King Rat
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Posts posted by King Rat
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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.
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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.
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7 hours ago, Roy Cronin said:
So the Golden Globes are generally acknowledged to have no merit or credibility, but they are (were) to me fine viewing entertainment.
That's all it's worth and I mourn its televised demise.
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.
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Just now, unwatchable said:
Was Morrow's Boston accent for the Goodwin character not good? I can't tell the difference. Then again, I saw the movie when it came out in '94 and I don't recall seeing it since.
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.
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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."
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1 hour ago, misswonderly3 said:
So, I re-watched Repeat Performance the other night. ( My husband hadn't seen it, so watched it with him.)
"Sheila is given a second chance. Yet she doesn't learn from this chance. She still tries to "keep" Barney as a husband. What she should have learned, the second time around, is that he wasn't worth the fight she was putting up for him. And if your husband wants to be with another woman, there's not much you can do about it. Get on with your life." and without Barney, Sheila would have actually had a nicer life.
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.
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On 1/2/2022 at 10:42 AM, Janet0312 said:
I thought Repeat Performance was great. The ending kept me on the edge of my seat. 1st time viewing for me. I enjoyed it very much.
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?
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--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.
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On 1/4/2022 at 5:50 AM, lydecker said:
I was thrilled to see Ben do the initial intro about Kay Francis month. When I realized her "night" was going to be Monday I thought: "Why do they give Karger so many SOTMs?" He really doesn't appear to have a clue about anything pre-1980 (Really? Your favorite director is John Hughes?) and when he does intros about a classic star it is clear he is just reading what the prompter tells him to read. If there is a factual error in the copy as written (which happens more often than not) it never gets corrected by the likes of Karger. My sense is that he has no depth of knowledge (or interest in) any studio system actor or director. Any of the other 4 hosts would be better to intro a SOTM from the classic era. Now . . . if he wants to intro Brat Pack films, that would be right up his alley.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On 1/1/2022 at 12:51 PM, LawrenceA said:
Here are my favorites among the older films (pre-2000) that I watched for the first time in 2021. Please feel free to add your own.
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1) Madchen in Uniform (1931) - German melodrama about a new student (Hertha Thiele) at an exclusive all-girls school who falls in love with one of her teachers (Dorothea Wieck). The performances are terrific, and the filmmaking is exquisite, with notable editing and camera work. Understandably controversial on first release. (9/10)
2) Chungking Express (1994) - Director Wong Kar-Wai's romantic tale, told in two parts, about two couple (Takeshi Kaneshiro & Brigitte Lin, and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai & Faye Wong) who find unlikely love during their days working in a busy train station. Told in Wong's signature dreamy style, this film is well deserved of its classic status.
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3) Born to Kill (1947) - I finally got around to this crime drama with Claire Trevor as a scheming woman who manipulates a psychotic killer (Lawrence Tierney playing to type). I knew that this was considered one of Tierney's signature roles, but I was more blown away by Trevor, giving one her best performances.
4) Three Colors: Blue (1993) - 25 years after seeing Three Colors: Red, I finally got around to seeing the companion films Blue and White. I didn't think much of the latter, but Blue is a powerful drama, examining one woman's grief following a horrific accident. Juliette Binoche gives one of her best performances here.
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.
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13 hours ago, NoShear said:
Another winter tragedy with Julie Christie: McCABE & Mrs. MILLER (1971)!
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.
