Writing about films, modern and classic, on the Internet, is more difficult than many years past; and there's so much more going on now, in the world, movie-wise, intellectually and socially, as to make one's head spin; but there are still some good places left, and new ones that have sprouted, post-IMDB,
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The closure of the IMdb Board was, certainly, a shockeroo of an announcement. Moviechat has "lifted and transferred" many of the IMDb pages HERE and its educational reading all the posts that were CLEARLY by people upset that the Boards were closing , petitioning to stop it(which rarely works)...now historical evidence that "where there's a will, there is a way," and a number of new boards sprang up. I daresay Moviechat has the strongest connection to IMdb in having moved old threads here. But I know there are other good boards.
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the relative safety of the old place, and the accompanying good fellowship (gender neutrally speaking) it's easy to get demoralized or just plain overwhelmed by all that's going on in the world,
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How horrible "the world" is right now, but it has been ever thus, and the "good world" continues to run alongside THAT mess.
There is some tut-tutting that right now, Taylor Swift is such a gigantic(and billionaire-ish) creative force in America and the world. Filling stadiums for 3 hour concerts(its not just movies, heh.) But it seems to me that HER dominance is very much an escape from that horrible world, for a lot of people, mainly young women(I know one, who set forth with her 10 or so girlfriends to see Taylor from nosebleed seats in a stadium. They loved the night out, if not the concert itself.).
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
much less the film world.
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I can't bring myself to be consigned to "old fogie land" by attacking the movies of the 21st Century as "all Marvel, all the time." But on the other hand, the diversity(in subject matter, not casts) of the movies IS long gone. Our highest grossing movies for the past 10 years or so have been Marvel movies, yes? Though from 2000 on, you'd have to add in the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises. And think about -- Marvel comic heroes go back to the 60s and DC comics to the 30s and Lord of the Rings -- well, I dunno -- the 60s? So this IS literature of a sort, not newly developed for the movies(Harry Potter was a new phenonmenon however.)
Well in 1973 we had two gigantic blockbusters -- The Exorcist and The Sting -- which were unique new stories being told. And American Graffiti almost made that kind of money. And literally SCORES of other interesting and different movies came out that year.
No more. There's no going back so...we might as well appreciate where we are now and accept it.
But wait a minute...in 2023...we had two "outta nowhere" unique movies -- neither a sequel, neither a comic book -- hit a billion: Barbie and Oppenheimer. So a "new world" might just be arriving. Several Marvel movies flopped. Only ONE Marvel movie (Deadpool 3) will be released in 2024.
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By all means, keep up the good work!
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Sounds like a great idea to me, Telegonus! Always an upbeat moment when you visit.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
swanstep wrote:
The National Board of Review awards were just announced, and, like the NY Film Critics Circle last week, they looked very fondly on KFM, giving it Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography (same DP as for Barbie and the award was for both). Indeed the NBR's president in her official statement called KFM 'a stunning masterpiece from one of our greatest filmmakers' and a 'complex, important, and deeply resonant epic'. The Holdovers and Poor Things got the rest of the acting awards and the screenplay awards between them. Nothing else, including Oppenheimer, won anything.
I'm not exactly sure who the NBR is but my sense is that it is a predominantly East Coast group and that it's not well correlated with Oscar success
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I don't really know "who the Natrional Board of Review" are, either, but that's a good guess, swanstep -- and I , personally LOVE the National Board of Review for 2 reasons:
Just two years ago for 2021, they named "Licorice Pizza" the best picture of the year, and it was my favorite, so...I LOVE those NBR guys. And they gave PTA Best Director. The Big Star of the movie, Bradley Cooper, showed up to give the award to those two crazy kids(Alana Heim and Cooper Hoffman_ who starred in it, that's on tape. Note in passing: Bradley Cooper showed up on Zoom and a LOT of places to promote Licorice Pizza("I got a call from Paul to be in his next movie, I said YES without reading the script") but ANOTHER star of note -- Sean Penn -- is in it, and I don't remember Penn doing ANY promotion for the film. Probably just as well. Penn just doesn't send off warm vibes.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
Meanwhile, the National Board of Review first captured my heart over 50 years ago with these three choices for 1969:
Best Director: Alfred Hitchcock....TOPAZ!
One of the 10 best films of the year...TOPAZ! (And the list was in order of preference and Topaz was Third out of Ten: They Shoot Horses Don't They" by Sydney Pollack was Number One and...Ring of Bright Water(!) was Number Two.)
Best Supporting Actor: Phillipe Noiret...TOPAZ!
..Now its a funny thing about Topaz. It mainly got BAD reviews(and Hitchcock personally didn't like it he said safely after its run was over.) and Pauline Kael said "its the same damn spy movie he's been making since World War II") and Jay Cocks at Time said "Hitchcock said "if the dead were to come back, what would you do with them? and I'd answer: "You'd call it Topaz.") ...and yet...
...Vincent Canby of the NYT wrote a review entitled: "Topaz: Alfred Hitchcock at his Best" and named Topaz one of the 10 Best Movies of 1969(a year with Midnight Cowboy and The Wild Bunch and Z and Butch Cassidy and True Grit in it.)
..and NBR gave Hitchcock Best Director.
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I've read that the NBR reportedly gave Hitch an award for Topaz to honor ALL his work, and I did some research and it looks like neither Rear Window nor Vertigo nor Psycho nor The Birds made the ten best lists of NBR...only North by Northwest did (and John Williams won Best Supporting Actor of 1954 for Rear Window AND Dial M.)
