Jump to content
 
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...

Vautrin

Members
  • Posts

    21,175
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    4

Posts posted by Vautrin

  1. I'm not religious either, but I have always enjoyed Christmas, including all the eating and drinking

    that goes on. I like many of the usual suspect Christmas movies, but once a year is usually enough.

    Hard to get excited about Christmas in Connecticut in July, but in December it hits the spot.

    Blasphemy--What do you mean, batteries not included? What kind of a cheapskate are you, Santa? 

  2. 1 hour ago, midwestan said:

    Well, it was from 1946 or thereabouts.  I think the outfit was a less formal version of what 'Madame Satan' wore 14 years earlier during that wild costume party aboard the dirigible.  And, Belita was maskless too.  Maybe if she had a whip in one hand and a cigarette in the other it would have given her that 'edge' you were hoping for. 🙂

    True. I wasn't expecting too much, but it seemed pretty tame, even for 1946. I'm sure if they needed some

    more stuff Albert Dekker could have scrounged up something from his dressing room, if he had his own

    dressing room. 

    • Haha 2
  3. I kind of felt sorry for ol' Barry. Sure he was messin' around with the boss's wife, which is a no-no, but

    a lot of people do that. I don't think it deserves an assassination attempt. And later on Barry might have

    killed Dekker in self-defense. By the Code he had to bite the big one, but that doesn't seem fair. I thought

    Bonita was pretty sexy, so he should have taken as much hard cash as possible and left town with her,

    after which they could have lived their second-rate  nasty lives for as long as they could stand each other.

    I don't know about that so-called dominatrix skating outfit. Looked pretty tame, like it was designed by

    Walt Disney. The skating provided a little break from the noir plot and the movie was pretty good. Still,

    I would have gone with less skating and more peanuts. 

    • Thanks 1
    • Haha 2
  4. The only one I watched today was Torn Curtain, which I haven't seen in 15 or 20 years. Besides the

    basic plot, the scene I remember best  is the prolonged killing of the East German bad guy in the

    farmhouse. You know he is a very bad guy because he wears a black leather jacket instead of a

    suit like the rest of the commies. This is a return to the let's visits lots of different places while

    spying plot of some earlier Hitchcock films instead of individual focused themes of films like

    Rear Window and Vertigo. It's also like other similar spy films of the mid 1960s. Maybe a little

    too much of going over well trod ground, but it's entertaining enough. The whole Cold War outlook

    of the movie is something that seems to have taken places ages ago, though it's fairly fairly recent

    historically. 

  5. I would have yelled out HEY THORWALD, WHAT THE **** KIND OF NAME IS LARS! I got a kick out

    of Thelma Ritter talking about petting parties. That's an expression you don't hear too much anymore.

    DirecTV is having a free HBO, Starz, Cinemax, etc. preview through Sunday. There must be about

    40 or so channels to choose from. 

    I meant to watch some of the Dallas game just to see the Boys get their rears kicked, but I totally forgot

    about it. This has been a great football season. Steelers are 10-0. The Cowboys, Patriots, and Panthers

    all suck. Sweet.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1
  6. Thunderball and You Only Live Twice are the only James Bond movies I saw in a theater.

    After adolescence I quickly lost interest in James Bond. Sorry 007. I will watch them both

    tonight because it's been such a long time and it will almost be like seeing them for the first

    time. I bought a chocolate fudge cake for Thanksgiving dessert, but I think I will start on

    it tonight during the Bonds flicks. Neither shaken or stirred. 

     

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1
  7. Another minor point. I found the cop played by Wesley Addy a real pain the the neck. He kept 

    hassling Hammer for no very good reason. If I hadn't seen the movie before, I might have thought

    he was somehow in on the whole thing. Kind of creepy. From what I recall, Addy often played slick,

    unsympathetic characters, though he do so very well.

    • Like 1
  8. When Hammer slammed Percy Helton's hand into the desk I figured Well that hurt at first, but

    how long can the pain last. Certainly not as bad as if Hammer had kept opening and closing the

    drawer. Then again, it wasn't my hand in the drawer. While Albert Dekker was good, he certainly

    didn't have much screen time, excluding the time the audience just sees his shoes and pant's legs.

    I found Maxine Cooper believable in her role. That's the way I usually judge acting. Perhaps a

    bit simple, but it works for me. There's the scene where Hammer goes to the gym and the guy

    tells him about his great new boxing prospect and Hammer thinks he's pulling his leg. Then

    when Hammer is tied to the bed in the beach house there is a fight on the radio. Maybe that

    was the same boxer they were talking about earlier at the gym and he's winning the fight.

    I'll have to pay more attention to that angle next time.

     

     

     

     

     

    • Like 1
  9. 1 hour ago, Hibi said:

    I thought of Elton John too, w hen I saw that guy!! All those run down buildings are gone now (at least on Bunker Hill) as they destroyed it to put up new buildings downtown.

    Especially at the first glimpse at the beginning of the intro. Get back, **** cat. I think the camera got a bit closer

    and the resemblance was a little weaker, but still pretty close. I read somewhere those buildings were razed. They

    were certainly spooky, especially at night. That's what gave it something of a horror movie vibe. And Gaby's bare

    bones room wasn't exactly inviting to say the least.

