traceyk65
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Posts posted by traceyk65
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If we're going to discuss remakes, how about the two versions of Holiday ? I have to say I prefer the 1938 version with Hepburn and Grant, just because I like the two of them, with their chemistry better than Ann Harding and whoever her co-star was (can't remember his name to save my life). I also love the way Lew Ayres plays the brother--he has just the right balance of sardonic and sadness to make you believe and want to save him. And I like that they expanded edward Everett Horton's role and added a part for Jean Dixon--I like her and they are funny, without the sometimes nasty edge that Hepburn's humor has (not her fault--it's written into the part, I believe). I do however, like Mary Astor as Julia better than Doris Nolan--she's prettier and sweeter-looking and I can beleieve Johnny fallin in love with her on a purely physical level better. Nolan looks so hard, I can;t believe Johnny would fall for her. (I think Aster vs Nolan was discussed on another thread somewhere?)
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One of the better reasons, which misswonderly mentioned, to watch High Society
And one I don;t think she mentioned, Louis Armstrong...
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> {quote:title=misswonderly wrote:}{quote}
> > {quote:title=FilmAficionado wrote:}{quote}
> I've never seen the original *Maltese Falcon*, just the John Huston version. Would like to check out the other two you mentioned.
I've seen the Bette Davis-Warren William version, Satan Met a Lady (1936)--in fact I think it played on TCM a while back. It's interesting, if you are a Davis or Warren fan, but not as good I think. They play it as a comedy (sort of) and changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent. Alison Skipworth takes over the Sidney Greenstreet role, which sort of works, but the chemistry between Davis and Warren is just not good enough to make it work.
Though the more I think about it, the more I want to see it again. I kept comparing it in my mind to the 1941 version and that's not really fair--they may be based on the same story, but handle it very differently. Hmm...
Edited by: traceyk65 on Feb 26, 2011 9:27 PM
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Had a thought about Suddenly Last Summer--the way Violet says, "Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian," besides being creepy--is it some sort of sideways reference to Twelfth Night? In that Viola and Sebastian are twins and are mistaken for one another at one point?
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> {quote:title=misswonderly wrote:}{quote}
> This seems to be a new trend, re-thinking Shakepeare with a female playing a lead male character. At the Stratford Shakespeare Festival ( in Stratford, Ontario) they are featuring a new production of Richard III, with a woman playing the villainous title role. I'm still trying to decide if I want to see it or not.
Prospera, ok, that's doable, even interesting , especially with Helen Mirren. Even a female Lear or Othello would work. But Richard III is based on a real person. How can they gender-bend that?
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> {quote:title=ChorusGirl wrote:}{quote}
> It can be horribly distracting. After reading about the brief Norma Shearer/Mickey Rooney affair, I cannot watch either of their films without having to visualize that truly bizarre sexual pairing--and wondering what the hell Norma was thinking. (its in Rooney's autobiography, and also in Gavin Lambert's book on Shearer)
>
Ewww. Of course, maybe ole Mickey has something going for him that we'd never suspect--he did manage to get Ava Gardner to marry him (along with 7 others women) plus he was linked (maybe by studio publicity?) to Lana, Carol Landis, Betty Hutton Gloria deHaven and a host of others.
"Sure, I love the chicks. I love 'em all. But when you're nuts about too many, how can a guy settle down to one?"
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> {quote:title=annelovestcm wrote:}{quote}
> I am more disturbed by celebrities doing commercials than anything else
> after that I cannot stand them anymore
> they should do what they are famous for
> they are already paid too much money why do they have to do commercials???
> let some unknown get their shot
They've been doing them since there were stars and commercials, beginning with magazine ads. Nothing's changed that way.
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I will always regret that I will never be able to go up to Katharine Hepburn on the street and ask for an autograph. If she didn't tell me to p*ss off, I think I'd be disappointed! If she did, I'd be like "Yes! That's just how you're supposed to be!" Too bad it will never happen now. Sad.
