FredCDobbs

I read somewhere that ?The Producers? is supposed to be a ?comedy? film.

I have Direct TV satellite service in the US and it's the same as having cable. They had to put up a small dish antenna in my yard and aim it South-East. But sometimes they can attach it to the side or the roof of a house. The dish is about 16 inches wide (diameter). The cable from the dish runs into my house where there is a control box that sits on top of my TV. The service is about $50 a month, and I think that installation now is free or not very expensive. I can record off of it just like recording off of cable, and the quality is very good. http://www.starchoice.com/english/default_new.asp

Hero's Island (1962) Indentured servants colonizing a Carolina island fight off rival settlers with the help of a notorious pirate. Cast: James Mason, Neville Brand, Rip Torn. Dir: Leslie Stevens. C-94 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format

Could it be "Kismet" 1944? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036984/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kismet_%281944_film%29

So she drove him to do it, huh?

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (with Tommy Kelly) 1938 in color: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029844/ Huckleberry Finn (with Mickey Rooney) 1939 B&W: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031020/

This looked like a 16 mm print to me. If so, that means it was printed to show on television years ago or for rentals to movie clubs. If it was shown on TV in the old days, it could have been cut down to make it fit into a 1 hour time slot. There may be several 16 mm prints of different lengths available of this film.

Funny YouTube version:

Dang! What intellectuals we have here on this thread! Grimes, I like your analysis of the three women. Now I know what Deborah Kerr was for in the film. Shannon could have easily replaced her old grandfather and gone traveling around the world with her. But it looks like he wound up with Ava. After all, she said she could ?get him up? that steep flight of stairs. ?Don?t worry, I?ll get you up,? she said in the last line of the film, just after Shannon had expressed a concern that he was too old and worn out to stay there with her and help her run the hotel. She really loved the guy and was actually just the right combination of the other two women.

In the movie, David told the doctor about an idea he had about how everyone should wear a device that received radio signals from some central location that would tell them the exact time where ever they are. There are such watches and clocks now that receive radio signals from atomic clocks located in Boulder Colorado. Europe has their own transmitter too. I have one of them.

I think what you are calling the cemetary is actually the culvert scene. The girl is in a dry wash under a railroad track. The film takes place in the Southwest US, and I live in the Southwest US. Regarding this movie, that's about like living on Skull Island before Kong left it, because we do have big cats out here that occasionally attack people. Sometimes they kill people. Going outdoors at night in a rural cat area is verrrry spooky out here, especially if I've seen any of the cat movies recently. A "dry wash" is basically a dry creek-like path that fills up rapidly with water whenever it rains out here, which is only a few times a year. Most of the year the "wash" is dry and can be used as a footpath.

Tell me what part went over your head and I'll explain it in more simple terms.

Seems to me that the main plot is about Shannon who once was a preacher but he has lost the ?calling? (in a way similar to how Preacher Casey lost the calling in ?The Grapes of Wrath?). Maybe I should say that both Shannon and Casey lost the formal official and disciplined denominational ?direction?, but not necessarily the basic fundamental ?calling? (the desire to be a preacher), since, in their own ways, they tended to retain a considerable amount of religion-based human values and they tended to preach a lot everywhere they went. Their main weakness seems to have been women. (?I wound up lovin? ?em,? said Casey, and Shannon confessed to having a similar problem.) Shannon felt guilty about it and he felt lost.... what else can a preacher do for a living while still working on some kind of church-related business? He didn?t seem to want to leave the church, and he seemed to try to fight his problem, but it was too much for him, so he still felt guilty about lusting after women... especially young church women, and that?s a critical time in his life when we meet up with him in the film. That?s why he was thinking about, ?Making that long swim to China.? (Of course he would not be able to actually reach China or return to shore, so the ?long swim? was a euphemism for suicide.) The leader of the church bus group, Judith Fellowes, is supposed to be a psychologically suppressed lesbian, subconsciously lusting after Sue Lyon, which is revealed by an insulting remark made to her by Maxine (Ava Gardner) toward the end of the movie. Maxine (and Tennessee Williams) imply, through the crudest of amateur pseudo-Freudianisms) that Fellowes is ?one? but she doesn?t know it. Fellowes senses some kind of insult in the remark, but she doesn?t know what it is, so she turns to Shannon and asks him what Maxine is talking about. But Shannon keeps the secret. I think this bit was a cheap salacious trick (one of many in the film) used by Tennessee Williams just to attract some favorable hip modern reviews for his play. Part of the big fun of going to a Tennessee Williams play or movie back in those days was to try to figure out all the Freudianly-hip ?secret meaning? of much of the dialogue. Inventing new pseudo-Freudianisms was the big rage among college psychology students back in the ?40s through the ?60s, and it was a common script tool of Alfred Hitchcock and other directors, especially in the 1940s and ?50s. Part of the fun of watching a Williams play or film was trying to decipher the veiled dialogue in a search of hidden meaning or double entendre. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre For example, in ?Iguana? did you catch the double meaning of what Maxine (Ava) said after she had asked Shannon to become a partner with her at the hotel and after he told her he would have a lot of trouble getting up the long flight of steps? As far as the Sue Lyon character is concerned, she was added to the mix just as a temptress to torment Shannon at a time when he was about to go completely berserk with depression and mental conflict, and she did a good job of that. Frankly, I didn?t get the Deborah Kerr character at all, and I?d like to read someone else?s opinion about her. The significance of the ?iguana? in the story has to do with a rumor that went around in newspaper stories and reviews shortly after the film was released. The rumor was that iguanas mate, at night, only one time in their lives.

