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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 16, 2017 14:32:22 GMT -5
Naw, you have to have Steve Holland, from the Flash Gordon tv series. He was perfect for the role... Aside from being 15 years old in 1940.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 16, 2017 14:46:54 GMT -5
My friends and I were eager to like the Doc Savage movie when it came out... but the French version dubbed Ron Ely with the same voice actor who played Sylvester in the Tweety & Sylvester cartoon! Hilarity ensued, killing our ability to take the adventure seriously. Sufferin' succotash!!!
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 16, 2017 16:08:23 GMT -5
My friends and I were eager to like the Doc Savage movie when it came out... but the French version dubbed Ron Ely with the same voice actor who played Sylvester in the Tweety & Sylvester cartoon! Hilarity ensued, killing our ability to take the adventure seriously. Sufferin' succotash!!! This reminds me that the Spanish-language version of the 1931 Dracula has one major problem - the guy playing Dracula looks like Carl Reiner. The guy playing Renfield is pretty awesome though. As good as Dwight Frye ... almost.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 17, 2017 3:42:25 GMT -5
What's Up Doc It's has a trio of Young Frankenstein stars ... Kenneth Mars, Madeline Kahn, and Liam Dunn as the Judge and this movie really tickle my funny bones and I have seen this movie over 20 times in my life and I have the DVD and watch it on a rainy day. This movie is a laugh a minute and I just can't seem to keep a straight face watching this madcap, insane, wild comedy that so screwy that you die laughing every time you see this Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand classic. It's has the perfect location to film it - San Francisco and all those hills, winding roads, and beautiful scenery along the way to make this movie memorable. Mabel Albertson was excellent in this movie as Mrs. Van Hoskins owner of those fabulous jewels came out wearing that hot pink peignoir crying over the loss of her jewels and Sorrell Booke and Stefan Gierasch were perfect as Harry and Fritz. The Bubble Bath Scene was nuts! John Hillerman is perfect as the Hotel Manager ... he had a short role in this movie and was superb in that department. Barbra and Ryan had great chemistry and they made the movie just special and that scene at the drugstore of the cashier charging Mr. Bannister over $60 for a bottle of aspirin was priceless. Trailer
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 17, 2017 20:04:08 GMT -5
And don't forget Austin Pendleton as Frederick Larabee. Always loved Pendleton; always played repressed Ivy League, patrician types beautifully. He's terrific as the stuttering public defender, in My Cousin Vinny.
Peter Bogdanovich was a bit of a wunderkind, at that point. He had made a name for himself as a film critic and historian, especially with his interviews of Orson Welles. Then, he started directing and had a nice string of great movies: The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc? and Paper Moon. All tremendous films, showing the influence of the directors he studied and wrote about. Then, it kind of went to his head and he produced 3 not-so-great films and then his personal life fell apart when Dorothy Stratten was murdered. Never really regained that place he once had.
His commentary tracks on these films are fascinating to listen to and his interviews with Welles are required reading, for anyone interested in film history.
Meanwhile, I remember seeing What's Up Doc? when it debuted on network tv, and laughed myself silly. Also caught Paper Moon that way, soon followed by the tv adaptation, with Jodie Foster in Tatum O'Neal's role. It was a decent tv series; but, just never had the ratings.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 17, 2017 23:12:20 GMT -5
Finally watched the silent horror classic Nosferatu all the way through. I'd seen bits and pieces of it over they years, and seen things inspired by it like Shadow of the Vampire, but never watched it form beginning to end before. I recorded it when TCM showed it a few Sundays back and finally got to sit down and watch it this afternoon (I only have about 40 other movies I recorded from TCM this month so far to get to now).
-M
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 18, 2017 9:26:24 GMT -5
Finally watched the silent horror classic Nosferatu all the way through. I'd seen bits and pieces of it over they years, and seen things inspired by it like Shadow of the Vampire, but never watched it form beginning to end before. I recorded it when TCM showed it a few Sundays back and finally got to sit down and watch it this afternoon (I only have about 40 other movies I recorded from TCM this month so far to get to now). -M Murnau and Fritz Lang were so far ahead of Hollywood, in terms of what you could do with the visuals of film, via lighting and other effects.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 18, 2017 9:36:56 GMT -5
That's not Madam Satan. That's Lillian Roth. I used a photo of her because I love Lillian Roth! I DVRed Madam Satan on a whim. It's a 1930 movie with the title Madam Satan, so I thought it's worth a look. I read the summary and discovered much of it takes place on a dirigible! It wasn't until I started watching it last night that I discovered that it was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and it stars Reginald Denny, Roland Young and one of my favorite obscure stars of the 1930s Lillian Roth! (Fans of classic films will recognize her from Animal Crackers.) It got pretty crazy. They don't get on the dirigible until an hour into movie. Roland Young seems to have rented the dirigible for a masquerade party but it's not supposed to leave the mooring mast. And there's a great scene where you see the partygoers taking the elevator or the stairs up the mooring mast and then entering the dirigible from the nose and walking on catwalks through the gas bag to get to the gondola. I always wondered how you boarded a dirigible. A storm rolls in and the dirigible is somehow disconnected from the mooring mast during the masquerade party, so DeMille gets to film one of his signature disaster sequences. Throw in some bedroom farce and some insane musical numbers and you get an exciting and sometimes unintentionally hilarious crowd-pleaser that you can hardly believe was made in 1930.