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*Birthdays Today and Yesterday (finally back on track):*
*Jim Backus*
Thurston Howell III
Mr Magoo
*Betty Hutton*
Annie Get Your Gun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY7Hh5PzELo
At the Hollywood Palace 1964:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39BLbX_eJ6I
*Robert Alda*
Cinderella Jones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z1R7y_Iyh8
As Gershwin:
*Tony Randall*
The Mating Game:
w/ Dick Van Dyke on Carol Burnett:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p5w-UuOsf4
Selling Veggies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhuOGI8nwJE
*Madeleine Carroll*
Being serenaded by Dick Powell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F15z4fmq2zs
*William Frawley*
Fred Mertz:
Hawking Chevies w/ My Three Sons cast:
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*Birthdays two days ago (I am behind):*
*Zachary Scott*
Ruthless:
Mildred Pierce:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4h4HZWSPUc
*Yes! An excuse to do Joan Crawford videos?*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy_VSsLt7GY&feature=related
*Bad Romance?Joan?s speciality:*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fBKXbYpBJA&feature=related
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Loco's notes (Betty Grable in How To Marry a Millionaire): Hi, everyone! I'm so excited TCM asked me to be the guest programmer. Gee, I hope I don't make any mistakes like the time I didn't understand what kind of lodge Waldo Brewster was taking me to. Was that ever embarrassing. Anyhoo, these are the four movies I'm going to watch next, so now we can all watch together. I picked HIGH NOON because those old movies about the dangers of marijuana are so much fun. Just don't call it "Loco weed," PLEASE. What could be a better title for a comedy than WEEKEND, and that Troy Donahue is so darn handsome. To prove I have a serious side, too, I picked MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE because clean clothes are important. Finally, I love it when my friends Pola and Schatze come over for a pajama party and we put our hair up in curlers and watch horror movies. Let's hope THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE isn't TOO scary.
Great Schedule. LOVE this--too funny!
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Suddenly Last Summer...I've watched this film once. And I felt like I needed to go rub myself with salt if I was ever going to feel clean again. Maybe I'm totally misinterpreting the whole thing, but it seemed me that Violet was in love with her son (or perhaps with the idea of herself as young and desirable? at the very least there was something seriously twisted there) and was humiliated when Sebastian chose to go abroad with his young cousin instead of her. "Sebastian and Violet.Violet and Sebastian..." It was very important to her to be a part of that "magic" relationship and when it ended, when she became too old to attract the younger men Sebastian apparently preferred, I think something in her head went awry. The fact that Sebastian died in such a horrible way after breaking up their partnership just added to the insanity. She started building this fantasy (or adding to it--it seems to me that she had a pretty thick layer of fantasy spread over Sebastian even before this) of her genius son and his great poetic talent and she had to silence Catherine--she knew the truth and would shatter the fragile fantasy world Violet had been maintaining all those years.
"My son, Sebastian and I constructed our days. Each day we would carve each day like a piece of sculpture, leaving behind us a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture until suddenly, last summer."
Another thought--if Violet's veneration of Sebastion and depiction of the two of them as "Sebastian and Violet.Violet and Sebastian" everywhere they went had any truth to it and wasn't just part of Violet's elaborate fantasy version of Sebastian, they probably attracted a different class of young man than desperate young Spanish guys. Sebastian might not have had to pay the men who came around he and Violet--they may have been attracted to him because they though he was just that nifty. Which makes me wonder how old Sebastian was--was he maybe getting a little long in the tooth too, that he was willing to take Catherine with him and take whatever he could pay to play?
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> {quote:title=Swithin wrote:}{quote}
> I don't know why they took it out of the South. Perhaps Rossen -- if it was at least partly his decision -- wanted to make it more universal. The South was Another Country to many Americans, and maybe Rossen who was definitly a political and social activist wanted to show that the many ills that were depicted in the film could happen anywhere. Perhaps he thought that the message would have been diminished if The South were a strong presence.
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You're probably right--if it had been set in the South, peoplein the rest of the country would have been like, "Man, those Southerners...you know what they're all like...what do you expect?" The message wouldn't have been taken nearly so seriously.
But I do remember getting a "Southern" vibe from this movie.
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*No birthdays today, so i thought I'd do a belated Valentines' tribute to*
*Love Noir Style:*
Out of the Past
In a Lonely Place:
To Have and have Not:
Gun Crazy:
Double Indemnity:
The Maltese Falcon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npsYzr5RcMU&feature=related
Martin Roumagnac
Gilda:
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> {quote:title=hamradio wrote:}{quote}
> .JonnyGeetar wrote:
> << You all just know they're gonna remake The Bad Seed someday, don't you? >>
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> They already did. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088766/
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> I was searching - bad seed remake - under Google Images and this was the first thing popped up on the screen, LOL! If they only.....never mind.
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> Edited by: hamradio on Feb 22, 2011 9:00 PM
Love the Shirley Temple as killer pic! Can't you see her warbling "Animal Crackers" and tap dancing around as she dismembers her vitctim? Twinkling away the whole time?
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> {quote:title=hlywdkjk wrote:}{quote}
> To those curious about deleted posts over night -
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> I've seen this happen before.
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> It appears that a particular post was removed. Undertaking that act of "clean-up" also included removing all posts that were in reply to the offending message or posts that quoted parts of the offending message. The missing replies were not necessarily objectionable- they were only "collateral damage." And the posters whose posts went missing are likely not in any jeopardy of being reprimanded.
