FredCDobbs

Hi, I almost never have any problems with Direct TV, except that they keep going up on their prices every couple of years. Plus I was paying extra for some channels, including Fox Movie Channel, then last year Fox went black and they want me to pay more money to get it again. A strong snow or rain will cause the picture to break up, but this is a phenomenon of EM radiation. That is, the TV signal can't get from the satellite to the antenna element of your outdoor dish. Your plastic dish has a metal parabolic reflector inside it, and the actual antenna is the little thing that sits up on an arm in the middle just above the dish. Snow on the dish and strong rains will cause the signal to be reflected away from the antenna. You can go out and scoop the snow off and you can wait for the rain to subside. This problem has to do with where the geo-stationary satellite is located, which is above the equator. Parabolic antennas in the US must aim toward the sky above the equator. This turns the dish antenna into a "scoop" or a "container" that catches the snow and rain.

French schedule: http://www.tcmcinema.fr/programme/index.html British/English schedule: http://www.tcmonline.co.uk/listings/ Spanish daily schedule: http://www.canaltcm.com/programacion/diaria Spanish weekly schedule: http://www.canaltcm.com/programacion/semanal

Welche Sprache h?ren Sie auf TCM Arena? Welche Sprache sehen Sie auf Untertitel auf TCM Arena?

Thanks for the information! I'll set my recorder for tonight.

> That's a good point about audiences back then not > being able to take constant danger. That makes sense. This type of all-thrills films like the Jurassic Park series gradually evolved in the '70s through the '90s. As an older guy, I don't really like all action all the time, but the kids seem to love it. For example, "Saving Private Ryan" seemed to have much more continuous battle action that most WW II war movies.

> it's > > so predictable and the characters are just > annoying. > > I think a lot of these "airplane in danger or > hijacked" movies spend way too much time on the > personal stories. Lol, what else is there to do on a 12 hour flight? Audiences in 1954 couldn't handle the plane almost crashing every minute during a 2 hour movie. The audience would just get up and walk out of the theater back then if they showed all-disaster movies like they do today. They needed about 10 minutes of personal stories, 2 minutes of near disaster, then 10 more minutes of personal stories, etc. Then the last 10 minutes of near disaster. What I wonder about is the very first movie that used this "personal stories" technique? Grand Hotel has that reputation, but I wonder if there were others before it? The German "Titanic" movie used the "Grand Hotel" technique, and so did most of the other Titanic movies.

> They look classier than today's planes though. I agree. I love the look of a two-engine DC 3. This airplane was used in a lot of movies in the late '30s and all through the '40s. Some of them are still flying as airlines and cargo planes in third-world countries. They are apparently easy to repair.

Those old prop planes were really slow. I flew on a few of them at the beginning of the jet era. They were noisy too. I flew on a DC 3 in the early '60s. Very primitive. One row of seats one the right side, and two on the left side. We had to walk up some short steps to get into the rear of the plane, we had to bend over so we wouldn't hit our heads on the top of the door opening, and then we had to walk up the center isle which was like a ramp going up a 20 degree grade. The noise was very loud and we couldn't talk much to each other. And it was so slow. That's why it had a big wing area. But it was fun.

I didn't mean to start a second thread on the same movie. You just beat me by a few seconds.

Many of the inside cabin shots are filmed from the right side, which shows the plane going in the correct direction. Maybe this director didn't believe in the right-left "rule" of photography.

> I'm watching it for the nostalgia factor. Love > looking at what planes used to look like - lots of > room, larger seats, etc. And flight attendants don't > dress as nice or treat passengers like that > anymore..... light your cigarette, feed you steak, > .... This was a big movie back in '54. Lots of publicity. The airlines hated it. According to the navigator, it takes them about 12 hours to fly from Hawaii to San Francisco.

The plane in "The High and the Mighty" is flying from Hawaii to San Francisco, so why is it flying right to left, with the left side of it lit by sunlight? See this and scroll down to this movie: http://www.moviemistakes.com/best1954

For oil movies I prefer "Boom Town".

I've never seen more than a couple of minutes of it at a time. I get it mixed up with Giant, which I've seen only a couple of minutes of.

I've never seen the film all the way through, but I remember some of the driving scenes.

Hmmm.... was that Lana Turner in Portrait in Black? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054197/

Mercedes McCambridge

"Grass" (1925) http://french.imdb.com/title/tt0015873/

> I looked forward to Bob Dorian's introductions (as I > do Robert Osborn's now), Yeah, me too. I'd like to see TCM hire Bob Dorian to do some intros. A lot of TCM films don't have intros, so they could work in Bob Dorian for some of them. I'd like to see Osborne and Dorian talk about movies together and also that Mankowitz boy too.

I think the change-over to wide screen was more sudden. I think most screens were wide by the late 1950s. I remember some people complaining about the screens of small theaters that had no room to make the screens any wider. So all they did was mask the top and bottom of their regular screen and show the movies in letterbox. People in small towns thought Cinemascope was a joke, since many of the little theaters actually had smaller pictures with the top and bottom of the screen missing.

That's an interesting question, but I don't know the answer. I recall that it was a gradual change-over during the 1950s and early '60s. I think most films were in color by the late '60s.

About 1-1/2 years ago TCM ran a Mexican film festival in the middle of the night. I was able to record only a few of them, and very few people actually got to see them because they were on so late. The best of the films need to be shown again and have an introduction by someone who knows something about Mexican films.

Uhh.... Are you an alien from Venus? Come to earth to try to conquer us men?

Uhh.... are you a militant feminist?

> > Oh, his remark was not in any way intended to be > > offensive. Not any more than calling a girl a > ?blonde > > bombshell? or a ?hot redheaded mama? or an ?Irish > > princess? or a ?China doll?. > > I didn't think that it was meant to be > offensive. > > I do believe that it is offensive, because > you're comparing a woman to something you eat.... Surely you are joking. Ha, ha, ha. A ?hot tamale? is a metaphor, just like ?blonde bombshell? and ?Mexican spitfire?. I don?t expect Jean Harlow to explode or Lupe Valez to spit out fire. Like the name of the Mexican town they were in.... ?Caliente?, which means ?hot? or ?warm?. And the hotel where she was dancing.... ?Hotel Agua Caliente? (Hotel Hot Water). She?s hot, hot, hot, get it?