Rinaldo

I can't recall details, but I seem to remember that there have been some similar instances. (Aside of course from "Noir Alley," which gives us a preview of Sunday morning's feature the night before.) In some cases a title that they've procured fits two different days' themes, so they use it for both. Waste not, want not.

I've seen only short bits of it as yet, but I thought the 5-host New Year's Eve worked out rather well. Seeing our hosts spending time together, sharing their pleasure in movies that we generally don't get to see them talk about... (I know they all present all sorts, but Eddie and Jacqueline especially do have their special niches on the air), that was fun. Maybe I'm a pushover, but It did feel like a bit of a party to me.

Apologies -- I know it can be disappointing to be told that one's favorite opinions aren't controversial after all 😉 , but I think you'd find that there are loads of people who love "Winter Was Warm," me among them. It (like the rest of Mr. Magoo's score) is the work of the same formidable team that did the score for Funny Girl, after all: Jule Styne and Bob Merrill. And it's received other recordings after the original one. Here's a lovely version by the great Victoria Clark:

For me too! I was going to mention him, but that message was getting self-indulgently long, and I tried to edit it down. But in my first draft I listed him alongside the other 4 actors I named. Mr. Magoo did a serious job there (and had a surprising amount of authentic Dickens dialogue to work with). It doesn't spoil it, but I do have a genuine question about his version: why did they put Christmas Present first? I've never seen any background info that answers that.

I'm addicted to comparing film (or video) versions of the Shakespeare plays, which I started reading at an early age. The Hamlets, for instance, all cast different light on what their makers found important, and I can jump around happily among half a dozen versions. There are an astonishing number of Midsummer Night's Dreams, all remarkably different from each other, and there's fun to be had in most of them (my own personal favorite, if pressed, is the Glyndebourne video of Benjamin Britten's opera, but that's just me). 40 years ago we had no films of Much Ado About Nothing; now we have two good ones. With Romeo and Juliet it gets especially complicated, because there's so much more text in the play than any film wants to (or should?) retain. The Zeffirelli got to me at the ideal age, and I still like to revisit it, but I can see its faults (like the dead studio sound of some of the post-dubbing -- like many Italian films it largely gave up on getting the sound right on location, and had the actors rerecord their lines after the fact, not always perfectly synced, let alone given proper distance perspective). The old MGM version is pretty much DOA, but it is at least beautiful in terms of design and B&W cinematography, and John Barrymore's Mercutio gives us a wonderful glimpse of a previous generation's stage style. There's also a sumptuous 1954 version directed by Renato Castellani, with a vivid Romeo from Laurence Harvey, some British stalwarts in support, costume designs based on Renaissance painting, and lots of Italian locations (looking much cleaner than a decade later for F.Z.). Luhrmann's adaptation is well known enough not to need description from me. The BBC "Complete Shakespeare" version uses by far the most complete text, but for me never really comes to life. I also discovered a 2013 film that I somehow never heard about at the time, with Hailee Steinfeld as Juliet. Apparently the fact that the screenplay includes additional lines by Julian Fellowes provided some critics with an easy chance to take cheap shots at it, as if nobody had ever taken a new look at the over-familiar plays before. I found it effective and entertaining, and Fellowes's embellishments intelligently conceived.

I do understand the sentiment (I fell for the movie on first run, and still love it), but I do think we have to give Zeffirelli his credit. The look and flow of it are his (OK, the music is Nino Rota's), and appealing as the stars are, they never made the same impression onscreen again.

I had a good time this month rummaging around on different services and channels and watching all the Christmas Carol versions I could find. One of the pleasures of the project was find that they could all coexist; almost all of them had virtues absent in another version. There are a number of excellent portrayals of Scrooge: Alistair Sim, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Michael Caine are all very fine, and each finds different legitimate facets to stress. I do still think there's room for another film that puts a priority on bringing to life exactly what Dickens wrote; the book is short enough that the goal might be attainable. I don't think the departures are criminal or anything, but I have yet to see, for example, the weird SF-like Christmas Past of the novella. On the whole, with due deference to many others, my heart remains with the 1984 George C. Scott telefilm, his Ebenezer being the most pleased with his own sarcastic wit (right out of the book -- Scrooge is constantly punning and one-upping in his interactions), and the cast of British eminences being top-tier. But others will have their own favorites.

