TopBilled

This seems like an October thread. Maybe it will come back to page one closer to Halloween. LOL

For a really dark movie related to this subject, they could air Bette Davis as THE NANNY, a British film she made in the 60s. She is implicated in the death of a little girl, and we also learn that she was involved in the tragedy of her own daughter. Certainly not the nurturing type!

If you get Netflix streaming, they have several of Yvonne de Carlo's films. Check out CASBAH, a Universal costumer she made around the time she did CRISS CROSS. It is a musical remake of ALGIERS...she plays the Hedy Lamarr role. She's sumptuously photographed in CASBAH. She had a long career at Universal, then made films at Republic before freelancing. Her film career continued into the 1990s. She has an extensive resume, and television was but a drop in the bucket for her.

Hale still oozed beauty and charm as Della Street, even in her later years. I particularly like the extended cameo she does in the original AIRPORT as Dean Martin's wife. This was right after the Perry Mason television series had ended. She worked continuously from the 1940s to the 1990s.

I have long thought that Barbara Hale was an underrated beauty. She became so typecast on television, but for a long time she was a leading lady in films at RKO (where she met her husband); then at Columbia and Universal.

Great and timely thread. I think the truth lies somewhere in between...my mother was both types. Incidentally, I really love watching Olivia de Havilland in TO EACH HIS OWN, because I think it's the most noble of portrayals, and I wish all mothers were so sacrificing, but the truth is they aren't.

*Barbara Hale & Robert Young* LADY LUCK...AND BABY MAKES THREE. Isn't she gorgeous!

*ALBUQUERQUE (1948)* From Agee on February 14, 1948: An actor, shot at, grabs his kneecap and falls down stairs. Within a few seconds he is able to explain, in a politely stoical voice, that he isn't badly hurt, just hit in the leg. This is a fair measure of how intimately most movies are acquainted with even the most rudimentary realities of experience. A good excruciating crack on every kneecap that needs it might be enough to revolutionize Hollywood. Even if it didn't, it would be a pleasure to deliver.

*EDMOND O'BRIEN* PARACHUTE BATTALION (1941) with Robert Preston & Nancy Kelly OBLIGING YOUNG LADY (1942) with Ruth Warrick & Eve Arden POWDER TOWN (1942) with Victor McLaglen & June Havoc THE AMAZING MRS. HOLLIDAY (1943) with Deanna Durbin & Barry Fitzgerald THE WEB (1947) with Ella Raines, William Bendix & Vincent Price A DOUBLE LIFE (1948) with Ronald Colman, Signe Hasso & Shelley Winters AN ACT OF MURDER (1948) with Fredric March, Florence Eldridge & Geraldine Brooks FOR THE LOVE OF MARY (1948) with Deanna Durbin, Don Taylor & Jeffrey Lynn BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN (1950) with Mark Stevens & Gale Storm THE ADMIRAL WAS A LADY (1950) with Wanda Hendrix & Rudy Vallee 711 OCEAN DRIVE (1950) with Joanne Dru & Otto Kruger THE REDHEAD AND THE COWBOY (1951) with Glenn Ford & Rhonda Fleming WARPATH (1951) with Dean Jagger & Forrest Tucker SILVER CITY (1951) with Yvonne de Carlo & Barry Fitzgerald TWO OF A KIND (1951) with Lizabeth Scott, Terry Moore & Alexander Knox THE TURNING POINT (1952) with William Holden & Alexis Smith DENVER AND RIO GRANDE (1952) with Sterling Hayden & Dean Jagger COW COUNTRY (1953) with Helen Westcott & Robert Lowery MAN IN THE DARK (1953) with Audrey Totter CHINA VENTURE (1953) with Barry Sullivan THE SHANGHAI STORY (1954) with Ruth Roman D-DAY THE SIXTH OF JUNE (1956) with Robert Taylor & Richard Todd STOPOVER TOKYO (1957) with Robert Wagner & Joan Collins SING, BOY, SING (1958) with Tommy Sands 1948 (1956) with Michael Redgrave THE 3RD VOICE (1960) with Julie London & Laraine Day THE GREAT IMPOSTOR (1961) with Tony Curtis MOON PILOT (1962) with Tom Tryon & Brian Keith SYLVIA (1965) with Carroll Baker & Peter Lawford FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) with Stephen Boyd & Raquel Welch THE LOVE GOD? (1969) with Don Knotts & Anne Francis

*In Hollywood: Rene Claire* The French director tries his luck in America. He works with Dietrich on THE FLAME OF NEW ORLEANS and with Linda Darnell in IT HAPPENED TOMORROW.

*THE BIG CLOCK (1948)* From Agee on June 19, 1948: An overrated but slickly amusing melodrama, with many good bits of comic directing by John Farrow. A perfect performance by George Macready; the tilt of his jaw line and cigarette on his hearing that his boss has committed murder is one of the neatest moments of the season.

*SUSAN HART* DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE (1965) with Vincent Price & Frankie Avalon WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP (1965) with Vincent Price & Tab Hunter

*Show Boats* Irene Dunne in the 1936 version; or Ava Gardner in the 1951 offering?

