FredCDobbs

LOL, yeah, such as the size of his big large bank account.

I don't think Bette cared. She was still HAVING FUN making movies. Dang, I wish I could still be a TV news cameraman in my 70s. I loved it. I just can't get around anymore. Melvyn Douglas was still making movies when he was 80, and Gloria Stewart made TITANIC when she was 87, and then she made 10 more movies and TV shows after that, the last one at the age of 94!

I think that might be why Joan Crawford made so many awful films at the end of her career. She probably didn't need the money, she might have known they were awful, but she probably still enjoyed making movies. After all, a lot of people still watch them whenever TCM shows them. Garbo decided to get out while she still looked reasonably good, but Bette Davis didn't seem to care. And look at Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. She did such a great job and should have won an Academy Award for her performance. I think she still loved making films and loved that story and didn't mind playing it. I think she enjoyed it, and she was so good at it.

I want to post something from YouTube that is the most frightening video I've ever seen. Have you ever watched a cat creep up on a bird that is on the ground pecking around for seeds? Have you ever wondered why the cat waits, very still, then suddenly moves a few inches closer to the bird, yet the bird often allows this and doesn't fly away. And the cat eventually gets close enough to the bird to jump on him and eat him? Have you ever wondered how or why a bird would let this happen? Well, I finally found out by watching this video, and this shows how old age creeps up on all of us, and often without us paying much attention to the creeping because we are so busy doing a lot of other things. The cat watches the bird's eyes and knows when the bird is, briefly, not watching the cat, and that's when the cat creeps forward a little more, like this... and this why we often don't notice that old age is creeping up on all of us. Of course time and aging is moving along all the time, but we just don't always notice it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDCXma0v-fY

Lillian Gish seemed to handle it well. So did Bette Davis.

Yes, and it happens to all of us sooner or later.

It is built into the system of the universe. As time passes, things age. It's something like entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, and some other things too.... things that eventually take us all.

SUSAN: Look at nose, eyebrows, 2 cheek creases (the high one and the low one), upper and lower lip, upper teeth showing during smile, hair naturally covering top part of ear, hair curls forward and upward in front of forehead.

Edna Ferber was completely unqualified, inexperienced, and so unknowlegable about that subject, and she was not qualified to write the novel or have a film based on it. She should have stuck with boring stories about Wisconsin cabbages. In the first place, most of the big cattle and oil baron showy Victorian estate houses were built much closer to some town and main highway, so wealthy neighbors and outsiders could more easily get to all the parties and business meetings. There might have been small expensive cottages 100 miles further inland, but not the main house. You can still ride past them on an Amtrak train today and see them just a few miles away from the train. The owners WANT all the passing train passengers to see their houses. All that race stuff was nonsense, such as a daughter in law being turned out of a papa's hotel. ALL of that would be worked out and clear in advance to ALL employees. The rich guy at the end would not have stopped to eat with his family at a working-man's diner, and the poor Mexican family would have gone to a Mexican diner. They still do. Rich oil and cattle men WILL go to a small diner or even a Mexican cafe, but almost always while in work clothes after being out on the range working half a day. Heck, my girlfriend and I were turned away from Mama Leone's fancy and famous Italian restaurant in New York in 1965, because we weren't dressed properly. Well, that's ok. I understand. We were disappointed, but we just said "Ok, sorry", and went somewhere else. I didn't start a fist fight about it! Everyone who sees this film needs to live in Texas several years to see what it is really like. It is not un-prejudiced of course, but it isn't as stupid as what is shown in the film. The cattleman would NOT have rejected the oil business. He would have just hired a manager to keep it separate from his cattle business. His real business was MAKING MONEY, and whether it was made by having to put up with a lot of cow poo or a lot of greasy oil, he would do it. The rich guy's wife would NOT interrupt a man's business meeting in the house, with a bunch of stupid Edna Ferber political lectures. That would be like the husband barging into a wife's lady's choir practice at her church, while drunk, and cursing all the church ladies. Neither of these things would happen without a divorce following. I mean, would YOU barge into your own company's top Board of Directors meeting and start spouting a bunch of Edna Ferber political nonsense or any kind of political nonsense? Of course not.

Wow, I just looked at the trailer and I want to see this. Looks like a good cast! YAY for NEW OLD MOVIES!