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> Kyle In Hollywood
Shoot, I had an entire thread removed. Just because I suggested that a certain politician might be in a league with the Son of Satan...when really, I was just complaining about the Toyota commercail featuring a SimGeneKelly and SimDonaldOConner. ::shrugs:: whatever
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> {quote:title=jbh wrote:}{quote}
> Gracious, everyone seems so angry! I just have one question: who (or what) is Temple Drake? I've watched my share of movies, am pretty smart, but this is a new one. Help please.
Hi jbh--
Temple Drake is the character played by Mirriam Hopkins in the 1933 movie "The Story of Temple Drake," which was based on the William Faulkner novel _Sanctuary_. It's about this sort of amoral southern belle who likes to party and finds herself in a very bad place one night--she and her date are stranded in a storm and the only "sanctuary" is a robber's den (of sorts). The gang leader rapes her and she likes it and begins a relationship with him. Finally, she can't take it anymore and shoots him. Pretty racy, even for a precode movie and unavailable on dvd. You can watch it on youtube:
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> {quote:title=filmlover wrote:}{quote}
> tracey, there is an interesting section in Wikipedia's listing of "A Yank at Oxford." Leigh was, apparently, "difficult," on the set, but...
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> Regardless of her prior behavior, Leigh managed to make her way through the filming without much acrimony and made an impression on her costar, Robert Taylor. Taylor returned to Hollywood talking of the great English actress he had worked with and suggested to Selznick, who was still searching for his Scarlett O'Hara, that they ought to look at her.
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> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Yank_at_Oxford
Oh well, she was brilliant as Scarlett and the antagonism between the two worked, as Scarlett and Rhett had a similar relationship. Makes you wonder what modern medicines maight have done for her, though; both for the TB and the bipolar disorder.
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> {quote:title=VP19 wrote:}{quote}
> > {quote:title=traceyk65 wrote:}{quote}
> > I think I've said it before, but I'd like to have seen Marlene Dietrich with Spencer Tracy, sometime in their primes. They were so good together in Judgement at Nuremburg, playing a widow and widower who thought they were years past it, feeling the attraction to each other, then realizing that they are too much on opposite sides for it to really work out...the shot of her sitting in that depressing little room while the phone rings and rings--heart-breaking (to me anyway). Tracy had the right kind of rough-edged all American-ness that she played so well against (Gary Cooper and John Wayne were two of her best co-stars). Clark Gable would have played well with her too, for similar reasons.
> >
> Gable and Dietrich did work together...but it was on radio. When "Lux Radio Theater" moved to the West Coast after two years in New York (a drop in transcontinental line costs made network broadcasts from the Pacific time zone more feasible), the first episode done from Hollywood, on June 1, 1936, starred Gable and Dietrich in "The Legionnaire And The Lady," a reworking of "Morocco" (still unsure why the title was changed -- probably to please the Breen office), with Gable taking over Gary Cooper's film role.
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> > I wonder, too, how William Powell would have played opposite Katharine Hepburn? He had a softer, more self-mocking version of the Cary Grant sophistication and Kate and Cary were excellent together, so...
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> That would have been interesting. Powell nearly worked with Greta Garbo in "Ninotchka," but his poor health at the time precluded it, and Melvyn Douglas got the part. (It would also have enabled Powell to work with Ernst Lubitsch.)
Now that I think about it, Ive seen the Dietrich/Gable raido play on youtube--I'll have to give it a listen. And wouldn't William Powell have been great in Ninotchka? Not that Melvyn Douglas did badly, but Powell would have brought something extra to it. More sparkle, maybe?
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*Birthdays today:*
*Robert Young:*
Northwest Passage:
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=11268
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=316505
Father Knows Best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh2ZoMPBUwo&feature=related
*Preview of tomorrow?s line-up:*
Giant:
Suddenly Last Summer:
You Were Never Lovelier:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHkMe2OmdPg
You Can?t Take it With You:
In honor of tax season:
The Great Zeigfield:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTwq_Fxr5ak&feature=related
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> {quote:title=ValentineXavier wrote:}{quote}
> Well, I'm not a Weatherman, but I did attend an SDS meeting once... The film doesn't make me feel racist, and I don't think it is supposed to. It is an honest look at black and white relations. It is a bit of a play, as you have noted. To me, it shows how human people are, and that we all have reasons for behaving the way we do, and right and wrong just aren't clear, or a quality owned by one side, or the other. I think it is one of Spike's best, along with *Malcolm X*. I can understand why people would find the film discouraging. It doesn't really offer any answers. I think it was just trying to create understanding of all perspectives. Personally, I sympathized with many of the characters, even if I didn't really identify with them that much.
