King Rat

We're No Angels: yet another well-made and thoroughly enjoyable movie directed by Michael Curtiz. This would rank high up on my list of plays transformed into films. Most of the action takes place in the building which is both store and home for Leo G. Carroll and his wife Joan Bennett and daughter Gloria Talbott, yet how fluidly the camera moves and how many useful but not showy camera set-ups Curtiz finds. The color cinematography by Loyal Griggs is nicely balanced, and the costumes are another plus. I would never have thought of Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov as perfect actors for a trio of prisoners escaped from Devil's Island, but they play off each other exceptionally well. As Dave Karger noted in his introduction, Bogart is a great comic straight man, and it's too bad he didn't do more comedies. Every reaction by Ustinov is a hoot, and Aldo Ray rises to the level of the others. Getting the tone of this story right is a constant balancing act. The prisoners originally plan to kill and rob the family, yet we like the prisoners, yet we know that Ustinov is a murderer and Ray is a rapist. Basil Rathbone, as Carroll's cousin and the owner of the store, is so obnoxious that he answers every simple question with an insult, yet we don't want him to be killed . . . or do we? If some viewers find all of this moral teeter-tottering a bit too queasy, that would be understandable. If this were a Lubitsch film, critics would probably be raving about "Lubitsch touches," but Curtiz' direction leaves nothing to be desired.

Dut dut duh! Here comes the thread again. If you missed We're No Angels, I hope it will be on the TCM app, because I enjoyed this movie and will post more about it later today on I Just Watched and probably Christmas Marathon as well. Joan Bennett has a good supporting role. She looks very thin, by the way. The fancy green dress she wears is quite lovely. Her scenes with Humphrey Bogart are nice, with just the right hint of a certain attraction on her part.

Since we've been talking about Company, I thought you might enjoy the Larry Kert Birthday Party Story, which Ethan Mordden recounts in One More Kiss and admits may not be true, though it should be: Larry Kert replaced Dean Jones early in the run of the show. It's Larry Kert's birthday, and he is about to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. Someone urges him to make a wish. With a smirk he says, "Who do you have to **** to get out of Company?" Sondheim says, "The same people you ****ed to get in it. Happy birthday, Larry." And leaves.

In Mafioso (1962) they bring Alberto Sordi all the way from Sicily, and he isn't a hitman, just an excellent shot. I'm with you on Blast of Silence. Would I love to see more films like it? No. But it does have its own special weirdness.

Brenda Frazier was in all the newspapers as a high society debutante gone bad. I remember my mother mentioning the name. Brenda is also cited in the opening verse of a delightful Rodgers and Hart song called "Disgustingly Rich": "Brenda Frazier sat on a wall, Brenda Frazier had a bad fall." In the early 1970s a good portion of the audience would still have recognized Brenda's name, just as the name "Kardashian" is recognized today, but for revivals of Follies it makes more sense to use "Shirley Temple."

If you've never seen The Long Night, I recommend this fine remake of the French noir classic Le jour se leve.

I see the Joan Crawford resemblance, but to me she also looks like an older Debra Messing.

Would this have been the first studio-released movie to use "Jesus" as a swear word? When Ralph opens the door to Frankie, I believe he says "Jesus," not "Geez," which would be unusual in 1961. By the end of the decade things were very different. I've been thinking about how different the film would have been if Peter Falk had played Frankie, as originally intended. Was Peter Falk already doing the Peter Falk shtick that many people love, but that I find hard to take for more than a couple of minutes? Falk would probably have found moments of comedy and pathos in the role. Allen Baron's blanker and less actorish approach works very well for me. I liked the almost attempted rape scene. Laurie, like many another young woman, believes that "misunderstood" bad boy Frankie needs the love of a good woman. Frankie takes her "what you need is a girl" comment as an invitation, which it is, though Laurie expects a sweet tender romantic approach. She learns what Frankie is really like and that rape is not out of the question. She wises up quickly, gets Frankie out of the apartment without a big scene, and finds a boyfriend who may be protection as much as romantic interest.

Who wouldn't want to see a double feature of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Incredible Mr. Limpet? Oh . . . yeah, maybe not.

Know that you are not the only one. One year I admitted that the holidays had been rough, and a couple of other people promptly said the same thing. If Sweeney helps you more than Santa, so be it!

Dargo, I'm pretty confident that all the cute girls and good-looking guys in my high school class have gained 100 pounds and voted for Donald Trump. You know, it's kind of like how I always wanted to look as good as Robert Redford and now that he's in his mid-eighties, maybe I do.

I'd like to add Sondheim's wonderful song "Our Time" from Merrily We Roll Along. I hope I got rid of the Google ad. Well into the song, there's a female voice which doesn't blend with the two men, but the two men are very good, and they do justice to one of Sondheim's best.

Thanks, txfilmfan and Swithin. For me, this doesn't work nearly as well as the original cast album. The tempo seems too slow, though the tempo might have worked except for the adenoidal sound of the young man (this might be his attempt at an American accent, if he's British) and his singing syllables instead of words. The guy's trying to sound young and innocent, but he drags down the work of Rosalie Craig. "Barcelona" works like a charm on the original cast album, but in this recording I hear the labor rather than the result.

