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Post by codystarbuck on May 16, 2017 11:29:39 GMT -5
I still can't believe that name got into a movie title.
Another great, but rarely seen Bogey film is All Through The Night where he is "Gloves" Donahue, a gambler whose favorite baker is murdered by Nazi saboteurs. It's gangsters vs the mob and a lot of fun. Cast includes Jane Darwell (Oscar winner for The Grapes of Wrath), Peter Lorre, Judith Anderson (Star Trek III), Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason, Conrad Veidt, William Demarest (My Three Sons), Barton MacLane (I Dream of Jeanie). Basically, a character actor's paradise.
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Post by Hoosier X on May 16, 2017 17:04:34 GMT -5
I still can't believe that name got into a movie title. Another great, but rarely seen Bogey film is All Through The Night where he is "Gloves" Donahue, a gambler whose favorite baker is murdered by Nazi saboteurs. It's gangsters vs the mob and a lot of fun. Cast includes Jane Darwell (Oscar winner for The Grapes of Wrath), Peter Lorre, Judith Anderson ( Star Trek III), Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason, Conrad Veidt, William Demarest ( My Three Sons), Barton MacLane ( I Dream of Jeanie). Basically, a character actor's paradise. It's been a while since I saw it but I remember it being pretty awesome!
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Post by Deleted on May 19, 2017 9:28:40 GMT -5
Last Night I watched on TCM
1. Them! (1954) 2. Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) 3. It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) 4. Giant Behemoth, The (1959) 5. Magnetic Monster, The (1953)
The last Movie on the list was pretty lame and I did not care for it at all and having said that it was clearly the worst of the five movies that I watched; the Giant Behemoth was okay but it was done impressively enough and the special effects was good.
The third movie was good and it's has it's moments and wasn't all that bad; and the 1st two were excellent and pretty much I seen them more than a dozen of times and I decided to stop seeing them for awhile.
The most disappointing one was the Magnetic Monster and I just can't this movie at all. This is the 1st time that I watch it (I've think it was) and having seen it last night ... it will be the last time that I see this movie.
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Post by Hoosier X on May 28, 2017 2:59:55 GMT -5
I noticed War Nurse on the TCM schedule and I read the summary and I saw it had Anita Page and I knew I had to see it. When it started I was happy to see it also featured Robert Montgomery and ZaSu Pitts, a couple of other favorites of mine. Also - Hedda Hopper in a small role. Movies like War Nurse are why I watch so many random movies from the very early sound era, 1929 to 1931. So many of them are fun and entertaining but don't get much attention because they look a little weird, even to many film buffs who are perfectly comfortable with Bringing Up Baby and Stagecoach and other classics of the late 1930s. War Nurse (1930) is about a group of American nurses in France during World War I. Treating the wounded, consoling scared mangled soldiers, enduring bombings, being courted (or manhandled) by doctors or aviators, grieving over the deaths of friends and strangers; it's all part of the experience when you're a World War I nurse. I've only seen a few movies with Anita Page - notably Broadway Melody and Our Dancing Daughters - but I'm more and more impressed with her acting abilities as I watch more of her films. She's very good in War Nurse as a young naïve American girl who soldiers on despite being in a bit over her head. She loses it in one scene that's pretty intense for 1930. Of course, Bob Montgomery and ZaSu Pitts are always good. Because it's pre-Code, War Nurse is actually pretty brutal. Toward the end, the screenplay starts picking off the main characters one by one. And the film doesn't cut away to the face of a shocked bystander saying, "Oh my! Helen's dead!" You see the nurses running to bloody bodies. It's especially disconcerting to see the bloody body of comedienne ZaSu Pitts pulled out of the rubble after a ceiling falls on her when the Huns are shelling a farmhouse being used as a makeshift hospital. Highly recommended.
