TopBilled

I haven't watched the Caruso episode yet but I am looking forward to it.

Supposedly, Cummings tired of Hollywood and emigrated to England. She is utterly fantastic in BLITHE SPIRIT (1945) with Rex Harrison and Margaret Rutherford.

We have some more of these today. I like how they sort of serve as warm-ups for actors that are going to appear in the next scheduled film on TCM. I just watched the one with Brandon de Wilde and Casey Tibbs. Of course, I had to look up Casey Tibbs...he seemed like he lived an interesting life.

There are many more nonfiction films and telefilms that cover these related subjects.

*MARTHA RAYE* RHYTHM ON THE RANGE (1936) with Bing Crosby, Frances Farmer & Bob Burns HIDEAWAY GIRL (1936) with Shirley Ross & Robert Cummings COLLEGE HOLIDAY (1936) with Jack Benny, George Burns & Grace Allen WAIKIKI WEDDING (1937) with Bing Crosby & Shirley Ross MOUNTAIN MUSIC (1937) with Bob Burns & John Howard DOUBLE OR NOTHING (1937) with Bing Crosby COLLEGE SWING (1938) with George Burns, Grace Allen & Bob Hope TROPIC HOLIDAY (1938) with Bob Burns, Dorothy Lamour & Ray Milland GIVE ME A SAILOR (1938) with Bob Hope & Betty Grable NEVER SAY DIE (1939) with Bob Hope $1000 A TOUCHDOWN (1939) with Joe E. Brown & Susan Hayward THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE (1940) with Allan Jones, Irene Hervey & Joe Penner HELLZAPOPPIN? (1941) with Ole Olsen & Chic Johnson MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947) with Charlie Chaplin

*THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)* From Agee on March 10, 1945: A good movie might have been made from THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. Albert Lewin's version is respectful, earnest, and I am afraid, dead. I very much like Angela Lansbury as Sibyl Vane. Some people are liable to laugh at her and to think of her as insipid. Mr. Lewin's modifications of the story and his outright inventions seem sensible. I feel, sympathetically, that he has tried very hard to transfer the tone of the novel to the screen. Yet the novel is distinguished, wise and frightening. But the movie is just a cultured horror picture, decorated with epigrams and an elaborate moral, and made with a sincere effort at good taste rather than with passion, immediacy and imagination. As Lord Henry Wotton, George Sanders delivers the epigrams almost too expertly. They will doubtless panic the public they were intended to pulverize. Within these limits, I think Sanders very capable, but two better men for the role would have been Robert Morley and the late Laird Cregar. And I suspect Henry Daniell or Alan Mowbray might have done better, for that matter. Nobody can be blamed very severely for the failure to cast Dorian Gray adequately. The only proper actor I can think of is John Barrymore in his early twenties. I realize that Hurd Hatfield represents a most unusually hard try at good casting. Once cast, he certainly tries hard as the wrong man can, but it is sad, like watching an understudy fall short with the chance of a lifetime.

Lombard was friends with Ball, too.

There are a few you may want to add. MADCHEN IN UNIFORM (1931)...From wiki: "It is noted as the first feature film to be produced with an openly pro-lesbian storyline and remains a cult film among lesbians." It was a film that Eleanor Roosevelt felt should be shown in the U.S. STONEWALL...a 1995 historical comedy-drama film. From wiki: "Inspired by the memoir of the same title by openly gay historian Martin Duberman, Stonewall is a fictionalized account of the weeks leading up to the Stonewall riots." MAKING LOVE (1982). This is one of my favorites. I love this movie. From wiki: "It tells the story of a married man coming to terms with his homosexuality and the love triangle that develops around him, his wife and another man. It stars Kate Jackson, Harry Hamlin, and Michael Ontkean." THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE..."a 2000 documentary film directed by Fenton Bailey and narrated by drag queen RuPaul focusing on the life of Tammy Faye Bakker." SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE..."It's Christmas Eve 1971 in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and the regulars of the local gay bar are celebrating. Not much has changed since Stonewall and it's not all peace on earth." LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION!..."a 1997 film adaptation by Terrence McNally of his play of the same name, revolving around eight gay men who gather for three summer weekends." ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES..."a 1992 documentary by Mark Rappaport. It shows clips from Rock Hudson's movies that could be interpreted as gay entendres."