To make up for the omission, "new blood" at NBR not only gave Topaz all those awards, but they put Topaz on the 10 Best List for 1969, Frenzy on the 10 Best List for 1972, and Family Plot on the 10 Best List for 1976 -- alongside my favorite of 1976, The Shootist(which got no Oscar love at all.)
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
So if the National Board of Review wants to give Killers of the Flower Moon its big award..its OK by me! On the other hand, watch out, Marty; it didn't help Licorice Pizza. (And hey, I'm personally pleased to see that Paul Giamatti and Da Vine Joy Randolph the acting honors for The Holdovers, I'm hopeful. Giamatti wasn't even nominated for Sideways; he is certainly "due." And Ms. Randolph is a front runner in her category.)
Back to Topaz for a sidebar on Phillipe Noiret: Topaz famously had a dull leading man in near-unknown Frederick Stafford -- he was "the male Tippi Hedren," an attempt to make a star and he looked all the world like a dessicated John Gavin . Indeed, I have since learned that Stafford and Gavin both played the same James Bondish part in some movie series.)
But where Topaz SHINED was in its supporting men: Roscoe Lee Brown -- Hitchcock's most significant African -American player; John Vernon as a Castro henchman, some Ingmar Bergman player as a sour Russian defector and...Michael Piccoli and Phillipe Noiret as a matched pair of French Communist turncoats. When I saw Topaz as a pre-teen, I thought the bald, handsome but kinda plain Piccoli was dull but I REALLY liked Noiret for his wry manner and his great FACE...he remided me of one of my favorite movie stars at the time: Walter Matthau. (Yes, I went for the character men as my idols back then, at least equally to McQueen and Newman.)
Anyway, Phillipe Noiret WAS good in Topaz, and DID deserve that award and went on to greater international triumphs like Cinema Paradiso(which I DID see, out of loyalty to Noiret.)
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
If it isn't clear, ecarle is not just saying that KFM is 'too damn long' rather he's saying the the film is a trap for Scorsese because it is so very long *and* its content hems Scorsese in in various ways meaning that he can't use humor, spectacle, flashy camera tricks and edits
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Thank you for referencing my other post, swanstep -- I think itis from the KOFM Board, but as we know, this here board(OT) is actually a BETTER place to get into the weeds (the KOFM board was haunted by someone who HATES Scorsese and this movie and his late works and...I think they erased their posts?)
And hey, before I go "more OT" on KOFM and your posts on it, swanstep, I will note the obvious connection between Psycho and Killers of the Flower Moon:
In both movies, a private detective is hired to investigate things(though in Psycho, Arbogast is only investigating a theft) and in both movies, that private investigator is murdered off rather quickly..by the leading man in both cases, too. I was rather amused when the private eye showed up in Killers of the Flower Moon -- I thought: "Aha, here's Arbogast" and sure enough he got killed pretty quick.
Probably the QUICKEST a movie has killed off a private eye was in the Tom Cruise/John Grisham legal thriller "The Firm"(1993) where a very entertaining Gary Busey is hired by Cruise in one scene and then killed by the bad guys in his NEXT scene. But Busey was a two scene wonder in that movie. Great performance. "Private eye who gets killed" is a plum role.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
From a different angle:
If it isn't clear, ecarle is not just saying that KFM is 'too damn long' rather he's saying the the film is a trap for Scorsese because it is so very long *and* its content hems Scorsese in in various ways meaning that he can't use humor, spectacle, flashy camera tricks and edits
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I will here clarify two things: (1) You have since made the point, swanstep - and well -- that sometimes a movie simply CANNOT be too entertaining if the subject matter is too serious and grim. I think you gave "12 Years a Slave" as an example and "Killers of the Flower Moon" has a racial angle that is too serious to get too funny about.
But now I will offer a surprise: I didn't think Killers of the Flower Moon was too long. I simply thought it was long and my belief on "long movies" -- be they Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon...or Barry Lyndon...or Doctor Zhivago...is that they are EXACTLY long enough, which is to say: as long as the filmmaker wanted them to be. So its our job to decide: do I want to sit through this?
Movies now have an "out" however: Soon KOFM will be on Apple and you can "turn it into a mini-series" and watch it over three nights or more. Moreover, Ridley Scott has a two and a half hour Napoleon in theaters right now that will be expanded into a four hour plus version on Apple as well.
And THAT brings up another point. Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America" was thrashed by Roger Ebert over the two hour plus version released to theaters in 1984 but later called a masterpiece by Ebert when a three hour "original version directors cut" was release. And The Godfather famously escaped being cut down to two hours for release -- it would have been pretty minor at that length.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
Here's a scary one: Hitchocck so disliked his rough cut of Psycho that he told Herrmann he was thinking of turning it into a two or three part episode of his HALF HOUR series! Surely all the violence and sex would have been cut out, leaving literally nothing for a TV broadcast.
But back to Killers of the Flower Moon. It was long but I cannot think of any scene that should have been cut given that I saw every scene and I "its too late now" -- that's the Killers of the Flower Moon I saw, I don't WANT it shorter.
