FredCDobbs
-
Posts
25,502 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
17
Posts posted by FredCDobbs
-
-
That sounds like one of the MGM Dogville comedy shorts from the 1930s.
-
I saw this movie one time and I always thought it was stupid. First, the guy on the phone is playing a tape recording at a fast speed to alter his voice, but the audience doesn?t know that until the very end of the movie, and the film has his altered voice responding to her phone statements and questions early in the film. Now how is a guy going to anticipate what she will say in advance so he can prepare the proper responses for playback with the tape recording?
And she keeps answering the phone and saying, ?Who are you??? Why are you doing this??? Agggg??? Please stop!!!! Who are you????? Do any real people do this when they get a few crank phone calls? No we don?t. Nobody does it. Nor do we crack up and go insane. Even back in the 1950s, before telephone answering machines, if someone received a long series of crank phone calls, they would report them to the phone company, and if they were threatening they?d report them to the police and have the line monitored so the cops could track down the guy making the calls.
-
Thanks for the information.
The last scene in the film is one of the most shocking I've ever seen in any film. All during the movie we occasionally see a street preacher set up in a park in some city in Australia, and he's trying to win converts since the last people alive on earth are there in Australia and will be dying within a few months.
We see the preacher and his audience several times during the film, and behind him is a large banner that reads, "It's not too late, brother." We don't think much about the banner until the very end of the film, where they show street scenes all around Australia showing that there are no longer any people alive. Everyone is now dead. Everyone on earth is now dead.
At the very end of the movie, they show the place in the park where the street preacher used to give sermons, and now there is no one there because everyone is dead. We see the banner flapping in the wind in the background. Then the camera begins to move in on the banner, so that finally it fills the whole movie screen, and then it dawns on us (the movie audience) that the message on the banner is meant for us... "It's not too late, brother," meaning that all of us should work to try to prevent international atomic war.
That was a pretty shocking message for 1959, and the way it was presented to the audience drew all of us into the film plot at the end of the movie. While the message on the banner had been a religious message during the movie, that last scene turned it into a secular message designed for everyone in the audience.
-
Oh, and I think "Stranger on the Third Floor" is not played enough by TCM. This is just about "officially" the first American "film noir" movie. Very creative and historical. Although a low-budget film, many later noirs copied much of its stylized photography and dream-like nightmarish mood.
-
I love "Pink Horse". TCM has aired it several times. Robert Montgomery seems odd trying to pay a "tough guy", but he seems like his movie character is trying to pay a tough guy. So I can't tell if he is over acting because he didn't know how to play a tough guy or if he wanted his character to seem to be over acting because he was an average guy trying to play a tough guy. Anyway, I love the film. A lot of interesting ideas in it. Some of it was filmed around Santa Fe, New Mexico during a real Zazobra celebration.
-
?The Brotherhood of the Bell? was a good and rare made for TV movie or mini-series with a top Hollywood cast. It was about a kind of fraternity whose members helped each other in business when they got out of college, including killing people for business purposes.
Other rare films are:
?Rain? with Joan Crawford, based on a famous play from the late ?20s. This is the play the gangsters are watching in ?Scarface? with Paul Muni.
?The Bitter Tea of General Yen? with Barbara Stanwyck, one of the best movies of the 1930s.
?The Man Who Reclaimed His Head," a 1934 commie movie about nasty capitalists conspiring to start WW I.
?On The Beach?, an excellent anti-atomic-war film. Very frightening. (It?s not too late, brother.)
The high-quality restored 2-hour original theatrical version of ?Greed?, as shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. Most modern prints of this film today have been ruined with hundreds of still frame slide-shows inserted into the moving picture, and garish colors artificially added by means of computers and Ted Turner?s ?colorization? process.
-
Yes that movie is an interesting character study. If a guy like that came into my town, I think I would go on a long vacation.
-
The Jimmy Stewart movie on TCM right now, "Night Passage", looks like it was filmed up in Durango Colorado. It used to be an old mining town. They also filmed some of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" there. The old train runs along the Animas River. The Animas empties into the San Juan (which is mentioned in at least one John Ford Western), and that empties into the Colorado River over in Utah.
-
Lol, yes I did. When I was in the TV business I picked up the habit of trying to sound like various network TV reporters and anchors, also, certain movie stars such as Gregory Peck. A friend of mine knew someone who knew Peck and my friend said Peck often went around his house talking in his low tones, exaggerating them, trying to train his voice to sound like Gregory Peck. I?ve heard that Jimmy Stewart first tried to get rid of his regional accent, but later he tried to exaggerate it, since people liked it. He was from rural area of Western Pennsylvania. One time I stayed a week in the town where he grew up, and all the older men in that town sounded like Jimmy Stewart.