Apparently, you cannot make every viewer happy. Probably if Zanuck had developed it in the late 40s or early 50s at Fox, it would've been done much better. He was good at social message dramas and he likely would've produced it in the docudrama style with entertaining bits of pseudo-fiction to move the story along. Of course, he would've had either Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck play the lead. I think this kind of project was beyond L.B. Mayer's grasp in many ways. If he truly cared about it, he would've waited till all the pieces fell into place (casting and scripting).

I love her. In my opinion, she's the inventor of the screwball heroine. One of filmdom's best female clowns. She made it possible for Carole Lombard and Lucile Ball to do what they did.

I like this film a lot. There are some plantation scenes in HEARTS DIVIDED, too. She's great at spoofing those southern belles.

I doubt MGM sold the rights to the story. I am sure it was 'creative plagiarism' on the part of network television and Paramount. It really hasn't been a viable property, since none of these films turned a profit. They are curios, at best.

>At one time, Storm Center had rights issues surrounding it. I don't know if those issues have been worked out but it is worth noting that just because a film is in a studio film library does not always mean that it can be shown. I think you meant STORM WARNING. STORM CENTER is a Bette Davis film made at Columbia and it recently aired on TCM. As for STORM WARNING, since it is on DVD, one would think it would thus be eligible for a cable broadcast. At any rate, I found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable, if not entirely far-fetched, movie. And I do recommend it, especially for completists of Ginger Rogers and Doris Day (they are very believable as sisters on-screen).

Well, there's only one real story behind the development of the atomic bomb. I suppose subsequent remakes could differ depending on whose point of view it is told through.

*ALEXANDER KIRKLAND* DEVIL'S LOTTERY (1932) with Elissa Landi & Victor McLaglen ALMOST MARRIED (1932) with Violet Heming & Ralph Bellamy STRANGE INTERLUDE (1932) with Norma Shearer & Clark Gable CHARLIE CHAN'S CHANCE (1932) with Warner Oland HUMANITY (1933) with Ralph Morgan & Boots Mallory BONDAGE (1933) with Dorothy Jordan BLACK BEAUTY (1933) with Esther Ralston

*ANNA KARENINA (1948)* From Agee on May 3, 1948; ANNA KARENINA is the latest movie version of Tolstoy's story (there have been four U.S. ones). It is by far the costliest but far from the best. Sir Alexander Korda and his British bankers provided the money; France?s famed director Julien Duvivier contributed his talents. With so much dough, Duvivier carefully hedged his bet. His script tore down Tolstoy's complex scaffolding of historical religious theory, eliminated the subpots and preserved only the central study of a falling woman, with a few glimpses of the high society she fell from. This might have been sufficient if the film had also saved a suggestion of the dreadful glacier-creep of Tolstoy's characterization. Instead, the camera work is uniformly uninspired, and the psychological glacier dissolves into teary mush. Vivien Leigh is lashed about by the tremendous role of Anna like a cat with a tigress by the tail. She is not assisted by a script which insists on sentimentality ennobling one of fiction's most vehemently average women. Irish-born Kieron Moore, Britain's newest cinematinee idol, is badly miscast as the debonair Vronsky. The principals suffer further by comparison with Sir Ralph Richardson, whose Karenin fairly lumps out the screen with its three-dimensional reality.

Probably in the case of the Paul Newman version, Paramount was trying to present a serious prestige-type film. The subject matter, if done right, could lead to Oscars. However, like its predecessors, FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY did disappointing business at the box office, earning just $3 million (a very low figure by 1989 standards). It proves that people are not necessarily interested in spending two hours watching a story about the atomic bomb, unless it has some sort of entertainment value. It's a tough sell.