An "intimate pair of confessions." By properly preparing for it, I sat through all 3 plus hours of Killers of the Flower Moon without need a bathroom break -- indeed, the end came sooner than I thought it would. But two years ago, because I hadn't planned ahead, I HAD to take a bathroom break near the END of Licorice Pizza, and I was angry because I really LIKED that movie so..I went back the next night and saw Licorice Pizza -- ALL of it -- again. (At this age, I often take bathroom breaks but I rarely go back to see the movie again to make up for it...I just wait for streaming.)
Ha.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
(This emphasis on matters of the bathroom with long movies isn't all that personal or facetiious -- entire COLUMNS are being written on the internet about bathroom breaks during long movies -- and even Hitchcock had a quote on it way back when, something like "How good a movie is is shown by people's willingness to hold their bladers to watch it." Ha.)
(Moreover, I have read of somebody having an "internet column" with advice on when to TAKE a bathroom break in a movie -- expository scenes where you can leave and come back! This is not a hidden issue!)
I once took a bathroom break during "The Ghost and The Darkness" (about hunters Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer hunting man eating lions in Africa) and it turns out Michael Douglas got killed early while I was out and I when I went back in I watche the movie for 20 minutes and I was like "Hey, where'd Michael Douglas go?" Heh. This is an endlessly amusing topic to me.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
[imagine a Lawrence of Arabia-type score and shot moment - maybe even an intermission used to set the stage - being used to herald the arrival of the FBI, imagine how pumped up the assembling of the team which includes a Native American officer (who ends up marrying Molly, our female lead!)] could have been!
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Ha...that would have been an exciting way to tell the story -- and the marriage angle would definitely be...MAINSTREAM. Ha.
Indeed, that is part of the "trap," I guess. When KOFM was announced as the next Scorsese project, I read the book and I was VERY excited given the material : horrendous crimes committed, a heroic FBI man against the villains. It COULD have been a real action epic -- a Charles Bronson movie for the 2020s. But that was all in my mind. Actually acted out on the screen...it was pretty grim.
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George Stevens isn't David Lean but he would have hit these beats hard too Marty! Absent all of that, and surely Scorsese *did* feel bound *not* to do any of this, KFM is *unavoidably* a pretty muted, long, depressing slog.
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Its funny: via some quick shots and narration(Molly's?) we "get the picture and fast" within the opening 10 minutes of the movie. This Osage woman died. "No investigation." This Osage woman died. No investigation. This Osage woman died. No investigation. All poisonings -- and then we get the shocking -- but banal -- moment that a husband shoots his Osage wife after she has put their baby in its carriage.
That was all powerful stuff, setting up quite the action epic and then-- well, a lot of movie left to go. A lot of scenes of Molly(ever weaker as the film goes on) getting spoonfed her medicine by Leo. Just grim.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
But hey, it is STILL pretty exciting when the FBI FINALLY shows up -- in the dull and border line ugly person of Jesse Plemons. Two things I liked about his arrival: (1) after "solo men" have been killed trying to investgate, it looks like Jesse could get killed too -- until the camera pans away from his lone figure to reveal that he's brought a whole TEAM of men with him. I also liked how the movie went "Native American spiritual" to have an Osage woman warn Leo about how "a man in a hat" will end this -- and up pops Jesse Plemons in the biggest hat imaginable!
Another downside: sometimes it is unavoidable to realize: we only have a small pool of A-list movie actors out there so it feels almost like Leo...and especially DeNiro...are too FAMILAR as actors to be playing these parts effectively. Especially DeNiro, who is in everything that Pacino isn't in(Jack is retired) and here brings his old "Cape Fear" southern-friend villain accent out again.
It WAS meant to be a big deal that DeNiro(Marty's star of the 70s through the 90s_ and Leo (Marty's star of the 2000s through the 2020s) are together for the first time for Marty here(though they worked together on A Boy's Life) but...somehow they are both ill-served by THIS story. No matter: I see an Oscar nom for DeNiro and maybe for Leo. Its just the way it is.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
I wonder whether Scorsese was tempted to show some scenes from The FBI Story (1959) which runs through the Osage story in 15 minutes or so (as opposed to Scorsese's 3 and a half hours).
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Heh. Well, it occurs to me that Marty could have done THAT instead of the radio show wrap-up (a radio show that really existed, I believe.)
I went ahead and bought The FBI Story DVD because of its historic connection to TWO modern movies by masters: Spielberg's Bridge of Spies(my second favorite movie of 2015 behind The Hateful Eight) and this one. In both cases, to see these stories given the 1959 "copaganda"(great phrase!) treatment is a real comparative note -- but hey, The FBI Story DID put across the racial bigotry and pure evil of the murder plot just fine(if in a slight "Dick and Jane" way.)
Indeed, its astonishing how "Dick and Jane" the script of The FBI Story is for James Stewart to enact in the same year he enacted the very adult and sophisticated "Anatomy of a Murder."
The FBI Story is one of two movies that gave us "the Vertigo that we could have had." For Vera Miles is James Stewart's love interest in The FBi Story and we know she dropped out of Vertigo. Stewart and Miles ARE a fine match on screen but Kim Novak had that va-va-voom going on. (Miles would ditch John Wayne for Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and THAT was a horrible ending...as intended.)
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
The radio show scene feels too dated to me and a little too random to make Scorsese's point properly so maybe seeing Jimmy Stewart doing copaganda on the stuff we've witnessed at agonizing messy length was the way to go.
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I certainly felt a "tonal jolt" -- to the comical side -- when things shifted to the radio show. How old radio programs were done is certainly fascinating -- Woody Allen made a great movie about it called "Radio Days" and some movies IN the forties (like The Horn Blows At Midnight) gave audiences an inside look (as did The Way We Were.)
