FredCDobbs

So far, your clues have described a common plot of about 5,000 different movies made during the past century. In fact, this plot even goes back to some pre-Civil War plays. Ok, so I?ll guess ?Our American Cousin,? the play Lincoln was watching in Ford's Theater.

I think that was it. From 1934.

I spent most of my life in the Deep South... Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. I spent a couple of years in Montana and Nebraska in the late ?40s and I didn?t like the cold. Down in the South, I think I got to meet the real ?Big Daddy?, the guy Berl Ives played in ?Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,? and the guy Ed Bagley played in ?Sweet Bird of Youth.? He was Leander Perez, and he was the old-time political boss of Plaquemines Parish in South Louisiana. Just about every county in the South had it?s local ?political boss?, but Leander Perez was the most notorious of them all. Plus, Tennessee Williams would have known about him, since Williams lived in New Orleans a lot, and Perez was in the news there a lot. I often met some character types such as those in Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner books, plays, and movies. I?ve lived in a lot of other states, and actually those types of characters live all over the US. But there weren?t many writers like Williams and Faulkner who could write about them well. I got to visit Tennessee Williams? apartment on Royal Street one time back around 1964, during an ?open house?. But he wasn?t there. I filmed some stuff up at Oxford Mississippi for CBS, back in ?62 and for NBC in ?63. The place was just the same then as it was in the film ?Intruder in the Dust.? In fact, I got to visit a lot of places that were in movies, such as the ruins of ?Windsor?, South of Port Gibson, which were shown briefly in the film ?Raintree County.? Windsor was an old pre-War Greek Revival mansion that burned down before the War. I also visited Rodney, which was a little town on the River before the War and Mark Twain wrote about it. It could be seen from steamboats on the River before the river changed course. Also I was in Vicksburg and Natchez many times. Natchez under the Hill hasn?t changed much in 200 years, and it was used in a lot of movies because of its location on the river and its old buildings. When I was in New Orleans, I lived on Bourbon Street for more than a year. Wow, that was fun. I was in New Orleans when Steve McQueen and Tuesday Weld were making ?The Cincinnati Kid?. Also when Robert Redford was making ?This Property is Condemned.? I got to meet the chief cameraman, James Wong Howe, briefly. So, although it was always very hot and humid, I enjoyed living and working in the South.

jarhfive, There are a couple of ways to make the sky seem black on film. One is to use a certain kind of orthochromatic film that makes the blue sky photograph as very dark in B&W, and also a red filter can be used with panchromatic film. Leni, in her long TV interviews, said that she had no idea what the Nazis were going to do a few years later, and she said that her filming back in 1934 and ?36 was just like some Russian making a great film about an old Moscow Mayday parade, or an American making a great film about a 4th of July parade or an Olympics anywhere in the world. And I agree with her about that. Gosh, I?d hate to work for a bunch of Nazis. I worked with a lot of bosses in the TV and film business in the US who seemed like Nazis. One time I had to film some indoor close-up scenes of Warner von Braun, in New Orleans in 1964, when he was working for NASA and they were opening the new facility at Michoud, which was just outside of town. My bright movie light bothered his eyes and he scowled at me. That scared the heck out of me. I could just imagine him thinking, ?Twenty years ago I could have thrown you in a concentration camp for that!? Yikes! But I think Leni didn?t really know what was going to happen a few years later. And once it started to happen, no one inside the country could stop it without being killed or sent to a concentration camp. It was similar in Russia and China during the Communist years. I?m sure glad I grew up in the US. My bosses could fire me, but they couldn?t send me to a concentration camp. FredC.

