FredCDobbs
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Posts posted by FredCDobbs
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Bill, you are right. I know what you are talking about.
I don?t think I?ve told any of my horror stories about those days in the South, in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. The South changed quite a lot in the ?60s through the ?90s, so I don?t want people today to have any bad opinions about the South now. And even back in the ?50s and ?40s most people down there were good people. But the mood of the worst of the **** was just like what was shown in the film ?Intruder in the Dust?, and quite a lot of what was shown in ?Fury? was accurate, although I think ?Fury? was set in some Northern town. The films ?Flamingo Road? and ?Pinkie? were quite accurate too. And most white people were simply downright afraid of the meanest of the **** and the local county political bosses and the police and Sheriffs they controlled. Most cops I came across were good and quite polite. But I was a polite white boy. I never gave them any trouble... not until I started doing freelance news work for CBS News in the early ?60s.
When I first saw ?Intruder in the Dust? in a theater back in ?49, when I was a kid, I wasn?t shocked at all. That was ?home? to me. That was a ?docu-drama? to me. You might notice, when you see the film now, look for something that is a hold-over from the old days. It?s actually an attitude that William Faulkner had, and even the director, producer, and the studio had the same attitude. They blamed the old black man, played by Juano Hernandez, for his own troubles. The white ?hero?, the lawyer, blamed him for making all the white guys mad at him because he was so ?arrogant?. But the old man wasn?t arrogant at all. He was a normal human being and he knew it. And that was not his fault. He didn?t need to kiss any white feet or say ?yas sir? to all the white guys. I consider the character to be quite brave, but not arrogant.
I knew several brave ones when I was working news for CBS, back in the early ?60s. One was Medgar Evers. He was eventually shot and killed by Byron de la Beckwith. But Medgar knew... he knew all along that such a thing could happen. I think Medgar was the bravest and perhaps greatest man I?ve ever known. Unfortunately he wasn?t well known enough by the national media to have been turned into a public media hero.
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Hi, I don't know if I should start a new thread about the following topic or not. I'll try it out here first.
Some people have said they were "strange ducks" or whatever while in school, partly because they liked old movies. I've been wondering how many of us ever tried to live out some of the themes or plots or fantasies of some of the old movies. I did. I realized it when I was in high school. I would often joke with some of my friends about being in "such and such" a movie type situation. Then then later in life I forgot about it. Then much later I began to look back and realize the urge never left me. I think I might have gone through life trying to live out various movie fantasies.
Anybody else?
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> What a wonderful story! I love the thought that even
> with so much time gone between the two of you, you
> could renew the friendship like no time had gone by
> at all... Thanks for sharing that with all of us.
Lol, thanks. I thought that was interesting. After all those years of not being in touch very much, and just after a couple of months of being back together, and not even realizing that we were both up at 2 AM that night laughing at the same movie, all of a sudden we were back in High School again. When I heard him laughing and when he said, ?Are you watching this?? I knew exactly what he was talking about. I didn?t have to ask, ?Am I watching what?? Lol, I knew what he was talking about and he heard me laughing when I picked up the phone. The call lasted about 15 seconds.
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Here?s a funny story... back in the 1950s I lived in a small town in Mississippi. I had a friend and we both liked old movies. We would watch them every weekend and also sometimes late at night during week days. We would call each other and discuss the interesting films we had seen, such as the great earthquake sequence in ?San Francisco.?
Ok, later I moved away and was gone for 21 years. I finally moved back to that town and renewed my friendship with the same guy. I had been in town a couple of months and was living in an apartment, and late one night ? about 2 AM ? I was watching one of the very funny Harold Lloyd films, one with him trying to climb the side of a building, and he kept falling off and sliding down. I was roaring with laughter.
All of a sudden, the phone rang. Nobody ever called me at 2 AM. I picked it up on the first ring while I was still laughing, and my friend was on the line. He was laughing too. All he said was, ?Are you watching this?? I said, ?Yes?. Then he said ?Ok? and hung up. I didn?t even ask him what he was talking about. I figured he must be watching the same movie I was watching, although we both had cable and many channels at that time.