The "smart" part of the radio show idea was to give us a "different version" of how many docudramas end these days; a few title cards to tell us "what happened next" -- "John Smith went to jail; Bob Wilson got happily married and died in 1946, etc" -- in a "radio re-enactment" based on truth. But still, it plays COMICAL.
And Scorsese's choice to walk out on stage with the final word seemed a bit too "self-referential" to me. Scorsese has actually done GREAT work as an actor over the years in short parts, but playing himself? What if Hitchcock skipped his cameo in Psycho and instead came out at the end to give the psychiatrist's speech?
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
Many of the most important movies of the year - Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Killer, Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon - have disappointed me.
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As I say elsewhere in this thread, swanstep -- you are a tough audience.
And fairly so. Me -- I'm a soft touch.
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Whatever their strong points, each in my view has some glaring problems that it can't solve and which effectively set its ceiling for me at about 8/10.
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A ceiling of 8/10 is still pretty high so I guess with at least some of these you liked better than others.
I see the Barbenheimer juggernaut of the summer of 2023 to be a great hype for the promise of movies in the future. A billion or a near billion, each. I really liked Oppenheimer even as I felt that something about its structure went "the wrong way"(the hearings, the petty jealousies of RDJ.) I also remain intrigued that if you combine Oppenheimer with The Dark Knight Rises, you will find Christopher Nolan to be one of our few filmmakers interested in giving serious study to Communism as a force in American politics and goverment.
(How major and accepted a force remains to be seen.)
Barring some other movie, I've given The Holdovers my favorite of the year status because -- unlike Scorsese and Nolan and Fincher this year -- THIS auteur delivered HIS expected experience, which he did not do with Downsizing. its an emotional experience.
Better still: I think there will be more to discover about The Holdovers the more I watch it. (The first nine minutes are up on Youtube to sample.) It will be a comfortable place to return, just as About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska were.
Speaking of Nebraska, I actually like THAT Payne movie MORE than The Holdovers, but in 2013 I liked two movies better than Nebraska and in 2023 I like nothing better than The Holdovers.
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swanstep (2616)
5 months ago
The FBI Story is one of two movies that gave us "the Vertigo that we could have had." For Vera Miles is James Stewart's love interest in The FBi Story and we know she dropped out of Vertigo. Stewart and Miles ARE a fine match on screen but Kim Novak had that va-va-voom going on.
This reminds me to mention that I recently watched KIm Novak's debut, a pretty good noir called Pushover (1954). There are multiple copies of it, as well TCM intro's and outros to it with 'Mr Noir' Eddie Muller, up on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pushover+1954
Novak's sizzle onscreen *is* amazing especially in the first 20 minutes but the whole film's well worth watching. It's got a big Rear Window-ish premise in the year of Rear Window, and it's got some fantastic anticipations of both Vertigo and Psycho. Director Richard Quine is onto something here and yet its Hitch who must have seen this who's been able to spin the raw stuff here into greatness. A tall handsome actor called Phillip Carey makes a big impression here. Boy, he must have been *so* close to becoming a star out of it. And Fred MacMurray gets another great cad role. Recommended.
p.s. It's truly amazing in retrospect how MacMurray transitioned into massive TV success as a benign patriarch on My Three Sons after decades of top-tier heel-dom on the big screen.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
This reminds me to mention that I recently watched KIm Novak's debut, a pretty good noir called Pushover (1954). There are multiple copies of it, as well TCM intro's and outros to it with 'Mr Noir' Eddie Muller, up on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pushover+1954
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Of all the multipleTCM hosts we have had available since the lost of the original "solo guy" Robert Osborne, its Eddie Muller who appeals to me the most. Makes sense, yes? He doesn't look like a tough guy, but he looks like he KNOWS tough guys and can take care of himself. Often he wears pin striped suits that bring back memories of Bogie on the ohe hand and The Sting on the other.He's got the "noir beat" and he has rather absorbed it. (Also I like the pretty female British host because the combination of looks and accent are to swoon for.)
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Novak's sizzle onscreen *is* amazing especially in the first 20 minutes but the whole film's well worth watching.
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Whether it warped me or not(and I don't think it did too much), the sheer succession of va-va-voom women on screen in the 50s and 60s is a great memory of my boyhood. Seeing Kim Novak in The Notorious Landlady and Boy's Night Out -- she seemed otherwordliy in her prettiness. Put a blush in my cheeks and prepared me for "the real thing (women) in later years.
There is movie called Pepe from Psycho 1960 which , on the one hand, has "a galaxy of guest stars" playing themselves (Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs, Eddie G) that SHOULD make it well worth watching while on the other hand treating its showcase Mexican star(Cantinflas) in a manner that can indeed be called racist. (The white men call him an idiot, the white women treat this grown man sweetly but like a little boy simpleton.) Not shown much.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
But worth a jaundiced look. Because in the course of the picture, Cantinfas meets 'the real Janet Leigh"(with her husband, the real Tony Curtis) and later meets "the real Kim Novak." Leigh -- first seen in a bathtub, a lot of water plumbiing in 1960 -- eventually dons a silvery dress and shows off that great figure but Novak shows up later and is simply a more overtly sweet AND sexual presence(one sees the vulnerability of her Vertigo character, yet again -- Leigh was toughter as Marion Crane.)
