ElCid
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Posts posted by ElCid
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1 minute ago, cigarjoe said:
Yea the scenes down at the old Fulton Fish Market and in DUMBO. You can always tell the Manhattan street scenes are sets for the lack of parked vehicles. It seems as if in Noir Hollywood Manhattan there is always a place to park. 😎
Always found it interesting how easily cars find a parking place on very crowded streets in the movies and on TV. Usually right in front of where they are going.
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2 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
Too bad The People Against O'Hara wasn't shot in NYC as originally planned. What passes for The Westside Highway or The FDR Drive is obviously one of the L.A. River bridges.
Too far from Spencer Tracy's favorite drinking spots? Per Muller, they shot exteriors in NYC for two weeks.
Seen it before, but long enough that I forgot most of it. Pretty good movie and well worth watching. The first movie I remember seeing Diana Lynn in was Plunder Under the Sun, (1953) with Glenn Ford. She plays an alcoholic or drunk, but Glenn helps her to stop. Wonder if she learned how to play it from Spencer in The People Against O'Hara?
Plunder is a pretty good movie and I frequently re-watch it. Based on a book by David Dodge, which I actually read before became aware of the movie. It was one of those books re-published by Hardcase Crimes.
Next weeks feature is another good one with a good cast - Dana Andrews, Ida Lupino, George Sanders, Vincent Price, Thomas Mitchell, Rhonda Fleming and more. While The City Sleeps (1956).
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15 hours ago, Dargo said:
So Cid. As I mentioned earlier in this thing, it's been decades since I've watched it, and so I'd like to know what you thought of Red Rock West.
(...did you also think it too "referential" and thus perhaps too "self-conscious" and as kingrat mentioned earlier that he found it to be, or not so much so?)
Actually had to go to Wikipedia to fully recall the story. ImDB rates it 7/10 and I guess I could agree with that. Nicholas Cage is one of those actors that I like, but somehow often does not impress in some roles. Too laconic? Lazy?
But RRW is a good movie if you have never seen it or have not seen it in a long time. Man walks into a bar......
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3 hours ago, Dargo said:
And perhaps also hosted by Eddie Muller. (although I could easily envision our friend CigarJoe around here doing this gig too)
Seems I've now seen almost every film that Eddie introduces (and very well I might add) on his Noir Alley series at least a few times in the past, and so how about some "new (cinematic) blood" here!
My initial film suggestions for this series would be the following:
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Body Heat (1981)
The Last Seduction (1994)
Blood Simple (1984)
Red Rock West (1993)
So, whaddaya think here, folks?
(...oh and btw...the first person who tells me these films are not "classics" and solely and/or primarily because they were produced after the fall of the studio system era, is gonna find demsleves sleepin' wit' da fishes...well okay, not really, but you know what I mean here)
I'm in favor of this. These are "classics" as far as I'm concerned. I just watched Red Rock West last week. Would love to see The Last Seduction again. Mulholland Falls, Body Heat and LA Confidential are definitely classics by any definition.
Sorry, Cigarjoe, but your lists are too long for my limited concentration. Also have not even heard of most of the ones I skimmed over.
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49 minutes ago, cigarjoe said:
Mister Buddwing (1966)
Lol, he didn't know it either.
Sort of a psychological noir rather than a “crime” noir. A melancholy film that plays with time, space and your mind as the various vignettes overlap it's eerie and noir-ishly suspenseful, but at times darkly comic. It requires multiple viewings to fully comprehend.
In a quest for a woman named Grace, Garner meets four women, Angela Lansbury, Katherine Ross, Susanne Pleshette, and Jean Simmons, each of the women he at first mistakes for Grace. So at first we see Garner interact with each woman in their true identities and at some point they become a vivid flashback to his relationship with Grace at different stages of his past life with Grace, the starry eyed young love stage, the struggle with real life, and the consequences of wrong decisions made. All this makes the viewer a little disoriented, a little lost, exactly how James Garner's character feels throughout the movie.