Lol, yeah. Well, maybe ?fishing trauma in Montana? was what I thinking about when I watched the movie. Fishing-reel trauma. My life in Montana was filled with tangled up fishing lines, hopelessly tangled on the old-fashioned type of reels. Back in ?49, my dad bought a new fishing rod that had an old-fashioned type of reel on it. Not the new ?no tangle? kind. Not for fly fishing either. Rainbow trout can be caught with a regular rod and reel as long as the last 15 or so feet of line is clear and has a fly on the end of it. Casting using one of these reels was an art-form too. Anyway, I fiddled around with it in his office one day and I got the line all tangled up on the reel. That was back before the no-tangle kind of reel became popular, the kind with the closed front with the line coming out of a hole in the front. This was an old open-reel kind, the kind that often got the line tangled up. So my dad had to spend the rest of the day trying to untangle the line. Then there was the time we went fishing outside of Cut Bank one winter. Cut Bank is just south of the Canadian border and just east of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. (I remember wondering, as a kid, why an individual Blackfeet Indian wasn?t called a ?Blackfoot?, rather than a ?Blackfeet?.) It was as cold as the North Pole that winter, and nobody had heard about ?global warming? back in those days. It was the weekend and some men and wives and kids from the same company were on a fishing outing up in the mountains. It was so cold, the heaters on our cars didn?t work. They were blowing cold air. Some of the men started a large camp fire, but that didn?t work either.... we burned on one side and froze on the other. We had to keep turning around and around to try to stay warm, and that made some of us dizzy. So finally we all gave up and left and waited for a warmer day to go fishing. Eventually, we did manage to catch a few rainbow trout on other trips to the mountain rivers. But we often came home with tangled up fishing lines.

Every now and then, somewhere inside my head, I keep hearing some guy yelling, "I'M CHARLES FOSTER KANE!!"

Yes, I really would like a serious answer. I find the film very boring. A little sex and violence and alcohol is thrown in every half hour or so, to try to wake up the audience. The brother dies off-screen to try to give the audience some feeling of drama and tragedy. But overall, the film puts me to sleep. Seems to me that it was only an antique show, as if the producers main goal was to try to include as many 1920 antiques as they could round up in Hollywood. I lived in Montana (Billings and Hardin) a couple of years back in the late '40s, and I recall more drama in real life than was in this movie, such as the very cold winters where the cows froze on the hoof, while standing up. And all the Indians who were still bragging about beating Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. And big rodeos where really old Indians were introduced who claimed to have been in the Battle as teenagers. And an occasional armed robbery by cross-country robbers. An occasional murder by an angry husband who caught his wife with another man. Avalanches, landslides, car wrecks. Small one-ring circuses coming to town and setting up a small tent in a cow pasture. Traveling vaudeville shows that performed in small tents in the same cow pasture. Occasionally one black student in a school filled with white kids. Halloween nights with adventures similar to the ones in "Meet Me in St. Louis". Occasionally a big movie star came to town -- like Lash La Rue -- and they would be in a big parade in a small town. Boys wondering what the rest of the world was like outside of Montana. Girls wondering what it would be like to be married and have babies. ===== PS: If you like it, that's ok. Apparently some people love this film because it presents small town life in the old days.

Trivia quiz: What do people see in "A River Runs Through It"? Why was the film made? What's it about?

I don't remember the name of the show that was an hour. The Gilliam series is available on two tapes, a total of 20 hours. http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1802816651/info

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHZ2qWTDsw4

I don't remember the length of them, at least an hour. They might have been cut down because I remember Killiam narrating what seemed like bridges or gaps in the films. I think the show might have been called Movie Museum. The series is out on two video tapes. Hmm, it could have been a half hour show, with 2-part specials for Birth of a Nation and one or two other long films.

When you talk about two women in a single sentence, and then refer to ?her? and ?she?, you need to tell us which of the two women you are talking about when you say ?her? and ?she?. The same goes when you talk about two men in one sentence and you say ?he? and ?him?. Let me see if I have the story straight.... The older woman has a younger friend who is a girl. The older woman is married but also has an older boyfriend. The younger girl becomes engaged to the older man (the boyfriend of the older married woman). The older woman and older man still love each other. The older woman doesn?t want her own husband to find out about her close relationship with the other man. The husband and the younger girl both find out about the relationship between the husband's wife and the other older man. The married woman asks for a divorce, but her husband won?t give her one. The husband threatened the other older man to stay away from him (to stay away from the husband). The older man (the lover of the married woman and fianc? of the young girl) was hit by a car. Is that about right?

Paul Killiam had a syndicated program on TV back in the 1950s that showed feature length silent films. He narrated the shorter groups of films.

>Bela Lugosi scenes from SCARED TO DEATH on YouTube, but I'm having trouble posting that link here for the video. Just post a link:

http://www.scifilm.org/tv/tz/twilightzone3-19.html

Photos: http://www.zianet.com/jjohnson/wt4a.htm