TomJH
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Posts posted by TomJH
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9 hours ago, kingrat said:
Although Bogart and Grahame have good chemistry, in real life if I were Laurel's friend I would be so glad once she and Dixon were over. He's a very scary guy.
Apparently there was an element of the real Bogart to Dixon Steele, which helps to explain why he is so chillingly effective in the role. I read that Lauren Bacall was frightened by him when he had a temper tantrum on his yacht one time, though there is no report that he struck her.
We've all seen women who get into relationships with bad boys. I knew one who kept breaking up with one low life, only to sneak back to him again time after time. On at least one occasion she called me to help her get away from this guy who had a wild temper and threatened me with violence, as he did others. He was in and out of prison like the institution had a revolving door. She once told me that it was difficult for her to explain a "sick relationship." She only got freed of him when he got kicked out of the country and, even then, she remained in contact with a guy who had physically and psychologically abused her and even once travelled to his country to see him, with hopes that he would get re-admitted back into Canada.
They don't all finally walk away for good like Gloria Grahame did in this film. And Dixon Steele at the end is also ready to call it quits like he realizes he went too far. Give me a break! In real life the disturbed creeps beg for forgiveness after trying to kill a girl, she invariably gives it to him and he's soon abusing her once again. It's a never ending circle of abuse, unless she really does emancipate herself. but, even then, she may be forced to hide in terror from him.
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8 hours ago, Dargo said:
Excellent acting all around in The Underworld Story, however still for my money, Howard Da Silva's wisecracking but ruthless mob boss Carl ("I'm really not such a bad guy...hee hee hee") Durham is always the performance that sticks with me of any of 'em.
(...and this was probably the third or fourth time I've watched this one)
Da Silva is, indeed, very good in his role. This was one of his final film roles before he was blacklisted by the Hollywood right wing paranoia of the time.
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8 hours ago, laffite said:
When Eddie mentioned that Molly would be in blackface, I winced. When I actually saw Molly enter the room and declare herself a negro, I was near overcome with disgust. The makeup was rather slight, wasn't it. Not that it makes any difference. What happens to Molly BTW? Oh well, she was only a negro. Seriously, her story arc is incomplete, isn't it? Or we can assume she goes to jail, or dies? Did the film end abruptly?
If Anderson hadn't been referred to as black, I would have thought she was a Caucasian character.
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I like Underworld Story. Dan Duryea effectively played it close to the line so that you couldn't be certain if his character would be a slime bucket or show integrity. But has no one anything to say about an obviously white actress, Mary Anderson, being cast as black in a 1950 film? Okay Fox did it the year before, as well, with Jeanne Crain in Pinky but that was a major part and the producers were concerned about box office.
But the Anderson character in Underworld Story is a small part. They couldn't have cast a real black actress in that role?
Okay, I just read Dargo's comment belatedly. Sad comment on Southern audiences if true.
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17 hours ago, rosebette said:
I just watched The Woman in Green (1945), a Sherlock Holmes programmer with my favorite Holmes, Basil Rathbone. Watching this on a Saturday afternoon reminded me of my first encounters as a teenager with this series on Saturday afternoons on a local syndicated station. I developed a bit of a crush on Rathbone's Holmes, cool and rational and naturally appealing to the nerdy daughter of a high school teacher, kind of an alter-ego to my other crush on Errol Flynn, who appealed to... well, you can fill in that blank.
Anyway, I was surprised at the innate sexiness of Rathbone's Holmes, who observes Hillary Brooke's character as having a good figure and "lustrous eyes," and automatically assumes she's going back to her apartment with the gentleman she's dining with: "Are you naive?" he asks the Inspector, as they observe her at the bar. The later scenes between Rathbone and Brook indicate more of a man-of-the-world than the Holmes we usually encounter. And Henry Daniell as Moriarty is worth the price of admission. Something else that I noticed -- the "sedative" that Brook offers Rathbone to induce a hypnotic state is identified as a form of canabis, which he rejects.
Anyway, all of this was over and done with in a neat 67 minutes, around the length of the average Masterpiece Theater mystery program.
I watched The Woman in Green again last year myself and regard it as one of the more entertaining films in the "B" mystery series. Basil Rathbone ranked Henry Daniell as the best of the three actors to play Moriarty in his Holmes films. While I have a hard time resisting George Zucco's interpretation of the same role in Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Daniell's superbly underplayed performance is still highly effective. A particular highlight moment of The Woman in Green occurs for me when Hillary Brooke, then at the peak of her icy patrician beauty, sets out to hypnotize Holmes, and we can't be quite certain whether she will succeed or not.