Maybe I just took it too personally. I taught for Headstart for a while, working with a population very much like that depicted in the movie. And it made me crazy, mostly because I could see how the lifestyle of the parents was having a detrimental effect on the children. My first year, I had a child killed by his mother's boyfriend less than a month after we'd reported the man for child abuse. I had kids come in all filthy, with no breakfast and Mom screaming at Dad or somebody on the cell phone, totally oblivious to her kids' needs and other kids whose parents had so many issues of their own that they couldn't even parent their children. And the kids suffered for it, not just emotionally, but with language delays and behavioral problems, all of which will have a negative effect ont heir ability to learn and cope with the world (We had a few good parents too, but they were a minority.) I still feel guilty about quitting.
I guess the question I've wanted answered for a long time is why have children you can't afford and you don't really want to raise? (Of course the latter question could be asked of a lot of wealthy and middle class parents too...) If people (regardless of race or socio-economic status) just waited until they had the resources, both financial and emotional, to raise their children in a loving environment...well that would be ideal, just not realistic, I guess.
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"Overheard: Robert Taylor telling Clark Gable he will enjoy working with Vivien Leigh in GWTW..."
Wanna bet?? LOL
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I think I've said it before, but I'd like to have seen Marlene Dietrich with Spencer Tracy, sometime in their primes. They were so good together in Judgement at Nuremburg, playing a widow and widower who thought they were years past it, feeling the attraction to each other, then realizing that they are too much on opposite sides for it to really work out...the shot of her sitting in that depressing little room while the phone rings and rings--heart-breaking (to me anyway). Tracy had the right kind of rough-edged all American-ness that she played so well against (Gary Cooper and John Wayne were two of her best co-stars). Clark Gable would have played well with her too, for similar reasons.
I wonder, too, how William Powell would have played opposite Katharine Hepburn? He had a softer, more self-mocking version of the Cary Grant sophistcation and Kate and Cary were excellent together, so...
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Do the Right Thing:
This is not a movie i watched today or even yesterday. I watched it Friday and have been thinking about it at odd moments ever since (so I guess Spike Lee was successful in some ways). I can appreciate what he accomplished with the cinematography--everything was all in rose and yellow and pink and oranges. I suppose this was to underline the heat but it made everything look...pretty, almost festive (though, given that it was filmed on location in Bedford-Stuy, I wondered where the trash, hookers and drug dealers were all hiding). He uses camera angles very well, shooting at an angle and from below to underscore the conflict in the final scenes and so on. I like the way the film began, with the nice (--ish) (the language was, sadly, very realistic) slice of life on a city block. He introduces the characters one by one, with all their idiosincrasies and personality flaws and makes you actually care about some of them. There's a Greek Chorus of sorts, in the perons of 3 older black men sitting on the corner, commenting on everything that happens. The day wears on, with the 4 races (white, black, asian and hispanic) all scraping each other raw with little comments (and some outright slurs) and everyone gets a little more angry on and on all day until BOOM! it all goes straight to hell via a baseball bat taken to a screaming boom box (not to mention the screaming man holding it) some gratuitous police brutality and trash can tossed through a window by a very surprising character.
The problem I had was that I didn't actually like any of the characters. Half of them were unpleasant people who spent a lot of the movie screaming at each other (especially Rosie Perez--I was totally picturing the duct tape across her mouth almost from the minute she walked on the screen)The only one I came even close to liking was Da Mayor (played by Ossie Davis) probably because he grew through the course of the movie, from the neighborhood drunk to a hero who saves a young boy's life and tries to stem the violence.
I suppose it's not important that I like the characters, as long as they make me think about racism and race relations in America. If part of the point was to make even the most die-hard liberals in the country feel racist, I'm sure he succeeded--unless you were a member of the Weather Underground, I don't see how you could be entirely comfortable watching this movie.
OK, there you have it--I didn't like this movie because it made me feel racist, dammit. And I hate that.
All the King's Men: Hoo-boy, this ain't too good!
in General Discussions
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> {quote:title=RichardKimble wrote:}{quote}
>>
> I would like to have seen Cagney in the role. Forget the Southern accent -- Cagney had the charm as well as the menace. His take on Long, A Lion Is In The Streets, was unfortunately a mediocre movie and the Long character was made into an outright villain. Perhaps if he'd played Willie Stark the character would have been more evenly shaded.
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> I also think Spencer Tracy might have done well. The Ford-Tracy Last Hurrah is an interesting version of a Longish character (if heavily romanticiized from the much more cynical novel).
I've never really thought a lot about this film (not one of my faves) but I think you;re right about Cagney. He'd have been impressive in the role. Tracy might have pulled it off too, if he called on his early gangster roles to recapture the edge. He managed it for the movie State of the Union, for a while he seemed like the corrupt politician he was supposed to have become, but then he did a 180 and became Mr All American Spencer Tracy again. I know the script called for it, but I thought it was too abrupt--he's been stomping on his wife's feelings for months and then suddenly in the final 5 minutes of the movie, he changes? Just because she finally tells him what she thinks, then goes on the air to support him anyway?