Vidor

More Paramount silents. From skimming that Films of the 1920s list above, movies jumping out at me are "The Sheik", "Miss Lulu Bett", "Moran of the Lady Letty", "When Knighthood Was In Flower", "The Covered Wagon", "The Ten Commandments", "Sally of the Sawdust", "So's Your Old Man", "Stark Love", "Chang", "The Last Command", "The Docks of New York", "The Wedding March", and "The Four Feathers" (which apparently was the last silent film released by a major studio and which co-starred William Powell and Fay Wray).

I don't agree with this at all. I think it's clear that Ilsa was admitting she loved Rick and that she expected to stay with him in Casablanca, which is why she's so shocked at the airport. As to whether Rick and Ilsa had sex the night before, this may be one of the cases in which the Hays Code made for a better movie. Did they? Who knows?

Lemmon. And here's some trivia: the only film Jack Lemmon ever directed, "Kotch", starred...you guessed it...Walter Matthau.

A good, oh, 18 years ago, I happened to be working in Northern California. My mom came to visit, and I took her on a spin around Lake Tahoe, because if you're in the area, you should go for a spin around Lake Tahoe. So we're driving, and my mom sees a sign for the "Bonanza" ranch, and she says "hey, let's go to the Bonanza ranch". She was old enough to know "Bonanza" but I'd never seen the show and I was concentrating on showing her the jaw-dropping beauty of the Lake Tahoe area, and I didn't want to waste hours at some tourist attraction, so I told her that we'd go there next time. Not long after that, in 2004, the Bonanza ranch was sold to developers and closed to tourists forever. Guess that 30 years after "Bonanza" went off the air there weren't a lot of tourists who wanted to see the sets anymore. I've felt guilty about that ever since.

Sunday. Not that it matters.

Didn't we just observe a paucity of films from those studios in the "31 Days of Oscar" list?

Given that they can't really show Paramount or 20th Century Fox films anymore, it's probably for the best that they air more recent films.

I think that "Bull Durham" is the best baseball movie ever made and the rest of that movie is filled with great dialogue. That one monologue however is pretty bad.

"8 Heads in a Duffel Bag" was a bomb and reportedly really terrible, but a good title.

Theory: Film titles that end in exclamation points or question marks usually indicate bad movies. Not always, but the correlation is high.

Sorry, I meant her *other* three year hiatus, when she went to Broadway after "The Heiress" in 1949. Her movie career never recovered and is mostly forgettable outside of "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte".

Victoria Principal in "Earthquake" is so odd. There's that body, that ridiculous body that's evidence of the existence of a benevolent God...and then there's the hair. The hair that is so, so awful that it almost achieves the impossible and makes her look unsexy. I'm shocked that people in this thread were talking about both magnificent breasts and Marjoe Gortner and not connecting the two topics by mentioning that he starred in "Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw" with Lynda Carter. It's terrible, but she looks so beautiful in it. I'm looking over the Medved list. How is "The Teahouse of the August Moon" on that list? Fine, Brando's in yellowface, but that is a good movie and by the way a sharply pointed satire of imperialism, yellowface aside.

Oh, and not to be Mr. Iconoclast or anything, but "The Sound of Music" is a great movie and Plummer is fantastic in it, even if he doesn't sing.

For a forgettable movie about a forgettable dance fad, "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo" has had odd staying power as a symbol for oddly named sequels.

I think it's the only de Havilland film she made before her ill-advised three-year Hollywood hiatus that I haven't seen. I still haven't seen some of her later films like "The Proud Rebel" ("Shane" ripoff, as I understand it) or "Light in the Piazza" which has been sitting on my DVR forever. Watched "The Dark Mirror" on Amazon a while back. Olivia as good twin/evil twin, that was a hoot. She should have played more villains. I remember reading once that she and Bette Davis were supposed to play opposite roles in "In This Our Life" but somebody lost their nerve and Olivia and Bette wind up playing their typecast good girl/bad girl parts.

Before hitting it big in the movies Plummer was in the original cast of Pulitzer-winning play "J.B.". He was as noted above, one of the best Star Trek villains ever.

No, no, no. That is a *great* line.

"The Well-Groomed Bride", just to see Ray Milland and Olivia de Havilland star together.

I've seen many of these. It's a pretty solid list. Maybe, with the balkanization of media continuing and TCM in all likelihood being largely limited to the Warner and MGM archives, it would pay for them to get more into foreign film. "Coup de Torchon" is really good.

I don't have it handy but I recall from reading "The Speed of Sound" that most of her talking films didn't do much better than break even.

When Marion Davies retired she was 40, which is when a lot of actresses find themselves not getting lead roles anymore. Not to mention that her films were not that popular and, outside of "Show People" and a couple of other outliers, not very good.

Before it went off of Netflix we ran through the whole run of "Cheers". It was formatted for widescreen, I assume from original negatives. But there's one episode where you get a clear view of the end of the set and a curtain off to the left. IIRC you can see a crewmember. There's also an episode where Carla gives Cliff a letter (I think?), and you can see the "address" on the letter is just squiggles. Good times.

Eh, the killer in all of the Thin Man movies is predictable. Ignore all of the suspects. Pay attention to the one character who is friendly and helpful and not suspicious at all.

That's a broad topic. Julie Salamon's "The Devil's Candy" is a behind-the-scenes history of the making of one particular movie. Namely, Brian de Palma's 1990 film adaptation of "The Bonfire of the Vanities". What makes it interesting is that "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was a notorious flop, one of the biggest box-office bombs of the era. (Kind of interesting that in a seven-year span Bruce Willis was in "Die Hard" and "Pulp Fiction" but also in this movie and "Hudson Hawk".) Now of course no one knew in advance that "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was going to be a huge pile of poop; the book was just going to be an insider's account of a movie production. Turned out to be way more interesting than that. A dude named Steven Bach wrote a book called "Final Cut" about another fiasco, the production of "Heaven's Gate". That book starts out with thumbnail sketches of how the studio system came to be, how the studio system was destroyed by the courts, and how United Artists struggled for 30 years to avoid bankruptcy only to prosper when the studios collapsed, and *then* to fall victim to corporate takeovers and Michael Cimino. It's really a story of the latter history of UA, primarily about "Heaven's Gate" but also other stuff like how Peter Sellers was going to make another "Pink Panther" movie, delivered a script to Bach and UA, and died a week later. Long time ago I read a book called "The Speed of Sound" about the transition to talkies and how a lot of people got ruined. Whole chapters on John Gilbert and Clara Bow--Bow probably could have stuck it out but she had mental problems. EDIT: There's also a great bit in "Final Cut" about how the UA people all assemble into a screening room to watch Cimino's cut and are horrified to find out that it's 5 1/2 hours.