Anyway, one more thing: "Pepe" was a Columbia Picture, and Novak was famously groomed by Columbia boss Harry Cohn to be "the next Marilyn Monroe." Novak survived a lot better than Monroe, and still lives as I post this. And Cohn was dead before Pepe came out, I think.
And Pushover was a Columbia picture meant (with some others) to help debut Novak.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
t's got a big Rear Window-ish premise in the year of Rear Window, and it's got some fantastic anticipations of both Vertigo and Psycho. Director Richard Quine is onto something here and yet its Hitch who must have seen this who's been able to spin the raw stuff here into greatness.
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Well, I really want to see this now. I've been aware of it, it seems, all my life. It got a lot of TV local airplay in the 60s and 70s, I remember seeing print ads for it in TV Guide -- playing up gorgeous Kim and crooked Fred.
Also, I'm a Richard Quine buff along certain lines. I've annouced my love of his 1967 movie "Hotel," which turns a B into an A through sheer sophistication, which Quine HAD in spades as a director(Johnny Keating's sad lush score helped, too).
Kim Novak has 'fessed up that the rather plain and middle-aged Quine was her lover for quite some time. She used it to her benefit to be sure -- she looks as perfect in Quine's Bell Book and Candle as she looks awkward in the clothes and hairstyle of Hitchocck's Vertigo(both famously with James Stewart famously in the same year of 1958 - one tragic ending, one happy ending.)
There is a Quine/Novak picture in Psycho year 1960 that captures the LOOK of Los Angeles suburbia(on the wealthy west side) quite well, called "Strangers When We Meet"(which is true, we ARE.) Kirk Douglas -- sporting his Spartacus buzz cut in Spartacus year 1960, too -- is the married man who cheats with Novak, the married woman.
Fun around the edges: Ernie Kovacs in one supporting role; Walter Matthau in another (it has been said that when Kovacs died in a car crash in 1962, he opened the door for Matthau's career -- otherwise Kovacs might have been in The Odd Couple - he was Jack Lemmons' pal.)
And Quine helped Novak look gorgeous opposite Lemmon in The Notorious Landlady.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
I wonder when Quine and Novak finally had to call it quits. More handsome men came calling for Kim and she married THEM. But she seemed to remain friends with Quine. On the other hand, Quine eventually did kill himself. Tough, tough town.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
A tall handsome actor called Phillip Carey makes a big impression here. Boy, he must have been *so* close to becoming a star out of it.
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Handsome guy, indeed. He seemed to age into a more middle-aged "respectable" handsomeness in the 60s and 70's. Three "trivia bits":
ONE: In the 60s Carey shot to fame with commercials for "Granny Goose potato chips" and HE played Granny Goose -- wearing a big Stetson and cowboy attire, the joke was as if John Wayne were playing the part. Granny Goose made Carey famous -- and hopefully rich?
TWO: There was an NBC Western in the 60's called "Laredo." It was somehwere between a straight Western like Gunsmoke and a spy Western like The Wild Wild West.
Each of the leads became famous in a different way -- they played a three-man team(and then a four man team) of Texas Rangers sent on missions by their boss, "Captain Parmalee."
Philip Carey WAS Captain Parmalee. And one of the three man/four man team was Neville Brand, the biggest WWII hero this side of Audie Murphy in Hollywood -- but much uglier -- pock-marked of face, heavyset, with a voice like gravel.
I had a friend who liked "Laredo" and used to do a "Neville Brand impression" just gargling out the yelled phrase "Cap'n Paramlee! CAP'N PARMALEE."
So two of the "Laredo" team were Philip Carey and Neville Brand. Good casting there. Another on the team was William Smith -- a mean faced muscle man "humanized" on Laredo - we were meant to LIKE him. Smith went on to play a LOT of famous muscular bad guys - fighting Rod Taylor in Darker Than Amber, Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can and -- famously -- Nick Nolte in Rich Man Poor Man.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
So, Carey and Brand and Smith. Great casting AND they had a handsome young surfer type named Peter Brown on the team(he was the "cute one" to contrast with Smith and Brand.) They eventually added a suave French guy named Robert Wolders who went on to fame as the husband/consort of Merle Oberon(from Hotel!) and Audrey Hepburn until her death. Over the years, I recognized ALL these guys from their years on Laredo(I show I liked) -- it just shows you where lot of lower level stars can be hatched. Wiliam Smith I think had the best career of the group.
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
THREE: (More on Philip Carey.) In the 70's, Philip Carey appeared on a famous episode of All in the Family. Big and handsome as ever, Carey played an old friend of Archie Bunker's who was an ex-football player(NFL? College?) . I can't remember. Carey visits Archie at home, and they are alone. Archie makes a disparaging remark about gay men. Carey challenges Archie to a friendly arm wrestle. Archie agrees. Carey locks Archie's hand so he cannot move, looks deep into Archie's eyes and announces "I'M gay." Hold this shot. Archie can't escape the grip. Carey just smiles seductively and gazes into Archie's
eyes. The audience laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.
I often wondered: WAS Philip Carey -- Granny Goose, Cap'n Paramlee -- gay?
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roger1 (2277)
5 months ago
And Fred MacMurray gets another great cad role.
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And I thought he only had THREE: Double Indemnity, The Caine Mutiny, The Apartment. And I'm always intrigued that his KILLER in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is a more sympathetic guy than his non-killer in The Apartment(Eddie G. LOVES MacMurray in D.I.)