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2 hours ago, mkahn22 said:
Winter Meeting from 1948 with Bette Davis, Jim Davis and John Hoyt.It takes place in the winter and uses the season as a metaphor, but it's not an overly "wintery" movie. It's also reasonably boring.My comments on it below:At some point, actors become too old for certain roles, but usually, stars overstay their welcome in the type of character that has propelled them to fame. Also, movies need to be about something, which is usually a conflict between ideas, people or events.In Winter Meeting, we see Bette Davis having overstayed her welcome in the role of the young, smart, pretty socialite, in this case, with an aversion to marriage. The young-socialite role is one she played many, many times in her twenties and thirties, but now, in her early forties, it's forced and not believable.Here she plays a wealthy Manhattan dilettante poetess (it's nice to have a substantial trust fund behind you) who, at the end of the war, meets a moody and aloof WWII naval hero, Jim Davis. Instead of acknowledging their age difference, we are just supposed to accept Ms. Davis as a woman in her twenties. She might be the best movie actress ever, but even she can't act twenty years off her real age.Even putting that aside, we are left with a movie without much story or conflict. Moody Jim Davis and hesitant-to-love Bette Davis, in theory, are too angsty soles who find comfort in each other, but their love affair struggles to take flight owing to some unknown internal conflict each has.The bulk of the movie is watching each lead try to draw the past secrets out of the other so that they can overcome their inner demons and embrace their new love affair. That effort takes way too long - extended kitchen conversations, a trip to a country house, exhausting fireside chats - and then offers up challenges that are not dramatic.(Spoiler alerts) Bette Davis' wealthy, socially proper minister father married a working-class Irish Catholic girl, Davis' mother, who proceeds to have affairs and finally abandons him and Davis - the shame! Meanwhile, Jim Davis has struggled since he was a teenager with a desire to become a priest (I know, what!?, it comes out of nowhere), but an uncertainty if it is the right path for him. Additionally, he dislikes that his heroic war efforts are being used by the media and Washington for propaganda reasons. That's it, those are the two big secrets that torture these struggling lovers.Sure, there's a bit of a connection between Bette Davis' embarrassment over her Catholic mother's behavior and Jim Davis' desire to become a priest and, yes, he helps to minister her through her guilt and anger, but by now the movie has gone on for almost an hour and a half. And even then, the angst kinda continues and the resolution, I'll leave that for those who want to see it, is pat and unsatisfying.But there are two bright spots. One is the 1940's version of east-coast elitism on display throughout as Bette Davis and her snarky sophisticated friend, businessman John Hoyt, look down on all things not east-coast establishment and money, like the Midwest roots of war-hero Jim Davis. It's only hinted at here, but Hoyt's character, today, would loudly proclaim his homosexuality as he is, and there's no other word for it, ****ier than Davis is when looking down his elitist nose at everything from how someone holds a fork to who their parents are. Bette Davis and he have a friendship chemistry that, unfortunately, never develops between her and Jim Davis.The other bright spot, and it's a very inside-baseball thing is Davis' voice and delivery. By this point in her career, she had perfected her acting voice: a subtler but as distinct a voice as Cary Grant's. Her diction and inflection are all her own as she constantly varies her speaking pace and cadence, from long pauses to rapid-fire delivery, all the while bringing her idiosyncratic pronunciation as words and vowels seem to go through some sort of high-brow nasal filter before coming out. The result is an incredible ability to project complex emotions - and condescension - with nothing more than the delivery of a few words and a look to match.Unfortunately, neither Hoyt's performance nor Davis's voice are enough to wake up this sleepy effort where Bette Davis is too old for the role and the conflicts too mild to carry nearly two hours of movie.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.
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8 hours ago, mkahn22 said:
Every time I've seen Juano Hernandez in a movie, his, usually supporting or brief, role is incredibly impactful. The three movies that come immediately to mind are "The Breaking Point," "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Young Man with a Horn." He's a major talent.
Edit add, just thought of one more, "Trial."
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."
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44 minutes ago, sewhite2000 said:
Typically, I seek out the poster on IMDB and just list the first two cast names I find there. Pretty sure that was the case with this movie. Sometimes, if it's a movie I'm familiar with, I will save myself a few seconds and make a judgment about which two performers have the most prominent roles. You can blame me at l east some of the times for any issues you have with this.
Given Rhonda's exercise scene, which James mentions, it's definitely OK to mention her. That's what I remember best about the film!
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20 hours ago, sewhite2000 said:
Daytime February 10 Murders! (Or, more accurately, I see after looking up the company credits for every movie, RKO murders)
Stranger on the Third Floor (Peter Lorre, John McGuire) (RKO, 1940)
Journey into Fear (Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio) (RKO, 1943)
Cornered (Dick Powell, Walter Slezak) (RKO, 1945)
The Locket (Laraine Day, Brian Aherne) (RKO, 1946)
Nocturne (George Raft, Lynne Bari) (RKO, 1946)
Crossfire (Robert Young, Robert Mitchum) (RKO, 1947)
The Woman on Pier 13 (Laraine Day, Robert Ryan) (RKO, 1950)
Angel Face (Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons) (RKO, 1953)
While the City Sleeps (Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming) (RKO, 1956)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.
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6 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said:
I did not….what year did it come out? sounds trashy as hell
Will look on YouTube
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.
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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.
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3 hours ago, NoShear said:
"I'm just mad about saffron...She's just mad about me"
I approve of everyone who knows this quote!!
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20 minutes ago, Hibi said:
With So Little To Be Sure Of from Anyone Can Whistle. Good Thing Going and Not A Day Goes By (Merrily We Go Along). Take Me To The World (Evening Primrose)
Saturday Night has some hummable tunes too, (TItle song among them) but I can't think right now the titles (his first show which never got produced due to a backer dying or pulling out or something).
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.
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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)
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Noir Alley
in General Discussions
Posted
"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.