*CLIVE BROOK AS SHERLOCK HOLMES* THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1929) with H. Reeves-Smith & Donald Crisp PARAMOUNT ON PARADE (1930) with William Powell & Warner Oland SHERLOCK HOLMES (1932) with Reginald Owen & Alan Mowbray

*DUFFY'S TAVERN (1945)* From Agee on October 27, 1945: The radio characters and a variety show including everyone in Paramount who was not overseas, in hiding, or out to lunch. Most of their tunes are about as incisive as a Mozart sonata played through a catcher's mitt; but Ed Gardner and Victor Moore are very likable and sometimes quite funny.

*DOROTHY DIX* THE NEVADA BUCKAROO (1931) with Bob Steele DRUM TAPS (1933) with Ken Maynard WHEELS OF DESTINY (1934) with Ken Maynard SUNSET OF POWER (1936) with Buck Jones GUNS AND GUITARS (1936) with Gene Autry

*NO GREATER LOVE (1944)* From Agee on March 11, 1944: A Russian film about a woman guerrilla leader, it has a kind ferocity and ugliness which none of the American films approach. The acting is furious and hyperbolic yet proper to the over-all key of frenzy. The photography would be discarded by any Hollywood studio; it is harsh, often crude, always sensitive to time, place, weather, substance, atmosphere, and the presence of life. On the screen you see it happening; at the same moment the voices are saying this happened, and this is roughly how. People may now get a chance to learn what they, and Hollywood, are cheating each other out of. Ideally, NO GREATER LOVE should be double-billed, all over the country, with THE NORTH STAR.

*Wallace Beery & Marie Dressler* The unlikely duo are a memorable team in MGM's MIN AND BILL and TUGBOAT ANNIE.

I regard it as filler. It is time that might be better used toward showing precodes or short films from the 30s and 40s that people really would enjoy more.

*Rich Girl in the Military* This is a fun subgenre. Lana Turner goes from spoiled brat to team player in KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY, while Goldie Hawn pretty much does the same as PRIVATE BENJAMIN.

*JAMES STEWART* NEXT TIME WE LOVE (1936) with Margaret Sullavan & Ray Milland SEVENTH HEAVEN (1937) with Simone Simon MADE FOR EACH OTHER (1939) with Carole Lombard THE ICE FOLLIES OF 1939 (1939) with Joan Crawford & Lew Ayres DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939) with Marlene Dietrich IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) with Donna Reed MAGIC TOWN (1947) with Jane Wyman & Kent Smith YOU GOTTA STAY HAPPY (1948) with Joan Fontaine & Eddie Albert MALAYA (1949) with Spencer Tracy & Valentina Cortese HARVEY (1950) with Josephine Hull BROKEN ARROW (1950) with Jeff Chandler & Debra Paget THE JACKPOT (1950) with Barbara Hale THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952) with Betty Hutton & Charlton Heston BEND OF THE RIVER (1952) with Julie Adams & Rock Hudson CARBINE WILLIAMS (1952) with Jean Hagen & Wendell Corey THUNDER BAY (1953) with Joanne Dru & Gilbert Roland STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND (1955) with June Allyson NIGHT PASSAGE (1957) with Audie Murphy FOOLS' PARADE (1971) with George Kennedy & Anne Baxter

*HAZARD (1948)* From Agee on June 19, 1948: Paulette Goddard and Macdonald Carey in perhaps an hour too much of the kind of edgy, intelligent worthlessness which Paramount turns out in its sleep.

I believe the first SUTS was back in 2003. This is the tenth year.

*DRAGON SEED (1944)* From Agee on August 5, 1944: DRAGON SEED is an almost unimaginably bad movie. This MGM film is a limp-leather-bound, goosefleshy Golden Treasury of the wind has brought the rain instead of it's raining.. Or you place the book where my hand cannot reach it, instead of put that back, damn it. MGM was up against many problems during the production of this film. The California countryside they chose for location shots was a dead-ringer for parts of China before they got busy terracing it, reterracing it, and finally painting the terraces to make sure they would show. The film's backgrounds are full of the evidence of this immense, earnest, rather pathetic labor. They look about as real and habitable as a miniature golf course, and very likely cost as much as it would have been to transfer the whole company to China. Against these unearthly, sepia-tinted landscapes, speaking their inhuman language, move such distinguished Chinese as Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston and Aline MacMahon and Akim Tamiroff and Henry Travers and Agnes Moorhead and Turhan Bey. I've seen another picture so full of wrong slants. Since there are plenty of genuine and good Chinese actors around Hollywood, some of whom appear as the Japanese in this film, it was entirely unnecessary for these principals to undertake their hopeless assignments. To mention only two more of the main things wrong with this picture, quaint pseudo-Chinese background music was never more insultingly out of place. And I have never so intensely deplored the more and more stylish device of transitional narration, which here comments upon the courage and endurance of a people, in the wheel-chair voice, if I'm not mistaken, of Dr. Gillespie.

*Anne Shirley as Anne Shirley* Actress Dawn O'Day took the name of the popular literary character and played her in ANNE OF GREEN GABLES and ANNE OF WINDY POPLARS.