Palmerin

Read GONE WITH THE WIND to find out for yourself how Cukor, Fleming and company were faithful to Mitchell's original story.

A truly baffling eccentricity of Puerto Rican Spanish: an essayist in the 1960s wrote humorous essays that often included really bad puns. In one of them she spoke about THE INDEX OF THE ARTIST, and it turned out that she was talking about the Dow Jones Index, which she thought referred to Tom Jones. Please ignore the really rotten pun, and take notice of how she referred to TJ: as the ARTISTA=ARTIST. That is your clue that she was referring to a singer; not a painter, or an sculptor, or an architect, or a novelist, or a playwright, or a poet, or an actor, or a director, or a dancer, or a composer, or even an instrumentalist--exclusively a SINGER. For reasons that not even the Puerto Rican branch of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Tongue can explain, in PR the word ARTIST has the very restricted meaning of singer, and absolutely nothing else.

Your flippant quips show that none of you is familiar with the real novel; I urge you to take a week off to read it, and then meditate on how the real story should be filmed.

... is that the clothes of Dunaway, her hair and makeup, and the hair of Beatty, Hackman and Pollard are pure 1960s fashions that have nothing to do with those items as depicted in the many 1930s movies that TCM broadcasts. 'tis absolutely exasperating how film makers consistently allow themselves to be deceived by the standards of beauty and fashion of their own time periods! Even BARRY LYNDON, a movie that works extra hard to present an accurate image of the 18th century, is ruined by the fact that its leading lady, Marisa Berenson, totally looks like a 1970s playgirl who chooses to go to the disco dressed up in 18th century petticoats.

Today's lesson of Puerto Rican Spanish: CAMISA=SHIRT CAMISETA=SWEATER TYPE SHIRT CAMISILLA=UNDERSHIRT

I read THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. Now I know for a fact that the script of Balderston, Langley and company is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE! The real plot is distorted so much that the only elements that remain true to the novel are the title and the names of the characters. Hope was not treated as respectfully as Margaret Mitchell.

I'm so sorry to hear that; Truffaut deserved better. There are two vocabulary differences between Latin American Spanish and Castilian Spanish: Indian words and archaisms. The Spanish of countries with wide use of Indian languages is naturally influenced by those languages; Paraguay, for example, uses such Guarani words as N~ANDUTI, a type of very delicate embroidery that resembles an spider web, which is exactly what n~anduti means. As for archaisms, eyeglasses, which are now called LENTES in Spain, are still known as ESPEJUELOS in PR and the rest of America.

... is one of the most popular movies on basic cable; hardly a month passes by without it being shown at least once. I am reminded of Schaffner's NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, and I wonder about why such a moving story turned into such a boring movie. Considering the other work of Schaffner--THE WAR LORD, PLANET OF THE APES, PATTON, PAPILLON--, I have come to the conclusion that FS did not like Masie's book, and therefore was not interested in making a movie as dynamic as the best of David Lean. Was LAWRENCE OF ARABIA simply Peter O'Toole, Claude Rains, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quayle, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif babbling incessantly about events that were uninteresting because they were never shown on the screen? Of course not! DL was careful to balance scenes of the actors talking with action sequences, and the result was an action classic. Bay obviously realized that a movie showing nothing but Jon Voight sitting on a wheelchair reacting to the news of the attack would antagonize even the most fervent admirers of Voight, so he made sure to show the entire story on the screen: the preparations of the Japanese, the Americans trying to anticipate the actions of the Japanese, the actual battle, and the Doolittle Raid! The result was a satisfied public that came out of the theatre happy with the realization that their ticket was a good investment of their money. If Schaffner had used his budget responsibly and depicted the very exciting battles of Mukden, Tsushima, Tannenberg, Gorlice-Tarnow, and the Brusilov Offensive, NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA would have swept the Oscars the same way LAWRENCE OF ARABIA did!

So Vazquez is a compatriot; !QUE BUENO!=HOW NICE!. I pray that her Spanish may be better than that of the woman with whom I share a mother; she speaks a strange Spanglish in which the syntax and verbs are Spanish, but the nouns are all English.

all I want is to know if Vazquez is a fellow Boricua. In the 60s and 70s there was a sisters' singing trio, the Claribelles, who modeled themselves on the Lennon Sisters. One of them appeared in a commercial for babies' products, and she mentioned her daughter, JENNIFER. When I heard that Celtic name, I immediately thought: the grandparents of that child are obviously very fond of THE SONG OF BERNADETTE.

