FredCDobbs

I like the first Maltese Falcon better than the Bogart one. It makes more sense, and the actors are very good.

I disliked that kid so much, I couldn't watch the whole movie. And I didn't tape it.

?I don't know why more participants don't feel free to do this;? Lol, because they can?t find the thread.

?Your idea regarding analysis (discussion) of film-noir movies after TCM broadcast? I like. I participate.? Ok. We?ll all have to watch and record a couple of specific films so we can study them and talk about them. I?ve got ?Confession of a Nazi Spy? on tape somewhere. I can?t find it right now. Speaking of harsh side lighting, I learned a long time ago (as a news cameraman) that I could make anyone look sinister by using a single light from a low angle in front of someone?s face. I used that kind of lighting on politicians I didn?t like. It gave them dark shadows around their chin, mouth, nose, and eyes. Ha ha ha! Also, I had a very wide angle lens, and it would distort faces if I moved in very close. It made noses and mouths bigger than normal. I used to use Dutch tilts in some of my news reports. They are very rare in news reports, but I see them every now and then on network TV news, maybe once ever five or so years. Whenever I see them, I figure that cameraman is also an old movie buff too. There?s another thing I learned from watching movies. If someone, especially a lady, is a little old or has a rough complexion, but they wanted to show her as being glamorous, they would use a ?diffusion filter? on her. This was placed over the camera lens. The earliest diffusion filters were made of Plexiglas. I learned how to improvise a diffusion filter. Any kind of cellophane will work. Take it off a package of cigarettes or candy, wrinkle it up, and put it front of the lens. It will soften any lines and imperfections in a person?s face, but without the audience noticing there is anything in front of the lens.

I wonder if Turner?s ?colorization? process could be used to add yellow, green, red, and deep blue to Trucolor films? There were a bunch of Roy Rogers films made with this 2-color process.

?Montana Belle?, showing on TCM right now, is in Trucolor, which was a 2-strip color process. Very interesting for a 1950 movie. It has blue-green and orange colors, but no solid yellows, greens, reds, or blues. By the way, ?white? people are not ?white?, they are ?orange.? Only color photographers seem to know this true fact of nature. So the skin tones are ok in ?Montana Belle?.

I was very lucky back in the late 1970s to do an interview with Mel Blanc for a magazine I worked for. Mel did the Bugs Bunny voice. He said when he was trying to work out the voice and give it a character, he thought of Humphrey Bogart and the New York district known as ?Hell?s Kitchen?. It produces people who have a certain tough-guy accent. He said he and Warner Brothers wanted Bugs to be a tough rabbit and not a wimpy one. Mel was a wonderful guy. I was a nobody reporter, but he treated me like I was a studio head.

?Fred, I of all people shouldn't, but I enjoy reading you talk of dames.? I don?t call them ?dames? in real life. They would slap my face if I did that. Rooney started low-key in the movie, but he soon got wound up the more trouble he got into. Some guys just don?t know when to leave ?dames? alone and go out with nice girls. Have you ever seen those MGM cartoons from the 1940s about the wolf dressed in a zuit suit, and his eyes bug out and his jaw drops whenever he sees a dame? That?s the way some guys are. That?s what we are thinking inside, even though we try to act cool and not let anyone know what we are thinking. But I knew a dame once who knew exactly what we were thinking. She used it to get out of us whatever she wanted. Like jewelry and fox coats, flowers and candy. I had to stop dating her after four years so I could finally pay off my large credit card debts.

path, what would you think of the idea of asking the TCM message board people to start a new main topic on the main board index called ?Great Movie Alert?, so we can all find it and see it every day?

I never can find "great movie alert" when I'm looking for it. I think we need a new main tread title on the main message board index called "Great Movie Alert" so we can all see it every day.

?Death of a Scoundrel? Coming up at 6 pm today Eastern time on TCM. A pretty good 2-hour mystery.

