CineSage

Foreign. Trouble is, MGM didn't make noir. Well, they tried (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE; LADY IN THE LAKE), but they really had no clue. MGM, especially during Louis B. Mayer's reign, took the edge off everything. Masters of Noir, like Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett, Wilder-Raymond Chandler, Edward Dmytryk-Adrian Scott were shunned by the studio, and wouldn't have done their best work there if they'd had the opportunity to work on the Metro lot. Even under Dore Schary, the studio pulled its punches on films like THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (though not Noir, it's a merely good film that too many people think is better than it really is. Had it been made at Warner's, Fox or Paramount -- none of which would've employed Vincente Minnelli, anyway -- it would've crackled in a way that it never did, or has.

The sled's name isn't "Rosebud"; it's the name of the fictional company that manufactured the sleds, and whose trademark is stenciled on the one owned by young Charles Foster Kane in Colorado.

Gershwin also "wrote" the music for several Woody Allen films. Bear in mind that virtually all the songs in 1952's SINGIN' IN THE RAIN were written in the 1920s (none by the Gershwins, of course; this is only an analogy), and were cherry-picked from the MGM song catalog by Arthur Freed, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen as that film project was developed. Songs are made to be used, and re-used.

That's Louis Jourdan and Debra Paget.

It's an RKO title, and owned by Time/Warner. It's therefore inevitable that the film'll turn up on TCM in the not-too-distant future.

THE SEARCHERS is fifty years old; it's also probably the most influential Western ever made, a deep, disturbing masterpiece, and the pinnacle of john Wayne's and John Ford's careers. If that's not the definition of a classic, I don't know what is.

Boyd was excellent. In fact, his performance is quite modern, and holds up far better than Charlton Heston's. He certainly deserved an Oscar nomination but, without polling the Academy members from 1959, we'll never know for sure why he didn't, though he and Griffith probably split the vote.

Sounds a bit like MAN WITHOUT A STAR, with Kirk Douglas and Jeanne Crain.

DeMille's film fell in the narrow window of sound films made before the Production Code took full effect. DeMille's silents often had wry, clever eroticism, but he never quite recaptured it when sound came in; by contrast, his contemporary at Paramount, Josef von Sternberg, leapt past him in this area, though his films were never as popular as DeMille's, and his career began to sputter in the mid-1930s. CLEOPATRA may be his most cinematic sound film, and is filled with wonderful moments but, to his dying day, he never really got the hang of talkies; his films were always quite clumsy verbally. Joe Mankiewicz's 1963 version of CLEO is, in my opinion, one of the most maligned films ever made (I have a soft spot for it for a number of reasons, one of which is that I own Pompey's Ring, the prop that unifies the whole dramatic Caesar-Cleopatra/Antony-Cleopatra structure). It hews fairly close to Plutarch, relying also on the less-reliable writings of Suetonius, but with obvious -- and necessary - digressions from history for the purposes of effective drama. The film does have three clear problems, though 1. The most compelling character, and performance -- Rex Harrison's Caesar (the finest performance of that actor's distinguished career) -- is gone midway through the film. History has presented dramatists with this unfortunate fact, and there's obviously nothing anyone can do about it. 2. Antony spends much of the second half of the film moping about, claiming that everyone compares him to Casear and finds him wanting. While it's true he was no Caesar, he was a charismatic leader, a hell of a soldier, and probably the worst possible choice to rule Rome. The film fails to make this clear, and suffers for it. 3. Taylor. She's just not up to the demands of the role. It needed a Glenda Jackson or Vanessa Redgrave but, unfortunately, neither had the requisite sex-appeal or boxoffice clout. Still, it's a terrible shame that Mankiewicz never had the opportunity to fashion the pair of 3 1/4 films (CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA he envisioned (and filmed), and we'll probably never have the opportunity to see them, either (though Fox has consistently expressed interest in restoring the film to this version as much as is possible). Message was edited by: CineSage Message was edited by: CineSage

Billy Wilder's and Charles Brackett's FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943).

No. There's too much danger from **** suicide-bombers.

Marshal (one "l"); the name[/i] is (usually) spelled "Marshall."

I once arranged for Hank Worden to attend a film-study screening of THE SEARCHERS at the American Film Institute. Hank held the class rapt for an hour, with his tales of working with John Ford, Howard Hawks, John Wayne and other illustrious by-then-long-gone co-workers and employers. He was a lovely gentlemen, and seemed quite touched that later generations would be interested in his career. He's missed.

"By the Shores of Gitcheegoomee." From the poem, Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (I wrote the audio commentary for the Fox DVD of DESK SET).

Yes, it's an experience I had just last week. I'm only now getting all the grease washed off my coveralls.

Not surprisingly, it's called "The Hut-Sut Song."

Back to the Future" was shown on TBS yesterday. It will be shown on TCM in a couple of weeks. Time Warner is now beginning to circulate the non-classic TBS films through TCM. I guess they save money that way and are gradually phasing out the real classic films from TCM. You guess wrong. They aren't "TBS Films"; The BACK TO THE FUTURE movies, as an example, are owned by NBC-Universal. AOL Time-Warner pays substantial licensing fees to them to show the films on TBS, TNT and TCM, and its much cheaper to run films Warner's already owns -- especially old films, for which there are no profit participants or residuals owed. TCM merely wants to present a broad mix of films, by genre, star, country of origin, and era, that's all. But I guess you enjoy being a doomsayer, even when the facts don's support your the-sky-is-falling view.

"...she...and said it actually rhymes with "dose"... She was probably suffering from a bad head cold at the time.

The film's rights had been in dispute for years; they've finally beeen cleared up, with the rights now belonging to Paramount. I should think there'll be a DVD within a year or two, but there'll probaby be at least a limited restoration of the picture and sound elements first.

They're necessary, they're absolutely necessary. I find it impossible to warch a movie unless I'm naked and having sex at the same time.

I've got something better than that: a genuine PAY OR DIE! apron that the studio sent out to theater concession stands to promote the movie (my father managed drive-ins in the late 1950s-mid-1960s)

Actually, it's Loos as in "loose," and Perc as in "purse." Miss Wynter pronounces her given name DAH-nah. And it's definitely George Sanders. A lot of people pronounce it "Saunders" but, being mainly Americans, they can't speak English, anyway. Message was edited by: CineSage

Faces without noses are even more distinctive (have you ever been to Molokai?). As for Rains, you may be thinking he might've been Jewish because of his role as a Jew in 1944's MR SKEFFINGTON opposite Bette Davis. In it, he has a rather touching scene in which he explains to his character's young daughter how people belong to one religion or another, that her mother (Davis) is a Christian, and that he is Jewish. Perhaps that's what's stuck in the back of your mind.

Cagney said it because it's the most famous line in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, and it was appropriate for the situation in which Cagney found himself (fortunately, he had parents and a sister).

Ann Sothern.