King Rat

"Vilma" is how a German or Pole would pronounce "Wilma," so it's the same name. It's not impossible for these names to come back into fashion. Two of the trendiest girls' names at the moment are Emma and Hannah. When I was growing up, only women over 60 had those names. I've recently seen Mabel and Millie as names for little girls, so there's hope for Wilma, Vilma, Velma, Thelma, and Selma. Come to think of it, I've also known an Elma and a Delma.

Since some of you were mentioning The Scarlet Hour, I'll reprint my post from May 2019: Alan K. Rode said in his introduction to The Scarlet Hour (1956) at the Palm Springs film noir festival that after the film had been shown at several festivals last year, Paramount told him that their archival print was no longer in good enough shape to be shown. Fortunately, some restoration work was done, and The Scarlet Hour with Lionel Lindon's cinematography looked just fine. Michael Curtiz was toward the end of his career when he made The Scarlet Hour. According to Rode, Paramount took a chance on him because he had a reputation as a starmaker, and the credits begin "Introducing Carol Ohmart, Tom Tryon, and Jody Lawrance." Lawrance had actually made a number of films already. The story is Too Late for Tears meets Double Indemnity, and Carol Ohmart is sometimes made up to look like Barbara Stanwyck. Ohmart plays a tough-as-nails gal from the slums married to a rich real estate developer (James Gregory). She's also carrying on with one of his employees (Tom Tryon). Tryon isn't as good an actor as Ohmart or Gregory, but he's OK. Bad girl Ohmart comes up with a plot to get enough money so that she and Tryon can run off together. What could possibly go wrong? Weirdly, Tryon's character, called "Marsh," is named E. V. Marshall. This is really strange because the top police detective is played by E. G. Marshall, excellent as always. David Lewis, who I believe was the original Edward Quartermaine on General Hospital, gives a strong performance as the boss of the crooks, the kind of man who doesn't have to raise his voice to be deadly. Richard Deacon, seen on TCM this past week as the butler in The Young Philadelphians, plays a jeweler here. However, Elaine Stritch steals the film as Carol Ohmart's hard-drinking, fun-loving best friend. She has so much energy that you can't look at anyone else when she's on screen. Curtiz directs well, the story has a couple of nice twists along the way, and I think most noiristas would consider this a solid three stars out of four film.

Eddie Muller in his intro told us just how neglected Repeat Performance was before his noir foundation and UCLA restored it: when Eddie tried to show the 32mm version he had finally found, it was decomposing while he tried to show it. Fortunately, someone had a 16mm print, which was then used to restore the film.

Two words: Ricky Gervais. Who will never be hired as Oscar host. You could also celebrate the end of the Globes by having your own Pia Zadora film festival.

The problem was that the performance was all accent and not much else. Morrow worked so hard on the extremely peculiar JFK-style accent that that's about all you get. A little flavoring of it here and there would have worked much better.

Sometimes the accent plays the actor instead of the other way around. A particularly gruesome example is Rob Morrow in Quiz Show. In community theater productions of Tennessee Williams it's not uncommon for women who have grown up in the South to adopt extremely thick "Suthun ay-ac-see-unts."

In a way, I think this may be the point of the movie--you get a chance to relive the last year so that you have a better outcome, but you concentrate on the wrong things. She thinks that if she can prevent Barney from meeting Paula, her marriage will be fine, but it isn't. She still doesn't see that her marriage isn't working because her husband is jealous of her career, and she can't prevent his drinking. This seems all too believable. Thanks for reporting back with your second impressions. This is a film I'd like to see again at some point. By the way, I was hooked by that party scene that Sheila runs to in her nightgown and fur coat, drawing William aside and then having to deal with the interruption by Bess. I didn't know who these people were, but I wanted to find out, and that shows some good writing and directing.