I've watched Mr. Buddwing a couple of times and still can't get into it, even though Garner is one of my favorite actors. The women in it are first class.
Don't know if I would call it Noir, but rather just a drama. A dark and dreary drama.
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15 hours ago, Dargo said:
Ah, Tin Men. LOVE that movie! Thanks for remembering this, Cid.
Saaaay, ya know. Couldn't this one be considered a "comedy noir" of sorts?
(...I think yes...YES?)
Not so sure Tin Men would be considered Noir. To me it is too much a romantic comedy of errors. While the profession (aluminum siding salesmen) of the "Tin Men" may be considered criminal, I don't think it rises to the Noir level.
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50 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Well, that's what the love of a good woman (who'll usually end up dying at about the 54:00 minute mark of every episode they're in) will do to a guy, ya know!
I don't remember the story line that well, but there is a scene in Tin Men where they discuss Bonanza. As one guy points out the father and three sons are all fairly close in age. Also, he had three wives who all died in childbirth.
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4 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
Her other good Film Soleil/Noir is Highway Dragnet (1954) with Richard Conte and Joan Bennett. Hendrix plays a fashion model, Bennett the fashion photographer, and Conte a GI falsely accused of murdering a blond bimbo in Vegas. Its got a cool ending in a surreal looking half sunken resort in the Salton Sea.
I recently got the DVD of this one and have watched it a couple of times. I would rate it about a 7/10. The ending is actually in Richard Conte's former home on the banks of the Salton Sea. Apparently it supposedly flooded very easily.
I looked up Salton Sea and apparently it is no longer much of a resort and lots of abandoned buildings.
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I like Dark Passage, but it is not your typical "crime/mystery" movie. A lot more of the human interest of Bogie and Bacall characters getting to know each other and of course falling in love.
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9 minutes ago, speedracer5 said:
Is it a DVD of scrambled soft-core porn?
I think so. It was just one of many DVD's in one of the catalogs I get. Will see if I can locate it. The only value would be to test yourself and see if you could spot various anatomy parts.
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2 hours ago, cigarjoe said:
I bought the series on DVD, I however, enjoyed the 1/2 hour season one episodes with their quirky NYC specific intros, i.e., the sidewalk fishermen who tried to retrieve change that fell through the sewer and subway air shaft grates.
Those first season episodes also had John McIntire as the head detective. The pacing was better in the half hour shows. Once it went to an hour the writers went hog wild with the drama dragging the pacing out with these long expositions of emoting (usually in standard looking blah studio sets), the actors probably loved it, it gave them more screen time to do their stuff, but I didn't cause it devoted less time to the now quite intriguing on location footage of NYC.
I remember when Gunsmoke went form 1/2 to 1 hour. It was my father's favorite show, but he quit watching it. Too much drama, romance or whatever. He wanted action.
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16 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I also remember on cable how if there was a channel that wasn't part of your subscription, you could still "see" the channel, except that the picture was scrambled. I remember the image being kind of green and swirly looking. However, the sound was crystal clear. As a kid, after we lost TCM due to it moving to a higher tiered cable package, I could still hear TCM and I could "see" it (kind of), the image was just scrambled.
They actually have DVD's now of these scrambled channels, but for the soft core porn sites, not TCM.
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A little off topic, but I just spent 2+ hours with two cable system experts trying to fix an ongoing problem. Not major, but sometimes annoying. We got into discussion about how complicated it has all become since the good old days of cable when you either had reception or not or you had snow or not. Of course you only had 12 channels as well.
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41 minutes ago, LawrenceA said:
I can attest to this. I didn't have cable-TV access until 1987. The only over-the-air station that was reliably available was CBS, while ABC and NBC were hit-or-miss for many years until the closest affiliates boosted their signal. We later got a couple of syndicated channels out of Jacksonville, but that wasn't until the early 1980's.
