FredCDobbs

> That's interesting. I guess everyone is looking for > the secret to a Happy Marriage, right.... Ha. I think a lot of girls are looking for a movie they hope will teach them how to train their husbands to be like pet dogs. This is just a hunch. I?ve got no proof. But it is unusual that this movie has had so many requests from females, and the requests have always been about the ?how to train your husband like a dog? issue. Not about the stars, not about the other points in the movie, not about the ending, not about the romance... just the part about how to train a husband like a dog.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044789/

I would imagine there have been a lot of gangsters called "****" over the years.

Yes, I love the old recordings. I started a collection of old 78s back in the late '50s. I started with the Carter Family and Jimmy Rogers and then Vernon Dalhart.

woff woff... grrrrr.... bow wow

Ha, I beat you by 5 seconds, and I had to look it up all over again. But what I did was start a thread on it some time back, so all I have to do is type in a keyword and up pops the thread. More people seem to ask about this movie than any other in the history of movies.

"If a Man Answers" 1962 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056093/

bump

AGGGGHHHHH! The "How to train your dog" question again!

I'm sure glad it was in B&W. That helps make it a good film.

TCM shows this about once a year. I think it is one of the few modern clasics.

Hey!

Paper Moon http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070510/

I'm bringing this thread back up to the top to let young people know some background about "The Manchurian Candidate" movie. See my post just below. This is based on a supposition that the "Red" Chinese were using drugs to brainwash American soldiers captured during the Korean War. ?Manchurian Candidate? Background Info "I thought some of you younger movie fans might be interested in learning about the background information that led up to the novel and the movie ?The Manchurian Candidate?. During WW II the American OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) learned that both Russia and Germany had developed drugs that were designed to induce captured soldiers and spies to talk freely and reveal whatever military secrets they had. When the CIA was formed in the late 1940s, a division of that agency tried to keep track of the latest developments of drug experimentation on humans by both the Russians and then later by the emerging Communist government in China. After the Korean war ended in 1953, 21 young American soldiers who had been prisoners of war in North Korea refused to return to the United States, and they went to live in Communist China. A long series of newspaper and magazine articles were written about these soldiers, and the media term ?brainwashing? was first proposed by newspaper reporters. The speculation was that the Chinese, who had helped North Korea during the Korean war, had developed a method of ?brainwashing? the American soldiers by means of hypnotism, psychological conditioning, and the use of some unknown drugs, so that they wanted to become Communists and not return to the United States. As a kid I remember seeing films of the 21 American soldiers in the newsreels in theaters, and I remember seeing them acting and looking a little odd and peculiar in the films. They had odd expressions on their faces and they seemed a little dazed. I remember some adults talking about the soldiers looking ?doped up? when they appeared in the newsreels. Just a few years after this series of events, the CIA began to experiment with the drug LSD, trying to find out if it could be used by the US as some kind of brainwashing tool that the CIA could used on Communist spies and agents. A few American universities were used to test the effects of LSD on various volunteers, as part of a government research project, and eventually the word got out in the American media about the strange effects of the drug on the human mind. Eventually and ironically, LSD began to be thought of among some university intellectuals not as a ?brainwashing tool? but as an intellectual?s ?recreation drug?. The very first LSD movie was ?The Tingler?, with Vincent Price, released in 1959. In the early 1960s there was an LSD episode of the TV series ?Route 66?, and various national magazines wrote articles about the drug. LSD use eventually became a fad among hippies in the late 1960s, until many of them finally had enough bad experiences with the drug, they gradually stopped using it. In 1962 the ?The Manchurian Candidate? novel was published, in which it was speculated that maybe the Chinese brainwashing techniques had been developed so much and were so advanced that perhaps the Chinese could gain such complete control over captured American soldiers that they could ?program? them to return home, act normal, and commit political assassinations in the United States without their own knowledge. In the movie, the disorienting scenes of the ladies garden club meeting, inter-cut with scenes of the Communist China brainwashing lecture, were designed to not only shock the movie audience but to show how well the young American soldiers were brainwashed, so that they thought they were at a ladies garden club meeting while they were actually at a Communist brainwashing seminar. The nightmares later experienced by Frank Sinatra in the film, in which he remembered a little of the seminar, was supposed to represent some of the defects in the Chinese brainwashing technique, and some flaws in it. After the movie came out, and after Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy a year later in Dallas, many people speculated that Oswald had been some kind of ?Manchurian Candidate? type of brainwashed character who had been ?programmed? to kill Kennedy while he had lived in the Soviet Union earlier in the 1960s. Some modern leftist conspiracy theories claim the CIA finally developed a ?Manchurian Candidate? brainwashing technique as a tool for political assassinations. Robert Osborne has often said on TCM that Frank Sinatra was so upset with the Kennedy assassination, and he always believed that the movie had something to do with encouraging or enticing Oswald to shoot Kennedy, Sinatra was able to have the movie pulled from distribution for more than three decades after the 1963 assassination. There was a long time when this film was not available in theaters, on tape, or on television. Since there never have been any major key political assassinations since the Kennedy murder, media people have come to believe that there is no such ?Manchurian Candidate? brainwashing technique that has been developed by any government, and that lower-level political assassinations in recent years have been the result of various random ?crackpots? going nuts and shooting someone for their own crackpot reasons. Here?s an article about the 21 American soldiers that did not return from Communist China after the Korean war:" http://www.aiipowmia.com/koreacw/zweiback21.html

Thanks kyle. This should help me avoid the 21st Century entirely.

