cinemetal
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Posts posted by cinemetal
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Hey now, no need to get too feisty, ye all! I don't intend to underscore the importance of age TOO much. After all, it was elder family members, friends and writers who inspired me to get into classic films in the first place. But, like I said, I do get a very general kick out of the sort of folks, like you all, whose appreciation of the flicker pictures far outstrips the ordinary threshold.
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I'll be damned, you're right!
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Well, to put it simply, I like the idea of chatting with people who are relatively younger. On far too many an occasion, even here in the very cultured NYC, I find myself to be the youngest person at a silent or 1930s film screening, often separated by a twenty- or thirty-year margin from the next youngest person. Frankly, I get a kick out of teens and twenty-somethings discussing Norma Shearer as readily as many of our peers might discuss Kate Hudson.
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So many...Dawn of the Dead is probably my current #1, though.
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Always put one in the brain!
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I don't think there is any another actor for whom I will watch ANY film s/he's in, regardless of its reputation. He's just so entertaining and fun to watch.
Oddly, I don't consider him my favorite actor.
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The Searchers (1956, Ford)
The Gunfighter (1950, King)
The Long Riders (1980, Hill)
The Big Trail (1930, Walsh)
Red River (1948, Hawks)
Rio Bravo (1959, Hawks)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, Ford)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Ray)
The Shootist (1976, Siegel)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969, Leone)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971, Altman)
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Aunt Lavinia: "Can you be so cruel?"
Catherine: "I can be very cruel...I have been trained by masters."
from The Heiress
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Ye lot have certainly named a good number of my top guys already, but as I mentioned, I am really looking to see how deep you (and the TCM programmers) can go. So, if it won't burn the synapses on you all, lemme see how obscure you can get for me!
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Recent remakes which actually hold up to the originals:
Ocean's 11 (2001)
Kiss of Death (1995)
There may be a handful of others, but they aren't springing to mind at the moment.
To remake a top-tier classic is absolutely pointless. The only types of films worth redoing are
a)public-domain classic novels which lend themselves to the occasional FAITHFUL updating. Note the capitalized word, which makes ever difference in the world, as evidenced by, say, the 1994 Little Women vs. the 1995 Scarlet Letter (ugh!).
b)good premises which weren't fully executed (Rope-->Compulsion-->Swoon)
c)well-liked movies which aren't quite bonafide "classics" (Ocean's 11, Kiss of Death)
d)films, good or bad, which have been almost COMPLETELY forgotten (which is why, someday, I will kill to remake The Man Who Laughs, last filmed in 1928, and perhaps Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film if... as well).
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A modern, black Some Like It Hot? Maybe it would work if Hollywood "brains" resisted the idea to stuff it with ghetto "humor" and profanity?
That would NEVER happen.
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Another VERY poor Jimmy Stewart pairing: Pot O' Gold, 1941, co-starring by beloved Paulette Goddard. Didn't work at all.
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Alright, alright people, but just indulge me and lemme know how old yous are in this here thread! Thank yas kindly!
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And an underrated actress to boot. The Oscar notwithstanding, her general kookiness, tabloid romances and wardrobe abominations have detracted far too much attention from the excellent work she offered in Silkwood, Mask, Suspect and Mermaids.
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I am too well-versed at this point to have any movies "introduced" to me by TCM, but the channel certainly does help me to track them down easier! But all of the movies listed are great choices, and now let me add a few of my own, featured here or on the once-great AMC:
Scandal Sheet (1952, Phil Karlson), a taut little crime drama about oily newspaper hacks and the people around em. Written by Sam Fuller, starring John Derek, Broderick Crawford and Donna Reed.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933, Frank Capra), a bizarre little melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck, prisoner to a strangely alluring warlord played by Nils Asther. Gorgeous cinematography and possibly the sexiest Stanwyck I've seen.
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948, Norman Foster). Burt Lancaster and Joan Fontaine in a quasi-noir melodrama about an ex-con trying to go straight with the help of a young woman's love, even as the pressures of the world around him conspire to keep him desperate and corrupt.
The Black Swan (1942, Henry King). One of the lesser-sung Tyrone Power swashbucklers, but to my estimation, one of the best, with outstanding Technicolor photography and a terrifically villainous George Sanders.
Fear Strikes Out (1957, Robert Mulligan). A true-life story of a baseball player pressured into submission and mental anguish by an overbearing father. Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden are both heartbreaking.
Forbidden Games (1951; Rene Clement). A deeply sad meditation on pre-adolescence and death, set in WWII France, where a young boy and a young orphan in his care build a cemetery for dead animals as a means of grasping the horrors around them.
The Front (1976; Martin Ritt). Starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. The only movie about the Hollywood blacklist that is truly necessary. Written by, directed by and featuring many actually blacklisted players, this drama (foolishly marketed and approached by '76 critics as a comedy) captured the heartbreaking atmosphere of fear and betrayal which pervaded the era.
History Is Made at Night (1937, Frank Borzage). Starring Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, this presages all onscreen depictions of the Titanic disaster by several years (though the ship in this film is not named, the correlation is unmistakable). Wonderfully romantic.
