-conscious.

Sounds like what a poor prize fighter might have said, more or less. That's true, but then a poor prize fighter (which is what Brando was portraying) seldom says it with flowers.

More recent films: NO. That's what HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz and Encore is there for. That's great if you can afford those premium channels. Not everyone is quite so fortunate. Not to mention that whereas TCM's more recent movies are carefully selected for quality to fit in with those of their more favored decades of the 20's through the 50's, the films on those other channels aren't nearly so carefully screened. For every first rate movie, you get ten pieces of trash and countless repeats. Some people aren't satisfied with 80% of the programming devoted to their favorite eras, I guess, so their idea is to impose a form of "Programming Correctness" on everyone else. Thank God that TCM has been ignoring those folks' wishes ever since 1994, and will continue to ignore them in the future, no matter how many times they keep beating the same dead horse.

That night down in the ^%$#^& Garden, Charlie. I could have beat a &^%#$^& like Wilson. But what the &^%$^& happened? He got a shot at the %^$^&* title and I got a one way ticket to Palookaville. You shoulda looked out for me, Charlie. Now I'm a ^%*%$ bum. That's all I am, a %&*^ bum. Telling it like it t-i-iz. Brando couldn't have said it better.

There are happy endings and there are happy endings, but I can't remember a happier ending than the one I just saw for the first time in *24 Hours To Kill.* It even made up for every impossibly hackneyed scene and cinematic cliche that took place before it, and that's saying a lot.