The hypnosis scene, with its calming background music and bowl of gentling swirling "waters of forgetfulness" into which they peer, with Hillary's soothing "Sleep . . . sleep . . .sleep" as Holmes appears to be falling beneath her spell has always been a particular highlight moment for me.
I can even forgive the image of Hillary's hand gently stirring the water in the bowl from the top of the screen, along with part of her face also visible, yet, bafflingly, we simultaneously see her and Rathbone peering into those same waters from the bottom of the screen without their reflections being upside down, as they should be from that camera angle. Such is the magic of the movies when you surrender to a scene and suspend any logic that gets in the way of seeing your stars right side up.
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10 hours ago, speedracer5 said:
I really enjoy Uncertain Glory. It might be my favorite from the "Errol Flynn Adventures" collection that I have. Errol Flynn looks gorgeous in it and he portrays an anti-hero hero (if that makes any sense). I wish that Flynn had had more scenes with Faye Emerson and less with the girl he meets later.
I always find Faye Emerson, aside from being a hot, sexy lady, during her Warner Bros. years, to be a very interesting actress, often cast by the studio as "hard" types. She could certainly be very glamourous. I wonder if it's because she was so frequently cast in hard boiled parts that the studio didn't think of elevating her to larger, better roles. I agree that her scenes with Flynn in Uncertain Glory have a sparkle, and certainly a sexual edge, that are missing in his scenes with the film's very virginal leading lady, Jean Sullivan. Once again Emerson is giving an interesting interpretation of a tough, conniving role and, once again, the lady makes an early exit from a film. It's a shame.
I thought that Emerson particularly shone in her role in The Mask of Dimitrios as the proprietor of a seedy joint. She was assisted by interesting photography and makeup making her appear rather tired and older in some scenes. But she also brought a certain mystique to the part that made me think that a director like Von Sternberg might have been able to do wonders with her.
In any event, Faye Emerson is yet another actress that the Hollywood film factory used infrequently only to spit her out when it no longer had any use for her. The lady never got her due in the industry, though she married well (Elliot Roosevelt, FDR's son, and later band leader Skitch Henderson).
Emerson reached a low point with a suicide attempt in late 1948 but she soon bounced back to have an extensive and profitable career in television, appearing as a guest panellist on numerous shows and even for a short while played the role of late night TV host on The Faye Emerson Show. She was known for her glamourous evening dresses and, according to one source, her dress slipped one evening with Faye, in an era of live TV, having large portions of her abundant form on display coast to coast. Emerson also appeared in a number of Broadway productions during the '50s. She announced her retirement from show business in 1963, spending her final years residing in Switzerland and then Spain. It was in Spain that she succumbed to cancer in 1975.
Here's Faye in a 1961 appearance as a panellist on To Tell the Truth.
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1 hour ago, Dargo said:
Yep, I knew all that about Chuck here, Tom.
Yep, it IS a shame that for so many (but not me) that image of him as the doddering old guy in that Moore flick is all they know about him and/or has tainted what they feel about his long and glorious career in the movie biz.
And so in that regard anyway, Chuck taught me a very valuable lesson.
And THAT being when I become as feeble as he appeared to be there, would somebody PLEASE just take me aside and tell me to shut the hell up!
Dargo, you'll know that time might be near if someone asks you if he may borrow your tennis racket and you respond, "I'll give you my tennis racket when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!"
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16 minutes ago, Dargo said:
REALLY???
Wow, well I thought he was EXCELLENT and at least deserved ANOTHER nomination for playing that feeble old doddering man he played in that Michael Moore flick about guns?!!!
(...boy, he sure inhibited THAT character I thought...NOBODY could've played THAT role better!!!)
LOL
Interesting, isn't it, that although to many Heston's image today is with that rifle raised over his head before the NRA his early forays into politics included being a civil rights protester. This was, of course, in the years before the President of the United States turned tear gas on them.
Heston had campaigned in 1956 for Stevenson and in 1960 for Kennedy. That was safe enough. But for those who made their living in the motion picture industry, the anti-communist congressional hearings in Washington and the purge of suspected party members in Hollywood had a deterrent effect on the political activities of filmmakers and actors. Yet at the very same time, a great movement was building in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s—and many of the nation’s biggest motion picture stars wanted to lend their fame and faces to the cause.
