TomJH

The Westerner (1940) They Died With Their Boots On (1941) Red River (1948) The Gunfighter (1950) High Noon (1952) Shane (1953) Hondo (1953) The Searchers (1956) The Big Country (1958) The Hanging Tree (1959) Rio Bravo (1959) The Professionals (1966) The Wild Bunch (1969) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) The Shootist (1976)

To many (myself included) she will be primarily remembered as the greatest of the "Bond girls." Not only was Honor Blackman breath takingly beautiful but she brought to her role as the iconically named **** Galore an individuality and independence. She was not just another Bond play thing but a woman who could take care of herself in a physical confrontation. I think that for that reason she earned the respect of audience members, as well. RIP, Beautiful Lady

I remember going to a Toronto theatre to see Doctor X when it was considered to be a rare film thirty-forty years ago, long before the days of video tape. It was a fun viewing then as it is now, with its two strip Technicolor, grisly effects, old time mystery house thriller ending and an engaging cast, with Lionel Atwill supplying the red heering creeps, Fay Wray the screams and Lee Tracy the laughs. I also recall seeing Elwy Yost, host of TV Ontario's Saturday Night at the Movies, a staple then for all Ontario old movie buffs, sitting two or three rows ahead of us. "Synthetic flesh" indeed.

I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned Errol Flynn's My Wicked Wicked Ways, a vastly entertaining autobiography even if Flynn had a ghost writer putting it together (splendidly capturing Flynn's witty conversational style, according to friends) and the accuracy of which, particularly his early pre-Hollywood years, is often highly suspect. The book is alternately funny and introspective, with Flynn often a surprisingly harsh critic of himself, particularly his film accomplishments. When ghost writer Earl Conrad interviewed Errol for months on his Jamaican estate it was the closest that Flynn had ever been to being psychoanalyzed and, after he lost his initial suspicions about Conrad, he opened up surprisingly to him about his insecurities and frustrations with the direction of his life. He acknowledged that alcohol was a slow form of suicide, had no fear of death despite his lifetime philosophy of living life to the fullest. Part of his activities even seemed to be to deliberately flirt with death with dangerous activities to see if he could beat it. Flynn was a fascinatingly enigmatic personality and he acknowledged his contradictory nature in his book, saying friends often didn't understand him because of it. By the way, My Wicked Wicked Ways was first published in December, 1959 with new paperback copies of it available today, making it, I believe, the longest selling autobiography by any actor.

Curly suffered a stroke while they were filming a pie fight sequence in Half Wits Holiday. He was sitting in a chair on the set and couldn't stand up. His days as a stooge were over. Harry Cohn, however, wouldn't make any kind of monetary contributions to help Curly out so it was up to Moe, Larry and Shemp to chip in a part of their pay checks to help the funniest stooge of them all keep going financially. Curly would finally succumb five years after his stroke. His health had been affected (and you can see it in his finally shorts as he grew weaker and lost some weight in the face) by a bad heart. Curly did make one final appearance (with hair) in Hold That Lion. It only lasted a few seconds as a guy asleep on a train but those fleeting moments were the only time that four stooges appeared on screen together.

Childhood nostalgia can play a huge role in your affections, of course. My generation grew up watching the Three Stooges on television, and one of my go to bits as a kid were my Curly impersonations. Not only the "Woo woo woo" but the "Ruff, ruff!" as well. Then, of course, there was the favourite, "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk." When you do stuff like that, and still find yourself doing it on occasion as a teenager, it's hard to ever really get Curly out of your heart. I believe that second image is from "Crash Goes The Hash" (?) which is Curly's reaction to a cooked turkey (with a live parrot inside it) which is now standing on those parrot legs and hopping across a dinner table. To me the Stooges were always at their best whenever they were in high society, making a disaster of some high fallutin' social gathering. There's nothing quite like a high society snob getting a pie in the face! Of course, the Stooges always got them in their pusses, too. Apparently Moe was an expert pie launcher and he was the one who threw a lot of those pies at others off camera. I dunno. I guess I've just always been into high brow humour. Curly's childlike reactions to everything can still break me up. Well, I gotta go. It's time for me to put my life on the line. I have to go grocery shopping.

That's because guys think, "Even I'm not that dumb."

I like The Three Stooges when Curly was part of the team. Shemp can have his moments but I wouldn't make a point of watching any of their shorts with him. When Joe Besser became the third stooge their shorts became as dumb and stupid (and unfunny) as could be imagined. Much as I dislike Besser by the time he joined the team both Moe and Larry were looking so low energy I felt sorry for them having to do the physical slapstick at their age. I haven't sat through any of the team's '60s feature films with Joe De Rita. I just assume those films are the pits designed for five year olds. But seeing Curly in his prime as an innocent child like nit wit, watching his growing frustration while trying to eat clam soup with a live clam, can still make me laugh. Years later Moe did this same schtick in one of their shorts and it only made me miss Curly all the more.