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 18, 2017 21:59:59 GMT -5
That's not Madam Satan. That's Lillian Roth. I used a photo of her because I love Lillian Roth! I DVRed Madam Satan on a whim. It's a 1930 movie with the title Madam Satan, so I thought it's worth a look. I read the summary and discovered much of it takes place on a dirigible! It wasn't until I started watching it last night that I discovered that it was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and it stars Reginald Denny, Roland Young and one of my favorite obscure stars of the 1930s Lillian Roth! (Fans of classic films will recognize her from Animal Crackers.) It got pretty crazy. They don't get on the dirigible until an hour into movie. Roland Young seems to have rented the dirigible for a masquerade party but it's not supposed to leave the mooring mast. And there's a great scene where you see the partygoers taking the elevator or the stairs up the mooring mast and then entering the dirigible from the nose and walking on catwalks through the gas bag to get to the gondola. I always wondered how you boarded a dirigible. A storm rolls in and the dirigible is somehow disconnected from the mooring mast during the masquerade party, so DeMille gets to film one of his signature disaster sequences. Throw in some bedroom farce and some insane musical numbers and you get an exciting and sometimes unintentionally hilarious crowd-pleaser that you can hardly believe was made in 1930. Well, you got onto the R100 and R101 like this... (Which, from the clips I have seen, I think is how it is done in Madame Satan) and you boarded the Hindenburg, like this... (look just aft of the command gondola; you can see the gangway, coming down from the belly of the airship). The Graf Zeppelin was a bit different... The Zeppelin Company updated the design, with the Hindenburg, to bring the passenger area more inside the skin of the ship, to reduce drag and make the flights more efficient. Compared to the R101, the Hindenburg's design kept passengers out of areas where they might cause damage or present a danger. The R101 was more luxurious, which contributed to its excessive weight and structural flaws, which led to its crash and fire, which killed far more that the Hindenburg Disaster. Now, if you want real fun, this was how you could board the USS Akron and Macon (and Los Angeles, in the testing stages), while in flight...
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Post by Deleted on Oct 22, 2017 10:03:32 GMT -5
Late Night TV - I watched RED EYE starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy and these two pulled some great scenes in this movie with a plot to kill a Homeland Security Analyst and it's was packed with an emotional rollercoaster of excitement at the end of this movie of where Lisa trying to save her father and at same time trying to make sure that the Homeland Security Analyst and his family are safe making countless calls on phones that she can grab on and all that. It was action-packed and filled with emotions running wild and McAdams was excellent in this movie. This is my favorite movie that she starred in everyone in that movie was doing a good job acting. Cillian was pure evil and rightly so. Wes Craven directed this movie and did a good job pacing it and made it a powerful film of plots and counterplots ... Lisa verses Jackson ...
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Post by Jesse on Oct 23, 2017 4:19:17 GMT -5
I swear I set a reminder to rewatch the j-horror anthology film Kwaidan (1964) tonight on TCM and Ben Mankiewicz even said they were showing it next but for some reason they are reairing Diabolique (1955) which is also a great movie but I've seen it twice within the last few years. I wonder why they got their wires crossed.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 23, 2017 13:52:36 GMT -5
I swear I set a reminder to rewatch the j-horror anthology film Kwaidan (1964) tonight on TCM and Ben Mankiewicz even said they were showing it next but for some reason they are reairing Diabolique (1955) which is also a great movie but I've seen it twice within the last few years. I wonder why they got their wires crossed. I love Kwaidan and I thought about DVRing it this year, but I am already DVRing so many movies for the Halloween season that I had to be a little choosy. (I got Eyes without a Face last night.) I'll watch Kwaidan next year for sure!