---p.s. It's truly amazing in retrospect how MacMurray transitioned into massive TV success as a benign patriarch on My Three Sons after decades of top-tier heel-dom on the big screen.
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Truly fascinating. First he "went Disney" in The Shaggy Dog(1957.) An old lady Disney fan hit MacMurray in the head with her purse for playing the cad in The Apartment.
So he did My Three Sons(in that great 1960 year) and doubled down on Disney(Absent Minded Professor, Flubber, Follow Me Boys.) Disney and My Three Sons saved MacMurray's career and kept him rich(and he barely had to show up for Sons -- played golf the rest of the time.)
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swanstep (2616)
5 months ago
Pushover (1954) has pushed me over the edge about Quine (after not really rating him). I now think he's a solid second-tier director, perhaps comparable to Richard Fleischer or Jack Smight (or maybe Ron Howard or Jon Favreau today) - although none of these comparison cases are entirely helpful I find.
BTW, thanks for all the info. about Phillip Carey. Reading his wiki page it seems that aside from the stuff you mention Carey's big achievement was in daytime tv where he became a much-loved soap star for 3 decades on 'One Life To Live'. That's a good career! Mortgage well and truly paid. See him in Pushover tho' and you'd bet that he was on track to become the next Burt Lancaster.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
Pushover (1954) has pushed me over the edge about Quine (after not really rating him). I now think he's a solid second-tier director, perhaps comparable to Richard Fleischer or Jack Smight (or maybe Ron Howard or Jon Favreau today) - although none of these comparison cases are entirely helpful I find.
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Well, these are all "journeyman" directors...the guys who never made Andrew Sarris's famous list (with Hitchcock and Hawks at the top in the "Pantheon" ) and yet, for thos of us who saw a lot of movies, sometimes their names stuck out.
For me is was the movie that Quine gave us with Hotel that put him over the top for me. Because a much bigger hit movie was made out of Arthur Hailey's OTHER square best seller -- Airport -- and THAT one IS clunky and too square and sometimes wooden with bad dialogue. Quine must have known SOME way to sharpen the sophistication of Hotel(the screenwriter was "name" as I recall, so he helped too.)
But Quine is indeed also famous for a bunch of Columbia contract jobs -- the military comedy "Operation Mad Ball" was a big hit -- and for working with Jack Lemmon almost as often as Kim Novak(Lemmon had a sidekick role in Bell Book and Candle, with Jimmy Stewart romancing Novak, and then was upgraded to lover status with The Notorious Landlady.)
And -- one more time! -- this Quine guy managed to have a fairly long, evidently sexual relationship with Kim Novak. He's my hero for that alone(but evidently, ALL directors not named Alfred Hitchcock got LOTS of movie babes.)
I have another "gulity pleasure" movie director and I'll name him next.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
My other guilty pleasure director is a man named..Gordon Douglas.
Evidently he was a Warners contract director and he
made "Come Fill the Cup" with James Cagney and "Young at Heart" with Doris Day and Frank Sinatra, so he proved a capable star director early on (and the Sinatra connection continued.)
But Douglas' "big one" for me(and evidently IMdb who put that one next to his name) is..
THEM! My second favorite movie of 1954, after Rear Window and ahead of From the Waterfront(a bit too Method overacted for me, and The Caine Mutiny.)
A great thing about the first time I saw THEM! -- on that 9-times a week Milliion Dollar Movie, is that I did NOT know what it was about. The TV Guide entry was something like "Scientists and the military battle mutants."
So I watched the moody, suspenseful first 40 minutes or so wondering what the hell WAS it(them?) that killed an entire vacationing family in their trailer in the New Mexico desert and an old storekeeper at his nearby store? And then a cop -- offscreen -- kinda getting the Arbogast investigator killing even as we HEAR these weird screeching sounds(forerunners to the Psycho violins.)
Yep THEM plays like a "black and white noir on the desert" about the search for a serial killer until -- it is revealed in a big scene that THEM is...ants. Big ones. GIANT ones. And the movie stays violent about how they kill their victims, and one of our stars gets killed at the end rather like Quint in Jaws -- not so gory but...our hero doesnt make it.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms(1953) and Them(1954) were evidently big Warner Brothers hits but Jack Warner didn't like them -- he had no idea he was seeing the future of movies. I found both of those films very exciting as a child and they hold up today. I've kept The Beast(which has a trailer featuring Vera Miles, who isn't in it) as my favorite of 1953, and THEM almost made it to the top slot of 1954. A great childhood memory. (It stars Edmund Gwenn one year before The Trouble With Harry, James Arness one year before Gunsmoke, and James Whitmore as Quint, er...a heroic cop who dies saving two little boys..)
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
Came the 60's, Gordon Douglas made these interesting entertainments:
Rio Conchos(1964) My Man Richard Boone in perhaps his best role -- helping lead a four-man team two years before The Professionals, but this team is more mismatced(suave rogue Tony Franciosa and square cavalrymen Stuart Whitman and Jim Brown.) I call this "the North by Northwest of Westerns" given its fantastical night climax and the journey to get there, and Boone and Franciosa re muy mas macho.
Stagecoach -- The 1966 remake of John Ford's classic was -- to my pre-teen eyes -- a LOT more exciting than the Ford film. Technicolor, Cinemascope, and a fair amount of gore. I saw Stagecoach when I wasn't allowed to see Psycho, and yet Stagecoach 1966 opens with a cavalryman getting a tomahawk to the face with crimson blood pouring all over it -- and more non-PC Native American war party killings to follow. (Though plenty of white folk kill each other , too.)
