kingrat Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 13 hours ago, LornaHansonForbes said: ps- for LIFEBOAT! THE MUSICAL They could borrow the shark costumes from Katy Perrys Super Bowl performance. They could also borrow the "Freedom of the Seas" number from the stage musical IRMA LA DOUCE: "Look, we're passing Martinique, regularly once a week." Irma is a delightful musical. Too bad Billy Wilder's version threw out the songs. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rosebette Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 I just went on a pre-code jag, watching Millie with Helen Twelvetrees, followed by Born to Love, with Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea. This must have been the "women are treated like s***" in divorce cases theme night. Millie was OK, but had some interesting support from Joan Blondell (adorable) and Frank McHugh. A young Anita Louise was gorgeous as Twelvetrees' daughter. I was rather appalled that in the storyline, she wasn't given a decent living or allowed to keep her child, even though her husband was unfaithful, and therefore the reason for her divorce. Born to Love surprised me and actually unexpectedly moved me. Constance Bennett was outstanding; I had never thought of her as a really dramatic actress, as I had mostly seen her as a clotheshorse in comedies. Joel McCrea was some good eye candy -- wow. I don't want to give too much of the storyline, as there are some shocking twists at the end, but Bennett also ends up in a divorce situation in which she loses custody of her own child. Maybe I was just in an angry and morose feminist kind of mood, but by the end of this one, I had gone from precode jag to crying jag at the injustice of it all. The last 10 minutes is a 4 hankie job. Unlike "postcode" movies, there is no condemnation from the film's perspective of the female character for having sex or a child out of wedlock; we're seeing a system in which the legal system favors wealth and males and women are treated very unfairly. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hamradio Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 "Geostorm" (2017) on Directv PPV. And I thought "The Day After Tomorrow" had a ridiculous plot! Typical progressive thinking, global warming went wild and the UN came in to save the day. One thinks man will ever control the weather. Excuse me have to calm my cat down, it's in hysterical laughing. Some things are not meant to be controlled......Duhhh, you think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LornaHansonForbes Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 7 hours ago, kingrat said: They could also borrow the "Freedom of the Seas" number from the stage musical IRMA LA DOUCE: "Look, we're passing Martinique, regularly once a week." Irma is a delightful musical. Too bad Billy Wilder's version threw out the songs. Your mentioning this actually reminds me of one of the other oddities about the 1973 LOST HORIZON That I did not mention in my review. Apparently 20ish minutes worth of footage was cut from the second half after disastrous previews (including three entire musical numbers) so the weird thing is: the film really starts out being a musical with characters breaking into song routinely about every 10 minutes, but then there’s a long stretch with absolutely no music at all...Although as aforementioned, the songs and the dubbing are so bad this isn’t really necessarily a bad thing, it just contributes to the film being a total mess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sewhite2000 Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 The Commuter Well, I really wanted to like this one. I had trepidation going in because it was a Liam Neeson film. While back in his Schindler's List days, it appeared Neeson was going to be a very prestige, Daniel Day-Lewis type actor. Instead, he's replaced Harrison Ford as the action hero for the AARP set, although his movies generally aren't anywhere near the quality of Ford's action films. You know the routine: at some point in the movie he tells someone over the phone that they better stop messing with his family because he's going to make them pay ... and then he does. There was even a parody of this in the recent Daddy's Home 2, in which the two families, snowbound in a small town, go to see a Liam Neeson movie in the only business that's open, and we hear Neeson's actual voice emanating from the screen they're watching. So, Neeson is aware he's become a stereotype and to his credit he can be playful with that image, but I guess the money is good, so he keeps on making these movies. Anyway, early on in this movie I suddenly had hope that this might be something a little different. It was a very good set-up and could have made for, say, a nice episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Neeson's character is probably a little too much of a weird hodgepodge of professions and skills that happen more in the movies than real life: he's an insurance salesman but a former cop who also happens to be an expert on literature (was this