Palmerin

At least this is not a remake of the first two movies. I know it's not much of a consolation, but being a movie fan requires having an iron stomach and a gag reflex to match.

Have you succeeded in forgetting that stink bomb? I watched it out of a desperate need to watch something, and I totally regret the time I wasted with it. Keith and Cabot did their best, but without jokes, repartee, visual gags or slapstick, that show was a lost cause.

An outstanding example of deception taken to the extreme is that other collaboration of Curtiz, Flynn, and de Havilland, THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, a film so chock full of falsehood that its producers had to admit openly that its plot bore no relation to the real battle of 25 October 1854. The intention was to present the Charge as an act of revenge against Nana Sahib for the Massacre of Cawnpore. When it was found out that that event happened in 1857, just after the Crimean War, the screenwriters invented a massacre to justify the fictional villain being turned into an human pin cushion. But do you know what is really outrageous? The fictional officer played by Flynn alters the orders of his superiors in order to launch an attack not authorized by his commanding officers! One of my cousins, a colonel of the US Army, retired, assures me that, for such an act of insubordination, an officer would be put on trial for, among other things, unnecessarily endangering the lives of the men under his command.

Ritter is unwilling to take on Reynolds as her traveling companion, and declares: what I need is a man--any man! Whereupon DB takes hold of TR's waist, drawing her close, starts caressing her face, and purrs into her ear with a very sultry voice: are you sure you really need a man?

A lie is a lie is a lie is a lie. I don't care for the propaganda of Eisenstein and his fellow Stalinists because practically nothing in those movies is truth.

So, in essence, you are saying that such a plan never existed, and that it was only a fabrication of a very dissembling screenwriter?

So that's why she was cast in those shows!: because of her association with WIND and TRAIL. It would be very interesting to read de Havilland's reminiscences of all those productions.

The South reasonable??? That's a good one! I wonder how de Havilland, the only surviving star of WIND and TRAIL, liked such shows as the original version of ROOTS; as you know, abolitionism pretty much started in the UK.

Cool it with the jive, white boy; surely you can't believe that the makers of this DRAMON=LURID POTBOILER actually believed such a redolent pile of SANDECES=MALARKEY! Read Catton, read Nevins, read all the historians of the US Civil War: they are all unanimous that none of the slave states were willing to give up slavery, and were perfectly ready to fight to preserve it, something that Brown knew very well--and equating JB to Hitler is nothing but the most malicious of slander.

Thanks for the correction; that West Point class has so many future 1861-1865 War generals that it's mighty difficult to keep them straight.

At the beginning, Stonewall Jackson=Errol Flynn argues with the abolitionist played by Van Heflin that abolitionism is not necessary; he says that the legislature of Virginia is considering a plan to abolish slavery in that state, and that all that the legislators need is time. Does anybody here know if such a plan ever really existed? I have researched this point in many books about the events leading to the US Civil War, and have yet to find even a hint that any of the slave states ever seriously considered abolishing their peculiar institution on their own.

I watched ST when it ran on Puerto Rican TV, and found nothing special about it, except that Mr. Spook was very annoying with his pomposity and his incessant blather about logic. The other two shows had better leads in Stewart and Mulgrew--admittedly not much of an accomplishment--, but they, too, baffled me. What should I see in ST?

Could it also be an expose of Mr. Biggley as an hypocrite who pretends to respect all universities, but who in actual fact would prefer to hire only fellow alumni from his Dear Old Ivy?

To quote the Kennedy brothers: WHY NOT?

Robert Morse discovers that one of the executives of Rudy Vallee's company is a graduate of an university of which RV does not approve. When the latter is informed, he makes a big deal out of the fact that he has always tried to hire graduates from ALL colleges and universities. If this is a joke, it goes way over my head. Was that a big civil rights issue in the 1960's: discrimination against the graduates of certain colleges and universities? And speaking of the 1960s, when I see those three men in black in the A SECRETARY IS NOT A TOY number, I know that eventually their tight unspeakably uncomfortable Ivy League coats and pants will split open, exactly as happened to me more than once.

EL SHOW DE PACHECO, hosted by an Spanish immigrant who dressed in the style of Buster Keaton, is one of my dearest childhood memories. It had an amazingly comprehensive assortment of cartoons, from those of WB that featured 1930s stars such as WC Fields and Mae West, to such 1950s productions as GERALD MCBOING BOING. As you surely know, most of those cartoons were originally shown on the big screen, along with the comedy and musical shorts, newsreels, and coming previews that preceded the movie itself. Wouldn't you agree that those cartoons would be a welcome addition to the programming of TCM?

Berle's son, who has no respect for his old man--no surprise, considering how pitiful the latter is.

The custom in Spanish America is to use dubbing actors whose voices are not heavily accented so that they may be understood all the way from Mexico to Argentina--just the same way news shows in the USA use news readers whose voices will be understood from Salem, MA, to Salem, OR. The actress who dubbed Merman was superb; she really sounded like her.

The distributor was concerned about the fact that Merman treats Berle more as her very henpecked husband instead of as her son in law. Did Provine marry Berle against Merman's wishes? There are at least two expressions: ESTIRO LA PATA=HIS LEG WENT STIFF, and SE QUEDO FRIO=HE ENDED UP ROOM TEMPERATURE.

When IAMMMMW was about to premiere in Argentina, a distributor thought it strained credibility to have Berle married to a woman young enough to be his daughter and saddled with a mother in law almost his same age. He therefore had the Spanish dialogue arranged to make Berle and Merman very unfriendly husband and wife, and Provine and Shawn their very cantankerous daughter and son. That rearrangement of family roles proved so successful, that even after the people of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay learned the true relationships of the four characters, almost everybody agreed that the distributor's rearrangement made much better sense.

what precautions have been taken in order to prevent such accidents from happening in real life?

I love to contribute to the boards of IMDb, particularly to the GOOFS collection, of which I have detected quite a few. My latest contribution, early this month, was to Wyler's THE HEIRESS. The men are not wearing the cravats that were in fashion until very well into the 1850s. Look at Healy's famous portrait of President Fillmore; that band of fabric wound around the neck in order to give the latter the look of a tall stately pillar looks very good on the 13th POTUS, who had a very impressive neck. Neckties and bowties did not come into fashion until the last years of the 1850s, the time of Lincoln's rise to fame; as abundantly proven by his many portraits, the 16th POTUS was very fond of bowties. This anachronism creates the mistaken impression that THE HEIRESS takes place AFTER the Civil War, instead of its correct period, which is more than ten years BEFORE that war. What information and corrections have you all contributed to IMDb, please?

is the so-called Spanish galleon really a galleon? IIRC galleons stopped being made in the 17th century, and were replaced by frigates, which is what that ship looks like to me. I suspect that ship is called a galleon simply because galleon sounds more pirate-ish.

A fan of SS, terribly concerned about the grief the latter gets for the innumerable implausibilities of the Indiana Jones movies, attempted to excuse them by affirming that IJ lives in an alternate reality that has no relation to the real 20th century. Really? No kidding? So that is why TEMPLE OF DOOM AND GLOOM speaks of a ,,sultan of Madagascar", a country that has never been Islamic, and which therefore has never had any sultans??? Yeah, right!

Practically nobody if you stay in PR, where there is practically no chance to speak the language of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. Practically the first thing Boricuas do when they move to the USA is to take refresher courses of English, because by then they have totally forgotten the English that was taught to them in school. I myself did not need a refresher course because I read regularly THE WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA and other similar publications, so that when I moved to Fort Lauderdale on 3 June 1980 I still remembered the English that I learned in parochial HS.