As with Rio Conchos, Jerry Goldsmith provided a great Western score for Stagecoach, and Norman Rockwell painted portraits of each star to be shown during the credits and published in magazines: Ann-Margret's hot "saloon girl"(hooker), Bing Crosby's wry comid drunken doctor and Red Buttons as his booze salesman "best friend." Alex Cord had some trouble taking over for John Wayne(in a year when John Wayne was BIG) ..and Bob "Saboteur" Cummings played the crooked banker. A good matte shot cliffhanger at night in the middle, again ala North by Northwest.
Chuka. Rod Taylor in the same year he headlined Hotel. These were both good movies that were not hits, sort of considered Bs. This one is a Western about how the Apaches have surrounded a cavalry fort and are going to kill everyone in it. They do. But not before Taylor and Ernest Borgnine have a great mano-y-mano fight NOT to the death, for once.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
The Sinatra movies. Roger Ebert complained at the time, but Frank used Gordon Douglas as his "in-house director" for the Rat Pack musical Robin and the 7 Hoods(considered the best Rat Pack movie) and then Miami private eye movie Tony Rome and its sequel Lady in Cement, and then a very big showcase for the new R rating called "The Detective" (probably Sinatra's final serious role.) Ebert complained in reviews that Sinatra kept working with "hack" Douglas when he should have been working with major directors. Sinatra didn't care.
Gordon Douglas directed all of those movies for Sinatra. The Detective was a huge hit but my fave is Tony Rome, a good basic private eye movie with good roles for Simon Psycho Oakland, Sue "Lolita" Lyon, Richard Conte(as the private eye's long-suffering cop friend) and the always honorable Gena Rowlands.
Says here that Gordon Douglas also directed Elvis in Follow that Dream and the pretty ficationalized bio Harlow -- a "bad movie" that has a script by John Michael Hayes(Rear Window) a great score by Neal Hefti and an opening sequence that melds the two. And a role for Martin "Psycho" Balsam. (He had to make bad scripts, too -- even one by John Michael Hayes.
Thanks to Angela Lansbury's heart-rending acting, watching it happen as a mother, Carroll Baker as Harlow gets a truly moving death scene -- that never happened. Its on YouTube.
So...Gordon Douglas. Mainly because of THEM, Rio Conchos, Stagecoach and Tony Rome. And the only classic in the bunch is THEM. And that's more of a kids SciFi classic, I guess, shot like an adult noir.
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swanstep (2616)
4 months ago
I remember seeing Them! (1954) for the first time only a decade or so ago and being surprised by how it took its time and by its general moodiness. I knew it was the 'giant ants' movie and was expecting the worst but it was pretty good. I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) at around the same time and was likewise pleasantly surprised by the writing, how good it looked, and how great the central performances were. Notwithstanding its slightly goofy title (less goofy than 'Them!' tho'), TISM turned out to be one of the best SF movies of the '50s. The director in that case was Jack Arnold, who has at least one other near-classic: Creature from the Black Lagoon. CFTBL while no TISM, is also *way* better than its title suggests and can be watched with pleasure today (Hell, Guillermo del Toro even showed how it could be tarted up into a mega-hit and big Oscar-winner).
Speaking of journeymen, Neill Blomkamp made a big splash with big-ideas-big-fx-cheapie District 9 (2009). I recently watched his ultra-gory Vietnam War-Sci-fi short film/one-reeler (26 mins) 'Oats Studio - Firebase' on Netflix, but it's also on youtube here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0V24IEHao
Worth a look. I don't think studios trust Blomkamp to get his mad ideas and fx skills to knit together enough for a successful feature again - they think District 9 was a fluke. So Firebase will never be properly finished/expanded.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
I remember seeing Them! (1954) for the first time only a decade or so ago and being surprised by how it took its time and by its general moodiness. I knew it was the 'giant ants' movie and was expecting the worst but it was pretty good.
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This is weird. I headed over to IMDb for some reviews and found that --despite a poster with scary looking killer giant ants on it -- cartoonish with the requisite woman in one of their jaws -- Warners themselves elected to "keep secret" that the villains were ants -- how, I don't know, I'd have to microfiche some 1954 newsaper ads, I guess.
In any event, back in the 60's when it played on Million Dollar Movie, the TV Guide listing only mentioned "mutants" so I had to wait a long time to know it was giant ants.
Here, an "off-topic" thread can swiftly become "on topic" when one considers these movies:
Them: The first killer ant shows up -- wonderfully looming up behind female lead Joan Weldon -- about 30 minutes in.
Psycho: People who had not read Bloch's novel had no idea what was coming: Mother's voice shows up about 35 minutes in and SHE turns up 47 minutes in.
So Them and Psycho rather have the same build up and structure!
Jaws: Much as I say that Psycho's promotion and history articles have "the biggest lie in motion picture history"(that HItchcock wanted to surprise folks with the shower murder when his trailer HYPED the shower murder), I think Jaws has a Big Lie too, but right now I can't prove it.
The Big Lie in Jaws:
"Because the shark didn't work," Spielberg 'had to turn a William Castle movie into an Alfred Hitchcock movie" and not show the shark much or at all til the third act at sea.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
Well, when I SAW Jaws in 1975, I felt it was INTENTIONAL and brilliant how the shark was slowly revealed:
ONE: Attacking the naked woman: not seen at all.
