FredCDobbs
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Posts posted by FredCDobbs
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I think "The Marines Fly High" is roughly based on when the US Marines were sent down to Nicaragua to help track down the revolutionary Augustino Sandino in the 1920s.
There is another rare film about that revolution and the Marine involvement, in an early Capra sound film titled "Flight".
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I didn?t care for ?Angel Face.? Too many plot flaws.
Mitchum suspected Simmons from the very beginning, regarding the thing with the gas and the old lady in the opening sequence. Everyone in the beginning knew that Simmons would inherit the old lady?s dough, and Mitchum even mentioned his suspicion to Simmons a couple of times.
Then both her father and the old lady die in a tampered-car accident, and she inherits the money.
A major plot flaw was Mitchum going back to the house with Simmons and being there with her alone, after the trial and after he was sure she had killed the two people. He would have known by then that she was nuts and could kill anyone, including him and even herself.
If you suspected a dame of trying to kill someone, and then later she?s around a house when two people die in a tampered car, would you go over to her house by yourself?
The director missed out on a good plot suspense tactic by not allowing the audience to think that maybe it was Mitchum who had tampered with the car and maybe he had some reason to kill Simmons. But by pulling the thing with the gas stove at the very beginning, the suspicion was on Simmons from the very beginning. The last car wreck was a shock, but it wasn?t worth waiting 1 1/2 hours for.
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Storm Warning
They Won't Forget
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Kay Francis made a lot of good movies in the 1930s. They keep turning up on TCM every now and then.
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Was that the film in which the gangster, Ayres, was hiding out in a Chicago hotel room, being stalked by the other gangsters who finally killed him?
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yah, yah, yah, I beat you by 30 seconds!
I seem to remember seeing a print of that film with a WC Fields segment in it. The announcer said that his segment is usually cut out of other prints of the film.
Did you notice that the title is a play on words:
"Tales of Manhattan"
"Tails of Manhattan" (the long-tailed coat)
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I agree about "Night of the Hunter" being unique, in a class of its own.
Did you notice the "iris in" shot? I haven't seen one of those since the 1920s.
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"Rain", 1932, Joan Crawford, pre-code.
"The Bitter Tea of General Yen", 1933, Barbara Stanwyck, pre-code.
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Well, can?t we all instantly recognize the era of films of the ?30s, ?40s, ?50s, ?60s, and ?70s?
There were some in-between eras, such as the early sound films of ?29-?30, when the girls still wore short skirts and those round bucket hats.
The transition era of ?39-?41.
The next transition era of ?48-?51.
There are some films of the ?70s-?90s that are quite similar in style, but if I see a zoom in the opening shot, then I know it?s a film from the ?70s.
A couple of nights ago I saw a 1940 film that had an opening zoom shot in it, and I just about fainted with shock. They did have 1:2 zoom lenses as early as the late 1920s, but they were rarely used.
I saw a noir type film from 1954, titled ?Black Widow?, with Van Heflin, Ginger Rogers, Gene Tierney, George Raft, and Otto Kruger. Wow, what a cast that would have been for a nice dark b&w 1944 film. But as a 1954 film, it was Cinemascope, bright vivid colors, all flat lighting (all front even lighting, no shadows), and the modern photography ruined it.
As for the accents in the ?30s and ?40s, I have a couple of theories. First, many British actors fled to Hollywood in the ?30s because their voices were very good and the money was better in Hollywood.
Also, many early sound actors came from the Broadway stage, and Broadway actors often tried to speak in what was known as a ?mid-Atlantic? accent, ie. (like half-way between London and New York), an accent that was half-British and half US Northeastern upper crust English, as with old wealthy families of the Northeast. I heard an acting coach (a black guy) telling a reporter that that?s the style his school still tries to teach to young New York actors.
Eventually, Hollywood got into the trend of searching for unique regional American accents, such as with actors who were from certain areas of certain states, such as Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Walter Brennan. Brennan was from a rural area of Massachusetts, and he learned how to twist his Massachusetts country accent around so that it could sound like a New England rural accent, a US Southern rural accent, and a western cowboy accent. Bogart?s accent was from a district of Manhattan in the central West side of the city.
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I remember reading when Barabbas first came out that the full eclipse of the sun, as shown during the early crucifixion scenes, was a real eclipse of the sun. A lot of people have forgotten that, since the scenes were shot in wide-angle and the sun couldn?t be clearly seen as actually being the sun. A lot of people think it was a special effect.
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Someone, either the director, producer, or a studio head, made the bad decision to turn "Satan Met a Lady" into a comedy, and that ruined the film.
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Wow, wouldn't it be great if all of these films were now showing at our local mall multi-plex theaters all over town!
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Thanks for the comments, Ayres and movieman, and everyone else. This type of discussion is about the real art of making movies. Here we are, delving into great depths into the characters of essentially fictional characters, but after seeing a great film like Stagecoach, many of us feel that we know the characters and that they are real people. This is the way I feel when I watch Gone With The Wind, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, and many other classic films. Some films are so great, I continue to wonder about what ever happened to the characters in the years after the film ended. I hope they are doing well. I hope they are happy. I hope Ringo stayed out of jail, and I hope he and Dallas had some nice kids.
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I never heard of if it before.
I've been trying to find a copy of his "The Man Who Reclaimed His Head" on some old movie channel. It was a rare commie film from the early '30s, about how capitalists conspired to start and carry out WW I so they could make money off of it. It was made as a kind of "horror" film. I haven't seen it since it was on TV in the 1950s.