I have always been rather partial to Jane Russell. Once you get past all that Howard Hughes promotion about her upper body endowments, I always felt that Jane reached her peak on screen as a musical comedy performer in SON OF PALEFACE (1952) and GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953). She and Marilyn had great chemistry in the latter film, with neither trying to upstage the other. Jane liked Monroe and her "Big Sister" persona in the film remains one of her most enduring screen performances, aside from the fact that she is also fun and sexy as heck in the film, to boot! Anyway, after reading Jane's autobiography in 1990 I rather impulsively dashed off a fan letter to her. Soon afterward I received a letter back from the lady, along with all the photos I had sent her autographed. Her letter was really sweet, beginning with the words, "Your letter is one to keep & believe me there aren't too many one would want to." But in the midst of the photos that Jane returned to me was a new one that she had slipped in with an inscription which perhaps makes that photo my favourite of them all. Here are images of a couple of glamour/sexy photos I sent the lady followed by the additional one Jane threw into the package, beautifully conveying her lack of pretentiousness and how unaffected she was by the "glamour queen" stuff in her later years. I'll always be grateful to Jane Russell for being such a down-to-earth gracious lady in her response to me. (By the way in her letter Jane's telephone number was a part of her letterhead. I never did call her, though, because, quite frankly, I wouldn't have known what to say).

I'm a big fan of Oliver Hardy, not that I don't appreciate Stan, as well. One of my favourite Ollie schticks are those moments when he is going to chase someone (usually Stan). Oliver screws up his face in anger than pumps his legs up and down on the same spot for two to three seconds before he finally takes off. It's like he has to rev himself up before he can go.

I just took a look through my film books and found that I have Classics of the Horror Film as well as More Classics of the Horror Film, also by Everson, both solid books for the fans. The Bad Guys, as you said, is broken up into various chapters devoted to different villains, with chapter heads such as The Civilized Heavies (Greenstreet, Clifton Webb, etc), The Swashbucklers (Basil Rathbone, the latter a favourite Everson heavy, Noah Beery), The Hooded Killers (from old dark house thrillers and serials), The Monsters (with an emphasis upon Universal's horror cycle of the '30s and '40s), etc., etc. There are also, of course, as with all Everson books, a huge collection of mouth watering photos. Just to show posters the flair of Everson's writing, here's his write up on Leslie Banks as Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game: "The tightest, fastest 68 minutes ever put on film, it was a spell binding tale about a mad hunter who deliberately causes ships to be wrecked off his island fortress, so that he may have human game to hunt in his private jungle. Stroking the jagged scar on his forehead, sitting down at the piano to launch into a tormented concerto, Banks was every inch the detached connoisseur of killing, his every sentence a masterpiece of construction and understatement in imparting dignity and a civilized veneer to the "barbaric" sport he has devised. "It is only after the kill that man revels!" he remarks as one point, a casual cutaway to Fay Wray's heaving bosom leaving no doubt as to the revels in mind! I hadn't seen The Most Dangerous Game when I first read this. Is there any doubt why I was dying to see it after reading Everson's colourful account? I was surprised to see that there are paperback versions of The Bad Guys, originally released in 1964, available on Amazon, one used copy for as low as $1.39! Now that's a bargain, though who knows the condition! There are other used ones for $10, a more than reasonable price, and there are also new copies of the book for considerably more.

That's right, MissW. It's just a fact of life.

I'm born and raised near Toronto. One time when I was in Vegas a store owner asked me if I was from Australia because of my accent. I had to explain to him that I had no accent (which was more than I could say for him).

She had her ki . . . Nah, forget it, Connery already said it.

He's Japanese. Close enough. (Sorry, I had a Trump moment there).

William K. Everson was a great writer who really instilled a lot of interest in films for me as a kid. His book, The Bad Guys, is the first film book I ever purchased and remains a favourite. I also have his Laurel and Hardy book, as well as The Detective in Film, another great read. The only criticism I would have of Everson is that sometimes in his colourful and dry humour recollection of a scene in a film he gets his facts wrong on occasion (possibly because he hadn't seen the film in years). But his love and enthusiasm for old films is infectious.

Yes, I have seen Murder at the Vanities though any memories of the film are vague. Again, a combination of pre code musical and murder, isn't it? I have a DVD of it buried somewhere so I may dig it out. Thanks for the reminder. It would have to go a long way, though, to rival the spectacular tastelessness of the jaw dropping "happy" ending of Wonder Bar.