TWO: Attacking the boy on the raft: Just a flash of silvery skin and fin.
THREE: Chasing the guys at the dock that collapses: represented BY the dock alone.
FOUR: Attacking the guy in the rowboat -- NOW we see the head and jaws of the shark closing on the screaming man(how I remember the HUGE scream when the audience saw THIS happen.
FIVE: Finally, at the end, seeing EVERYTHING as the shark closed its Jaws on a leading actor -- Robert Shaw -- and gobbled him down.
I don't much believe that "the shark didn't work" explains THIS at all. I bet the script said this. There was no reason to show the shark attacking every victim in full.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
And thus: Them (1954), Psycho(1960) and Jaws (1975) all elected to bring the monster on pretty late in the movie and show him/her/it/them sparingly.
This was important to Them, we've learned, because the giant ants were essentiallyh "giant practical effect robot puppets" and could not be seen MUCH.
The giant ants in Them were like the shark in Jaws -- practical effect robot puppets. Mrs. Bates in Psycho was a human being played LIKE a monster.
Brings me to this:
All these years later, I see the conenction of Psycho to the monster movies of the 50s, but back THEN, I NEVER saw it as "only a monster movie." The people were too real(even if the house was often shown in fantasical terms), the murders were too savage and vicious, the killer too much a REAL type of HUMAN monster(homicidal maniac division.)
And yet -- Them -- Psycho -- Jaws. A similar template for suspense: bring the monster on late after a long build up , don't show the monster much.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
I saw The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) at around the same time and was likewise pleasantly surprised by the writing, how good it looked, and how great the central performances were.
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For whatever reason, Shrinking Man was not part of the Los Angeles TV monster shows of the 60sd as I can recall. I caught up with it almost by accident on an afternoon movie away from LA in the seventies.
And I found the idea TERRIFYING when it got down to brass tacks:
As the man shrunk, suddenly he was not the "giant in the room." Animals land insects that were "smaller than him" were now LARGER than him.
The cat was scary enough(they are such furry killers) but once he shrunk down to where a SPIDER was his foe
-- and bigger than him --now THAT was a terrifying scene. Spiders , man. Terrify me. And THAT spider managed to crawl atop our little hero and bleed copious goo on our hero as he stabbed upwards into the belly of the beast.
Jump ahead: I've noted that I'm moviing About Schmidt up to my 2002 favorite(Chicago goes down). But my SECOND favorite movie of 2002 was "Eight Legged Freaks" about...yep, giant spiders. HUNDREDS of them, as created by CGI and converted into attacks that looked a lot like "The Birds" except when a great big furry tarantula took the stage.
I don't think Eight Legged Freaks was much of a hit -- spiders just creep people out -- but I thought it figured out how to do it: make the spiders "fake enough" and their MANY killings bloodless enough -- and it turned into a bit of a comedy.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
Notwithstanding its slightly goofy title (less goofy than 'Them!' tho'),
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Well, THEM! was the sad and scary scream of the little girl who survived the slaughter of the rest of her family -- it had dramatic meanning, but sure, I get it...
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TISM turned out to be one of the best SF movies of the '50s.
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Yes, in addition to the horror of the cat attack and the REAL horror of the spider attack...the movie had great metaphysical meaning...as the man's wedding ring fell off and his ability to plesaure his wife became non-existent.
And then in the final moments...he just kept on shrinking and found 'another world" inside ours. Meaningful.
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The director in that case was Jack Arnold, who has at least one other near-classic: Creature from the Black Lagoon. CFTBL while no TISM, is also *way* better than its title suggests and can be watched with pleasure today (Hell, Guillermo del Toro even showed how it could be tarted up into a mega-hit and big Oscar-winner).
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Yeah, I thought ol' Guillermo rather borrowed from the best there.
Jack Arnold is another one with that "journeyman reputation"(add Gordon Douglas and Richard Quine, etc.) But he also APPEARS as one of about 25 directors helping John Landis out with cameos in "Into the Night"(1985). Arnold is funny as a guy walking three barking dogs who end up getting shot ...as a COMIC gag.
(Landis had had his Twilight Zone death tragedy in 1982, and all these other directors took cameos in Into the Night to demonstrate solidarity. I was never sure if that looked kindly or arrogant, frankly.)
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
And get this: John Landis figures in the remake called "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" - a comedy with Lily Tomlin and a non-horror bent..and so does Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock and Landis were pals on the Universal lot in the late 1970s(Hitch loved Animal House) and Landis implored Hitchcock to appear in a trailer for ANOTHER director's movie. He wanted Hitchcock to hold a tiny Lily Tomlin in his hand. Hitchcock jokingly refused by continuing to say "Who is Lilyi Tomlin?" until Landis gave up.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
Many of the most important movies of the year - Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Killer, Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon - have disappointed me.
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Hey , we forgot one: Wes Anderson and Asteroid City. Its on streaming now...has been for a long time. LOOKS great. But way too twee and abstract.
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roger1 (2277)
4 months ago
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And yet -- Them -- Psycho -- Jaws. A similar template for suspense: bring the monster on late after a long build up , don't show the monster much.
--I figured I would return to play out this "thread within a thread" -- re Psycho, Horror Movies and..spiders. But the thread got too narrow for me so,,PART TWO awaits...
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