"Gabriel Over the White House" was a politically significant film. It was made at a time when a lot of people in various states were clamoring for the federal government to become involved in national crime-fighting. That was back in the days when the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution were much stronger than they are today. Consequently, there weren?t very many federal crime laws, and each state was on its own concerning gang activity, bank robberies, and many other types of crime. That was before cops from one state could pursue criminals into another state. That?s why we see some old movies where the pursuing police stop at the state line and allow the fleeing bank robbers to get away. I read somewhere that the Gabriel film was scripted as a suggestion that the next President should assume more powers and take on the crime issue as a federal issue. That actually did happen with FDR, but he also had the help of Congress too, and that?s how we got our federal bank robbery and ?hot pursuit? laws. Ironically, some people today think that the feds have too much power and we should return to the old 9th and 10th Amendment days, when states had much more autonomous control over their own affairs. Another film to watch that has the strong ?federalization? message is ?Scarface?. This film calls for citizens to rise up and demand more federal control of firearms and the federal eradication of crime gangs. Along these lines, it is interesting to compare the movie ?Inherit the Wind? with the actual transcript of the John Scopes trial of 1925. In the movie, the William Jennings Bryan character is portrayed as ?a crazy fanatic?, but in the real trial transcript, it is clear that it was Clarence Darrow who was the fanatic. The Scopes trial represented an attempt by the ACLU to get a Supreme Court ruling that standardized all state school curricula around the country and to federalize the American state school system. The ACLU failed back in 1925, but they finally began to succeed in the 1960s and ?70s.

Sam, I saw 49th Parallel and I thought it was great. Was that an American-made movie?

That's what we need to do. We need to record the special series and trade our DVDs with each other. I'm trying now to record about 16 hours of Robert Montgomery movies. Why are they all shown at once like this,over night? I don't understand. Not many people are able to stay up all night so they can see all of them, and I don't know of any 16 hour recorders. That means MOST PEOPLE WON'T SEE MOST OF THEM, so why show them at all? They should be broken up in to 6-hour segments, shown over several nights, so that everyone can set their recorders to record them. I think it's really dumb to show 16 hours of them in a row, especially over night, and expect all people who want to see them, to be able to see all of them. So now I've got an 8hr VCR going and a 6 hour DVD. Plus I had to calculate my time and subtract 2 hours from all the New York times.

Maybe you're getting two or three film clips mixed up together. As far as I recall, "Stella" comes from Streetcar, "top of the world" comes from White Heat, and running in the snow (not rain) comes from It's a Wonderful Life. Running in the rain comes from a lot of movies.

Nope, it?s copyrighted. See this.... http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:mAuvw_TYf70J:www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.htm%22happybirthday%22+copyrighted&hl=en&lr=lang_en Also, I read a news report last year where some music company is trying to get money out of the Girl Scouts because they always sing favorite old folk songs whenever they have their national camp-out.

Thanks for the info. I think maybe there are more lawyers today.

Claudette Colbert in the milk-bath scene in ?The Sign of the Cross.? Yikes! Wow, what a dame!

Wasn?t it the second film in which Jane went swimming in the nude? I think that is aweful! I?ve watched the film dozens of times and I am always shocked, SHOCKED by it! I plan to watch it a few dozen more times. I think I'll go watch it right now.

I?ve heard that the copyright law has changed a lot during the past 30 years, and I?ve been wondering if there is now some way that old ?public domain? tunes can now be copyrighted by someone else. I recall that people used to sing ?Happy Birthday? and it appeared in movies for years, but by the 1980s it suddenly became copyrighted and now people have to pay for it to sing it or use it in movies. I wonder how this works? Maybe all the old ?public domain? music has been re-copyrighted. Anyone here know anything about this? Why can?t TCM spend a little money with their ?young composers? project, and get some old-time piano players to make up some general tunes, some general background music for some of the dead-track segments of some of the films such as ?The Great Train Robbery?? After viewing the film at least a dozen times back in the ?50s and ?60s with a piano-music background, I don?t understand how it can now turn up on a TV network with no sound track at all. There should be plenty of people who collect old out-of-copyright 78 rpm piano music from the teens and ?20s who could come up with some bg music for this film and to fill in the gaps in the 1929 Showboat film. I used to make TV documentaries, all my life, and I often used old ?78 rpm records as background music, where appropriate. For example, I did a lot of films in the rural South, showing old-timers building log cabins, riding horses, driving old cars, in old type boats, etc, and I used a lot of old out-of-copyright 78s for the background music. I didn?t have to pay some young whippersnapper a lot of money to write me a new full orchestra score.