Lol. That was funny.
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> I just remembered another nifty little movie to file
> under "forensics, postwar division". The Richard
> Basehart movie, He Walked by Night (1948), in
> which he's tracked down by coppers led by Scott Brady
> using rather sophisticated techniques, (for their
> time), is pretty interesting.
Hmm, that reminds me... I saw some old film from around 1936 on TCM a few months ago about forensic police work. They had an old IMB punch-card computer. I just about passed out when I saw that. We used those well into the early 1970s.
The cops had the descriptions and MO of many crooks coded on the cards. So to find their most likely suspects, they typed in some of the eyewitness descriptions and some of the MO regarding specific cases, and they put all their crook cards into the machine, and it ran all the cards and deposited the most likely suspects in the last slot.
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No problem. Feel free to rant any time.
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Disney could solve all it?s ?Song of the South? problems with an introduction like this. I mentioned this earlier in the year, and I specifically mentioned black actors like Morgan Freeman doing the special intro.... i.e. talking to some black kids who are gathered around a family TV in a nice upper class home, telling them about the old days in film and about how black characters and voices weren?t used in cartoons very much in the old days, and telling them they are about to see a rare treat because there are black characters and voices in the cartoons in the movie they are about to see. Something like the introduction to ?Green Pastures? where the preacher was introducing the upcoming story to the kids in the church. That introduction was handled so well, everyone in the audience was anxious to see the rest of the film. Here is my post:
Morgan Freeman has a special talent of now being seen as a wise old man, like a wise grandpa, and his ?race? is now ?universal?.
TCM should do more black-kid promos and feature scenes from the films of Sidney Poitier, Juano Hernandez (?Intruder in the Dust?), Rex Ingram (?Green Pastures?, ?The Thief of Baghdad?, ?Sahara?), Mildred Boyd (?Out of the Past?), Daniel Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney (?Hallelujah?), Paul Robeson (?Jericho?, ?Big Fella?, ?Song of Freedom?), Josephine Baker (speaking French in ?Zouzou? and ?Princesse Tam Tam?), and plenty of others that I?ve already seen in these classic films on TCM.
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Here it is: Tennessee Vs. Garner, 1985:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=471&invol=1
?The use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect.?
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I just finished watching the movie.
The point was the three boys were trying to steal something and they almost got caught. It was supposed to be a ?lesson? for teenagers in the audience. Something to frighten them.
The fine for speeding back in those days would have been maybe $20 or less, but I think some towns could send people to jail for 30 days for speeding. Some towns could also put the passengers in jail. Back in the old days, there were no major ?Civil Rights? laws in effect, so the feds had to stay out of state and local affairs. Some small towns had stiff fines and jail terms for minor crimes, especially if the cops suspected the kids were ?up to trouble?. They didn?t always apply the stiff fines and jail terms, but they were reserved for special circumstances.
Also, back in those days.... in fact, right up until the late 1970s, cops could shoot people who ran away from them. The cops could ?assume? the people were ?fleeing felons? and they could shoot them dead, but a Supreme Court ruling finally outlawed that. That?s why we see so many police pursuits on TV news today. In the old days, the cops could have shot the people in the speeding cars. There is one TCM movie that shows two people trying to elude two California cops, around 1948. One of the cops pulls out a Thompson machine gun and shoots the car full of holes. Ahh, the good old days.
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> I like to watch the "Ma & Pa Kettle" movies series.
> Although it's pure hokum it is funny. And ya can't
> beat Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as Ma & Pa.
> wish TCM could get the rights to air the series.
> Perhaps someday.
I agree. Sometimes hokum is a lot of fun. The Bowrey Boys, The Marx Brothers, Ma and Pa Kettle, Frances the Mule movies. Lol.
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It's available from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Christmas-Carol-versions-Colorized-Original/dp/B00000F168
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I don't see any listings for it during the next 14 days.
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> I don't know what it was like in the past since I
> just got TCM but if there was a 24 hr block of xmas
> movies and they're not doing that any more well then
> I can understand your disappointment.