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High School Confidential was a pretty good teen-noir movie. She was some young guy's "aunt". I remember that she kept holding her shoulders back and her elbows back, and her hands on her hips, so her, uhh, chest would stick out more. As we used to say, she looked like the front end of a '56 Cadillac.
Seems like the story was about a dope ring at a local high school in California, and a young guy, working as a cop, infiltrated the ring. That was the type of film our parents didn?t want us to see. It was sort of post-code.
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Wow, a lawsuit and a judge! Hmm, I wonder if we can talk the judge into reducing the number of commercials and stopping the editing.
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Ahh, I love discussions about ?film theory.?
My opinion is that the actual issue doesn?t have much at all to do with what Ringo knew or didn?t know about Dallas. It all had to do with what a typical 1939 movie audience knew about Dallas, and when they learned it. Today, we adults can all usually figure it out from the very beginning because of the way the local ladies citizen?s committee escorted Dallas out of town. But many young people and some adults in a 1939 audience would not have figured it out until much later in the film, after Dallas gave them a lot of obvious clues, including the one at the very end.
But even then, some members of a 1939 audience would have never figured it out during the course of the film, because the way John Ford present it, it was quite secretive and his hints even left some room for doubt, even at the end, and it left some room for possible thoughts that she might be just some kind of gambler or just a drifter who was not the marrying kind. The house she approached at the end of the film didn?t look much like a brothel. There weren?t a lot of people going in or out of it. Maybe she was going there to stay with some past boyfriend or sugar-daddy, much like the Navajo city girl in ?Laughing Boy,? and like some of the girls in countless other 1930s movies. They weren?t all prostitutes. Many of them just had a number of different live-in boyfriends they would drift around to from time to time. In fact, I think John Ford gave the girl that ?out?, that way out, since he never really made it clear as to whether or not she was a prostitute or just a dame who lived with guys while not being married.
Dallas? exact ?past? was kept much more secret from the 1939 audience than Belle Watling?s profession in ?Gone With the Wind?, and Joan Crawford?s profession in ?Rain? (1932). I think it?s possible that Ford wanted to separate Dallas? nice-lady persona during most of the film from her ?past? profession, or perhaps just from her past lifestyle of living, unmarried, with men, so that she would seem to be a nice character to match up with John Wayne?s nice character.
As far a cowboys and sailors wanting to marry such girls in films, this is actually a fairly common theme in 1930s films, and it's almost a requirement in early 1930s pre-code films. The same thing happened in ?Rain?. It happened in ?Winchester 73? after Shelly Winters was escorted out of town by a ladies citizen?s committee. The same thing happened with the jewelry merchant in ?Skyscraper Souls?. In that film, the director knocked the audience over the head with the obvious evidence about his girlfriend, to make sure they would understand the girl?s profession and how the jewelry merchant didn?t care about her past.
And I?ve seen the same thing happen in plenty of other western and war movies. I?ve even heard of these things happening in real life. After all, John Wayne killed three men at the end of the movie, he was a rough character, he?d been in prison for years, he?d escaped from prison. He wasn?t a preacher or a naive merchant. He was a tough cowboy, he knew what was what, and I think he would have preferred to marry a pretty Dallas ? who wasn?t too old, who was kind, and who was still very good looking ? rather than marry a girl like the quiet and less lusty soldier?s wife (the one who had the baby).
What was really more difficult for me to accept was John Wayne?s character in ?The Angel and the Badman?, giving up his rowdy ways to marry the innocent Quaker girl.
So, I would say that the Ringo character knew, almost as soon as meeting Dallas, enough about her to realize something was in her past, but he also learned enough about her during the trip to not care what was in her past.
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Thanks for the info.
I've read some of their original papers and documents, and many of them really were great writers and public speakers.
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This was a wonderful film. The dialogue was great. I wonder if those various little details and private conversations actually did happen? But if not, the film was still fun.
Regular old history books always try to make it seem like the "founding fathers" knew exactly what would happen and how things would turn out in the end, but I don't see how they could have predicted what actually happened. This film showed much of their doubt and disagreements.
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The line in "A Streetcar Named Desire" was...."S T E L L AAAAAAA!"
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That was "Wild Oranges", 1924.
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Sometimes, in the middle of the night, TCM airs a series of rare 1930s films. Some are funny, some are sad, some are mysteries, and others are wonderful little jewels that very few people have ever heard of.
Today I saw one that I recorded last week, titled ?After Tonight?, with Constance Bennett and Gilbert Roland. It is a WW I spy movie, of a fairly common theme which I always enjoy. A boy spy working for Germany and a girl spy working for Russia. They must keep their profession a secret from each other, even after they fall in love. Oh! How sad! They always do fall in love, and one or the other always discovers that the other one is a spy. Oh! No! But yes.... it always happens. The duty of their minds is always loyal with their own countries, but the romance of their hearts is always loyal to each other. But they must make a decision.... betray their lover or betray their country... or... most romantic of all, betray themselves and volunteer to be shot at dawn in order to save the life of their lover,
These two lovers in this film had a wonderful lucky break at the end.
You should see Gilbert Roland and Constance Bennett together. They are so wonderful and romantic.
Movies that make you feel like your there
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I get cold whenever I watch Dr. Zhivago and The Thing. The Thing seems so realistic.