It was from an old DVD recording I made off TCM years ago. I'm not certain how frequently they show Wonder Bar anymore since it's so politically incorrect.

Wonder Bar (1934) Bizarre, tasteless Warner Brothers combination of musical and melodrama, complete with Busby Berkeley production numbers. This film has something in it to offend almost everybody yet, at the same time, remains a fascinating illustration of pre code amorality at either its worst or most audacious, depending upon one's point of view. Slickly produced and photographed, this studio musical, rather than having an American backstage setting, as were previous Berkeley efforts (42nd Street, Footlight Parade, etc.) is set in a Parisian night club run by Al Wonder, played by a typically gregarious Al Jolson. The big cast includes Dolores Del Rio and Ricardo Cortez as the night club's tempestuous dancing duo star attraction, Kay Francis as a stuffy banker's wife having an affair with Cortez who wants a necklace back that she gave him, Dick Powell as the crooner/band leader in love with Del Rio, Robert Barrat as a bankrupt determined to have one last fling at the club before doing himself in, along with, for laughs, bumbling American tourist hicks Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert showing up with their wives, played by Ruth Donnelly and Louise Fazenda. The film is perhaps best remembered for the spectacular racially stereotyped tastelessness of a 12 minute blackface number with Jolson, "Going To Heaven On A Mule," complete with fried chicken and oversized watermelon rinds. But there is also a whip cracking "gaucho" dance number with sado masochistic overtones, a murder, as well as the exploitation of a suicidal person to help cover up that murder (and getting away with it!). Also played for laughs are a couple of men dancing with one another with Jolson quipping, "Boys will be boys." The film would have gotten away with none of this had it been released a few months later when the production code was being more stringently enforced. Amidst all this activity, however, the film is fitfully amusing. Speaking for myself a little of Al Jolson goes a long way and there's an awful lot of Jolson is this film. However, Dolores Del Rio arguably never looked more glamourous, Richardo Cortez was always a good cad, Kay Francis moodily pleads with Cortez while her obtuse husband sees little, and Louise Fazenda has fun as a rube flirting with a gigolo while drunken hubby Hugh Herbert makes eyes at a call girl. 2.5 out of 4

You make it sound as though Cagney puts Sheridan in her place. That's not true. He might try to but the beauty of watching their scenes together is how Ann stands up to Jimmy and refuses to let him dominate her. Cagney, in the final analysis, respects her for her gutsiness. That's what makes their scenes together so special.

I know but they lost those rights some years ago, while Angels is a more recent occurrence. I read that Warners lost the rights to Santa Fe Trail (thus all the PD quality copies of it floating around) due to a goof up and someone simply forgetting to renew the rights to the film. I wonder if the same thing happened with the Cagney gangster flick.

Angels With Dirty Faces is a major film title. I wonder why Warners lost rights to this film while retaining it for so many others, many of them minor compared to this one.

It's nice to see that TCM will have a month long tribute to Ann Sheridan. She and Cagney had great chemistry in their three films together. Unfortunately, ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, the film that first made Warners see Ann's star potential, can no longer be shown on the channel. Sheridan was cursed with a lot of mediocre script material by Warners. She later said she got two bad films for every one good one by the studio. The film of which she was unquestionably most proud was KINGS ROW (even though she doesn't appear in it until the half way point). It's too bad that her Paramount films don't make it on the channel nor her Universal or RKO films from the '50s. It's also a shame that COME NEXT SPRING, a charming bucolic piece with Steve Cochran, won't be broadcast. JUST ACROSS THE STREET from 1952 is the one Sheridan film of which I've never been able to find a copy. For me the highlight Sheridan films to be shown are TORRID ZONE, THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, CITY FOR CONQUEST, KINGS ROW, SILVER RIVER and WOMAN ON THE RUN. However, Ann always put on a good show no matter what the quality of the film, and there are things to be said for IT ALL CAME TRUE, GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE, EDGE OF DARKNESS, SHINE ON HARVEST MOON (despite a wretched script), NORA PRENTISS , THE UNFAITHFUL and even JUKE GIRL (in which Sheridan is great though the film disappoints). Here's an image of an autographed 1948 pix of Annie that I was able to snag:

Yup, same film here. I remember first watching A & C Meet Frankenstein as I sat on my Dad's lap and covering up my eyes every time I heard the Wolf Man theme music start to play. Of course, I also peeked between my fingers. I have been hooked on old movies ever since.

Robert Duvall in one of his earliest roles as the shy, withdrawn Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird.