TopBilled
-
Posts
154,044 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
376
Posts posted by TopBilled
-
-
The films that really caught my attention this week:
Deanna Durbin in THREE SMART GIRLS GROW UP. It's easy to see why she was awarded a special Oscar that year. Such a marvelous performance, and the rest of the cast is in spectacular form: Charles Winninger, Robert Cummings & William Lundigan. Of course, it helps that Henry Koster is directing. I watched it twice and may watch it again when time permits.
Also, I watched Claudette Colbert in TEXAS LADY, which was available on Netflix streaming. This was her last starring role, and in many ways it's a routine western from RKO in the mid-50s. But like one would expect, Claudette elevates mediocre material and turns it into something special. She has extraordinary chemistry with Barry Sullivan. The Technicolor photography flatters both stars and the outdoors scenery, and there are some nice musical touches that bookend the film. I don't know what it is about her, but I always feel that Claudette puts extra care into all her projects and it's that painstaking dedication to her craft that is so worth our watching her.
-
*SONNY TUFTS*
SWELL GUY (1947) with Ann Blyth & Ruth Warrick
BLAZE OF NOON (1947) with Anne Baxter & William Holden
EASY COME, EASY GO (1947) with Barry Fitzgerald & Diana Lynn
THE UNTAMED BREED (1948) with Barbara Britton & George Gabby Hayes
RUN FOR THE HILLS (1953) with Barbara Payton
COME NEXT SPRING (1956) with Steve Cochran, Ann Sheridan & Walter Brennan
THE PARSON AND THE OUTLAW (1957) with Anthony Dexter, Marie Windsor & Charles Buddy Rogers
-
*THE EXILE (1947)*
From Agee on December 8, 1947:
THE EXILE is one of those shy wildflowers which occasionally spring up almost unnoticed in the Hollywood hothouse. But because of its forced growth, half the freshness is off the bloom.
The story is a pleasant little fraud. It is designed chiefly to purvey the Tarzantics of Actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. But THE EXILE is also Young Doug's first fling as a producer, and he has concealed most of the fraud with both legitimate and handsome cinematic tricks.
The script (which he is said to have written) has a charming, blank-verse hauteur that just possibly may be a bit asinine, but the direction saves the day by insisting on a witty, natural reading. Fairbanks has also inflicted an extreme lilt on the rhythm of the film, a lilt that would be annoying if it were not necessary to keep the lame plot marching along.
The mock-ups of 17th Century inns and windmills are engagingly na?ve, and often drafty enough to send a chill through a steam-heated audience. The camera seems to eye everything with cavalier detachment, and the sepia film gives the illusion that everything is seen through a blear of centuries.
-
You can add:
PICTURE MOMMY DEAD (1966) on April 25th.
-
Thanks Dargo. Livesey is especially good in those mid-40s British flicks.
-
It's not the usual Ayn Rand, because it has the usual David Selznick touches instead.
-
I recently rented STAY AWAY, JOE from Netflix. Picture quality was excellent.
-
*GRACE MOORE*
A LADY'S MORALS (1930) with Reginald Denny & Wallace Beery
NEW MOON (1930) with Lawrence Tibbett & Adolphe Menjou
ONE NIGHT OF LOVE (1934) with Tullio Carminati & Lyle Talbot
LOVE ME FOREVER (1935) with Leo Carrillo
THE KING STEPS OUT (1936) with Franchot Tone
WHEN YOU'RE IN LOVE (1937) with Cary Grant & Aline MacMahon
I'LL TAKE ROMANCE (1937) with Melvyn Douglas & Stuart Erwin
-
You're welcome. I agree, he has the perfect name.
-
*ANGELINA (1948)*
From Agee on April 24, 1948:
A sloppy job from Italy, with a few fine flashes from Anna Magnani.
-
Calvin,
As always your updates are much appreciated. However, would you please highlight the newly added titles so it is easier to see what else is now on the schedule? Thanks!
-
*LOVE LETTERS (1945)*
From Agee on September 29, 1945:
A story so inconceivably factitious that only a poet-moralist or a romancer of genius could have been wisely attracted by it, or could have brought it above the sill of absurdity. But Lee Garmes' lighting and photography are wonderful, in a romantic way I do not personally care for; and his, or William Dieterle's camera set-ups and shot-series and Dieterle's directing are like a highly skilled piece of wrestling. Most of the acting, especially that of Ann Richards (in a rather easy role), has unusual intensity and style.
-
I posted the second photo of him, because it shows how versatile he was...he started as a jazz musician and my guess is that the first film with Frances Langford has him doing some big-band numbers. Then, he switches to country music and morphs into a western musical star at Fox where he starred in five cowboy pictures for Zanuck. His career is interrupted by the war, and in the mid-to-late 40s he usually appears in other stars' westerns offering musical support.
