GregoryPeckfan
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Posts posted by GregoryPeckfan
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Seeing Lana in ZIEGFELD GIRL and another 1941 film, H O N K Y TONK, made me finally understand why she became such a big star. There's the mask-faced Lana of her late 1950s films, when the years in Hollywood and the bad romantic choices had taken their toll. In 1941 she was a petite, fresh, luscious, very beautiful and very talented young woman.
ZIEGFELD GIRL, which is basically one of those "three girls" pictures, stars Judy Garland, James Stewart, Hedy Lamarr, and a whole slew of fine character actors, and who walks away with the picture? Lana.
I recently saw Lana in the Secret of Dr. Kildare opposite Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore in a single film appearance in the popular series. She stole the film from Lew's leading lady as far as the female acting attention is concerned.
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I haven't read through each of the five pages, so I apologize if my choice for "pitchfork worthy" has already made an appearance: Judy Canova, in everything in which she performed her "you call this humor" shtick".
I don't think she has been mentioned.
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Esther Williams spoke openly about a lot of people - when "That's Entertainment" was released, she sued MGM for invasion of privacy(?!).
When long-ago stars decide to write their autobiographies, the publishing house puts pressure on them - that is, to rip the veil of privacy from their lives.
But, since she had been intimate with Jeff Chandler and he was so very serious about her, she should have refrained from telling "his secret".
Of course, that finally-revealed secret did eventually put quite a dent in his highly masculine image which was just so persuasive on screen.
Since I am a Jeff Chandler fan, I prefer NOT to think about that secret.
And, although I do enjoy Esther Williams' films, I have never thought of reading her autobiography.
Yes, well as far as I am concerned, Rayban, this is not the public's business. Why Williams decided to write a tell all reflects badly on her. When Jeremy Brett died, the woman who was living with him when he died decided to write biography about him without his family's or friends' consent and told everything about him. I cried when I read that book and I am glad it was a library book and not a book I bought.
Nowadays because of the internet and 24-hour news channels, nothing is secret.
But during the studio system era, the press actually worked *with* the studios to make sure that the image portrayed on screen matched the press releases. This continued for a long time.
It may have kept going if MGM had not decided to market Frank Sinatra as a clean cut sky guy who needed Gene Kelly to introduce him to girls. Sinatra was NOT that kind of man.
Therefore, when he divorced his wife to marry Ava Gardner - remember that Sinatra was Catholic - the press got angry and exposed everything.
Meanwhile, Tracy was living with Hepburn but never divorced his wife.
But the end of press and Hollywood studios agreeing with each other was gone.
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Thanks again, Barton. I appreciate you doing this each month.
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"Star Trek VI:The Undiscovered Country" with Plummer as Klingon General Chang.
Supposedly Gene Roddenberry died shortly after seeing this film.
Was it "Henry V" when Billy Shatner stepped in for a sick Plummer?
That's correct. Plummer had kidney stones.
Shatner had not yet memorized his lines and would get through part of his lines, forget what was coming next and then continue. It was a memory thing.
But there was a critic in the audience who thought that Bill was doing it on purpose and praised him in a newspaper review.
From then on, whenever Shatner would play a larger than life character like Kirk, he would do this strange pausing. But he did not do this when he was playing an ordinary person like in the Twilight Zone episode "Nick of Time."
So, basically, we can praise/blame a theatre critic for the Captain Kirk impressions.
Your turn, D.J.
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Jeff Chandler's death has always been weird to me.
Would not be surprised if there was something more to it.
The book I got rid of - gave to someone else - spent several pages on it.
From what I remember of reading about the tragedy:
He did not go into surgery right away after he broke his back. Whether this was a factor or not I do not know.
When he finally went into surgery, he would not stop bleeding. He had to be given a transfusion. He then developed pneumonia.
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For me, another pitchfork-worthy character is Dinah Lord in The Philadelphia Story.
I would like to nominate for pitchforking Father Lord in both The Philadelphia Story and High Society.
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Jeff Chandler always gave rock-solid support to his many leading ladies in the movies.
My favorite coupling is Joan Crawford and Jeff Chandler in "Female On The Beach".
According to co-star Natalie Schaefer, he and Crawford had an off-screen affair.
But Chandler was in love with Esther Williams and wanted to marry her.
But she couldn't live with "his secret" and decided to turn him down.
Yes, Esther Williams decided to write a tell-all book and expose this. I think she made a lot of money off of it.
But her Hollywood friends were furious with her because Jeff died from complications due to his back surgery and shortly after Cooper and Gable (I think that is partly why I got dates confused as I knew that 2 of the 3 actors died within a month of each other. I just got the identity of which 2 mixed up.)
I did not read that book. But I did have a Hollywood death book which discussed Jeff in great detail and this whole issue of his "secret" and the death and the timing of his death compared to these screen giants.
I've never been a fan of watching people swim, anyway, so I don't know if my reading of this tragedy and the fact that she wrote the tell-all book affects my ability to watch her movies. I don't seem to care in Take me Out to the Ballgame, in which she appears with Kelly and Sinatra. But I am not watching the movie for her.
