FredCDobbs

Several great movies coming up today, starting with: ?Viva Villa? 4:15 PM Eastern Time and ?Cleopatra? (1934) 6:15 Eastern Time

Dum, dum-de dum, dum-de dum... do not for-stake me oooh ma dar-linn... dum-de dum, dum-de dum.... not on this our wedddin? day.... dum-de dum, dum-de dum......

Yes Charlie!

How about ?The Divorce? with Norma Shearer. She learns that her husband did it with another girl, so her husband goes out of town and Norma does it with Robert Montgomery.

"Can you last 10 more days?" I think so. I'll be an expert on Nazi jets and rocket planes by then, and crop circles, and area 51. I learned all about Japanese jets tonight.

The Professionals Airport Bye Bye Birdie Looks like it is ?documentary night? on the National Geographic Channel for me.

Mr. Horse? Mr. Ed? Charlie Horse?

There is a small town in Northeastern Wyoming named Sundance. It's not too far from Deadwood, South Dakota.

?You may know about parts of the Appalachian south which were strongly pro-Union during the Civil War? There were areas of the South where there were large pockets of war resistors. They didn?t fight for the North or the South. They just wanted to be left alone. There was a group like this in Southeastern Mississippi. Hollywood made a film about them titled ?Tap Roots? with Van Heflin and Susan Hayward. The film mentions the actual towns and county areas where those people lived. I knew some of their descendants. They still live there.

?Then of course there was the infamous case of the most famous Jew of the south Leo Frank in Georgia. Has that story ever been made into a film? Should be but it is too sad a story to tell...? Yes, they made a fiction film around this basic plot. It?s called ?They Won?t Forget?. It is an excellent film but a sad one. They changed the Jewish character to just being a ?Yankee?.

Well, I can just guess... my opinion is something like why some younger people don?t care for antiques. They want modern cutting-edge electronic stuff, not old-fashioned mechanical stuff. They want shiny new plastic, not old wood. They like big-screen color TVs and wide-screen color movies, not old black and white movies. But that?s often the way it is with a lot of kids, especially during the past hundred or more years. I first learned about classic old movies from my father, starting in the late ?40s. He worked as a projectionist?s assistant in the late ?20s and early ?30s. He started telling me about ?King Kong? and other great films before I ever saw them. Then some of them came to local theaters as re-releases when I was a kid, and others turned up on the ?late show? on local TV stations in the 1950s. I saw ?King Kong? in a theater in a little town in Alabama in 1952. There was a guy in Chicago in the ?50s who collected and restored old silent films. His name was.... Gilliland or something like that. He rented his silent film series to local TV stations, and some of them had a narration track that explained some technical stuff about the films. That?s how I first saw ?The Great Train Robbery? around 1958 and ?Birth of a Nation.? In school we had some history lessons about the early 20th Century, the WW I era, the ?20s and prohibition, and the depression in the ?30s and WW II in the ?40s. Old films seemed like a natural way to learn more about the history of those decades.

Yes, there is some Klezmer music that sounds like old Dixieland Jazz and some that sounds like Zydeco and bluegrass. There is some Tex-Mex that is definitely patterned after Cajun music. I?ve got some tapes off of Univision Mexican TV that has a Tex-Mex band that plays Cajun music in Mexico. Among Cajun music, regular ?Cajun music? tends to be white oriented while ?Zydeco? tends to be black oriented. (Them Cajuns from Canada got around when they moved into South Louisiana.) I don?t care a whole lot for modern Tex-Mex, but I do go for the old corridos and ranchers from the 1930s, ?40s and earlier. There is a peculiar type of ?Mexican? music from the ?30s, which sounds a lot like French cabaret music from the ?20s, and I learned that both are actually supposed to be based on Portuguese ?fado? style folk music. Here is a link to some Klezmer music from the Arhoolie record company: http://www.arhoolie.com/titles/309.shtml Check out the other sections on that website. One time I ordered a Russian Jazz record from a book store in Chicago. It was the Leningrad Dixieland Jazz Band, http://www.ldljazz.com/ and it contained some ?folk music? on it that sounded a lot like American bluegrass. Back in the 1980s I did a lot of traveling in the South and interviewed a lot of people about their family history. It turns out that ?****? are NOT all ?Scotch/Irish/English?, they are from everywhere in Europe. The immigrants with the most ?foreign sounding? names Anglicized their names when they came over here and moved in to the South. So, it turns out that a lot of the famous ?****? families from the Deep South actually had ancestors who came from Eastern Europe, Russia, Germany, France, Greece, and even Spain, (in addition to Scotland, Ireland, and England), and some of the Southern country music comes from old European folk music of various countries. And I suspect that the ?mandolin ?in old country music bands could have originally been a balalaika from Russia, since some Russian folk music tends to resemble Bluegrass music more than Italian folk music does. Another little known fact is that some Jewish families moved into the South to set up stores. They were all over the place well before the Civil War. And without synagogues being available everywhere, some of the family members gradually lost interest in keeping the old ?traditions,? and some of them became **** like everyone else. I was doing a news report in a little Pentecostal church in Mississippi one time and I was introduced to one of their new church members who they told me was a real ?Hebrew.?

Dang! I got caught in a parallel universe! Anyway, both of them do play on TCM from time to time.

Yes, both of them play on TCM every couple of years.

Yes they both play on TCM every couple of years.

Thanks, I forgot about her singing in "Lady on a Train." TCM has run Deanna Durbin festivals about every 4 or 5 years, showing a few of her films during each one.

I?m glad I taped that film. Yes I see Allen Ladd. That was an awful appearance in a film for him! He was very handsome, but they gave him a goofy part. LOL. And yes the Ritz Brothers were too silly.

TCM has aired her silents: Queen Kelly, Sadie Thompson, and some film about her and other rich people being marooned on a desert island.

Thanks! Let us know the quality of your copy after you've seen it.

I think you are right. The 14 year old kid next door refuses to watch any film that is in black and white. He refuses to watch my Tarzan movies. He wants color, lots of noise, cussin', murder, death, decapitation, explosions, more noise.

I like in the Nancy Drew series with Bonita Granville.

Who played the third man in ORSON WELLES' movie ?The Third Man??

What character is never seen in the film ?Rebecca??

?Question: What were the POW's forced to build in "The Bridge on the River Kwai?"? Uhh.... doh.... their self esteem? Their muscles? Friendly Japanese/American relations? A good marching tune that they could whistle while they worked?

Uhh.... Lassie comes home?