It has been variable over the years. Last year was pretty good. One year they showed a bunch of old classics including silent versions of "King of Kings" and others. This year they seem to be going with more Christmas-with-family type films.
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> It was always a tradition with us to watch the older
> Christmas movies. We thought we could always depend
> on TCM instead we have found only 2 Christmas movies
> while during Halloween we were inundated with horror
> films.
> Where is "Scrooge with Allistar Sims? Holiday Inn?
> White Christmas? The BIshop's wife? Meet me in St.
> Louis? and more ... I did find Miracle on 34 St on
> AMC. I wrote once before and was told TCM is looking
> for a younger audience ... have they found them yet?
> There are people who simply want to come and find the
> comfort of something from their childhood but alas we
> are disappointed with movies that are rated with 2
> stars ... I simply don't understand the dumbing down
> of TCM.
Well, they probably have younger staff members now.
I like the old classics at Christmas too.
Looks like they've got only one this year, "King of Kings," early Sunday afternoon.
NBC is supposed to air "It's a Wonderful Life" again on Sunday at 8 pm Eastern.
You can go here, and in the upper right corner of the page type in a movie name and click on "Search." If that movie is showing soon it will tell you when and where.
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Yes, the brief boxcar scene.
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> The truth is we all miss the good ones, and hope the
> troublemakers are gone for good.
I agree.
This is just another argument thread, and everyone should go back to the first post and see who started it.
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What do you think about the strange film "Fargo"? Do you think it will become a "classic" in the future? The film fascinates me, but I'm not ready yet to call it a "classic".
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> That is the one I own but with a pickup bed instead
> of the closed back bed. The short used the civilian
> powerwagon and even a powerwagon bus. It's a fun
> movie is there anyway to contact TCM and find out
> more about where they got the movie?
I think that short showed in theaters along with the "King Solomon's Mines" movie. The studio probably got the trucks free in exchange for doing the short.
That movie had a lot of media publicity when it first came out. It is so expensive to shoot a film in Africa, because they had to fly so many people and so much equipment all the way from Hollywood, and it was not easy for find places for all the cast and crew to stay, plus they had to drive a long way out of the major towns so they could shoot the wide shots with no towns and no smog in the background.
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I don't remember.
I think It's a Wonderful Life will be on NBC this Sunday the 24th at 8 pm Eastern.
Some store here in town sells little ceramic buildings made to look like some of the buildings in the downtown scenes in the movie. People can construct a little Bedford Falls under their Christmas tree.
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I'm in a part of NM where we get a little snow every year. Albq. got snowed in for three days earlier in the week. They had all highways going in and out of town closed down for a day or two. I think it's like that in Denver today.
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Jon, I guess you are already on the road by now, but I'll send this message to other people.
I recently found out that a cell phone can be used to send a text message to an email address, and an email address can send a text message to a cell phone. A teenager taught me this.
So, in theory, Jon could send some one of us text messages of his progress across the country to OK, and that person could pass the message along to us on this board. (I love modern communications.)
Lol, I remember the days when we picked up our telephone and a real "operator" answered and said "Number Please". In small towns we had telephones with no dials. To make a long distance call during holidays sometimes required a waiting time of an hour or more, especially from small towns in the South to places like New York or Los Angeles. We had to call the operator and tell her the number we wanted to reach. She said she would call us back when she got a line connected. So we would sit and wait an hour or more for our long distance call to go through. And they cost us about a gazzian dollars a minute.
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Ok, ok, I hope you get snowed in!!
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I remember my earliest game playing with the other boys was ?cops and robbers?, ?cowboys and Indians?, Superman, and WW II.
I didn?t start playing the Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner plots until I grew up and started dating girls. Then I moved to New Orleans and got an apartment on Bourbon Street. I don?t think I ever quit playing movie games. Even in my 40s I put together a safari outfit, like the one in ?King Solomon?s Mines?. Man was I happy when the Banana Republic opened a safari clothes store in New Orleans. That was the result of the ?Out of Africa? film. The store was filled with young ladies buying Meryl Streep look-alike clothes from that film.