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Can you identify classic movie musicals from dialogue bits alone? (*Not Song Lyrics) Here's one to start off the game: "Have you ever tried spreading ideals on a cracker??!!"

Does anyone else think they have suddenly crammed notes from the last 3 weeks and beyond all into today’s (Thursday) material? Yikes!! :spinning head: Or is it me? And a ton of it is all new material about the time line we covered! It’s a 4 week wrap up!

So, in watching the discussion of High Society today, I found it difficult to agree that High Society's musical numbers give more depth to the characters. I would argue it has less dimension than the non-musical Philadelphia Story. I see just as much psychoanalysis of Tracy in the original as the father tells her a daughter's love is what keeps a father young, and his affairs are her fault. I've always felt that that aspect of the tale was a "Just, wow!" moment that is hard for contemporary women to swallow. They cut her down to size quite deftly in the original with the same complaints about her expectations of others. Hepburn's Tracy is far more transformed from ice queen to a woman who embraces people and herself as they are and she is. I don't see a convincing change in Kelly's Tracy. I do love the music in High Society. Any Louis Armstrong is good music. Likewise Cole Porter. I agree that the most delightful couple is Bing and Louis. This is what I watch an otherwise watered down movie. Grace is stunningly beautiful, but Hepburn outacts her by miles. Cary and Jimmy are also leagues ahead of Crosby and Sinatra in depth of character, nuance in performance, and bringing issues of class to the front. I found it interesting in comparing this movie's exploration of class and how the "mighty have fallen" as a bit out of place in the prosperous for white-America 50s where it was right in line with the original Philadelphia Story's 1940 preference of the average Joe, deflation of the rich as America had not yet come out of the Depression. What do others feel about High Society?

I can remember seeing what is being called a roadshow throughout the 50s. My parents would take me into Center City Philadelphia to all the large extravagant theatres to see films like The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Around The World in Eighty Days, Pepe, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Ben-Hur, Giant, for starters. They all came replete with overtures, intermissions, programs in the lobby and my favorite - bon bons! So I’m thinking roadshow wasn’t new to the 60s. In fact, I recently got the roadshow edition of Since You Went Away! Wasn’t that the 40s?

Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess was not in B&W but in stunning technicolor and widescreen.

Just finished watching Born to Dance. About an hour and a half in - just before Lucy throws the glass thing at McKay - something falls behind her from the ceiling. Try as I might, I can't figure out what it is. Can anyone else do better. It's one of those crazy things that for some reason gets by the editors.

So "Shall We Dance" is on now to be followed by "Swing Time" (my personal favorite of their pairings). Our wonderful instructor keeps alluding to the outsized size of the clubs and apartments, and she isn't kidding. I think this is an essential element of the musical....space. Sets are spectacular and impossible in reality for these films. I adore it all, and I wonder what folks make of the device of impossible spaces in musicals. This goes beyond Astaire and Rodgers straight through to the musical dream sequences in The Big Lebowski. Is it because it's all just a little to fantastic? What say you all?

Very odd that Jeanette MacDonald's sister was Edith Marie Blossom MacDonald (Blossom Rock) who played "Grandmama" on the original The Addams Family. Nelson Eddy sang many major operatic roles including some unusual works such as Strauss' Feuersnot and Berg's Wozzeck, before he gave up opera for Hollywood and big bucks.

Anyone else signed up for this online collaboration between TCM and Canvas? The course starts June 3.

The problem with this offer is that's not academic enough and more commercial than a real education on film history. It's focusing on just the popular. At least it works that way.

In a earlier topic on message board I had corrected Ben Mankiewicz's claim that m.g.m. released Kiss me Kate Flat,cause of 3D being dead.I too made a mistake . I misread some information about the release of the 3D version as being released through 1955.I was wrong. The 3D version was released late of 53 to early 54.That makes much more sense what was happening to the motion picture business at the time.Sloppy projections,Expense and huge wide screens put an end to 3D at the time.It was easier and cheaper to shoot a film with a single Mitchell camera using a big fish eyed lens,Todd A.O. to the psychological perspective for the movie audience in a film.

People who have visited my profile page will have noticed that I am a Frank Sinatra fan. My favourite female singer of all time is Judy Garland - there are several threads about her and her co-stars. Frank Sinatra is my favourite male singer of all time. He is best known for his beautiful singing of course, and his friendships with a group of people sometimes called The Rat Pack, but according to MacLaine were actually called The Clan once Bogart died. I love his movies whether musicals or non-musicals. He was fond of saying that Gene Kelly taught him to act as well as dance as he was always a singer with a microphone before Kelly. Some of my favourite films of Sinatra's in no particular order except the first; SOME CAME RUNNING FROM HERE TO ETERNITY HIGH SOCIETY ALL THREE MOVIES WITH GENE KELLY THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE THE TENDER TRAP OCEAN'S ELEVEN PAL JOEY A HOLE IN THE HEAD Unfortunately, Miracle of the Bells was not available in Canada