In the TV business, we have the advantage of being able to hear recordings of ourselves every day and we can change our accents to sound like a neutral accent, something that is known as a ?neutral Midwestern? accent.
It?s fairly easy to change one?s accent, especially when someone moves to a different part of the country, but they have to concentrate on it. I?m out in the Southwest now, and, for some reason, most of the white people here sound like they have a Midwestern accent from around Michigan or maybe Indiana. A lot of Mormons immigrated out here from the Eastern states in the late 19th Century.
-
I first went to Natchez to visit my grandparents around 1949. The Civil War had ended 84 years earlier, so there were still many older blacks in Natchez who had been slaves as children, and many others whose parents had been slaves. Sometimes I would hear the adults talking about ?the War? and they always had to make a distinction between WW II and the Civil War, to let people know which War they were talking about. WW I was almost never discussed, but the Civil War was still a major topic of discussion.
In Mississippi and Louisiana in those days there were still large cotton plantations, big plantation houses that were still in use, and the slave quarters that were still being lived in by the blacks who worked on the plantations. Of course, by 1949 they were being paid a little money for their work since the Feds didn?t allow slavery. Many of the old plantations and homes were still owned by the same families that had owned them before the War. Rumors were that many of the plantation owners had a lot of gold hidden or buried or in foreign banks, so they were able to survive the War with their family wealth and their original plantations and homes.
Northern people were still called Yankees, and there weren?t very many of them working in the Deep South in those days. Occasionally I would meet some Yankees who went to work for my dad?s company, which was a national company owned by California businessmen. I remember the Yankees having strange accents, Yankee accents. If you see the movie ?Red Badge of Courage?, there are some good regional Northern accents used in that film. The Southern accent to us was the ?normal? accent, and the regional Yankee accents were the odd ones. We didn?t know we were speaking with a Southern accent.
When we saw Hollywood films, we generally didn?t notice any regional Northern accents and not many Southern accents, except for the Kentucky accent of Una Merkel. We heard unusual accents like that of Henry Fonda and James Stewart, but we didn?t realize they were specific local regional accents. We thought they were unique accents that only these men spoke. We knew there were variations in Southern accents so when I saw Gone With the Wind in 1953, I thought all those accents were really Georgia accents. I thought of Ashley Wilkes accent as being a ?high class? Georgia accent. We had already heard stories in school that some of our own ancestors had spoken English with British and Irish accents. I thought of Rhett Butler as speaking ?normally?, just as we spoke ?normally?. I didn?t realize that his accent was ?normal? while ours was not.
A strange thing happened over the years as people began to hear their own voices on tape recordings. I remember the first time I recorded and heard my own voice when a Sears store in Mississippi was trying to sell an early model of a tape recorder, sometime around 1956. Only then did I realize I had a Southern accent. Over the years many Southern people gradually lost their strongest accents that they and their parents had had back in the 1930s and ?40s. This especially began to occur when Southern students went North or West to college and came home speaking with much less of a Southern accent, and when Southern people began to travel around outside the South on business and on vacations.
I remember when I first heard my voice on tape. I must have been about 13 or 14 years old then, and I was shocked. I felt that I sounded like a really backward hillbilly such as the kind that were made fun of in movies. I never understood the phenomenon involved. I could not hear any accent in my own voice or the voices of my friends while talking live, or in my own friends voices when recorded on tape, but I could hear my own accent when I recorded my own voice and played back the tape. When I was in high school my dad bought a tape recorder and my family and I practiced trying to lose our Southern accents.
I remember the first time I was in Ohio, around 1962, and I saw a little monument and a park dedicated to ?The War of the Rebellion.? Lol, I thought that was what the Yankees called the Revolutionary War. I asked someone about it and they said it was a monument to the Civil War. In later years I got to live in California and I spent several months in New York City, so I finally realized what a nice large great country this is. I loved the regional accents in the film ?Fargo?.
-
?I don't mind the British accent either since that's how people originally spoke in the south.?
Quite a lot of wealthy Southern plantation owners were Europeans. Some came directly from Europe to the South to start their plantations. The big boom started after 1793 when the modern cotton gin was invented. This is why Ashley was portrayed as British, because he was, and this is why Scarlett?s father was Irish, because he was.
See the dates on these Natchez plantation homes. This shows the beginning of the cotton plantation era in the deep South.
-
There were a few exceptions in the old days. For example, Dragnet and I Love Lucy were shot on film, so that the finished edited program could be sent out to air on all TV stations on the same night. This produced a better quality image and it allowed all the TV stations in the country to air the same program on the same date.
Desie Arnez was supposed to have been the first person to think of filming a live TV stage show (with a live audience) with three movie cameras set up in front of the stage, just as ?live? shows had been broadcast with three live TV cameras set up in front of the live stage. Shooting with three film cameras was a little more expensive than shooting with three live TV cameras, but the system worked out and it began to be used more in the future in the 1950s and ?60s, and this helped such filmed shows to retain their visual quality in future years.