  10. I always get a kick out of Kiss Me Deadly. It's pretty out there for a 1950s p.i. flick; part horror

    movie, part detective movie, and part advertisement for the 1950s Playboy life style--girls,

    cars, music, though Hammer is not as sophisticated as Hef would have wanted. And yeah, who

    knew Elton John would show up on Noir Alley. All those rundown apartment buildings are so

    sad and lonely and creepy too. On a minor point I'm glad the untalented opera singer wasn't killed,

    as I could just imagine the two hoods coming into his room and starting to smash all his treasured

    opera records, a la The Blackboard Jungle. Lots of fun and I suppose people can speculate endlessly

    about what the box, or as Velda called it the what's it, was about. 

     

    • Like 3
    • Haha 1
  11. 2 hours ago, Bronxgirl48 said:

    Boy, that Mickey Spillane sure could write.

    Sure could. That's one of my favorite lines in the movie. I laugh even though

    I know it's coming. Hey, put that away, my mother might be around. 

    • Like 1
  12. Hey Marty, wanna go down to Lowe's Paradise and  **** *** on the heads of those girls on the main

    floor?

    Nah, Ang, we just did that last week and remember the usher caught us and kicked us out.

    C'mon Marty, it'll be fun.

    Nah, they might call my mother. I don't want that Ang. Just last week she caught me in the bathroom.

    You're gettin' to be a real drag, a real drag, you know that Marty.

     

    • Like 1
  13. It's a long way from St. Petersburg to Poverty Row, in more ways than one. I would call this one

    a comic book version of a Classic Illustrated version of the novel. Taken as an adaption of the

    novel, it's pretty thin and weak. Taken on its own as another crime movie, it's okay, but nothing

    special. The low budget sets and look go with setting of the original story, but otherwise not very

    good. And then here's another dumb criminal. Doesn't take the money and run, starts throwing 

    himself in the way of the police inspector. The trick ending is kind of lame, but it also goes with

    the whole quickie vibe of the movie. The crime was the idea of adapting the novel on the cheap,

    the punishment is sitting through most of it. Thank goodness the sentence is only 68 minutes.

    • Like 1
    • Haha 3
  14. I was clicking between this flick and Newsmax for some comic relief. The idea of guys trying to

    make it with Joan was......a little off putting. I'm sure Miss Joan liked the ego stroke that idea

    gave her. And I would have replaced Ty Hardin with Try Harder. I wonder if the Rolling Stones

    were influenced by that scene of a spike right through someone's head. A funny line from

    a review by Leslie Halliwell--"Grisly and unattractive thriller with an ageing star in a series of

    unsuitably abbreviated costumes." Actually Joan didn't look too back from the front, but when

    she was in profile, yikes. I did like the sharp suits that the London detective wore, so it wasn't a

    total waste of time.

  15. 15 hours ago, nakano said:

    Uriah Heep are still active..Hensley left after the Conquest lp in 79-80,Mick Box is the only original member in the band,all the others foutding members are deadLee Kekslake died 2 months ago,they were very big in Germany and in Russia, Japan,still releasing stuff i heard.

    I went to their Wiki page out of curiosity and yes they are still around. Fifty years is quite a milestone,

    even though only one original member is still in the band. I haven't listened to my albums in a while, but

    they were pretty decent. After that they kind of fell off my radar. 

     

  16. 2 hours ago, jamesjazzguitar said:

    After Hibi made the point about improbabilities,  I decided to find the biggest ones and found 3:

    Not looking into the bag,    not making sure the Ray character was dead,   and at the end when the good guys see the tracks in the snow,  and even say they must be from the bad-guys,  they go ahead anyway without any firearms (which the two men also discuss and the insurance guy says guns are for the police).    Yea,   so why didn't you back away and call the police!!!!

    Oh well,   I really like this film and as is the case with many films one just has to go-along with those improbabilities.

      

     

     

    I liked it also despite some of the pretty unbelievable aspects of the movie. I just about rolled my eyes

    when the insurance investigator said he wasn't carrying a gun. Hey, this isn't some fraudster trying to

    collect disability you're going after. Film fans just learn to roll with the punches when it comes to

    improbabilities. They're all part of the biz.

  17. I had never seen Nightfall before. Pretty well done with a good balance of urban and rural locations,

    though I could have done without the butter/cornmeal debate. The Ray~Bancroft romance was more

    interesting than many of these noir romances, more down to earth than usual. And among other

    things, Ray says he paint soup cans. A pop artist ahead of his time. I couldn't decide whether I wanted

    Red to be killed because he was such a nasty psycho or because of all his dumb jokes. Maybe a com-

    bination of both, though I felt a little sorry at his ultimate fate. There certainly were a lot of improbabilities.

    The most glaring to me was the two robbers not looking in the bag to make sure it was full of cash and

    not the doc's medical equipment. Hard to believe.

     

  18. The problem with Silas Marner as a soporific is that it's a relatively short novel, so if one is reading

    it consecutively, it won't last that long and one will have to find a new book as a sleep aid.

     

    Elster killed his wife. He already had Judy pretending to be Madeleine and hired Scotty to follow her

    because he knew when it came time to throw his wife off the tower Scotty would not be able to follow

    Judy through the trap door and up so he would not see Elster throwing his dead wife off the tower

    and thus Scotty would think Judy was the wife and had been killed, when she really hadn't. I think it's

    implied that Gavin was doing Judy, though it's never made all that explicit. Kim Novak was made up

    to look like Elster's wife to fool Scotty. After the murder she returned to her original look. It was

    stupid to stay in SF, but maybe she figured the chance of running into Scotty in a big city was minimal.

     

© 2022 Turner Classic Movies Inc. All Rights Reserved Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Cookie Settings
×
×
  • Create New...