In the 60's, we actually only had two stations from Charleston, SC - CBS and one split between ABC and NBC. In the late 60's, we finally got three stations - ABC, NBC and CBS.
Of course that was in the really good Ol' days when there was 15 minutes of local news, weather and sports and 15 minutes of national news once per day around 6 PM.
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Growing up we had ABC, NBC and CBS. They did have late shows at 11:00 as I recall. Of course Johnny Carson or Jack Parr or whoever was on one network. Regardless I did not watch programs after 11:00 except on rare occasions.
When I did watch some in later 60's and 70's, they were not "classics" but whatever the TV stations could get on the cheap. The only one I remember is The Strange One with Ben Gazzara, but only because it was based on my alma mater.
Did not live in an area where cable was available until 1985. If you lived outside a densely populated area, the companies were slow to get there.
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I enjoyed The Tattooed Stranger and especially Eddies commentaries. Forgot which one, but apparently one of the female hosts has a tattoo?
Thought it interesting that the RKO-Pathe B movie enterprise died due to many people discovering they could work in TV and essentially make 54 minute B movies every week. Eddie mentioned M Squad and The Naked City as two of the Noir type TV shows that displaced B movies.
I thought the "love interest" looked familiar, but as Patricia Barry, not White as noted by Eddie.
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One of the things I learned in model railroading is that an S curve (as above) is very tricky. The train is headed in one direction and you jerk it to another and then do it again very quickly. Leads to a lot of derailments.
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3 hours ago, Dargo said:
Actually, and once again here Cid, in many many cases, and in most of the major battles earlier in that war, once again it WAS the forces of the South that through a form of guerrilla and often hit and run tactics had won said battles and primarily BECAUSE of their entrenched positioning.
(...yep, trust me here...I ALSO know my Civil War history, dude...and I ain't always just the guy lookin' for an easy joke to insert around here!)
You don't know it very well.
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33 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Yeah, amazing isn't it that the so-called "military genius" Robert E. Lee somehow didn't realize that pretty much up to the time of Pickett's Charge, the reason the South had previously won so many other battles and skirmishes up to that point in the war was because it had been HIS forces that had been entrenched behind barricades and that the Union forces had usually been the ones marching across open fields in advancements against them.
(...but HEY, I guess we ALL make mistakes sometimes, huh!) LOL
Suggest you study up on Civil War history and especially Lee's tactics and strategies. He won so many battles because he usually attacked first. It was his favorite tactic and it worked until Gettysburg. Also, the prominent strategy for battles, North and South, was the frontal attack.
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I've got Experiment in Terror on DVD, but haven't watched it in a long time. Somehow it just does not come together the way it should for me. Glen Ford, Lee Remick, Stephanie Powers and the mystery actor. The name of the villain is not revealed until the end of the movie.
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I started watching On Dangerous Ground, but quit when Ryan got to Ida Lupino's house. Somewhat to hear what a Viola d'amore sounds like. I had watched it several years ago and just didn't get into it.
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10:07 AM, Saturday, June 29: The Falcon's Alibi. Fairly interesting with Jane Greer as a torch singer and Elisha Cook plays a radio DJ. OF course, preceded by cartoons, a 60 minute Western, a serial and shorts.
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10:07 AM, Saturday, June 29: The Falcon's Alibi. Fairly interesting with Jane Greer as a torch singer and Elisha Cook plays a radio DJ.
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1 hour ago, Vautrin said:
Well, poor ol' Buz lost his eyesight yesterday. Somehow he miraculously regained
it before the episode ended. Never underestimate the healing power of Route 66.
I remember that episode, but never re-watch it. Too depressing. I think Barbara Barrie played another blind person at the school for the blind.
HITS & MISSES: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow on TCM
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Posted
I'm not so sure. Ford is better at playing a more restrained character and that seems to have worked well for 3:10 to Yuma. Although Mitchum probably could have done it. I do think Mitchum for sure is a better actor than Ford, but Widmark is a toss up to me.