I'm very much in agreement. All in all, it's an enjoyable film. Hawks flops with "The Ransom of Red Chief." His films are not notable for including children, are they? "The Last Leaf" is indeed excellent, with particularly strong work by Jean Peters as Anne Baxter's sister, and I also like the ending very much. Charles Laughton and David Wayne are outstanding in "The Cop and the Anthem." I agree that Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger make a handsome couple.

For those of you who have seen the female Bobbie in Company: what did they do with "Barcelona"? That would seem the hardest song to make work with a female protagonist. It made perfect sense with Bobby and a female flight attendant.

I should add that Villette is one of my favorite novels. Charlotte, under the pseudonym Currer Bell, dedicated Jane Eyre to her favorite novelist, Thackeray. This proved embarrassing for him. People who knew Thackeray thought the book had been written by a former governess to the Thackeray daughters, because Thackeray, like Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, had a mad wife.

Devotion had little relationship to reality. Emily and Charlotte never competed for a man. Charlotte was described by the Victorian writer Harriet Martineau as the shortest woman she had ever seen outside of a circus. Malnutrition probably played a large part. Too bad Linda Hunt never got a chance to play Charlotte. Patrick Bronte strenuously objected to Charlotte's marrying, fearing that pregnancy might prove fatal to his daughter, as indeed it did.

If Spielberg really wanted to update West Side Story, wouldn't the Jets have been Black? Blacks vs. Puerto Ricans would make us see the story with new eyes.

It's odd, because several other songs are partly heard or are referred to in Six by Sondheim, like Sondheim's explanation of why "Can That Boy Foxtrot" needed to be cut from Follies. Jarvis Cocker's performance of "I'm Still Here" is scarcely the best available, though an excerpt of it would have been fine. On the other hand, I really liked seeing Dean Jones work hard to get a final recording of "Being Alive." Whatever he may have been like on stage, his singing is right on point. Sondheim's interviews are wide-ranging, and he strikes the perfect balance, showing a just appreciation of his talents without being arrogant about success or bitter about the commercial failure of certain shows. He notes that before the movie version of West Side Story, only two songs from that show had been covered: Johnny Mathis singing "Maria" and Dinah Shore singing "Tonight." He also notes that "Send in the Clowns" was not an immediate success. Only Bobby Short had recorded it. Then Judy Collins and Frank Sinatra made their recordings, and the rest is history. The documentary has a nice montage of various people singing "Send in the Clowns." I don't care for the additional verse Sondheim wrote for Streisand (sung by Audra McDonald in the documentary), which only underlines what the other verses have already communicated. A big plus is having Sondheim himself in "Opening Doors" playing the producer who complains that the songwriters don't have anything hummable in their show. You know he must have enjoyed that.

Tonight I watched James Lapine's documentary Six by Sondheim, which is available on HBO Max. I'm not sure why the title, but it is very well done, drawing on many interviews, tapes of performances, and some rehearsal videos. Anyone interested in Sondheim would probably find this a good way to spend an hour and a half.

Patti LuPone also changes many vowels on high notes to make them easier to sing. This is a common technique, but it can sometimes make the words more difficult to understand.

All of these seem like great choices. I'll add one other and study on the rest of these years: 1952 - Singin' in the Rain

Hey, we did see the one with Andie MacDowell, Dashing in December, with the gorgeous Juan Pablo Di Pace, a shy and, according to this Hallmark Movies & Mysteries movie, almost celibate ranch hand who would have to fight off admirers if he lived in a town with even one gay bar, even if it only opened on weekends in a diner where the guys had to cruise each other underneath shelves of Campbell soup and Vienna sausages. Yes, it really existed. Maybe still does. Anyway, Andie wants to pair the delectable Juan Pablo with her not so pleasant son who's lovin' 'em and leavin' 'em in the big city. The mystery is why Juan Pablo would be interested in this guy. Anyway, it's great that Hallmark is adapting their formula to same-sex couples, and Andie MacDowell still looks great.

If you can overlook some holes in the story--we don't need no stinkin' plot logic!--and just roll with the noir moments, the mystery moments, the comedy moments, and the musical moments, Lady on a Train is a lot of fun. Deanna Durbin is an excellent comic actress, and the supporting cast is full of good character actors, from Edward Everett Horton to Dan Duryea to Ralph Bellamy to Elizabeth Patterson to George Coulouris to Jacqueline deWit to Patricia Morison. George Coulouris and Edward Everett Horton in the same movie? That should tell you a lot about the movie. If you know the mystery novels of Craig Rice, best sellers in the 1940s, Lady on a Train is very much like them. The opening gambit of the film is like the one Agatha Christie later used for 4.50 From Paddington (American title What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!), which became Murder She Said: someone witnesses a murder from a train. Because the film is set at Christmas, Deanna sings a heartfelt version of "Silent Night." Because she is impersonating a nightclub singer (don't ask), she sings a sultry "Give Me a Little Kiss" and then an outstanding rendition of "Night and Day" which is closer to Broadway style than the operetta numbers she sings in some of her other films. Had she remained in Hollywood and gotten the right opportunities, she could have played musical, comic, and even dramatic roles that went to other actresses.

Hey, Dargo, next you're gonna be saying you can't buy Humphrey Bogart as a Mexican bandido in Virginia City. Sheesh!