JOHNNY O'CLOCK

I think it is sad and unfortunate when some beautiful young ladies are big stars in their 20s but they quickly begin to look “old”, even in their 30s. I just can’t imagine having a successful and famous career for ONLY 10 years, and then “life is over” for them when they turn 30 or 31. While others, like Lana Turner, go well into their 30s and even 40s still looking good enough to be the female lead in a film. And some others don't mind playing roles as mothers and grandmothers well into their 80s, such as Lillian Gish. She was ALWAYS wonderful, from her youth and on up and into her old age. I faced the same situation as a news photographer and reporter, when my career suddenly began to become very difficult when I was in my late 40s, when I had to start using new and very heavy video camera equipment, whereas, before that, the old news FILM cameras had become fairly small and light weight. But some of the newest early portable video cameras weighed up to 40 pounds, and the separate recorder that we had to carry weighed 20 to 25 pounds. Yikes! Now, video cameras are tiny and very light weight, but now I’m too old to walk without the help of a cane or a wheelchair so now I CAN use the small video cameras as a news cameraman, but I can't get a job as a cameraman any more because at age 71, I can't do the basic thing of "walking". LOL. Such luck. There is another problem with older workers in MOST professions. As a long-time employee gets bonuses and raises over the decades, he/she soon finds him/her self in a high-wage category by the age of 45, 50, 55, etc, and his/her salary can buy 2 new young college graduates, so the "old" experience person gets the axe, while the 2 inexperienced college grads get hired and replaces the older experienced worker, and the old-timer’s salary is split down the middle and paid to the TWO young inexperienced workers. And when we go shop or call some company, some young new worker tries to help us but they are so inexperienced they don't know what we are talking about. A young kid I talked to at Directv didn't know what a "documentary" channel was, and a young girl at Best Buy didn't know that their store sold recorders that had a tape deck and DVD deck in one unit. She tried to convince me that "only a computer can record a movie on DVD". I finally found an older salesman in the store, and he showed me where the VHS/DVD machines were located.... about 15 feet away from the young lady clerk, who didn't even know what they were. At a big LOWES hardware store I was looking around for a 1-1/4 inch, I.D., rubber hose, and the young female department head tried to sell me a 1-1/4 inch, O.D., rubber hose. I told her I needed a 1-1/4 inch, I.D. hose, and she didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and she got MAD at ME for using such "unknown", foreign, ethnic, stupid, or "antique" language!! I told her I would come back later, which I did, and I found the right hose, but WITHOUT any help from any young sales person or department head. Anyway, I feel bad for the popular young actresses and actors of the old days whose careers lasted only 10 to 15 years because of the age issue.

They probably saved a lot of money with the Cameos, by having the big stars doing a single number in a studio, so they could put them in the advertising, while less important actresses were in all the Jeep scenes.

Canadians watching American TV:

Yes she was. I just saw her, and she is listed in the cast on IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036836/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt

I'm watching the Fox Movie Channel now, Four Jills in a Jeep, with Betty Grable. TCM is showing Suspicion (1941) again now. This is a frequent repeat that I will never watch again.

NIGHTMARE 1956

The Rene Clair films shown last night were certainly good.

The Rene Clair films were really good. Too bad they missed them.

Pinky was a hoax. Jeanne Crain was an all-white woman, going back at least 8 or more generations. The treatment of her by the local whites was far more egregious with her being so white looking. They used dark makeup on Ethel Waters.

It’s very simple. I was in the TV news business back in those early days of cable TV, and I read the trade papers about new developments in television. All the relevant articles said that the newest trend was away from antenna TV and toward satellite and cable TV because of all the dozens of new “niche” channels, meaning very specialized channels that were designed for specific audiences, such as the sports channels, the food channels, the youth-music channels like MTV, and ethnic channels like BET, and OLD CLASSIC MOVIE FAN CHANNELS like AMC and TCM. Now, almost all of the niche channels have moved away from their original niche audiences and are showing mass-marketing junk, like Ice Road Truckers, and Pawn Shop Sweepstakes, and Housewives of New Jersey, and blah, blah, blah. With AMC having changed formats entirely, and TCM gradually changing to an “all era movie” channel and moving more and more away from a "Golden Age of Hollywood" channel.

I loved that British Hammer noir special night a couple of days ago. Very interesting and mostly good films that have never been shown before on TCM.

No, by ALL I mean all the original early subscribers and 2nd tier subscribers who WANTED the OLD TCM just like they wanted the OLD AMC the way it used to be. But now TCM is showing only about 1/4 of its original type of old-classic film programming and specialized programming. 3/4 of it now stinks to those of us who have been with TCM the longest.

Please do not try to guess what I think or misrepresent what I said in the past. You state what you believe and I will state what I believe. Anyway, let's at least remain friends and keep this discussion friendly.