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 23, 2017 14:19:15 GMT -5
I had an "Obscure 1930s Movies" double feature a few days ago. I watched "Lady for a Day" (1933) and "Long Lost Father" (1934). I watched Long Lost Father because I love Helen Chandler so much. She's pretty well-known for playing Mina in the famous 1931 version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi, but otherwise, her movies are kind of hard to find. You really have to be on the lookout in the TCM summaries to catch one every once in a while. I can only think of four movies I've seen with her ... and that includes Long Lost Father, which I saw a few days ago. It's an OK movie, only 63 minutes, so there's no time to get bored with it. John Barrymore plays Helen Chandler's roustabout father, who abandoned the family when she was very young. But fate has brought them together as he's managing a night club where she's just been hired as a singer. She wants as little to do with him as possible, but he comes through when she gets in a bit of a jam. The Helen Chandler film to see if you ever get a chance is The Last Flight. She's really good in it and is helped out by a cast of early 1930s actors like Richard Barthelmess, David Manners and Johnny Mack Brown. The other movie I saw was Lady for a Day. My favorite year for the movies is 1933, and one of my long-term goals has been to see all the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1933. This has taken a while because back then, they had ten nominees for Best Picture. (And really, 1933 is a very frustrating year for the nominations because, with ten spots, they couldn't find room for King Kong, Duck Soup, Footlight Parade or The Bitter Tea of General Yen! It really is the stupidest year for Oscar nominations.) TCM finally showed Lady for a Day and I was able to complete my goal to see al the films for 1933! Hooray! But I wanted to see Lady for a Day anyway because I'm such a Damon Runyon fan. Truth be told, the source material for this film, a short story called "Madam La Gimp," is not one of my favorites. So I like the 1933 film quite a bit better than the original story. Warren William is pretty awesome as Dave the Dude. And Guy Kibbee really shines as a pool hustler called "the Judge" who pretends to be Apple Annie's husband. May Robson is pretty good as Apple Annie, the destitute apple vendor who gets to be a lady for a week while her daughter (who was raised in a convent in Spain since she was a child) visits New York and the entire underworld works overtime trying to pass Apple Annie off as a society matron. May Robson was nominated for Best Actress, and there's a bit of unverified Internet trivia going around that she's the only person ever nominated for an Oscar who was born during the Civil War. I quite enjoyed Lady for a Day, but I don't know how well it would work for people who don't know the work of Damon Runyon and don't know early 1930s films beyond a few Universal horror movies. I loved seeing old-timey actors like Glenda Farrell, Nat Pendleton, Ned Sparks and Barry Norton (who was the Jonathon Harker character) in the 1931 Spanish-language version of Dracula), but I'm a sucker for the films of this period, and I'm easily entertained by them.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 23, 2017 16:10:05 GMT -5
Lady for the Day is a delightful film Hoosier X and I loved May Robson's performance as Apple Annie and this number by Glenda Farrell too. I loved this scene!
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 24, 2017 11:00:49 GMT -5
"Old German Movies" department Yesterday, I watched Fraulein Else, a 1929 silent film from Germany starring the wonderful Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner is another one of those 1930s actresses I love so much. She was a big star in Europe in her time. She left Germany in the 1930s to flee the Nazis because she was Jewish and probably also partly because they were Nazis. In England, she starred as Rosalind in the Shakespeare play As You Like It, which is where I first came across her because it's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. Laurence Olivier plays Orlando. I instantly fell in love with her energy and her personality. I've heard that the movie flopped because British audiences didn't like her accent. Bergner also made Escape Me Never in the U.S., for which she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. In Fraulein Else, Bergner is Else, a young woman in her late teens, I think, it's hard to tell because Bergner is very petite and looks as young as 15, but she was 32 when she made this movie. But Else could be a little older. She's playful and doesn't seem to have any interest in the young men around her at St. Moritz, so I was under the impression that she was 14 or 15. While Else is vacationing in St. Moritz with her aunt and her cousin, Else's father suffers a terrible financial setback when the Viennese stock exchange collapses. Else's mother writes to Else with the bad news, and asks Else to ask Herr von Dorsday, an old business associate of her father, for a huge loan to cover the losses. Else finally works up the courage to make the request, but Herr von Dorsday makes a rather inappropriate suggestion for services he would like as a "favor" to himself in exchange for the loan. I liked "Fraulein Else" a lot. Bergner is great, as always. I especially like the scene where Else is following Dorsday through the halls and salons at the St. Moritz resort, trying to get his attention at the same time she is trying to work up the nerve to ask him for money. She had blown him off twice before when he had talked to her in the lobby and asked her to have dinner with him as an old friend of the family, so she's a little embarrassed. But it's so different from any silent German film I've ever seen that I'm not sure what to say to people about whether they'd like it or not. The film spends a lot of time setting up the plot, so you get to see lots of scenes of Else's father going from one bank to another to get more credit to cover his losses, and then a lot of time is spent on the dad crying in his office and being tended to by Else's mother. By the time von Dorsday makes his improper suggestion to Else, there's only about ten minutes left in the movie. So pacing is a bit of a problem. It's available on YouTube, so it's easy to see for anybody who's curious. (As You Like It and Escape Me Never are both on YouTube as well.)
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