Of the Martin & Lewis films, one, the 1954 Living It Up, is of some interest to TCM addicts, because it's a gender-flipped remake of the 1937 comedy Nothing Sacred, by way of the 1953 Broadway musical Hazel Flagg, with Lewis in the Carole Lombard role (Homer Flagg instead of Hazel Flagg). Janet Leigh takes over the Fredric March role, retaining the name Wally Cook. Dean Martin sings a couple of the Jule Styne songs from the musical, and Martin & Lewis together sing the best-remembered number, "Every Street's a Boulevard in Old New York." It's just such a bizarre circumstance that this happened: Paramount bought the rights to a musical, and unlike most such cases when the musical bombs (only archival fanatics like me remember it), went ahead and actually made the movie, with two of their biggest stars. Here's the big number:

Carol Burnett's "The Lady Heir" sketch (after The Heiress, of course) was a special delight to me for two reasons. 1, it happens that I'd never seen it before. 2, it served (as the best parodies can) as an act of criticism of the source material. Please understand: I'm very fond of The Heiress -- I'm touched by it in the intended way, and I admire the writing, acting, direction, everything. Still, a furtive bit of me thinks that Catherine could have reacted in other ways. She might have had a final satisfying confrontation with him and told him what she thought. Or she could have reacted less self-destructively and decided that even if this gentlemen turned out to be a cad, someone else might not and she should keep a positive attitude. Or she could be pragmatic and decide, "He's going to be careful to treat me well and keep me happy, and I might as well fool myself with him as with someone else." Or of course she could do what Catherine did in this sketch.

Maybe this is the right time and place to mention that if one wants to see some no-tricks great acting from Maggie Smith, devoid of the snappy putdowns for which she's rightly considered incomparable, look up Alan Bennett's 50-minute monologue "Bed Among the Lentils." I'm by no means the first to single this out, but it should be better known:

If one has never seen it, certainly see it and decide for yourself. If you're asking my opinion, though, I don't think it works at all. Somehow that amazing actress Maggie Smith feels inauthentic in the role (I can't think of many other such instances from her), and this time her characteristic mannerisms seemed to me like a big of tricks rather than part of a coherent characterization. Maybe others feel differently about it.

No matter how many times I see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I'm enthralled every time. Muriel Spark's novella was assigned reading in my freshman English class in 1965 (at which time it was only 4 years old), and its unique flavor stayed with me. When trailers for the movie appeared, they put me off -- they acted as if the story had been updated to make it "relevant" in the style of the moment ("out of her classroom comes a whole rebellious generation of Miss Brodies!"). But when I finally talked myself into seeing it, I was immediately captivated. It was intensely true to the book after all, with only the smallest and most forgivable of deviations (the art teacher is allowed to have two arms, two of the girls are combined into one, Miss Brodie and Sandy get a culminating in-person confrontation). The dialogue remains crisp and revealing, providing a succession of classic Maggie Smith quotable lines ("She seeks to intimidate me by the use of quarter hours"). The acting is beyond praise (has any actor ever risen to the challenge of a verbal sparring match with Maggie Smith, and winning, better than young Pamela Franklin?), I now have the pleasure of being familiar with Celia Johnson and seeing how charmingly she aged, and every time I see it I'm amazed by the trickery of aging the girls from preadolescence to assured young women before our eyes (when the filming took place, of course, over a matter of mere months). A gem for sure.

And the magical contribution of costume designer Bob Mackie, once singled out in passing by Pauline Kael as "the wittiest costuming television has seen." Mackie was primarily known as a couturier, especially dressing entertainers for public appearances; but his commitment to The Carol Burnett Show throughout its long run shows his brilliance at theatrical design as well. He not only captured period style when needed, he provided just the right kind of comic exaggeration whenever it was needed.

I enjoyed Carol Burnett's "Torchy Song" inordinately. I remember seeing it when it first aired, not knowing what it was referring to (as she said in her conversation with Dave Karger, Torch Song wasn't really well known to 1970s audiences, but she wanted to do the spoof anyway), but still finding it incredibly funny. I still do. The distillation of the Joan Crawford attitude and aura, and of course the focus on That Stance, make it unforgettable. Torch Song itself remains negligible, as far as I'm concerned. But it does contain one of my all-time favorite movie quotes. After her new pianist makes a series of criticisms of her musical choices, La Crawford snarls back at him, "Well, I happen to like it unorthodox, arbitrary, and abrupt!"

Oh, I hope they include "Little Miss Showbiz"! This took half an hour (half the show) and was a musical spoof of 30s movie musicals, Shirley Temple specifically, with Anthony Newley, Bernadette Peters, and the regulars. It wasn't in the syndication package and hardly ever comes around on the specialized channels now. Others of their classics of course include "Went with the Wind," "Rancid Harvest," "Caged Dames," and "Mildred Fierce" -- well, there were a ton of them.