Love Me Tonight (1932, Rouben Mamoulian). Plainly stated, this is one of the best musicals of all time. Why it is not better known today eludes me completely (though the standard "Isn't It Romantic?" lives on in Paramount films to this day). The best Chevalier/McDonald pairing (and the last), this film's camera movement and sparkling dialogue remind one of Lubitsch and Clair, the two other Continental charmers of the early sound era. I don't know how many other superlatives I can use for this film. Find it!
Sunny Side Up (1929, David Butler). Janet Gaynor acquitting herself capably in a singing role. One of the few artistically successful pre-1930 musicals, with beautiful and uplifting songs ("I'm a dreamer...aren't we all?") and a love story so charming that even the insufferable Swedish "comedian" El Brendel can't ruin it.
Quills (2000, Philip Kaufman). A startingly frank, mature treatise on sexual perversity and censorship as evinced by the Marquis de Sade spending his last days in an insane asylum. As played by Geoffrey Rush, the Marquis is mad, to be sure, but also caustic, witty, verbose, sexy and appealing as he devises new and clever means of ducking the authorities who would deny him the chance to publish his works. Brilliant supporting work by Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine...need I say more?
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Grumble, grumble...count me as another of the Cusack-enamored: Say Anything..., One Crazy Summer, Better Off Dead, The Grifters, I love em all!
As for my most recent (and egregious) example of someone who rarely, if ever manages any sort of sexual chemistry with an on-screen partner, there is Jennifer Lopez. I find it truly alarming that, with George Clooney excepted, someone so incredibly "hot" can fail to ignite sparks with any of her pairings. I have surmised that this has much to do with the fact that she comes across as so unequivocally self-absorbed that her greatest love will always be the reflection in the mirror.
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Oh my, how could I forget A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, by my friend Richard Barrios? It's a much-acclaimed book which I think many of you could very much get into, basically tracing the birth of musicals from the advent of sound up to the 1934 enforcement of the Production Code? A lot of rare films are discussed therein, from DeMille's Madam Satan to the notoriously Golden Dawn.
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Lemme see if I can recommend any film-oriented books for yas...
Frank Capra's The Name Above the Title
Josef von Sternberg's Fun in a Chinese Laundry
Peter Bogdanovich's Who the Devil Made It
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It's pretty cool, but I don't see all that much mentioned about people's ages.
As for me, my father who was born in 1930 taught me much about old movies and music, to the point where by the age of five I had a basic understanding of opera and ragtime and could distinguish between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone. This was compounded by showing me a book about movie villains called The Bad Guys, wherein I was drawn to all the classic movie monsters like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, etc., and also learned about classic films like Greed and The Birth of a Nation -- all of this, to repeat, before I turned six! From there it was only a matter of tracking those movies down wherever I could find them -- Phantom of the Opera by seven, Chaplin's Easy Street by eight, and so forth.
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Just out of curiosity, what fave directors would you like to see spotlighted on the channel? Of course, I love Hawks, Curtiz and Ford, but we get plenty of their films already, so dig a bit deeper for me!
Me, I'd like to see more pre-Code Mamoulian, Van Dyke and Browning.
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> I'd like to see a month of Ida Lupino (and include
> the movies she directed too), Robert Ryan, the
> Barrymores (all 3 together), and William Powell.
> Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert would be a lot of
> fun to watch too as stars of the month.
You just missed the one film which all three Barrymores played together, Rasputin and the Empress, which was screened either last month or the one before.
As for whom I'd like to see featured, let's see...Conrad Veidt, Jennifer Jones, Harry Langdon, Lon Chaney Sr., Alain Delon, Jean Gabin, John Garfield and El Brendel (heh heh, points to anyone who knows the last one!).
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Howdy, I'm new here and just wanted to get a basic idea of whom I'm consorting with here. Age is rarely a concern of mine in discussing the arts, but I have to confess having great admiration for people whose appreciation of cinema and other arts precedes the immediacy of their own timeframe. To wit: I am 26 but my appreciation of film goes right back to King Vidor, Chaplin, Browning and Lubitsch. And it has since youth, when my good ol' pop (born 1930) regaled me with childhood cinema tales of Errol Flynn, James Cagney and Sonny Tufts (don't ask!). And still, that backward-looking good sense doesn't mean I am not a big fan of Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee and Cameron Crowe, again, to name but a few. Ye regs and guests, please drop a few pertinent lines here so that I can get to know you lot better. Thanks.
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It refers to the Indian genre films which incorporate choreographed musical interludes and other classic Hollywood motifs. It does not, however, refer to ALL Indian cinema; for example, the neo-realistic style of Satyajit Ray and the overt sexuality of Mira Nair are not generally considered to be "Bollywood."
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It has to be added that part of the reason why Mayer blocked his own film The Crowd in 1928 was to pave the way for The Broadway Melody to win the following year.
Directors?
in Your Favorites
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Gotta add one to my own list, heh. Gregory La Cava. Yep.