Yep, me too. Late to the party, and enjoying all the comments about the film. Repeat Performance would make a great double feature with either The Velvet Touch or A Double Life, which are also noirish films with theater settings. I loved the premise of the film and wanted to see how it would work out. As Miss Wonderly mentioned, some great-looking fashions. The designer had fun with Natalie Schafer's outrageous hat and also did a good job of giving some glamor to Joan Leslie, like her fur hat or the stylish outfit she wears on the second New Year's Eve. Joan Leslie does a creditable job in the lead role. She's not ideally cast and has to work hard for a presence that actual stars could take for granted. The slightly naive quality that makes Leslie not seem to be a star actually works for her in convincing us (or me, anyway) that she would stick by a husband that some other women would be glad to leave. Louis Hayward's performance works for me in the sense that I think he's playing a character not unlike himself. Eddie Muller mentioned the effect that the war had on Hayward. Compare the handsome confident rogue he played in Ladies in Retirement with the husband in Repeat Performance. To a great extent, Hayward has lost his looks. As several of you have said, Richard Basehart gives a wonderful performance. Without a word of dialogue, he lets us know that William is homosexual and is platonically in love with Joan Leslie. Natalie Schafer does campy and trampy with the best of them. Virginia Field as the ice queen playwright, Benay Venuta as the sparkling burgundy gal, and Tom Conway as the suave producer are all welcome additions. I believe Benay Venuta understudied Ethel Merman on Broadway in more than one show, but Merman rarely missed performances. It's fun to think of an A-List 1947 version of Repeat Performance. How about Gene Tierney as Sheila, Fredric March as Barney, George Sanders as Jack Friday, Eve Arden as Bess, and Eleanor Parker as Paula?

--Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark and Out of Africa. --The Boston papers thought that Laura Linney was the one who nailed the South Boston accent in Mystic River. --Jean Smart, who grew up in Seattle, did an absolutely authentic Southern accent on Designing Women. Probably the best Southern accent ever by a non-native. --Matthew Rhys is another British actor with a natural-sounding American accent.

My mind is still boggling at the thought that Dave Karger would name John Hughes as his favorite director. When a family member was in her early teens, she announced that the Twilight vampire movie was the greatest film ever made, and sure, that was understandable. She's going to see many more movies in her lifetime. John Hughes directed only eight films, and I have seen only two, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which I loathe, and Sixteen Candles, which I would not want to see again but do not actually loathe. Molly Ringwald was cute, and Anthony Michael Hall would go on to give a good performance in a film I like a lot, Six Degrees of Separation. What's refreshing about Karger's comment is how it breaks stereotypes: 1) the stereotype that gay men have good taste and 2) the stereotype that gay men only like stuff like Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Hughes is as mainstream a director as I can imagine. He is skillful at writing stuff that a large mainstream audience will respond to and find funny. He chooses high school as his topic, something almost everyone has been subjected to, and cleverly makes the main characters outsiders yet not too far away from the in-group--Ringwald as a cute girl not yet in the inner circle of popular girls and Hall as the nerdy underclassman who in a few years might be successful enough to employ all the jocks who play pranks on him now. Hughes ruthlessly makes fun of those who are genuinely outsiders: the Korean exchange student and the girl in a neck brace. Her attempt to drink from a water fountain is apparently so side-splittingly hilarious that Hughes shows us similar scenes twice. Now there is no reason that a gay man can't be part of the mainstream audience and no reason that a gay man may not identify with the genuine outsiders in a film--in our society today gay men need not, in some parts of the country, be outsiders. I do hope that Karger will eventually discover better directors than John Hughes. After all, there are hundreds of them.

Some neglected films from the classic era that I like are: High Barbaree The Guilt of Janet Ames Hungry Hill The Crystal Ball City for Conquest Honeymoon for Three The Velvet Touch So Well Remembered So Evil My Love Sarabande for Dead Lovers

Day of the Outlaw, Track of the Cat, Nightfall, and On Dangerous Ground would make a great evening of winter noir. Thanks to Joe and Lavender for suggesting them.

I hadn't seen The Corn Is Green in several years, but my husband got interested in the story and we watched the whole movie, enjoying it very much. Although Bette Davis is younger than Miss Moffat probably should be, this is one of Bette's best performances, with restraint and with the emotion behind the restraint. The supporting cast is uniformly strong. Nigel Bruce's pompous squire provides some welcome comedy. Rosalind Ivan's asking people if they have been saved made me feel like I was back in the South. Much of the story would make sense if it were set in Kentucky or West Virginia. Rhys Williams adds some warm sympathetic touches as Mr. Jones, who has in fact been saved and in the last act is willing to make a huge sacrifice. Joan Lorring's Bessie is about as slutty, malicious, willfully stupid, and cunning as possible. John Dall is effectively cast as Morgan Evans, the student whom Miss Moffat wishes to send to Oxford. Many actors with longer careers than John Dall don't have three movies as impressive as The Corn Is Green, Rope, and Gun Crazy. Emlyn Williams' play is at least partly autobiographical. I haven't read the first volume of his autobiography, George, which covers his early life, but I've read the later volume, Emlyn, which is quite interesting.