My only positive impression of that ,,comedy'' (!!!!!!!!!!) is that Belushi would have been perfect as one of the gang of Jimmy Conway in GOODFELLAS whom JC whacks in order not to pay them their share for the Lufthansa heist; otherwise I absolutely regret the money and time that I wasted on that offal.

What recognition did people like Curtiz, Henreid, Lorre, Reagan, Veidt, and Wayne receive for their propaganda work during WWII? Was there a decoration specifically intended for that purpose?

Something that makes me awful sad. Rooney and Garland would be almost forgotten by now if they had not been given the opportunity to grow beyond their personae of juvenile musical performers.

... the movies of Presley, Avalon and Funicello, which were designed exclusively for a teenage audience? Movies with such a limited appeal were bound to become outdated practically from the moment that they were released! The movies of Garland and Rooney were not intended for an exclusively juvenile public, but instead for anybody and everybody who enjoyed musicals and had the money to pay for a ticket.

Was this little maiden an ancestor of THE BAD SEED, as TV GUIDE speculated?

how did they look when they were young? I take it they weren't old and wrinkled all their lives. Speaking of WB, a comedy that was broadcast in the spring has the line of a woman character being so UGLY she makes Beery look EFFEMINATE. That makes me laugh because it reminds me of an anecdote of C Aubrey Smith. While filming the 1937 THE PRISONER OF ZENDA, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., confided to Smith his fear that playing Rupert of Hentzau would typecast him as a villain, whereupon the old veteran replied: Young man, I have played every role of PRISONER except Princess Flavia, and I assure you, playing Hentzau will not typecast you! EVERY ROLE OF PRISONER EXCEPT PRINCESS FLAVIA... in other words, the beetle browed beady eyed big nosed sharp jawed C Aubrey Smith put on drag to play Madame Antoinette de Mauban.

The election of 1992 is notorious for two examples of DISPARATE=NONSENSE: the pony tailed whiner who begged to Busch and Klingon to treat him like a baby who needed to be coddled, and Matt Groaning trying to fool the nation into believing that he actually believed that the downturn of 1992, which was over by 1993, was the second Great Depression. What's with you Yankees and the GD? An economic downturn, which is a perfectly normal feature of economic life, comes along, and you go into hysterics, baying about soup kitchens, shantytowns, and dust bowls! Regarding THE WALTONS and their role in that farce of a campaign, was that family really poor? They had a magnificent house--certainly much better than my slimy rathole of an apartment--, they had land and crops, and, judging from how their neighbors treated them, their community held them in high regard. They remind me of the families of my mother and my stepfather at that very same time. Francisca Morales was the next to last of seven sisters; Victor Roldan was the seventh of a family of nine brothers and three sisters. Their parents had land, crops, and animals; could afford to employ AGREGADOS=HIRED HANDS; they made good money with the products they harvested, and managed to pay for the education of their numerous children. One notable anachronism in THE WALTONS! Their hairdos are of the 1970s; they do not resemble one bit those of the 1930s movies that TCM is so generous to show us.

Once again TCM keeps rejecting on the following day the passwords that it gave me the day before. What must I do to get a REAL password, please?

I suspect CORNELIUS RYAN is to blame; Boricuas--including myself--loved the THE LONGEST DAY book and movie, so when my compatriots saw his name associated to the Attenborough flick, they jumped to the conclusion that it was another DAY.

When I watched ABTF in Rio Piedras, PR, the original reaction of the public was very positive; everybody was clearly enjoying the action and the performances of its many stars. That reaction changed at the ending; the downbeat ending, with everybody in the movie sad and morose at having lost the battle, made the public very angry, and they did not hesitate to yell it out loud. It seems most of that public did not know the story of the Battle of Arnhem, so its disappointing ending caught them by surprise because they were expecting another THE LONGEST DAY. How was your experience when you saw ABTF in the theatre? I myself loved the music of John Addison, who was himself a veteran of Market Garden.

An assassin who puts the moves on her targets; then, when they are relaxed and waiting for her, she pulls out her weapon: a syringe with poison. A literal black widow who is never caught because she is so stealthy.

Today, 26 May 2016, I discovered LEE GRANT in the THE LADY FROM MESA episode.

You are forgiven. I love to watch episodes of classic shows because of the many future celebrities to be found in them. In LAW AND ORDER, the episode MAYHEM has Robin Tunney, and the episode SKIN DEEP features Claire Danes.

TWO FUTURE STARS appearing on THE SAME TV EPISODE.

On 21 May 2016 I watched the DAYS OF GRACE episode of THE BIG VALLEY on INSP, and discovered that it had TWO future stars as guest players: KAREN BLACK and ELLEN BURSTYN. Two future stars on the same episode: do you realize how amazing and rare is such an event?