guy created by committee?). He's got a loving wife played by Elizabeth McGovern and a son about to start at Syracuse, which Neeson frets he's not going to be able to afford. He gets fired at the beginning of the movie and feels his world closing in on him. He's got two mortgages on his house; his brilliant son is probably going to have to go to community college now; and he's 60 - who's ever going to want to hire him for something that was paying as well as this job? In a funk, he boards the commuter train he's been riding from the city (I assume New York) out to the burbs five days a week for the last 10 years, when he's approached by a charming but mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) who claims to be a behavioral therapist and asks him if he wants to hear a behavior hypothetical: what if you were asked to do a very tiny thing for a large sum of money that would in no way have any negative impact on your own life? And if it negatively impacted somebody else, well you were guaranteed to never know about it or be connected to it in anyway? He quickly realizes this conversation is not actually hypothetical: she's offering him $100,000 to find a certain passenger about whom nothing is known, not even gender, except for a code name and the fact that this passenger is getting off at a stop called Cold Spring. Then he's to place a GPS tracker on that passenger's bag and walk away. He initially plays along, especially when he gets $25,000 up front, but when he starts to fret about what might be about to happen to this passenger, Farmiga ups the stakes by presenting Neeson with his wife's wedding ring, letting him know that the bad guys have her, and he better go through with it. So, a very strong first 20 or 30 minutes, but then the movie just gets stupider and stupider. I won't list all the plot inanities, but a glaring one is that it's established early on in the film that there's one car that's experiencing an electricity short, and the passengers aren't allowed to sit in it. But they're still allowed to walk through it I guess from one car to another. Ninety per cent of the film's action scenes take place in this conveniently empty car, where Neeson can get into a series of fist fights and gun battles with one bad guy after another, and yet no one else on the train ever hears any of the commotion. The final fight in the empty car is especially ridiculous, as Neeson and the bad guy go after each other with a gun, a hammer and an electric guitar and crack three windows, including completely shattering one. The fight goes on for about seven minutes. And no one else on the train ever knows that it's going on. There's also an unnecessary overload of CGI, which I guess looks cool to most people, but no matter how more realistic-looking this stuff gets every year, there's always a certain artificiality to it that instantly takes me out of a movie. Here we have things like tracking shots that impossibly show the entire interior of the train from front to back, car to car, so we can see the entire layout accompanied by a very loud, sweeping sound effect to let us know we are swooping through the train. And late in the film (Spoiler alert!), the train crashes. When DeMille and Lean had train crashes, they filmed actual trains crashing! But here we have CGI cars flying in all sorts of crazy directions, bouncing over and into one another, turning at all sorts of fancy angles. But it doesn't impress me. It just looks phony. Finally tack on a scene that is stolen straight from Spartacus (the movie also steals from Narrow Margin and Strangers on a Train, among others. Might as well borrow from the best!). I was delighted to see Sam Neill in a supporting role, but his part is very small. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RosieSayer Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 My most recent movie, and it's also a fairly recent discovery for me, was A Majority of One, starring Rosalind Russell and Alec Guiness. It's the story of a budding romance between a widow and widower from two very different cultures: she a Jewish working-class woman from Brooklyn (I think), and he a prominent Japanese gentleman from Tokyo whom she meets through her son-in-law in the Foreign Service. There is gentle humor and touching vulnerability in this movie. The humor comes mainly from the delightfully down-to-earth personality of Russell's character contrasted with the formality of Guiness's. (My only complaint is an obvious one--why couldn't they have found a great Japanese actor to play the part of Mr. Asano?) I found myself dabbing my eyes at the scenes in which the two main characters carefully negotiate the divide between them. I highly recommend this movie. I think I first saw it on TCM a few years ago and had to own a copy, which doesn't happen to me very often. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesJazGuitar Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 3 hours ago, RosieSayer said: My most recent movie, and it's also a fairly recent discovery for me, was A Majority of One, starring Rosalind Russell and Alec Guiness. It's the story of a budding romance between a widow and widower from two very different cultures: she a Jewish working-class woman from Brooklyn (I think), and he a prominent Japanese gentleman from Tokyo whom she meets through her son-in-law in the Foreign Service. There is gentle humor and touching vulnerability in this movie. The humor comes mainly from the delightfully down-to-earth personality of Russell's character contrasted with the formality of Guiness's. (My only complaint is an obvious one--why couldn't they have found a great Japanese actor to play the part of Mr. Asano?) I found myself dabbing my eyes at the scenes in which the two main characters carefully negotiate the divide between them. I highly recommend this movie. I think I first saw it on TCM a few years ago and had to own a copy, which doesn't happen to me very often. As for your complaint: There was not a single Japanese actor on the planet at the time that had even close to the American public's name recognition as Guinness. The studio didn't wish to take a gamble that Russell alone would be able to ensure box office success. Movie making is a business more than an art form. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fedya Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 If Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers can be played by black actors, Alec Guinness can play a Japanese man. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BagelOnAPlateOfOnionRolls Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 2 hours ago, Fedya said: If Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers can be played by black actors, Alec Guinness can play a Japanese man. "Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir?" 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BagelOnAPlateOfOnionRolls Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 On 1/27/2018 at 9:46 AM, LornaHansonForbes said: Isn’t there a PETER IBBETSON opera or ballet? anyhow, in the right hands, IBBETSON!: THE MUSICAL could actually be amazing. There is an American opera Peter Ibbetson. Deems Taylor is the composer. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LornaHansonForbes Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 3 hours ago, Fedya said: If Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers can be played by black actors, Alec Guinness can play a Japanese man. Puerto Rican. (And by that, I mean the guy who played Alexander Hamilton in the musical HAMILTON! was Puerto Rican. Not that Alec Guiness was Puerto Rican) 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cigarjoe Posted January 28, 2018 Share Posted January 28, 2018 A Bullet For The General (1967), Gian Maria Volontè, Lou Castel, Martine Beswick, Klaus Kinski, one of the first of the Zapata Spaghetti Westerns and a pretty good film, 8/10. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NickAndNora34 Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 Re-watched Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989) yesterday afternoon as I was in the mood. I had forgotten how much I love this movie. It is easily in my Top 10 Disney Movies (of all time) list. I think Alan Menken's score is fantastic, as per usual. "Part of Your World" used to be one of my favorite childhood songs. Granted, as an "adult," I'd have to say that there are some things I've noticed about this movie, that I didn't as a child; nevertheless it still remains timeless in my opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LawrenceA Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 Room Service (1938) - The Marx Brothers went to RKO to make this adaptation of the play by John Murray & Allen Boretz, with a screenplay by Morrie Ryskind and directed by William A. Seiter. Groucho stars as Gordon Miller, a down-on-his-luck theatrical producer up to his ears in debt. When a new-in-town young playwright named Leo Davis (Frank Albertson) shows up with a promising new play, Gordon, with help from assistants Harry Binelli (Chico Marx) and Faker Englund (Harpo Marx), tries to stay one step ahead of hotel executive Wagner (Donald MacBride), whose after them to pay their bill, until they can get funding for the new play. Also featuring Ann Miller, Lucille Ball, Cliff Dunstan, Philip Loeb, Philip Wood, Alexander Asro, and Charles Halton. This was the only Marx Brothers film not written for them specifically, and it lacks the anarchy and chaos of their best, earlier work. There's still a lot of funny stuff here, but it seems more like a standard comedy of the day. Groucho has the biggest part and comes off the best, whereas Harpo is very underutilized. seeing Lucy's name in the cast was promising, but she's hardly in it. Ann Miller and Frank Albertson provide the meager romantic B-plot, which is weird knowing Miller was 15 at the time (she lied about her age). MacBride is amusing as the loud, blustery bill-collector Wagner. "Jumping butterballs!" (7/10) Source: Warner DVD. There are a couple of shorts (a live action Our Gang and an early animated Daffy Duck) as bonus features. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LawrenceA Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 The Baker's Wife (1938) - French comedy from director Marcel Pagnol. In a small French country village, newly-arrived baker Aimable (Raimu) and his much younger wife Aurelie (Ginette Leclerc) set up shop, much to the bread-starved town's delight. However, shortly after opening for business, Aurelie runs off with a handsome shepherd, leaving Aimable devastated and unable to bake. The townsfolk rally around him, determined to raise his spirits and/or retrieve his wife so that he'll get back to work. Also featuring Fernand Charpin, Robert Vattier, Chalres Blavette, Robert Bassac, Marcel Maupi, Alida Rouffe, Odette Roger, and Yvette Fournier. Pagnol, Raimu and Charpin had previously collaborated on the Marseille Trilogy to great effect. This later endeavor isn't up to that level, but it's still enjoyable. Raimu is terrific, and much different from the blustery blowhard of Cesar in those earlier films. His Aimable is a more sensitive, gentle character, more prone to despondency than loud tirades. The supporting cast of small town oddballs is very good, and much of the film's delight is in seeing their various petty squabbles being put away in order to secure good bread. This is one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, although I don't think it would make my list. (7/10) Source: YouTube. The copy is of only passable picture quality, and the subtitles leave much to be desired. Those with a working knowledge of spoken French may fare better with it. There has never been a Region 1 disc release of this one, so beggars can't be choosers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bethluvsfilms Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 I watched EXECUTIVE ACTION with Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, a 1973 movie with a 'what if' scenario concerning JFK'S assassination and the 'conspiracy' that could have taken place like the movie portrays it to be. The movie doesn't state for a fact that there WAS a conspiracy, only the possibility of it. I suspect we will never really know what happened that day in Dallas. I concede that there is probably much more to what happened to JFK than we know now or will ever know, so I just took this movie for what it is....a simple 'what if it happened this way' type of movie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hibi Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 On 1/27/2018 at 6:30 PM, rosebette said: Actually, there was a stage musical based on Gone with the Wind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_with_the_Wind_(musical) Yeah, it never made it to Broadway. (closed after it's LA run) It did run in London for a year or so........I hadnt realized there was a 2008 version. I was thinking of the 1970s version with Harold Rome's score... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hibi Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 On 1/26/2018 at 8:28 AM, LornaHansonForbes said: Hoo Law, the 1973(?) musical remake of LOST HORIZON came on (actually is still on right now, but i'm at work) this morning and i watched a pretty fair chunk of it. it's real damn bad. to start with a positive, because i feel like i should, it was on as the tail end of Charles Boyer's SOTM festival and HE'S REALLY GOOD IN IT. Yah, he's playing a Chinese Lama with a French accent, but he works it...he brings a dignity and his A-Game to the part, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say of JOHN GIELGUD as (I kid you not) "CHANG", who pretty much plays his part from BECKET while squinting... slightly. again, it's real. damn. bad. the songs are awful and the actors so obviously dubbed they really may as well have gotten Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey to dub Liv Ullman and Peter Finch- in whichever order they felt, it's that believable. even PETER FINCH, veteran survivor of some baaaaaaaaad movies can't seem to work up much enthusiasm for this. speaking of, with the possible exception of LYLAH CLAIRE, can anyone think of a film LESS DEMANDING for a musical remake than LOST HORIZON? GRAND ILLUSION maybe? MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW? GASLIGHT? Oh GOD the sets are TACKY. according to imdb, the Fertility Number was cut because audiences howled with laughter. it was restored in this version (thanks TCM) and while i think a lot of imdb trivie should be taken with the grainiest of salt grains, I BUY THIS 100% It feels like Roddy MacDowell should have been in this.... Oh, Sally Kellerman... The musical number in the school room... The Pucci print Cheong-Sam blouses on all the men... The delicious bare-naked avarice of the ailing studio system in the early 1970's.... I end with a verified goof I found from the imdb "goofs" section, because it encapsulates the movie better than I could if I kept going on and on and on about it (and i still might): "The library at Shangri-La is supposed to be a repository for the world's great literature. A number of "Readers Digest Condensed Books" on its shelves. " Oh, DAMN! You mean I missed the fertility dance??? I've always wanted to see this! They always run the cut version of LH when they've showed it before...........yeah, Roddy was in so MANY bad movies in his later years.... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LawrenceA Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) - Slapdash musical comedy from Paramount Pictures and director Mitchell Leisen. The "plot" concerns a transatlantic ship race between two new "super-ships", the Gigantic and the Colossal. On board the former, S.B. Bellows (W.C. Fields), the brother of shipping line boss T. Frothingill Bellows (also Fields), tries to ensure that his ship wins, although he spends most of his times in drunken calamities. Also on board is entertainment host Buzz Fielding (Bob Hope), who takes time in between introducing musical acts to rekindle romance with one of his ex-wives (Shirley Ross), while his current girlfriend (Dorothy Lamour) falls for handsome ship radioman Bob (Leif Erickson). Things get even more chaotic when Bellows' daughter Martha (Martha Raye) comes aboard. Also featuring Ben Blue, Grace Bradley, Lynne Overman, Patricia Wilder, Rufe Davis, Lionel Pape, Virginia Hale, James Craig, Richard Denning, Monte Blue, Mae Busch, Leonid Kinskey, Bernard Punsly, and Russell Hicks. Seemingly assembled from bits of different movies awkwardly stitched together, there's some funny stuff here, but no kind of pacing or interesting narrative. Fields, who was making his final Paramount film here, is funny, and his golf game and billiards game scenes are top notch. Bob Hope, making his feature debut, sings his signature song. I was pleasantly surprised to see future Road co-star Lamour already working with him. Martha Raye gets a rather impressive song and dance number that gets acrobatic and she obviously didn't use a double. The music numbers are an odd lot, too, with a couple of songs by Mexican star Tito Guizar, a performance from Norwegian opera diva Kirsten Flagstad (doing Wagner's "Brunnhilde's Battle Cry"), and Shep Fields and His Rippling Rhythm Orchestra doing "This Little Ripple Had Rhythm" which combines live action with animation to show the "origin" of the "rippling rhythm", which apparently was an ambulatory blob of swamp water that separates from a bog and walks to Fields' band and teaches them. It makes as much sense as it sounds. The movie won the Oscar for Best Song ("Thanks for the Memory"). (6/10) Source: Universal DVD. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hibi Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 On 1/25/2018 at 8:49 AM, LornaHansonForbes said: just a lil' bit more about CLUNY BROWN (some things i forgot to mention in my initial review) and then i'll shut up about it, i promise. UNA O'CONNOR is in this because, of course she is. She has not one line of dialogue and steals every second of the 5-6 minutes she is onscreen. I know BILLY WILDER was a huge admirer of LUBITSCH, I wonder if this film influenced him to cast Una in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. PETER LAWFORD was in this, i know he gets a bad rap from posters some times. he's one of those who is cute enough that i could forgive a lack of talent, but the thing is: there was NOT a lack of talent. He was a good actor...before, of course, JFK decided to stay at Crosby's house thus beginning Peter's ouster from the Rat Pack and his descent into sucking Sterno. HELEN WALKER is in this, I think she recently had a tribute night on TCM, yes? She was marvelous and very sexy and her character's name- BETTY CREAM- is pretty epic. some of you may know that her career was cut short by an auto accident and scandal and she died at 48. I really loved how- with the exception of RICHARD HADYN's prim and prissy pharmacist- that the supporting characters were not two-dimensional or merely platforms to launch one-liners off of. this film in the hands of someone less than Lubitsch could have really been a misfire. In case any of you were bothered by Jennifer Jones's lack of a British accent, I think that was a deliberate choice on the part of the director to make her seem even more of a fish out of water...and if you doubt her accent abilities, please check out GONE TO EARTH (which makes fascinating companion piece to this film) or BEAT THE DEVIL (which sucks, but she's good in it.) again, you really need to see this film multiple times to appreciate the layering of the script and the cleverness of the joKES. CHARLES BOYER plays the kind of person I would very much like to be in this film. this was also, sadly, LUBITSCH's final completed film. did i mention that I love this movie to bits and pieces? I can't remember if i brought that up or no... I watched the film again this wknd and loved it even more! Much of the humor is so subtle that it takes a few beats to get the humor and then I start laughing. Jones did have a bit of an accent in the beginning, but then it gets less so as the movie progresses. Helen Walker was HILARIOUS. Too bad her career didnt pan out due to bad luck. She's very funny in this. Such a funny send up of British nobility and the snooty servant class as well. Just love the themes behind the story....... