FredCDobbs
-
Posts
25,502 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
17
Posts posted by FredCDobbs
-
-
There was a young guy, Otto Matieson, who played Dr. Cairo in the original ?Maltese Falcon? in 1931. He was quite an outstanding character, but he died in a car wreck in 1932.
-
Thanks. I was searching for Susan Peters name. She was so good in Random Harvest, especially her scene in the church where she realized Colman didn't really love her and was trying to remember his past.
-
I think of this topic every time I see "The Lady from Shanghai".
Oh, I remember another.... Nils Asther in ?The Bitter Tea of General Yen?. He was in other films, but not as very important characters, but he was outstanding in Bitter Tea.
-
Orson Welles already had a low voice to start with, but when watching that film I noticed his voice was even lower. Then I studied it to see if he was lip-synching, and he was.
In the news business we sometimes "disguise" people's voices by different means, and one means is to speed them up or slow them down a little. Another method is to use someone else's voice saying the same thing the interview subject is saying. Some networks have electronic scramblers that can change the voice.
The next time you watch Jane Eyre, especially when you first hear Welles speaking, see if you think his voice is extra low.
Hollywood developed so many photographic and audio tricks, it's just amazing.
-
Surely you remember what the characters looked like. Were they Indians, hippies, Civil War soldiers, family campers, or what?
There is a hippie 'round the campfire scene in Easy Rider that could have the lines in it, but I agree with Mrsl that it's probably an Indian who said the lines. Some old cowboy and Indian movie.
-
Virginia Leith, in ?A Kiss Before Dying? (1956) is another one. She was the excellent star of this film (along with Robert Wagner), but she made very few other movies and is mostly an ?unknown?.
-
By this I mean, can you think of any great actor/actress who made only one great movie and was very good in that role, but they are almost unknown in other films?
Right now I?m thinking of Glen Anders who played George Grisby in the Orson Welles movie, ?The Lady From Shanghai? (1947).
This guy is so outstanding as the creepy and sweaty Grisby in this film. Anders played a few small bit parts in other films of the 1940s and early ?50s, but he?s not very well known. I can?t imagine ?The Lady From Shanghai? without Anders as Grisby.
Right off hand I can think of a few other great actors who we are familiar with in only one major film performance.... such as the several Austrian actors in ?The Third Man?.
-
Lol, me too. I'm way behind in dubbing and watching. In the last couple of months there were a bunch of 1930s and pre-codes I had to record, and now I'm behind on dubbing them to DVD.
-
?Last night I watched 1944's JANE EYRE for the umpteenth time and I always am struck by the masterful editing. This movie is a director's and editor's movie, and the do their job so well that it captures the spirit of Bronte's novel, without including all the plot, and highlights the performances of the actors. I don't know how much all this was Orson Welles, who I understand really had a hand in the direction.?
Did you notice that Welles voice was lower than normal and that he was lip synching his dialogue? His voice was recorded and played back at a slightly slower speed to make his voice sound lower.
-
Another example... Japanese planes should be coming from the left to the right side of the screen, and American planes from the right to the left side. Once a group of them get mixed up in a complex dogfight it?s ok to change the directions around a little, but if a Japanese plane is BEHIND an American plane ? let?s say chasing it from screen right to screen left ? then the American plane must also be moving from right to left. If the American plane is moving left to right, while the Japanese plane is moving right to left, it will look like both planes are heading right toward each other.
-
"2) Anyone familiar with the 180? rule? Sorry to be so academic, but I'm curious about this stuff. Can you think of examples of when the "rule" was broken and why? Doesn't it draw attention to itself; reminding the audience that they're seeing a movie??
It works like this..... If an actor is on the left side of the screen and looking to the right side of the screen, then if the camera moves around the actor too much, beyond that 180 degrees, the actor will be looking in the ?wrong? direction, to the left side of the screen. In certain circumstances this is ok, especially when several people are ?on stage? and the camera wants to show the point of view of each of them, but it helps to see one of the characters turn his/her head to look into the camera lens when the new scene starts.
A simpler example.... All trains, airplanes, cars, and buses in the US traveling from East to West (let?s say from New York to California) should travel from right to left on the screen. That?s the way we look at maps, and most outdoor photography in the US, showing wide scenes, is from the South, with the East on the right and the West on the left, because that is the side lit by the sun (the South side). A plane going left to right would give the audience the overt or subconscious impression that it is flying from California to New York, instead of New York to California. Also, it would give the audience the impression that the airplane has turned around and is flying the wrong way.
Notice in ?5 Came Back? that the plane that crashed in the Amazon jungle was flying right to left. Why? Because the camera?s perspective was land-based. It was looking West, out to sea.
I noticed last night when I saw ?Deliverance? again, the first scene of the river looked to me like it showed the river flowing from right to left, and when the men loaded their canoes they aimed them right to left, but in the first scene of the canoes going down the river, they were going left to right. It looked like they were going up river. Most of the rest of the scenes in that film show the river flowing left to right, which would be toward the Atlantic ocean, somewhere not far out of Atlanta.
This same 180 rule applies to documentary film making too, so the audience won?t be disoriented during the program.
The rule applies to vehicles and people walking all over the country, like going from New York to Chicago should always be right to left. Not all cameramen follow this rule, but most do. In certain sequences such as chases in alleys in film noir movies, it is sometimes disregarded, such as in the sewer scenes in ?The Third Man?, but this might have been an effect purposely to disorient the audience, since the sewers were disorienting. A clever cameraman/director can violate the 180 degree rule to manipulate the audience without the audience ever realizing it.