?Where the Sidewalk Ends? is a good film. I like films where a guy gets into trouble and spends the whole film trying to get himself out of it. There was an interesting noir film from the early ?50s with Mickey Rooney, in which he was a small-time guy in an auto repair shop. All he wanted was a date with a beautiful dame in the neighborhood, but she was expensive and he borrowed some money from his boss? cash register to take her out on a date. He was going to try to replace the money within a few days, but the boss found out the money was gone. Then the movie went into a whole series of disasters where Rooney took money from one guy to pay the previous guy, then he had to take more money from another guy to give to the last guy, and within a few days the cops were after him and he was wanted for murder and armed robbery. All because he just wanted a date with that one dame. I think the film was called ?Quicksand?. Not very well known, but quite interesting. I try to watch all film noirs (at least one time) that TCM airs. Then I keep tapes and DVDs of my favorites. I also have some on tape from the old AMC days and a few from Fox. ?Fallen Sparrow? is a good one that is shown on TCM. It?s about a WWII vet who is trying to track down a Nazi torturer hiding out in New York. John Garfield narrates quite a lot of that film, telling what he is thinking. I tend to like the ones that have a lot of narration by the hero. I don?t know why, but I tend to think (inside my own mind) in the film noir narration style. I don?t know if I was born that way or if I picked it up in my childhood from watching noir movies. If it is a natural tendency, I?ve been wondering if some noir screenwriters and directors have that mental trait too. Maybe that?s how and why they invented the style for the movies. Maybe the next time a good noir movie comes on TCM or a noir festival, we can start a thread to analyze the films. I can pass along some information about the photography and the lighting, since I was a documentary cameraman all my life. Maybe we could find a good psycho-analyst among us and he or she could tell us about the deep psychological meaning of some of the scenes. For example, in ?Stranger on the Third Floor?, the cameraman/lighting-technician used a set of devices that is placed in front of lights that cast specific types of shadows. In the film, the hero was often covered with these shadows when he went into the hallway of his apartment. They were supposed to look like shadows from the posts on his stairway railing, but they also looked like prison bars. Hitchcock sometimes used these kinds of shadow devices that resembled spider webs and the spider web shadow was cast upon the hero of the film. It didn?t look like a real spider web, but more like some kind of architectural feature on a house, such as the round wooden frame and braces of some kind of fancy window, but the shadow resembled a spider web. Other types of interesting shadows are shaped like people, but they are only shadows such as the kind we sometimes see if we hang up our coats in an unusual place in our house, then we wake up in the middle of the night and see the shadow of the coat and we think it?s a person inside our house. When we see these films listed to show on TCM, maybe we can start threads to alert everyone about them.

Would anyone like to talk about "Stranger on the Third Floor"?

Not often enough.

"Tarzan Triumphs"

?The Girl of the Golden West?, 1938, Janette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.

Ok, I found a listing that said it aired on Fox on Mon Feb 27 04:00P on Fox Movie Channel And will air again on: Thu Mar 23 04:00P on Fox Movie Channel I just saw a couple of minutes of it. Don Johnson was good, but I just couldn?t accept Jason Robards as a ?Big Daddy? type. When I watched the film I saw him as Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post trying to run a cotton plantation down in Mississippi.

CW, this film was on TV just a couple of weeks ago. I can't remember what channel. Maybe it will be shown again soon.

teds, I receive TCM over Direct TV satellite service and I never have a bad signal or out of synch sound.

"Tender Comrade"

If you don?t mind, give us your opinion of it. How would you describe it or review it?

Hi. Did you see the film?

?Stranger on the Third Floor? (1940) Has anyone here seen this film? I finally found my copy of it. It was shown on TCM back in the 1990s. This is often credited as being the first American ?film noir? movie. The mood is dark and the photography is in the 1940s noir style. In fact, it seems to be the first movie that was made in the American noir style. The film seems to be a result of a good collaboration between the screenwriter (Frank Partos), the director (Boris Ingster) and the chief cameraman (Nicholas Musuraca). All three were Europeans. The cameraman also worked on the films: ?Cat People? (1942), ?The Fallen Sparrow? (1943), ?The Seventh Victim? (1943), ?The Spiral Staircase? (1946), ?The Locket? (1946), ?Out of the Past? (1947), ?Blood on the Moon? (a film-noir western, 1948), ?Roadblock? (1951), ?Clash by Night? (1952), ?The Hitch-Hiker? (1953), and several well-known non-noir movies. His photography in ?Stranger on the Third Floor? (1940) was so unusual and surrealistic, filled with dark shadows, I?ve been thinking that maybe he is the one who started the new trend toward film noir style photography. I can?t think of any American 1930s film that uses such stark side-lighting with so many carefully-planned shadows. Regarding the script style, the film is filled with long segments narrated by the hero, who is falsely accused of a murder. The film also includes one of the best surrealistic dream sequences, which was perfectly carried out by the director, the screenwriter, and the cinematographer. I think we might want to request that TCM show this film again, and more often, maybe at least once a year, and certainly at the beginning of a film noir festival.

The channel on which you receive TCM depends on your own local cable or satellite system. TCM doesn't decide on the local channels where you receive it.

?How long would it take me to reach those magical numbers while discussing our common love for films ? What could possibly, we new people to the forum, add to the subject matter that hasn?t already been talked over before? Should we .. pack up and shut up?? No, of course not. There were so many films made and so many shown on TV, no one person could have seen them all, and you have probably seen many that others here have never seen. So just start talkin?. What?s your favorite kind of movie?