-
"One word of warning for any interested in buying the set: the quality of the picture ranges from poor to terrible. I don't know if they were taped as opposed to filmed, which might explain their sorry state."
They were probably Kinescoped. That was a method where a movie camera was set up in front of a high quality TV monitor, and the TV image was copied to film. This was necessary in the early days since many small local stations had no national telephone cable running to them that could carry a ?live? signal. So local stations often got the weekly shows one week later and on film. For example, where I lived in Mobile, Alabama in 1953, we saw only Kinescopes until the new telephone cable was run into Mobile in mid-1953. After that, we could finally get all network programs live and we could get the Today Show live over WALA.
The problem with Kinescope was that film cameras and projectors run at 24 frames per second and live TV images run at 30 frames per second. So a Kinescope was fuzzy to start with, because it was a film of a TV screen, plus several film frames per second were double exposed. In other words, one film frame sometimes contained two different TV frames. That was the only way to get 30 TV frames recorded on a 24 frame film system. Kinescopes seen on TV in film form was a little better than when they were copied again later onto video tape. This caused additional frame synchronization problems, going from TV to film and back to video tape.
The networks usually kept their old Kinescopes stored in vaults, and many of the early TV shows are still available today. Video tape didn?t come into widespread use until the late ?50s and early ?60s. For example, some early Ernie Kovacs comedy shows were video taped instead of being Kinescoped. The tapes stored fairly well, and they look pretty good when copied over to modern video tapes.
-
If he carries a large hatbox and speaks with an Irish accent, it sounds like "Night Must Fall" with Robert Montgomery.
-
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049092/
Produced by Dick Powell.
It was a cowboy movie all done with people made up like Chinese invaders. Wayne looked silly as Genghis Khan.
-
I agree that it was a clever little film, but it had some silly stuff in it that was too silly for me.
The editing was outstanding and the matching of the old clothes in the original films with the new clothes of what looked like the same kind in the modern parts is quite good. Also, matching the hair styles, the sets, the lighting, and the stand-ins is very good.
-
I like Osborne too. He's great. But I also like the original guy who was on AMC in the old days. I wish TCM would bring him back for a few film introductions.
-
I think Dark Passage with Bogart was the first film to do this. We didn't see the face of Bogart until more than half an hour into the film, after he had plastic surgery.
Lady in the Lake followed this idea all the way through, and we never saw Robert Montgomery except occsionally in mirrors.
-
I taped The Searchers off TCM a couple of years ago. They ran it several times, and the quality was very high.
-
-
For movie buffs going East or West, there are a couple of ways to get to Monument Valley.
On the L.A.-Chicago route, on I-15 and I-70, take the route South on 191 in the State of Utah. Monument Valley is about 150 miles South, just North of the Arizona border.
On the I-40 cross-country route (old Highway 66), go North out of Flagstaff, Arizona, on highway 89, then right on 160 near Tuba City, then left on 163 at Kayenta. This will take you through the Navajo Indian reservation. Monument Valley is just North into the state of Utah, about 165 miles from Flagstaff.
Once you pull over a big hill, from both directions, you will see the big sandstone mesas and buttes shown in the films. Most of the films were shot from the South, looking North, because the sunlight is better that way.
-
Yes, Red River is a good one. All the cowboys looked like real cowboys.
-
divin,
I felt the same way you do when I was your age. It started with me when I was around 10 and I started noticing that some of the re-released films in theaters, such as "King Kong" (which I saw in '52), were made long before I was born.
I liked the way people talked and acted in the old films. By the time I became a teenager, in the mid-'50s, all the main actresses in the '50s were "old", at least 25 to 35 years old, while I was 14, 15, etc, but I noticed that the ones in the films from the '30s were quite young and even teenagers themselves, such as Marian Marsh in "Svengali". A lot of the male actors in films of the '50s were old too, while a lot of them in films of the '30s were quite young. So, when old films finally began showing on TV, in the early '50, I began watching a lot of them. And then by the early '60s they a few rare ones were being shown in "art" theaters in big cities. I was astonished when I saw "Citizen Kane" in New York in 1964.
-
I've noticed for the past 30 or so years the same actor is recorded using the two different words, one is for use in the theater and the other is for use on TV. Some of the words are not allowed on TV by the FCC. Other milder words are allowed but certain sponsors won't sponsor a film on TV that uses them. I don't want to hear any of them. In my life I can go for months, even a couple of years, without hearing any words like that in real life.
Happy Turkey Day!
in General Discussions
Posted
Thanks Bob!
Today was eat, eat, eat.
Tomorrow is shop, shop, shop.
I love America!