I stayed up late last night to see the 1929 silent/sound version of Showboat, and I was surprised to find a long dead-track segment with no sound at all. A note at the start of the film said that part of the sound track has been lost for this film. This was a part-silent film with an orchestra in the background, with two full-sound sequences. The track was missing apparently from the second sound sequence. It sounded to me like the original track during all the movie was on a phonograph record rather than an optical track. I recall that back in the 1950s and ?60s, whenever there was no sound track for a silent film, someone played various classical and pop tunes on a piano. This is how silent films were shown back then. When universities or some local theaters in various cities showed silent films that had no tracks, special piano players would be brought in and they were experts at playing appropriate music for various scenes in the film without the need of a score or sheet music. Many of them didn?t need any sheet music to go by, they just played many of the appropriate tunes they already knew. Many of the tunes back then were known to be ?out of copyright? and ?in the public domain?. So I?ve been wondering, why would any silent film today be shown on TV with no piano music or any music of any kind be playing in the background of dead-track segments? A couple of years ago TCM aired ?The Great Train Robbery? with no sound track at all. I don?t understand why, because this film had various piano-music sound tracks when I saw it many times back in the 1950s and ?60s. In San Francisco in the ?60s and ?70s, several theaters showed old films, and often they would have piano and organ players provide the impromptu background music live for the audience. Why can?t TCM do this and add the music to the blank tracks of their films that have no sound? Some of the films now, that I saw and heard on late-night movie programs in the 1950s, with modern piano tracks (playing old music) back then, now have no sound at all. Why? Does anyone know why? There was plenty of piano music released as sheet music in the late 19th Century and early 20th that eventually went out of copyright after 17 years, and became part of the open and free ?public domain?. Has anything changed about that? Why would any TV network run a movie today with no background music sound track?

The last scene in "On The Beach". Everyone in the world dies. It's not to late, brother.

"Name the role played by both Sam Jaffe and Alan Ladd." Uhh... doh... Shane?

The Prince and the Pauper

?The Navigator?

Hi, I thought some of you might be interested in this book: ?The Hays Office?, by Raymond Moley, 1945. This contains a history of the Hays Code, and a copy of the various versions of the Code, including the final 1934 version. I was lucky enough to find a copy of this book at a library sale. Now it is available as a used book for about $15, here: http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?gpnm=AllBookStores&an=moley%2Craymond&ph=2&tn=thehays+office This book tells the background about the code and why Hollywood wound up with it. The book doesn?t go beyond 1945, so it doesn?t tell the story about how all the terms of the Code were eventually broken, starting in the early 1950s and continuing on through the 1960s, until the Code was completely gone.

I think some films like Casablanca are classics because they make members of the audience feel that they are actually in Casablanca during that time period and they are one of the people in the cafe. It?s like sitting in on a real-life situation and we are one of the characters in the film. Also, the many characters in the film are varied and have vastly different personalities, like real people. Plus, some of the realistic characters come and go. They aren?t in every scene. Sometimes they appear for just a few minutes, then they disappear, then other realistic characters come into the film. A surprising number of films have just two or three main characters who dominate the whole show, but Casablanca has many realistic characters who appear at different times. The mystery about Rick?s past and future is interesting. Who is he? What did he do before, and what is he going to do next? We don?t know, but we can imagine. That makes him seem more like a real character.

I agree. The British film makers were so good at films like this. Many of their most dramatic moments were merely facial expressions and body language. Subtle little things like the wine in a glass on a table tilting to one side of the glass.

Hi Sam. I could be watching ?His Girl Friday? right now, but I?ve seen it about 20 times already. ?Zardoz? (the world?s worst fantasy movie) is on Fox. AMC is running commercials. So I guess it?s time to go to the disks until ?My Favorite Wife? comes on TCM later.

lzcutter, I don?t know about that. I just saw ?Paper Moon? on TCM in prime time and in it I saw a 10 year old girl setting up a date for a prostitute and I heard her say, ?Daddy, I need to go to the s*** house.? Theaters owners in the ?30s-?50s would have been jailed if they had shown stuff like that in their theaters. This type of vulgarism is what movie makers liked to produce in the ?70s, when the Code was finally broken, but I don?t think it?s appropriate for TV today. The ?70s was the worst decade in films for this type of vulgarity. I think ?Paper Moon? is a generally a good film, but I think it could do without the kid?s foul language and the prostitute sequence.

Oopps, I just found the original rules. I can't post a clue until I win a round. Sorry. I'll wait. Message was edited by: FredCDobbs

I agree with you. I think the British "A Night to Remember" might be the saddest version.