King Rat

Sam Neill cute? You betcha!! And not many actors as manly and good-looking as he would risk playing a not very bright weakling as he does in A Cry in the Dark.

I'm also a fan of Bombshell. Lee Tracy is lots of fun as the fast-talking agent. Yes, I think A Cry in the Dark is one of Meryl's best. It can be a hard film to watch, with a miscarriage of justice and Meryl playing such an unsympathetic character, the polar opposite of Susan Hayward's sanitized "innocent" in I Want To Live! Sam Neill's scene on the witness stand is great, too.

Casablanca was originally planned to star Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan.

Irene Handl is also hilarious as David Warner's Marx-spouting mother in Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment.

Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland were going to star in Carousel.

Bogie, were they right on the "fringe" of WWI? You gotta love Kay's costumes!

Many actresses wanted the role of Fannie Brice in the original stage version of Funny Girl. The song "People" was specifically written for Anne Bancroft.

I think there's still one indication that Vertigo was intended for Vera Miles. Judy, the woman who looks so much like the dead Madeleine, says she is from Kansas. So was Vera Miles, who had represented Kansas in the Miss America pageant.

From last night's Noir Alley, Over-Exposed: Isobel Elsom as the society lady Mrs. Payton Grange and Donald Randolph as the queenly owner of Cafe Coco.

Great description of Heavy Metal. I saw it on its first run in NY when I was visiting someone who did not become the love of my life (thank you, oh spirits of the universe!). The two movies we saw, at his choice, during my visit were Heavy Metal and the Bo Derek Tarzan and the Ape Man. Definitely not a marriage made in heaven! He had seen Miles O'Keefe, Bo's Tarzan, in a New York gay bar and said that Miles had a high-pitched voice about an octave higher than you would expect from his manly frame. What happened as we were walking to see Heavy Metal was a better story--in retrospect--than the actual movie. A car full of teenagers slowed down, and one of them threw a chocolate milkshake all over me. Hair, shirt, pants. The shirt was ruined. If you haven't had a good laugh since the beginning of the pandemic, I'll admit that at the time I had (brace yourself) a curly perm just like Tony Geary as Luke on General Hospital. No doubt the milkshake was my cosmic punishment for the bad hairstyle.

Untamed can also be seen as another variation of Gone With the Wind, like Reap the Wild Wind. Susan Hayward, in her days as Edythe Marriner, actually read for the role of Scarlett O'Hara. Tyrone Power plays the Rhett Butler figure to Susan Hayward's Scarlett in Untamed, which begins in Ireland, ancestral home of the O'Haras. Untamed isn't bad, though I got the impression that a lot of story had been condensed, especially in the last third of the movie.

This sounds like a version or imitation of Henry James' novella The Aspern Papers. I have never heard of this film. Did you see it online?

A shamefully neglected film is Almost You (1984). I would never seen it if the daughter of a friend hadn't mentioned that it was her favorite film from that year. Brooke Adams has been in an accident and needs physical therapy. Her husband, Griffin Dunne, begins to fall for the physical therapist (Karen Young). In an era of open marriage (or not), what is he to do? The film maneuvers between comedy and drama, and we're not sure where this is going (in a good way). There's a job interview scene that will be especially funny to anyone who has ever interviewed candidates for a job. Dana Delany also has a small but important part in the film.

Rex Reed wrote "If Diane Keaton doesn't win the Oscar for Looking for Mr. Goodbar, there is no God." She did win the Oscar, but for another film, so I'm not sure what that tells us about the existence of God! Quite a few Oscar winners have been helped by another performance the same year. By the way, we all seem to be on the same page about Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Sundays and Cybele used to be hard to obtain. I'll have to look for it again. And jakeem and Bogie, thanks for mentioning The One That Got Away, a film I've never heard of. Hardy Kruger was wonderful in The Flight of the Phoenix, and seeing that again would be a great way to remember him.

A much too neglected film from 1980 is Serial, starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld. Fortunately it is now on DVD; for a long time it wasn't. I remember laughing myself silly at this satire on the self-absorbed denizens of Marin County. Casting Martin Mull as the straight man among all the loonies seemed like odd casting at the time, but it worked. Tuesday Weld is the wife who falls for every fad going, and brother, there were a lot of fads going. And where else does Christopher Lee get to play a gay biker?

The Ricky Gervais comment about James Corden went something like this: "This year James Corden was a big *****. He was also in the Cats movie." Before the She-Devil movie, there was a British mini-series called Confessions of a She-Devil (the title of the novel), starring Patricia Hodge and Annette Badland. It was much better and worth seeking out. As you can see from the clips, Meryl has to do a fair amount of acting to get the accent which Patricia Hodge could take for granted.

Understood. Can't think of the guy without remembering the Ricky Gervais comment from the Golden Globes. Haven't seen the Meryl version of Into the Woods, only the PBS filming that CinemaInternational mentioned. That was good, though I had seen an amateur production which had stronger actors in a few roles, especially the Baker.

As much as I hate to disagree with both Lorna and CinIntl, I like The Hours and feel a deep personal connection to it. Not so much the Nicole Kidman with a fake nose winning the Oscar part (you know I mean Nicole winning the Oscar, not the fake nose winning the Oscar, or did it?), but I have almost never been moved by a child performance (I could stop right there) as I was by Jack Rovello as Julianne Moore's abandoned son. I love that this super-arty film had better twists than any thriller of the day: a character assumed to be dead returns; one character turns out to be the older version of another character; one character takes an unexpected exit from the film. All of these twists work for me, and they make the film. In a film with so many great actresses, Jack Rovello and Ed Harris give the standout performances. I also love Julianne Moore in this film, Allison Janney adds a human touch of comedy amongst the Great Ladies of the Theatah, and Toni Collette in a small part is, as always, memorable and real. This is not to slight Meryl, great as always.

You could pair them with a "Liberals Playing Racists" theme, and add Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue.

Mr. Lucky has one of his best performances, and Laraine Day and Charles Bickford are great, too. I'm very fond of this one.

She probably felt she had to scream to keep up with Claire Trevor.

Richard Kiley is even better known as a Broadway leading man, star of Kismet and Man of La Mancha. To some, his voice will be familiar from cast albums. He introduced "Stranger in Paradise" and "The Impossible Dream."

I got to see The Stunt Man at one of the TCM Film Festivals with Richard Rush present. The film had been restored and looked great on the big screen. Though my memory is hazy, I believe it had been years since Rush had seen it on the big screen. The audience was very enthusiastic. For whatever reasons, Rush never had the sustained directing career in the movies that his talent deserved. I'm with 100% about Best Director nomination being deserved, omission of Best Picture nom OK, and that Peter O'Toole, in a supporting role, feels like a leading man. The Paul Brodeur novel is no more linear or coherent than the film. I had seen the film on television and realized, after seeing it on the big screen, just how many nude scenes had been cut for TV. No wonder it was so difficult to follow. Yes, it was filmed at the Hotel Coronado in San Diego, where Some Like It Hot was filmed, and where L. Frank Baum stayed when he was writing some of the later Oz books.

Beth, thanks for booping this thread back to the first page. Since devil possession has been a recent theme on Days of Our Lives, which I watch only occasionally, I was delighted to learn that 1) the devil has left Marlena--or was scared out by Jackee, I missed this--and has instead possessed Marlena's grandson Johnny who 2) because the devil made him do it, dumped his new sweet black wife, Chanel, who 3) was consoled in bed by her girlfriend (in both senses) Alli who 4) felt guilty and wanted to confess to her boyfriend Trip. It ain't yer grandma's soap opera!