FredCDobbs

"Safe In Hell" is pre-code with Nina Mae. She plays a South American hotel manager and she acts like a normal person. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022335/ The basic story in this rare film -- about various criminals from around the world hiding out in a South American town -- is used in the 1977 film "Sorcerer". A second theme in "Sorcerer" is based on the French film "The Wages of Fear".

TCM had a pretty good black film festival this past summer. I hope they have it again next year. Also, you might want to watch for some British Paul Robeson movies and some French Josephine Baker films that TCM occasionally shows. They are the stars of those films. Also, ?Hallelujah? is a pretty good all-black film that TCM shows. Nina Mae McKinney and Danliel Haynes are outstanding in this film. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019959/

> Fred, how old is the film you're thinking of? Black > and white or color? Part of the plot is like that of > "Von Ryan's Express," except that film involved Italy > instead of Holland. I think the film I'm thinking about is B&W and British. But Von Ryan's Express sounds like the same basic story. It was supposed to be a true WW II story. The one I saw took place in Holland. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059885/

Our wording was quite similar, huh. You must have been reading my mind.

Hey! Dang! You beat me by 2 seconds!

You might be thinking about "Second Chance" with Linda Darnell.

Both of these movies are pretty good. Spiral Staircase is a mystery noir, and Garden of Allah is a rare old color film with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer, Arabic type film.

> > I guess I have a funny attitude toward Shane. It's > > not a movie I would want to watch once a year. > Maybe > > once every 5 years would be ok. But everytime I > watch > > it, I think it's great. > > Life is too short to wait 5 years to watch anything > again............ LOL Oh, Geeze, I didn't think of that! I'd better start watching it every year now!

> Shane = excellent acting - not one of my favorite > films though. I guess I have a funny attitude toward Shane. It's not a movie I would want to watch once a year. Maybe once every 5 years would be ok. But everytime I watch it, I think it's great. I think I can't watch it often because I anticipate what's going to happen later in the film and I remember it. But after about 5 years I tend to forget all the details, so it's like a fresh new film for me every 5 years.

> By the way, I thought the Tetons almost overwhelmed > the movie. Every time the mountains appeared I > thought, "wow...such beautiful peaks." Then, > materialist that I am and knowing something about > Jackson Hole real estate prices...I thought, "that > little bit of Starrett land is probably worth two > million dollars today...with, or without, the > shack." Yep, out here in the West some of the most valuable land is on Indian reservations. There are many million dollar houses around old Santa Fe and in small towns no one has ever heard of.

> Then you probably also missed the 1950s silver > airstream trailer that glides past in the distant > background below the Tetons as Shane rides up to the > Starrett homestead for the first time (it's so small > that it can't be seen on television; only a full 35mm > projected image yields this little bit of the modern > world's intrusion). Yes I missed that. I'll have to study the film again. I wish they had left all the old buildings in place.

Excellent point. Good photo. I think some people who worked on the film must have studied old photos of Western pioneer ladies, because of the drab costumes and I think all the ladies in the Shane film looked fairly old, which generally was the way the pioneer mothers looked in 19th Century photos. It is the young girls in "7 Brides for 7 Brothers" that is wrong, not the ladies in "Shane."

> The same thing has happened in many modern movies. > > > Not a good thing to teach kids and teenagers in the > TV audience. > > I'm curious, Fred. Do you actually think evil deed > do'ers in the U.S. get punished? Yes, but there are more criminals and more criminal teens now than when I was a kid and a teenager. We didn't have dozens of serial killers running around in the 1950s. We had basically one cross-country killer couple in the whole 1950s and that was Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend. Now we have several a year in this country. We didn't have child kidnappings then like we do now. We didn't have to carry guns on cross-country trips or on camping trips in the '50s to protect ourselves, but now everyone should carry one. We had such a small "gang" problem in the US in the '50s, Hollywood make a musical out of it -- Westside Story -- and the big deal in that film was that just one young guy got shot and there was just one gun at the gang fight. But in L.A. today, young gang guys get shot every day. Message was edited by: FredCDobbs

> Why did Elisha Cook Jr's character only draw his gun > halfway on Palance? He supposedly fought for the > South, was he lying about that, and froze when he > really had to kill a man? That scene with with the way Cook drew his gun was remarkable. I?ve never seen that in a Western before. The guy got really mad, pulled his gun, and then he realized he had been taken advantage of by a real gunfighter, but by then it was too late. I liked that brief scene with Ben Johnson near the end, where he went to warn Shane and they became pals at the end.