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Post by codystarbuck on May 28, 2017 21:15:23 GMT -5
Just watched Tobruk, with Rock Hudson and George Peppard and Raid on Rommel, with Richard Burton. Both were made by Universal, about 7 or 8 years apart; but, with pretty much the same plot. Raid reuses a lot of footage from Tobruk and it becomes obvious when you watch, as the quality changes. The sequence of events is different, so the footage is mixed around a bit, in the timeline. Tobruk is about a raid by a British unit on the oil storage depot in Tobruk. Rock Hudson is a Canadian officer with experience with the oil companies. he had served with the Long Range Desert Group and was captured in Vichy Algeria and interned. He is "rescued" by George Peppard, dressed as a German soldier. Peppard and his men are German Jews, working for the Special Intelligence Group. They bring him to a commando unit, commanded by Nigel Green, who are going to infiltrate Tobruk, disguised as a POW convoy, with the SIG soldiers as their guards. However, there is a traitor among them, and they also run across a pair of Irish Nazi sympathizers who are trying to get to Egypt and Palestine to stir up the Arabs, to aid the Nazis. Hudson is reluctantly pulled into things, based on a plan he concocted previously, which was shot down. Guy Stockwell, Dean's brother, is also one of the SIG soldiers.
Raid has Burton as a British engineering officer, who is placed in a half-track, with dead soldiers, to appear wounded, and sent on an interception course for the Germans. He is brought to a POW area, where he expects to link up with commandos, who were to be inserted into the camp, to be taken to Tobruk. Their mission is to silence the shore batteries, to allow the Navy to land troops. The commandos were all taken out, leaving a ragtag group of prisoners, who have to be trained in commando tactics, while they drive for Tobruk. They overpower their guards and take over the convoy, which includes the mistress of an Italian general. They end up meeting up with Rommel (played by Wolfgang Preiss), which allows them to locate a hidden oil depot, in Tobruk, from Rommel's maps. The attack footage is all from Tobruk, but mixed around. Tobruk is definitely the superior film and is available as a manufacture-on-demand disc, from Amazon.
Peppard has another war movie in the 60s, Operation Crossbow, where he is an intelligence officer, disguised as a german to infiltrate a V-2 launch facility, to expose it for a bombing raid. Sophia Loren also stars. He can also be seen in the World War 1 aviation war movie, The Blue Max, as a German soldier, fighting in the trenches, who connives his way into the Luftwaffe. He is of middle-class birth and raised from the ranks, so he is isolated from most of the other officers, except one, played by Jeremy Kemp. He is ambitious and is driven to win the Blue Max, Germany's highest award, though his tactics expose his fellow pilots to danger, when he doesn't cover them. He is part of Richtoffen's squadron. Probably his best film role, outside of Breakfast at Tiffanys.
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Post by Deleted on May 31, 2017 8:24:45 GMT -5
Last night I watched It Started in Naples with Sophia Loren and Clark Gable. I enjoyed the movie very much, but Clark Gable seemed to be miscast as Loren's love interest (he was much older than her). It also looked like Gable gained weight as the movie went along. In some scenes he is fat while in others he looks more trim. Maybe he had too much pasta while filming. The movie is about the nephew of Gable and Loren and whether or not the boy will stay in Italy or move to America.
Also over the holiday weekend I watched Destination Tokyo with Cary Grant. Usually I am not a fan of war movies, but this one was really good. Grant is the captain of a submarine going on a mission to Tokyo. He and his crew have to deal with an emergency appendectomy and attacks from the Japanese. Very well made and interesting.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 1, 2017 8:52:51 GMT -5
Also over the holiday weekend I watched Destination Tokyo with Cary Grant. Usually I am not a fan of war movies, but this one was really good. Grant is the captain of a submarine going on a mission to Tokyo. He and his crew have to deal with an emergency appendectomy and attacks from the Japanese. Very well made and interesting. I'm a bit surprise by you not liking war movies. I love Destination Tokyo and it one of the better Cary Grant's movies based on Wartime Experiences. I agree with you that it was well made for that alone.
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 1, 2017 16:00:32 GMT -5
I DVRed a couple of rare Bette Davis movies back in May and today I watched The Golden Arrow (1936), with Davis and George Brent.
I liked it OK. Bette is the cold-cream heiress and she's after reporter George Brent and she persuades him into a "convenience marriage" so that poor but titled Europeans will stop pestering her with proposals.
And it turns out she's not really the cold-cream heiress. She was hired by the company to pretend to be the heiress (because business heiresses were trendy in the 1930s?) for publicity purposes.
Complications ensue!
The reason I bring it up at all is that George Brent was named John Jones and I was trying to imagine it as a Martian Manhunter story. It wasn't hard. Most of it is set in Florida, where blogger Scipio says J'onn J'onzz's Silver Age stories were set. (And if you know Florida, you know what a weird place it is.) And also, The Golden Arrow was entertaining, yet confusing, and didn't hardly make any sense ... just like a Silver Age Martian Manhunter story.
