Milburn Stone

Criss Cross is part of TCM's Noir Alley, which is always repeated on Sunday mornings after premiering on Saturday nights.

I liked seeing a young Dylan Baker. Other than that, it was a great SCTV parody.

How does The List of Adrian Messenger hold up? The only time in my life I've seen it was as a 13-year old kid at the neighborhood movie theater. I knew the gimmick going in (that was probably the only reason my friends and I were there) but I think I was pretty bored by the actual movie, and not especially blown away by the actor-reveals at the end. But it could be that even though I knew who these stars were, I didn't have all that long a history with them, and someone who did would have been more gobsmacked. Incidentally, in the movie's trivia section on imdb, I learned something I never knew. There's good reason to believe that Frank Sinatra and Burt Lancaster actually did not appear in the movie until the very end; their characters were portrayed by uncredited actors, and the two stars showed up only for the "reveal" sequence. Something else I learned in that same trivia section, concerning another movie: Voice king Paul Frees dubbed most of Tony Curtis' Josephine voice in Some Like It Hot. I have a hard time fully accepting this, only because I'm very good at detecting voices, and Josephine sounded to me like Curtis in falsetto; but that could be because Frees was so darned good at his craft.

FWIW, this is happening to me too. On Safari 13.0.3, Catalina OS 15.1, light theme.

I found the episode engaging enough, but then I did a thought experiment on myself and tried to imagine exactly the same episode but with someone other than Charles Dance in the part. And I realized it would have totally sucked. Boy are they lucky they got him.

A shareholder has profit participation in a company. A stakeholder may not have any profit participation, but nevertheless is affected by the fortunes of the company. (He may be an employee whose job depends on the company's success, for example.)

I got a lot out of the movie that wasn't old ground. I'll try to summarize. Disclaimer: I'm taking on faith some of what the movie said about actual personages. But with that caveat... I learned more about Jimmy Hoffa than I ever knew. I was already a young adult at the time of his disappearance, so I was well aware who he was. But I always just assumed he was a mobster himself. And that he somehow deserved his fate. I never knew that genuine passion for the welfare of the working man is what drove him. And a genuine, accurate perception of the forces arrayed against the working man. I got more sense than I had before of the mobsters being real human beings. This is not the first time a movie has had as its thesis that "mobsters aren't monsters." But it went farther along those lines than movies I've seen before. And it went farther in telling the story of how choices have consequences. Other movies have done an excellent job of portraying those consequences as "you'll get killed or end up in jail." This movie did more than other movies I've seen to portray the emotional consequences--alienation from family, loneliness, the isolation that comes when you're not able to tell a soul anything true about your life.

Re the reruns over Thanksgiving weekend--seems short-sighted on the network's part if only from a business point of view. They're not wrong that the audience looking for news will be 75% smaller on a holiday weekend, they're right! (I myself had no desire to turn to the channel over those four days, and I bet I'm typical.) And they're not wrong that running the operation, even with substitute anchors, is going to be unprofitable--it will be! But the people who did turn to the channel looking for news over those four days? They're your core audience, MSNBC. Your "heavy users," as they say in marketing. Your most loyal audience, who will be here years from now, looking somewhere for news, no matter who is president. You disrespect them foolishly.

Enjoyed the episode. I've grown accustomed to most of the episodes containing something I can't buy (seems like all of us have), and for me, it was the Family not seeing the documentary until the whole country did. Really? After as much micro-managing as Philip did with the filming, he never asked to see the cut?

Thanks for this. I too was clueless as to what a "tip" was in the context of the episode (except "thing that caused the calamity"), and now I know. Boy. As disappointed as I was by "Margaretology," what a comeback this episode was. I'm in agreement with those who think that the ending would have been more powerful without the tear. I was thinking it in real time as they pushed in on her from the back; literally voicing to myself, "don't cut to a closeup of her face, this is the perfect ending right now, if only you can realize it, Peter Morgan." We knew the emotions going on inside her. How much better it would have been to end with one remaining mystery only, whether those emotions could produce a tear. I would have been more sympathetic to her--and certainly more moved--if I could believe that with all that going on inside her, she still couldn't access the catharsis that crying would bring. But they couldn't resist the obvious. Oh well. Nobody's perfect.

Not digging this season so far, despite how much I was looking forward to it. The show had its bad moments before, but it's like Peter Morgan has now followed his worst instincts as a writer and constructed a series entirely of bad moments. (Is Julian Fellowes his role model?) I do believe Margaret and Johnson could have bonded over their shared "subordinated in the shadows" history. (Although let's be accurate: Johnson was subordinated in the shadows for all of three years. Before that, he was the most powerful man in the Senate, and before that, a rising power in the House of Representatives. I'm sure it rankled him to be so disrespected as Kennedy's VP, but he was accustomed to real power, unlike Margaret.) What I don't believe is that Margaret would have shit-talked Kennedy at that dinner, or that LBJ would have tolerated her doing it for a second. I also didn't buy, at all, the whole limerick sequence. Some cursory research bears out that this never happened. But the more serious problem is not that it's fictional, it's that it's so unconvincingly fictional. Finally, to my own surprise, I'm not liking Olivia Colman in this as much as I thought I would, based on how much pleasure she's brought me in other roles. Her queen feels recycled to me. I see the monarch she played in The Favourite. I see the step-mom she played in Fleabag. I see a bit of her real persona as she projects in person. I see a lot of mannerisms that scream Olivia Colman. What I don't see is a fully inhabited and convincing character, in a performance that I wish rose to the level of the ones she gave (as very different characters) in The Night Manager and Broadchurch. I hope Episode 3 brings me back in the fold.

I like Klobuchar, but is she blaming the shaking on the HVAC system in Atlanta? Really? Maya's Kamala is so good, I might start to get them mixed up. (Like I did with Fey/Palin.) Edited to add: I just realized I like her Kamala so much, I want Kamala to win, just so I can see more of Maya.

Every execution in this campaign makes me wonder the same thing: What weasel-word language are they using, that they were able to get past the lawyers, that allows them to say these are real people when every fibre of my being says they're not real people?

It is definitely among the most Lumet-y of all Lumet films. Like you, I haven't seen it since it came out. The thought of it makes me nostalgic for the era that we went out to movies a lot--even for movies that, arguably like The Anderson Tapes, didn't promise to be fantastic but did promise to be fun. I'll look for it On Demand.

I don't know the answer (I guess I'm lazy also), but I would be willing to bet a crown or two that they were not. And the reason is that they laid the double-meanings on so thick. Peter Morgan was doing everything but elbowing us in the ribs while saying "nudge nudge, wink wink." No one in the actual reception would have been deaf to something going on in a speech straining so hard to have two layers. And Elizabeth would never have risked being so obvious. And that double-meaning thing was actually my problem more generally with the episode. We are painfully made aware over and over how the story of Russian influence so uncannily parallels our current day. Yes, Russian spying happened then as it happens now, so the problem is not that the show is unfactual. It's that Morgan's allusions to our present day are so unsubtle. The phrase "laying it on with a trowel" comes to mind.