I?m familiar with Monument Valley and Lordsburg, New Mexico. The stagecoach in ?Stagecoach? did not go straight to Lordsburg. It road around in Monument Valley for several days. Sometimes it went North, sometimes it went South. I guess the scenery was better in Monument Valley.
-
How about "Easy Rider"?
-
For TCM watching, my favorite dish is my Direct TV satellite dish.
For food I like turkey and dressing, and more dressing.
-
You can sometimes find the tune with a Google search. Type in the name of the music and the word "midi".
-
AAAgggggg!
-
This one is asked every two weeks. The answer is:
Bird of Paradise 1932 version with Dolores Del Rio and Joel McCrae, and the 1951 remake with Debra Paget, Louis Jourdan and Jeff Chandler.
-
Since this question gets asked at least once a week, here his a whole thread on it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056093/
Sandra Dee meets and marries photographer Bobby Darin -- 1962
Her mother gives her a book about how to train dogs and tells her that is how she should train her husband.
Please pass this information along.
-
OMG! This same question gets asked at least once a week, and I never can remember the name of the movie! This one is as frequent as the one about the girl who gets thrown into the volcano.
-
I think there were three similar films shown all on one night. I can?t remember which ones had all the pianos in it. Try:
Footlight Parade or Gold Diggers of 1933
-
I?ve seen original tinted prints from the 1920s. They were usually subtle colors and not very vivid. Most often blue was used on outdoor night scenes and light orange was used on indoor candle-lit scenes. Some of the bright garish colors seen in some of the ?restored? films are done by computer and the colors are too bright, vivid, and distracting. Originally the film was soaked in a color dye and then spliced together for projection and for switching back and forth between orange and blue. Sometimes a red dye was used for large scenes of fires.
-
Well, uhh.... wouldn't it be better to start a Fred Astaire thread with his name in the title of it?
-
I think more of these should have been air-dropped over Europe and in the Orient too:
-
They knew very well that something was going on, but there wasn?t much they could do about it.
When I was younger I used to wonder how the Nazi thing got going in such a big way in Germany. I finally began to understand after I saw ?Triumph of the Will?, which was a documentary made about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress (the annual Nazi Party convention). That part was pure patriotism, just like a lot of American 4th of July stuff. Before Hitler developed a bad reputation.
And I also saw the drama film ?The Seventh Cross?. That film takes place in 1936 and is about the early concentration camps. People ? anyone ? who criticized the government would be arrested in the middle of the night and would disappear into a concentration camp, and they would never return. They would be killed there. That alone tended to cut down on open criticism of the government.
So, it finally dawned on me that the combination of these two concepts: 1) patriotism in the beginning, and 2) fear of being put in a concentration camp by 1936, influenced a lot of people in Germany, so it was better to just keep quiet and not criticize the government.
But I still thought that something was missing, since if any of my friends and folks disappeared in the middle of the night here in the US, if Nazis took power, I?d go out and knock off some of the Nazis responsible for it. So many Americans would do that, even if they got killed themselves, such a thing could not happen here (not right now, at least) because the masses would knock off the Nazis.
But we have guns, while the German and most other European citizens did not. Why was that so?
Finally, I saw an interesting documentary about the long tradition of ?no hunting? in Europe. It said that for nearly 2,000 years the rich and powerful people (Kings, Queens, Dukes, wealthy land owners, etc.) controlled all the land, and they would not allow hunting on their property. Hunting was reserved only for the vast land owners. So by the middle ages, even bows and arrows were banned among the peasants, and things like rabbit traps were banned. The rich people and the governments would hang poachers. They'd kill people for hunting rabbits and deer on rich people's property or for just having a bow and arrows.
The documentary said that this, and the fear of ?revolution?, is supposed to be why Europeans were never allowed to own guns in most countries, and why so few European citizens owned guns in the 1930s. So, then I realized, the people in Germany had no guns and no weapons in the 1930s, so they couldn?t go out and ?knock off? all the Nazis who were kidnapping their friends and relatives in the middle of the night. They didn?t even have swords or machetes. (A few Mexicans with machetes can knock off a lot of soldiers and cops.)
So, with rising patriotism, vicious Nazi ?police?, and no weapons among the citizens, I think maybe those three things were the most important factors that allowed the Nazi movement to grow in Germany. A similar thing happened in Russia under Stalin and in China under Mao. It?s going on today in North Korea.
-
Something like that happened with ?Svengali?. I saw that on TV in the late 1950s, then years later I learned there was a second film of a similar plot, ?The Mad Genius,? both starring John Barrymore and Marian Marsh.
I?d like to see a second episode of ?Treasure of the Sierra Madre,? if there was some way to bring back Humphrey Bogart.
The film ?Apocalypse Now? later was released with several additional episodes, which was great.
I?d like to see more episodes in ?Gone with the Wind?. Another 8 reels would be fine.
I?ve been hoping for years that someone would make a realistic film about the war-like nature of the ancient Mayans, and now the new film ?Apocalypto? seems to be just that.
great one-time-only performances
in General Discussions
Posted
> Maria Falconetti--The Passion of Joan of Arc. She
> made only two other films in her entire career.
Yes, she was great in that film. Seems like she should would have been more famous.