Have you ever watched a film a second time and been surprised at how little time a performer you liked actually had on screen? I believe Max von Sydow has only one scene in Winter Light as the man who's terrified of nuclear war now that the Chinese have the bomb. I don't care much for the film, but von Sydow is great. Then there's Zohra Lampert in Splendor in the Grass, who has (I think) two scenes, one when she's in her element in the Italian restaurant and then at the end of the film when marriage has turned her into a farmer's wife in, of all places, Kansas.

Lawrence, I'm so glad you got to see Maedchen in Uniform, Born To Kill, and Three Colors: Blue. Blue is by far my favorite of the Three Colors films. It would be much easier for me to list my favorites of the films seen in the last year if, like you, I had kept a list of them! Maybe that should be my New Year's resolution, along with seeing Chungking Express. I did see We're No Angels, a worthy addition to the Michael Curtiz canon. It made me wish Humphrey Bogart had made more comedies. Blast of Silence was remarkably good for a film made on such a low budget.

SPOILER ALERT: Of course, there are two schools of thought about Warren Beatty being up to his neck in snow: 1) What a tragedy! 2) Not enough snow.

I only saw the end of this movie. Thanks for the review. What impressed me the most were the really awful haircuts Bette Davis and Jim Davis were sporting. Bette's can be seen clearly in the still you posted. It looks like Jim Davis is wearing a bad toupee, but maybe it's just a bad haircut.

Let's add The Pawnbroker to that list. I'm always glad when Juano Hernandez gets the recognition he deserves. Let me add a little-known actress in a little-known film: Geraldine Wall in High Barbaree. I am not always a fan of June Allyson, but she is excellent in this film and has never looked more attractive. Not only are Van Johnson and June Allyson charming in the film, the studio found two children who sure enough look like the young Van and June. Geraldine Wall plays Van's mother, a woman who seems so interesting that we want to say, "Tell us more about her."

Given Rhonda's exercise scene, which James mentions, it's definitely OK to mention her. That's what I remember best about the film!

That's a nice line-up. I'm not fond of While the City Sleeps, but it has a fine cast. The Locket, Crossfire, and Angel Face--attention, all Robert Mitchum fans!--are especially good.

I had the title wrong: Anatomy of a Seduction (1979). With a 5.6/10 rating on imdb! This was the time when both Jameson Parker and Susan Flannery were trying to make the transition from soaps to movies and/or primetime TV. Parker got Simon and Simon, and Flannery went back to daytime when The Bold and the Beautiful was created. If you're a fan of Jameson Parker, look for the movie A Small Circle of Friends, with Brad Davis and Karen Allen.

Has anyone else seen Diary of a Seduction, a TV movie where's Rita's best friend Susan Flannery (no, not THAT kind of best friend!) is seduced by Rita's son, played by . . . would you believe Jameson Parker? Jameson Parker is lovely and languid, but Rita is not exactly ethnically correct as the mother of this blond babe.

I approve of everyone who knows this quote!!

There really are so many "hummable" Sondheim songs, and so many different kinds of songs. In addition to his other skills, Sondheim is a great creator of melody.

I imagine most of the contributors to this thread can hum, sing, and whistle quite a number of Sondheim melodies, but for those who still insist that Sondheim can't write a tune, I jotted down a list of ten songs that came immediately to mind as good choices for Sondheim 101: "I Remember" (Evening Primrose) "Comedy Tonight" (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) "Anyone Can Whistle" (Anyone Can Whistle) "Being Alive" (Company) "Broadway Baby" (Follies) "I'm Still Here" (Follies)--almost every song in Follies qualifies "In Praise of Women" (A Little Night Music) "Send in the Clowns" (A Little Night Music) "No One Is Alone" (Into the Woods) "Our Time" (Merrily We Roll Along)