As for Jeff Chandler's career: I am most familiar with Broken arrow and Peyton Place. I have yet to see the war film where he broke his back, but it is on my to-see list.
Contrast this with Ricardo Montelban who also broke his back when he fell on rocks during the filming of a western and survived.
*note* I no longer have the Hollywood Death book. I recycled it because I decided it was too morbid.
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actually, it's not really specific exactly what happens in DORIAN GREY, which is what makes it so interesting- the one element of Dorian's eternal youth is highly supernatural- its origins never explained- the rest of the story is grounded in reality (in fact, quite harshly so) and i don't think the Wilde novella or the film really get into the specifics of just what in the Hell (or other places) went down with just WHY Dorian never aged but the Picture did...
The Devil specifically doesn't show up, although George Sanders might give the impression of devilry, there's a wish cast without a thought in front of an Egyptian cat statue, and that's about as much exposition on the mystical elements as we get.
so unless you think cats= the devil, i'm not sure you can really bring The Horned Prince into this thing (much as i generally like to.)
Yes, I remember a lot about the cat and the mirror and I know some people are quite harmful to black cats especially around Halloween so you are not allowed to adopt a black cat from a shelter in October in most places.
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Re: MeTV and Remmington Steele and a potential tribute to Doris Roberts:
I just tried to check on the website for my local Metv station to see if we would be getting any tribute and the site says that it has been hacked.
I guess I'll have to check metv channel itself and wait and see.
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His Girl Friday
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Baker, Diane
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I meant good ol' Tom Joad from
Oklahoma.
Oh, okay, The Grapes of Wrath character, not the poster Tom.
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Later, the practice became one of re-dubbing-- even if the dialogue was not in-sync. But in those early sound days, they would actually film it twice. If the star was multilingual, like Claudette Colbert or Marlene Dietrich, then they would basically be making the same movie twice. If the Hollywood star only spoke English, then their part was recast in the foreign language version. At least this is how I understand it.
Yes, I think that Maurice Chevailier did that a lot.
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Chester Morris was in The Big House with Robert Montgomery
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Zerbe, Anthony
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Toy Story
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Rear Window
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Night People starring Gregory Peck which I have been able to see only once due to it rarely airing on television.
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I have not yet seen any of the franchise Aliens. I am familiar with the scene where something comes out of stomachs, but I have not watched the movies.
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Happy birthday Mr. Sulu.
I am enjoying recording movies of Mr. Lloyd which I have not seen.
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Tom, you're not in Oklahoma any more. Out here in
California we are fairly loosey goosey when it comes
to these things. And not that it makes any difference,
but I'm a Wilkie Republican.
Tom's in Canada.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of those films where I have read the novel and seen the film.
I try to see The movie at least once a year, often on or near Angela Lansbury's birthday.
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BEST ACTOR OF 1940: NO ORDER; WINNER LISTED AFTERWARD:
Spencer Tracy in Boomtown
Clark Gable in Boomtown
Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator
Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath
Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story
Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
Laurence Olivier in Rebecca
Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent
Spencer Tracy in Northwest Passage
Cary Grant in His Girl Friday
Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife
Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk
Dennis Morgan in Kitty Foyle
Errol Flynn in Virginia City
William Powell in I Love You Again
Charles Boyer in all This and Heaven Too
Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois
Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940
W.C. Fields in The Bank Dick
Don Ameche in Down Argentine Way
Louis Hayward in Dance, Girl, Dance
Robert Taylor in Escape
Herbert Marshall in The Letter
Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro
W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee
Clark Gable in Strange Cargo
Fred McMurray in Remember the Night
Fred McMurray in Too Many Husbands
Melvin Douglas in Too Many Husbands
Laurence Olivier in Pride and Prejudice
James Stewart in the Shop Around the Corner
Conrad Veidt in The Thief of Bagdad
Sabu in the Thief of Bagdad
Humphrey Bogart in They Drive By Night
George raft in They Drive By Night
Robert Taylor in Waterloo Bridge
William Holden in Our Town
Peter Lorre in Stranger on the Third Floor
WINNER:
TYRONE POWER IN THE MARK OF ZORRO
(second place was Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath)
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I Just Watched...
in General Discussions
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Quite true. There were stages to this.
There was a lot of "yellow journalism" around the kidnapping of the lindberg baby, and this style was used in the filming of Murder on the Orient Express (1976) where Richard Widmark plays the murder victim - in my opinion, a film that David Suchet's version could not have hoped to top as I paid no attention at all to Ratchett in Suchet's version - shows this.
I wondered why I was so taken by the murder victim in an Agatha Christie mystery - a film I had seen dozen of times without knowing that Richard Widmark was a movie star.
Then I saw R.W. in Yellow Sky opposite Gregory Peck and could not take my eyes off of Widmark. So I looked his career up and realized I already knew who he was.
That is when I became a Richard Widmark fan.