Maybe we can put this into better perspective. Vera Ralston made 26 films at Republic. In 22 of those, she was the lead female actress (often top-billed over the male leads). She costarred with John Wayne, Fred MacMurray, Sterling Hayden and Joan Leslie, among others. Of course, she married Herbert Yates, the head of the studio, but the point is that she was given a huge push and built into a star. She was a movie star, the biggest female star at Republic. Now, we can debate the merits of her acting skill and probably conclude that Angela Lansbury was a better actress, but the fact remains that Vera Ralston was a movie star and Angela Lansbury was not because Lansbury did not get the same publicity build-up from MGM or any other studio where she worked. Even Judy Canova, another top female star at Republic for many years, was more of a movie star than Angela Lansbury. The difference here is that Judy Canova was also a huge radio star and musical personality and she sold a lot of movie tickets because of this (probably more than Ralston). Then, we have someone like Shirley Booth. Shirley Booth only made five feature films and like Lansbury had great success on Broadway and television. However, in the films that Booth made at Paramount, she is top-billed and lead actress in all of them. In fact, she was awarded a best actress Oscar for the first one, COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA. Now, we can discuss whether or not Shirley Booth was a character actress or a stage and television star first, but in this case, she definitely outranks Lansbury because for a time, Paramount did market her and sell her as a (different kind of) movie star.

>How about one they never show? STORM WARNING from 1951 with Doris, Ronald Reagan, and Ginger Rogers. Since that's a Warners film and in the Turner library, I expect it will be scheduled in April. It is much easier for TCM to air it than those Doris Day films from Universal and Fox. You're right...it seldom screens, and it was absent from Ginger's SOTM tribute a few years ago. Fortunately, it is on DVD. It's one of my favorite films from the early 50s. Ginger is great in it and so is Ronald Reagan.

The MGM version was definitely telling the American side of the story. I haven't seen the 1989 telefilm. Paramount made FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY in 1989. In that film, Paul Newman stars as U.S. Army Corps of Engineers General Leslie R. Groves, the man assigned to head up the Manhattan Project in 1942.

Well, they probably did not realize yet the ramifications of the cold war. Interestingly, the Nazis were using the term 'iron curtain' back as early as 1943. Churchill first used the phrase in a confidential memo to Truman in May 1945.

They began the script back in 1945 and it was filmed in June 1946. So all this information came right from the government at the end of the war.

Agreed. There was too much exposition at the beginning of the story. It could've been trimmed down to 90 minutes easily. Personally, I think MGM did much better a few years later with Robert Taylor in ABOVE AND BEYOND. That film, a 1952 effort about World War II American pilot Paul Tibbets, also addressed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

I want to address a few comments you made. First, I agree that sometimes there is a lack of tolerance for dissenting opinions. Posters should not feel threatened by your not liking Lansbury's film work. I do think people confuse the actress with the mystery character she played for 12 years on CBS. That was a good gig for her and it prolonged her career in Hollywood. She did well with it, and it deserves to live on in syndication. But that has nothing to do with her film output. As for her work in MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, one strong performance does not a movie star make. The greatest barrier, in my opinion, was her lack of sex appeal. For example, when she was cast in Columbia's B-flick A LAWLESS STREET, she was unable to take the opportunity and snag more roles within the genre. She did not have a string of hits in this vein like sexier actresses did-- Felicia Farr, Ruth Roman and Virginia Mayo. In fact, I am surprised that Lansbury was cast at all against Randolph Scott as a romantic lead. I would think that Donna Reed would have been more of a box-office draw in a western than Angela Lansbury. But I guess the stakes were not as high with a B-budgeted film as it would have been with something more prestigious.

Fred, it doesn't really pick up steam until around the hour mark. The second half of the film is infinitely more interesting. The problem I have is that Robert Walker is gliding through this role and certainly not up to his usual skill as an actor. Tom Drake is trying hard and does okay. Then there's the rest of the cast. Hurd Hatfield, so excellent in MGM's THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, is dropped into a thankless role. What was Mayer thinking?