Charlton Heston was one of the first.
In May of 1961, Heston had picketed a segregated Oklahoma City lunch counter at a now-forgotten demonstration that was one of hundreds of such actions building up to the March on Washington. The day of the ’63 march, the U.S. Information Agency filmed a roundtable discussion with Heston, Belafonte, Poitier, Brando, and Baldwin. It’s worth watching, despite Belafonte’s long-windedness (and can be seen here, thanks to C-SPAN).
Asked why he is marching, Heston steals the scene.
“Two years ago, I picketed some restaurants in Oklahoma, but with that one exception -- up until very recently -- like most Americans I expressed my support of civil rights largely by talking about it at cocktail parties,” he says. “But like many Americans this summer, I could no longer pay only lip service to a cause that was so urgently right, and in a time that is so urgently now.”
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I don't know how common this is (not many, I suspect) but Charlton Heston won the Oscar the only time he was ever nominated for one.
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43 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Interesting. I didn't know Brando or Lancaster were ever considered for the lead in Ben-Hur. Sure, while both, and especially Lancaster, would have had the physicality to pull it off I suppose, whenever I think of them the thought of being more suited to more modern roles comes to mind.
I would guess the primary reason Brando was ever considered would have been his turn as Mark Antony in the '53 Julius Caesar film. And, even though Lancaster had played in a few period pieces by that time and such as those pirate movies he did, did HE ever play a character based in antiquity?
(...nothing immediately springs to mind here, anyway)
Lancaster tried to make a big splash when he played Moses in a made-for-TV film that few people ever talk about.
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15 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Right on, RG! The Big Country has been a favorite western of mine for years now, also. And Chuck was not only very good in it, but was also perfectly cast.
(...and similarly to the movie Major Dundee, has I felt seemed unfairly neglected whenever the topic of the greatest westerns of all time comes up in conversation)
Chuck was good in that and soon afterward he would be a star in The Rifleman. Oh, wait, wrong Chuck. Nevertheless the statement still stands.
As for the other Chuck, Wyler was said to have been so impressed by his work in this film that he pushed for him for Ben Hur (despite other big names like Brando and Lancaster, I believe) also being under consideration.
By the way, wouldn't it have been something if we had had Burt as Judah Ben Hur, with Kirk Douglas as Messala? I could rally see Kirk getting into that role (and, hopefully, in his big death scene, unlike Stephen Boyd, he might have actually kept the film within a three hour running time). There was, of course, no chance for Kirk to be in this production since he was trying to pull Spartacus together at this time. He did, however, drop by the Ben Hur set.
Some of my favourite Heston performances are his low key ones, such as General Gordon in Khartoum and the title character in Will Penny.
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1 hour ago, rosebette said:
I think Uncertain Glory is an unrecognized gem. It was panned when it was released because it's not a typical Flynn vehicle, but holds up well compared with some of the now-cartoonish WWII films, such as Desperate Journey. Flynn gives a nuanced and understated performance, and Paul Lukas is always worth watching. I felt that the young female lead was not especially credible.
I agree with your assessment of the performances in this film, rosebette. But there is certainly a big difference between Flynn and Lukas as performers. Flynn was never respected by the critics for his acting (at least, not until Sun Also Rises at the end of his career) but, at his best, as he is in Uncertain Glory, his performances seem spontaneous and natural. He was an understated actor and his acting, unlike that of some others, doesn't date.
By contrast, with a theatre trained actor like Lukas you can often see the wheels turn which, for me, can be a distraction. But I think his performance in this particular film does work.
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Carol Lombard became Carole Lombard.
Okay, okay, not exactly earth shattering but spelling counts here, too, doesn't it?
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Quite frankly it's not a close contest for me - SPARTACUS all the way.
The cast of the Kubrick film is vastly superior, with supporting portrayals by Ustinov, Laughton and Olivier vivid and even complex. At the same time the two leads, Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons, bring a poignancy to a few of their scenes together. Speaking of Douglas, not only is he sufficiently physical in the lead role of Spartacus but he brings a sensitivity to the part, as well, as opposed to the constant macho glower of Russell Crowe in Gladiator.
So much of Gladiator is taken up with the predictably psychotic portrayal of Joaquin Phoenix as crackpot Emperor that, at almost three hours, it becomes a bit tiresome to watch him after a while. As entertainment, he hardly compares to the enjoyable theatrics of the three British supporting players in Spartacus.