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Post by Hoosier X on Jun 2, 2017 22:08:25 GMT -5
I saw ten movies from the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" list in May. I'm trying to average eight of these movies per month, but my mother is visiting in mid-June for ten days and I thought that might put me behind a bit, so I fit in two extra in May. It wasn't that hard because I was bit on the hand by a cat (it had been surrendered to the pet rescue organization that I volunteer for and it was very scared, so I forgave him) and I got a tetanus shot and I'm on antibiotics and I took off a few days work to give my hand a rest. (It was very swollen!) So I sat around and watched movies for three days! One theme you'll notice is "Late 1980s Films that Hoosier X Should Have Seen Thirty Years Ago." Yeah, I had never seen Wall Street, Pretty Woman or When Harry Met Sally until last month! I got Wall Street from the library and then Pretty Woman and When Harry Met Sally were both on cable at the end of May. So I DVRed them and watched them recently. With no further ado, here are the films from the List I saw in May: Olympia, Part 1: Festival of Nations (1938) - Leni Riefenstahl's two documentaries about the 1936 Berlin Olympics are both quite a bit more watchable than you might think, especially the first one. And you can spend hours diddling around on the Internet looking up more information on the 1936 Olympics and on Riefenstahl herself. Olympia, Part 2: Festival of Beauty (1938) The Five Deadly Venoms (1978) - Wonderful martial-arts film, despite being quite flagrantly silly in the dubbed print that I saw. Wall Street (1987) When Harry Met Sally (1989) - I liked this one the best by far out of this trio of films from 1987 to 1990, when I was going to the movies a lot, but didn't quite get to these three, for various reasons. Pretty Woman (1990) Cache (Hidden) (2005) - A very strange French film, with a bit of a mystery and a bit of social commentary mixed up into a one-of-a-kind film that's not for everybody. Juliet Binoche is great! Senna (2010) - Interesting documentary about the Brazilian race car driver Senna, who reached the heights of Formula One racing while still young and died in a wreck during a big race in the 1990s. I didn't know a thing about him until I saw this movie. Shame (2011) - It's a rather unpleasant but thought-provoking movie about a sex addict. Wadjda (2012) - I loved this so much! Coming across films like Wadjda is one of the reasons I'm watching the films on the List. Wadjda is a 12-year-old Muslim girl living in Saudi Arabia, and she really wants a bike! Everyone objects! It makes you sterile and no man will marry you! She will do anything to get a bike, including a contest memorizing the Quran! Reportedly the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia.
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Post by Jesse on Jun 15, 2017 15:05:47 GMT -5
Watched The Man Who Laughs (1928) for the first time and was really impressed with the story. I've been meaning to watch this one for awhile because of its relation to The Joker and I'm glad I finally got around to it. Conrad Veidt manages to be both creepy and sympathetic as the main character Gwynplaine. Definitely something I plan to rewatch eventually.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2017 23:15:59 GMT -5
I'm currently watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) on TCM and it's my 3rd of 4th time I seen this classic!
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Post by Jesse on Jun 17, 2017 12:26:56 GMT -5
Was on a bit of a nostalgia kick this past week and rewatched Clue (1985) and ¡Three Amigos! (1986). I feel like they are both as silly as I remember them as well as both having some pretty good casting.
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Post by Jesse on Jun 20, 2017 17:13:27 GMT -5
Horror movies I've watched in the past month or so...
Zombi 2 (1979) by Lucio Fulci Dawn of the Dead (1978) European Version Demons (1985) Demons 2 (1986) Day of the Dead (1985) The Lost Boys (1987)
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Post by LovesGilKane on Jun 21, 2017 10:03:32 GMT -5
i've been trying to get up the guts to watch the uncut version of The Beyond by Fulci, again. no luck this month
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Post by Jesse on Jun 22, 2017 16:37:40 GMT -5
Watched Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders (1983) today and enjoyed it. I've only seen parts of this growing up but never sat through the whole thing before. There's some decent character work, a couple genuinely touching moments and a tragic climax. During the epic gang fight scene the sound quality is so good I could hear the cicadas in the background along with the rumble of thunder. It all made for a very intense sequence as the fight began and the rain started coming down. Definitely an all star cast and an interesting look back at a early time in some of their careers.
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