One of my favorite modern films is "Wag the Dog." I think it was absolutely brilliant and very funny, an extremely clever film. I like the new Titanic too. Back to the Future is a very good film, but I've seen it so many times on TV, I'm no longer interested in it. Jurassic Part #1 was really good. Jackie Brown is an unusual modern "cult" type film which I've seen many times. I like the characters. They seem so real to me. But, mostly, I like the older films, and I see many of them often, such as The Third Man and Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

> First Class is fine when everything goes smoothly and > you like to be first off the plane when it arrives at > the gate, but if you're afraid to fly, you're best > advised to listen to an old National Transportation > Safety Board official who once remakerd: > > "We've never had one go in (meaning crash) > tail-first." I've flown in every area of a plane, depending on where the most survivors were located in the last crash I heard about. I like the tail the best, because it's supposed to be the safest part. However, when I rode in the tail of a giant 747, I could see the entire rest of the airplane warping up and down at different rates. The front and tail would dip down while the center was going up, and the center went down when the front and tail was going up. I never realized that a big plane would warp so much while in flight. I expected it to rip apart right in the middle. The smaller DC-3 was much tighter. The whole plane went up and down all in one piece. But with the giant wings I felt that it could land ok with no engines. To take off, the pilot had to dip the nose down first, to get the tail up off the ground, then he had to pull up slowly so the whole plane would get off the ground without the tail wheel hitting the ground. And when it got up and banked, it could bank left or right at about 45 degrees. I'd be looking out the window almost straight down. But the real thrill was the Goodyear Blimp, which I got to ride around 1964. Strange experience. The gondola was all wood like a 19th Century boat, and the windows raised up like a house window. I could stick my head out a window and look straight down. No noise at all. The engines were way in the back. We just floated around for a while.

I got to ride First Class one time. They ran out of seats in coach, and they put me in First Class. The seats are much wider, free champaign, better food. And. lol, we arrived before coach arrived.

Lol. There is some really good directing, photography, and editing in this film. Whoever handled the deer did a great job. Did you see the way the various people were looking around at each other when Ryker was lecturing Mr. Starrett during the night scene? When Shane and Jack Wilson were checking each other out? That took very skillful planning and really good editing. The color is very good too. Note the drab clothes of the farmers? This was something that made the film seem more realistic, without the bright colors of usual Technicolor, except for the blue color of the mountains and the sky.

It was fun. A nice trip back to the mid-'50s.

Thanks for the information.

That sounds about right.

Shane was filmed at the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. http://employees.oxy.edu/jerry/gteton.htm

Shane just started. The color is great. I wonder how they got that deer to act like that?

> Technically, the "old B&W show" aired one episode in > color, "The Big Little Jesus," but it apparently > survives only in B&W. I think it's among the various > PD episodes floating about today. I saw that episode when it was first aired. We got our first TV back in 1953. But I can't remember why the kid took the statue.

> The odds of being killed during a scheduled airline > flight are about one per million--nearly four times > greater than the odds of being killed in an > automobile ride. But most car trips are for far fewer > miles. Per passenger mile an automobile ride is 10 > times more likely to result in fatality than an > airplane journey. Statistics don?t mean a danged thing when I?m up in one of those aluminum coffins and the plane is bouncing around while the pilot is trying to find his way through the thunderstorms and clouds so he can miss the mountain that is on the West side of the Tegucigalpa airport while he?s trying to avoid the sheer cliff drop-off on the East end of the runway.