Furthermore Spartacus has a message in its screenplay, not overplayed, about respect for the individual, in particular, the oppressed under dog in an authoritarian society that still rings true, even if some today might regard it as leftist propaganda. The 1960 film, which further benefits from an impressive, sweeping musical score by Alex North, also dares to have a downbeat yet poignant ending based on history.
In contrast to that I thought the melodramatics of Gladiator's ring finale and its outcome uninvolving and really quite hokey. SPOILER: All that business with the dead warrior floating to join his deceased family waiting for him? Come on! Is anyone actually emotionally involved in whatever happens to any of the characters in Gladiator? If any were, I was certainly not one of them.
Overall, I thought Gladiator an okay but overlong time waster. Spartacus goes on too long, as well, but, for me, stands up as arguably the most intelligent of Roman Empire epics and a model of its kind.
One more thing, I'm always impressed by the elaborate battle or action scenes done in a film, such as Spartacus, in which you know real people and real stunt men participated in what you see on screen. All of the CGI work in a film like Gladiator, while superficially enjoyable enough to watch, still leaves me a little cold knowing that so much of what we are watching on screen is coming from a computer.
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Then there was Bill Cosby, whose name became Mud.
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1 hour ago, Arsan404 said:
I've always liked Jack Lemmon, but I didn't really started to appreciate him as an actor until he made The Apartment. I also think he did some of his best work in subsequent movies, like The China Syndrome, Missing, and Glengarry Glen Ross. He was a standout in his brief appearance in Short Cuts.
Lemmon's a mixed blessing to me. His constantly shouting Professor Fate in The Great Race gets on my nerves, while I like everyone else in the film (particularly Peter Falk). Even his fine performance in Days of Wine and Roses goes over the top, for my money, when he's crying and rolling in the mud making me think, "Jack, you really do want that Academy Award, don't you?"
On the other hand, if I had my way, he would have won the Oscar for The Apartment and probably even Some Like It Hot.
However, I agree with you about his work in China Syndrome. I haven't seen Missing or Short Cuts and I have a brain blank on Glengarry Glen Ross. His grumpy comedies with Walter Matthau are mildly amusing though I usually thought that Matthau more than pulled his own in their screen relationship. Sophia Loren's appearance in their second grumpy comedy played a far bigger role in that film's enjoyment than anything that Jack did.
But I must say that I found Lemmon very funny as his hard put upon character in The Out of Towners (along with Sandy "Oh my God" Dennis). There's a lot of Lemmon's later work, particularly his dramas, I have yet to see so I may yet change my mind to a degree if I discover a hidden gem there. Any recommendations?
I'm a person who, for years, proclaimed that Jack Lemmon was a great actor until I realized one day that that statement was based almost entirely upon his first two Billy Wilder comedies, with a lot, well, all of the rest of his stuff failing to make an equal impression upon me.
For those Jack Lemmon lovers out there, we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
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1 hour ago, kingrat said:
Tom, I also like Sands of the Kalahari. Cy Endfield is a good director. But not only does Stuart Whitman not get sunburned, Susannah York's hair looks runway-ready.
Non sunburn and runway hair style aside, it's a solid if harsh film that deserves to be better known.
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34 minutes ago, Dargo said:
LOL
Well, that wasn't hard to do with those skimpy little Gladiator outfits they wore back then ya know, Tom.
(...nope, more than half the time that sort'a thing was merely accidental)
Well boys
in skimpy outfitswillmoonbeamboys.-
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36 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Btw, my pick here wouldn't be either of these two.
Nope, for my money that 1964 Italian/French collaborative epic Hercules Against the Moon Men stands head and shoulders (and on its little sandals with sword in hand) above the rest in this film genre.
Another classic. Didn't Hercules actually moon the Moon Men at one point?
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Sands of the Kalahari (1965)
Fresh off the success of the memorable Zula, director Cy Endfield and actor Stanley Baker were reunited for this tale of survival of six passengers in a small plane which crashes in the Kalahari Desert. Strong shades of Flight of the Phoenix, which would be released the same year, and, like Phoenix, this is an unsentimental, realistic presentation. Interest in the film increases throughout as it becomes apparent that the characterizations here strongly veer away from the usual stereotypes of movie survivors in harsh conditions (ie. 1939's Five Came Back).