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomJH Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 1 hour ago, LawrenceA said: The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938) - It's a shame that in the one film in which they both appeared that W. C. Fields and Bob Hope couldn't have shared a scene together. This film was made before Hope's screen persona was firmly established as a fraidy cat comic (dealing with spies, ghosts, etc.). In this film he's as much smooth leading man as he is wise cracking comedian. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LawrenceA Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) - First outing for Sidney Toler as the titular sleuth, from 20th Century-Fox and director H. Bruce Humberstone. Charlie Chan (Toler) is back in his old stomping grounds of Hawaii, awaiting the birth of his first grandchild. When a murder is committed on a cargo ship set to leave for San Francisco, both Charlie and son James (Victor Sen Yung) climb aboard for the journey, determined to find the killer before the ship docks. Also featuring George Zucco, Robert Barrat, Marc Lawrence, Phyllis Brooks, Eddie Collins, Layne Tom Jr., John "Dusty" King, Claire Dodd, Richard Lane, Paul Harvey, and Philip Ahn. Toler is no Warner Oland, who I will always picture first as Chan. Toler in the role seems lethargic and a bit phony, at least in this first appearance. I'll have to see how well he grows into the role. Despite the title, very little of the action takes place in Hawaii. The mystery is fairly pedestrian, but the performances of Sen Yung as Chan's excitable son James (Keye Luke's Lee is said to have left for university in NYC), perennial thug Marc Lawrence, and especially George Zucco as a fellow passenger with a brain in his luggage, make this enjoyable if not groundbreaking in any way. (7/10) Source: Fox DVD. There are a trio of featurettes, one on the series coping with Oland's absense, one on Toler's life, and one on the abortive final Oland outing that became a Mr. Moto movie instead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomJH Posted January 29, 2018 Share Posted January 29, 2018 47 minutes ago, LawrenceA said: Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938) - I think that Sidney Toler is an okay Charlie Chan but he will never have the charm of Warner Oland in the same role. As the Toler series at Fox progressed I think the films got slicker and faster than the Olands, some of them with really striking black and white photography (Charlie Chan at Treasure Island and Dead Men Tell, in particular, coming to mind for their visual look). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LawrenceA Posted January 30, 2018 Share Posted January 30, 2018 College Swing (1938) - Raucous musical comedy from Paramount Pictures and director Raoul Walsh. Set at fictional Alden College, the "story" concerns a 200-year-old stipulation that if the current generation member of the Alden family can graduate, they can take possession of the college and it's lucrative coffers. That latest generation is Gracie (Gracie Allen), a bizarre dimbulb with no chance of passing the final exam. Along comes shady "tutor" Bud Brady (Bob Hope), who helps Gracie cheat at the test in exchange for being named to the college faculty when she takes possession. Also featuring Edward Everett Horton, George Burns, Martha Raye, John Payne, Florence George, Jackie Coogan, Betty Grable, Ben Blue, Cecil Cunningham, Jerry Colonna, James Craig, Richard Denning, Tully Marshall, the Slate Brothers, and Robert Cummings. This is goofy and dumb, kind of like a 30's version of a teen-appeal 60's movie like Beach Party. Musical interludes are interspersed with comic bits, some funny, some not so much. Allen is funny, and a sequence with Ben Blue teaching a girl's gym class has some funny slapstick bits. Horton plays a rich guy with a phobia of women, while Burns is wasted as his secretary. Raye leans more on the annoying side than amusing. Still, this has some time-capsule appeal. (6/10) Source: Universal DVD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LornaHansonForbes Posted January 30, 2018 Share Posted January 30, 2018 BAD FOR EACH OTHER (195?)- Absurd and quite badly acted film about which next to nothing has aged well, most notably the dialogue and premise- truly, It was quite a stupid movie. MARJORIE RAMBEAU Has a small role in it and she is (as always) terrific. Ditto MILDRED DUNNOCK. Everyone else in it is baaaaad though, with Heston (as always) taking home the Prize Pig for his buffet of ham. LIZABETH SCOTT was also in this...sort of. Someone did her a favor and edited down her part to what felt like about seven minutes. It’s more or less the end result of what you would get if you asked Ed Wood to write a remake of THE CITADEL. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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