I prefer the longer version. I can?t think of anything that should or could be cut from the longer version. I?ve heard that the shorter version doesn?t have a few seconds of the nightclub strip dance in it, but I can?t think of anything else missing. I saw the US version about 15 years ago and it had Joseph Cotten giving the narrated introduction at the beginning of the film. But as for what was missing, I don?t recall.

I don't know if it was a book or not. Also known as "Reign of Terror" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041796/ A French Revolution Noir.

Are you talking about the "Third" man, or the "Thin" man?

> I don't question the film. I believe I made several > statements to the contrary. Films are like any other > art--open to many interpetations. > > Some people will see one theme in a movie while > another person will see things entirely differently. > I offer my views as just that--my interpetation of > the film. If someone does not see things my way > that's OK. You are right about that and that's a good point. For me, the movie puts me to sleep after about 10 minutes. If I want to hear people talk about other people and about their own problems, I'll go to work or get together with some of my friends.

He told me that he was living in Seattle or some place north of LA when he was about to turn 20. He said he and a brother or a cousin discussed future careers and they decided to go to Hollywood to see if they could get into the movies as actors. He said he went around to the studios and no one needed him, but one studio (I think Warner Brothers) just happened to need someone who could do voices for cartoons, so they did a test with him. He said he didn't know he could do voices for cartoons. He said he had never thought about it before. But he did some funny voices for them and was hired.

> The majority of Mel Blanc's career was doing all the > voices in the Warner Bros. Cartoons. I met Mel back in the late '70s. I did an interview with him for a CB radio magazine. He used to go on the air and talk to people around LA and tourists driving through town. He would do his Warner Brothers cartoon voices. People said he was very good and sounded just like the characters. When he told them he WAS the characters, they didn't believe him. He was a very nice guy and had hundreds of old stories about Hollywood.

> "I'm a Medford Man. Medford Oregon." > > -- Jackson (Hall) in DOUBLE INDEMNITY > > And Hall was the sour studio executive, Mr. Hadrian, > in Preston Sturges's incomparable SULLIVAN'S > TRAVELS, and Jack McCall, the weasely assassin of > Wild Bill Hickok in DeMille's THE PLAINSMAN. > > Yes, he was a splendid, versatile actor. > > It's interesting that Hall's character, Mr Boot, > performs the same basic function in Wilder's ACE > IN THE HOLE -- the basically incorruptible moral > yardstick against which all other characters are > measured -- as Edward G. Robinson's Barton Keyes does > in the director's DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Wilder > and his co-writers (and James M. Cain) realized that > a reader's or viewer's notions of morality are too > subjective and fluid for them to perform this > function themselves; consequently, characters such as > Keyes and Boot are necessary to lay down the ethical > framework, and draw moral lines in the sand, that men > like Walter Neff and Chuck Tatum then cross on their > inevitable path to oblivion. Good point. This is one of the reasons for the Hays Code. Many films in the late '20s and early '30s had no moral yardstick and as a result the themes were drifting toward murder, corruption, and prostitution, with no punishment for the guilty. The same thing has happened in many modern movies. I saw a recent BBC television production of "Rebecca" in which Mr. DeWinter admits to the new Mrs. DeWinter that he murdered his first wife because she was no danged good. So Mr. and Mrs. DeWinter successfully go through the rest of the film covering up his murder, and they get away with it. Not a good thing to teach kids and teenagers in the TV audience.

That sounds a little like "Leave Her to Heaven" (1945) http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0037865/ With Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde. The crazy lady is the guy's wife. They live in a cabin in the woods near a big lake and they have to get there by a small motor boat. The lady is jealous of all her husband's friends, so she kills herself and set it up so that her husband will be blamed. He goes to jail for some time and is then released.

I finally solved a mystery tonight that I had beed wondering about for years. A very good old actor played the Gowrie father in "Intruder in the Dust". He was the mean old **** man, and in the film he really looked like a many old **** man. I didn't recognize him but he seemed like an accomplished actor. In the film he has only one arm. I don't know if they hid his missing arm or if he really did lose it in an operation. Anyway, there were several Gowries listed in the film, and I didn't recognize the names of any of the actors who played them. Tonight I saw the actor who played the newspaper publisher, Jacob Boot, in "The Big Carnival." In this film the actor put on a hat in a certain way, and then I recognized him as the guy who played the father, Nub Gowrie, in "Intruder in the Dust." This actor, Porter Hall, played the guilty man in "the Thin Man". He was in many mystery films in the 1930s. He was Bette Davis' father in "The Petrified Forest." This guy was really a great actor. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0356004/

I swear I?ve seen variations on this film before. The gangland doctor, the hero fed going to prison to get in with the gang. The crook?s sister, the rain storm, etc., and especially the elevator for the gangster?s car in the hide-out. But I don?t remember seeing it with Chester Morris. Did Cagney do one like this?