Baker plays an alcoholic whose leg is injured in the crash, Nigel Davenport the plane's pilot, nominally the group leader who unexpectedly takes an unhealthy interest in the one woman among them (played by Susannah York). York's character will make some equally unexpected choices about her fellow survivors. Also featured are Stuart Whitman as a great white hunter who spends most of the time macho shirtless (with his back curiously never breaking out into blisters or burn from that broiling sun), Harry Andrews in a colourful spin as a retired German soldier (quite remarkable when contrasting this portrayal to his stunning very hard Brit commanding officer in The Hill, released the same year) and Theodore Bikel as a likable professor.
Cinematographer Erwin Hiller brilliantly captures the hard, beautiful, harsh and forbidding desert locations. The film remains a visual marvel throughout, not only for the desert photography but also some startling closeups of baboons with some of the most ferocious dagger-like teeth you will ever see. As the story develops it increasingly becomes a tale, not of group solidarity, but survival of the fittest, with one of the participants doing his best to stack the deck in his favour.
Of the cast, Whitman is a standout with his hard, macho portrayal, making one appreciate what an effective performer this actor could be in the right role. The film's final scene is one quite unlike any other film ending that comes to mind, guaranteed to linger in the memory for some time.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had been under consideration for lead roles in this production but backed out, due to the harsh shooting conditions, I believe. Burton may have been fine as the hunter (assuming that was the role he would have played) but I'm glad they wound up with Whitman instead.
By the way, one of the key messages that Sands of the Kalahari leaves for any viewer unfortunate enough to wind up in circumstances similar to that of these film characters - don't ever anger a troop of baboons!
3 out of 4
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Jack Lemmon gave a great, if broad (Get it? Broad) comedy performance in Some Like It Hot, followed by another great but far more subtle portrayal, alternately comedic and, at times, poignant, in The Apartment. After these two Wilder milestones I thought the rest of his career was rather anti-climactic.
That doesn't mean Jack wasn't effective in any of a number of later films but I often found him grating on my nerves a bit with a tendency towards ham. He was fortunate to have had the great material with which Billy Wilder supplied him in their first two films together. Jack recounted that the director once told him you're as good as the best you've ever done. While I may question some of Lemmon's later film efforts I can never take away from him the brilliance of his best work.
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1. Mary Tyler Moore Show
2. Seinfeld
3. Dick Van Dyke Show
4. SCTV
5. Rockford Files
6. Avengers ('66-'68)
7. Tonight Show With Johnny Carson
8. Maverick
9. Monty Python's Flying Circus
10. Moonlighting (Seasons 1 to 3)
11. WKRP in Cincinatti
12. Dean Martin Show
13. Taxi
14. Rifleman
and, ,just to throw in a current show that few on this board will know, Murdoch Mysteries (it's a Canadian turn-of-the-century detective series about to go into Season 14)
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Maybe I'm dumb and this is too obviously the case for everyone else. When Hawkins fired that mortar shell and made with the "I had to do it" afterward it was deliberately done to kill Holden (and Geoffrey Horn) in case they were still alive (so they wouldn't be taken prisoner and possibly tortured, I assume). That's why the girls looked at him the way they did and why he threw the mortar away in disgust afterward.
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5 minutes ago, Dargo said:
Aaah, now I get your point.
EUREKA!
Noir Alley
in General Discussions
Posted
I agree. Anderson gives an understated performance and doesn't embarrass black people by representing them. It's the damn movie (much as I rather like it in many other respects) and the studio system itself that was an embarrassment for the insult to have cast a Caucasian actress in this role. The fact that her character disappears in the film shows how much the filmmakers gave any kind of real damn about her character anyway.
Look, I can understand a studio mogul like Zanuck being afraid to cast a film like Pinky with a black actress in the lead role (much as it makes our teeth grit today) because of box office concerns. But, hell, were Southern movie audiences in 1950 really so filled with hatred that they would refuse to see a little film like Underworld Story (which concentrates on a BLACK PERSON accused of murder after all) because the SMALL ROLE is actually played by a black person? Why would they care? Does that make sense, or were the producers of this film simply gutless cowards who decided not to take any chances so, what the hell, "let's put a white chick in the part to keep our white audiences happy." I see this casting as being more of a gutless producer decision than anything else. Maybe I'm naive about the degree of bigotry that existed in 1950 over a SMALL (!!!) role being played by a black actress, especially when the character she's playing is black.