He seems like the suavest, coolest cowboy singer of his era, much more urbane than his contemporaries. I would love to see his films on TCM.
-
*SMITH BALLEW*
PALM SPRINGS (1936) with Frances Langford
RACING LADY/ALL SCARLET (1937) with Ann Dvorak
WESTERN GOLD (1937) with Heather Angel
ROLL ALONG COWBOY (1937) with Cecilia Parker
HAWAIIAN BUCKAROO (1938) with Evalyn Knapp
PANAMINT'S BAD MAN (1938) with Evelyn Daw
RAWHIDE (1938) with Evalyn Knapp
DRIFTING ALONG (1946) with Johnny Mack Brown
I KILLED GERONIMO (1950) with James Ellison
-
I'm surprised Sony hasn't issued it on DVD...they have pretty much released everything else he did at Columbia.
-
Yes...this is the one I am most looking forward to seeing on TCM in the days ahead. Can't wait!
-
*MAUREEN O'HARA*
TEN GENTLEMEN FROM WEST POINT (1942) with George Montgomery & John Sutton
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY (1946) with John Payne & William Bendix
THE HOMESTRETCH (1947) with Cornel Wilde
THE FOXES OF HARROW (1947) with Rex Harrison & Victor McLaglen
FATHER WAS A FULLBACK (1949) with Fred MacMurray, Betty Lynn, Rudy Vallee, Thelma Ritter & Natalie Wood
TRIPOLI (1950) with John Payne
THE MAGNIFICENT MATADOR (1955) with Anthony Quinn
EVERYTHING BUT THE TRUTH (1956) with John Forsythe & Tim Hovey
-
*ARCH OF TRIUMPH (1948)*
From Agee on June 19, 1948:
Some real talent, and a lot of desperate effort, lost in a picture god wisely forsook. If you haven't lived until you've seen Bergman love Boyer, you should have stood in bed.
-
*DEL MOORE*
STAGECOACH TO DANCERS ROCK (1962) with Warren Stevens & Martin Landau
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1963) with Jerry Lewis & Stella Stevens
CATALINA CAPER (1967) with Tommy Kirk
-
*THIS LAND IS MINE (1943)*
From Agee on May 1, 1943:
THIS LAND IS MINE eschews physical terror in favor of mental, and tries to give an exposition of the obligations of free men under those circumstances. That is a courageous but foredoomed idea. I doubt, first, whether physical and mental terror and obligation can in this context be separated.
You cannot afford to dislocate or internationalize your occupied country; or to try to sell it to Americans by making your citizens as well-fed, well-dressed, and comfortably idiomatic as Americans; or to treat the show to the corrupted virtuosities of studio lighting and heavy-ballet composition. This film is filled with bitter, anachronistic, interesting talent under pressure, but it is a question where the pressure begins and the self-description ends.
-
I am posting all of his reviews. I have tried to coincide certain ones with airings on TCM. I don't think the majority have been negative. What I think he does is gives suggestions for improvement, but in all the reviews, he usually says at least one thing positive. He believes in the value of cinema and in making it better.
-
*HEATHER SEARS*
THE STORY OF ESTHER COSTELLO (1957) with Joan Crawford & Rosanno Brazzi
SONS AND LOVERS (1960) with Trevor Howard, Dean Stockwell & Wendy Hiller
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962) with Herbert Lom
-
*OVER 21 (1945)*
From Agee on August 25, 1945:
OVER 21 is Ruth Gordon's story of the liberal newspaper editor who joined the army and was joined by his wife and his former boss in a crowded and flimsy Miami cottage. Some of the congestion and despair is amusing, especially a claustrophobic cocktail party at which the ex-editor tries to entertain his Colonel and the Colonel's two ladies.
I don't feel that Irene Dunne has quite the right kind of humor to play the wife, but Alexander Knox is very proficient as the editor, even when he is required to be impossibly silly.
Toward the end of the film, resuming his impersonation of Wilson, he reads a most sincere editorial in which the creation of the postwar world is compared with the creation of an apple pie. In either undertaking, if disaster is to be averted, all the ingredients have got to be good. Since all the world is not an apple pie, but is composed of atoms which have just begun to learn that they are many, and that we are few, I found this editorial unbearably discouraging.
-
Yes, there's a reason Michael and lzcutter remind us that the early schedules are not set in stone. I started this thread so that others who had written down those titles would realize they are no longer being offered this month. As I said, it is my hope that TCM will be able to reschedule them. At least they tried!
Love Letters - Not your usual Ayn Rand..
in Hot Topics
Posted
Yes, Selznick often thought he could rewrite stories better than the original acclaimed authors did.
Luckily, we did not have to witness his epic retelling of the Bible. Now that would've been something! Of course he probably would've sent a detailed memo to God about the way the Old Testament was written.