Rinaldo
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Posts posted by Rinaldo
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12 hours ago, SusieQ said:
Robert Redford was totally miscast as John Dortmund in The HotRock.
He was, but who would have been better at that date? John Dortmunder is an easy person to visualize, but hard to cast. The later Dortmunders (George C. Scott, Paul Le Mat, Christopher Lambert, and yes Martin Lawrence) came no closer. At least one thing can be said in favor of The Hot Rock as a film: George Segal was dead-on perfect casting as Andy Kelp. When I reread any of the books, Segal is always who I'm picturing.
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I'm a bit embarrassed to bring this up, as it's totally insignificant, but here goes:
On Tuesday, Ossie Davis Day, TCM is showing the 1979 movie Hot Stuff at 10:15 am ET. I remember watching it more than once in the early 1980s, partly because HBO ran it constantly in those relatively early days of cable networks, partly because the script was cowritten by my favorite comedic suspense writer, Donald E. Westlake. A group of Miami undercover police (Jerry Reed, Suzanne Pleshette, Dom DeLuise, Luis Avalos, with Davis as their captain) set up a pawnshop as a long-term sting. From there it plays out like an extra-long TV episode, with laughs and jeopardy and all, and a bit of a family feeling (DeLuise directed and used his actual family as his onscreen family, Reed wrote and performed the theme song, etc.). Like I said, of no importance, and probably not even "good" in any serious aesthetic sense, but you might find it a diverting 90 minutes if it fits your taste, and I doubt it'll come around on TCM again.
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@Charlie Baker, I saw many of the American Film Theatre releases as they happened, but I skipped A Delicate Balance, because I (despite being a fan of other Albee) couldn't make sense of the play, either on the page or in the one local (albeit professional) production I'd seen, and Hepburn didn't seem the sort of performer who would help with that. I was wrong. When I finally caught up with it (on TCM) a few years ago, I was impressed by how well it all worked and "held." Credit to the tactful direction of Tony Richardson, and to the cast including Joseph Cotten and Lee Remick,* but most especially Paul Scofield and Katharine Hepburn, if only through sheer technique and star assurance. It's been pointed out (e.g. by Dan Callahan in his book about American film acting) that whereas many of the studio actresses of Hepburn's generation ended their careers in minor, sometimes cringeworthy movies, Hepburn never stopped taking on classic challenges like Mary in Long Day's Journey Into Night, Hecuba in The Trojan Women, and this.
As to The Madwoman of Chaillot: it's a play I know pretty well (I acted in it in high school), and it's a movie that... I guess everyone should decide for themselves.
(*Incidental fact about ADB that I doubt will get mentioned: The showy role of Claire, the alcoholic sister and a showcase for vivid actresses like Elaine Stritch and Maggie Smith, was initially cast with the legendary stage actress Kim Stanley. But when at the first rehearsal she went all Actors Studio, improvising and adding lines and noises instead of sticking to the script, Hepburn was so put off she was going to withdraw. So the part was recast with Kate Reid.)
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6 hours ago, EtheltoTillie said:
It's like doctors watching medical shows or lawyers watching courtroom dramas.
I do understand about this sort of situation. When a movie or TV show features a situation where teachers are trying to do good work but are constantly hampered or defeated by needless funding shortfalls, inane administrative decisions, or buzzwords of the moment, I just can't watch it -- it's too real, and I lived with that world for decades. Many of my friends have recommended Abbott Elementary to me as a good current comedy series, but I couldn't last more than 20 minutes for just this reason. (On the other hand, I can be philosophical or even amused when movies get my area of teaching -- music -- wrong, because it happens so often, it's more the rule than not.)
5 hours ago, Suzn said:I'm surprised at the criticism of Merle Streep's acting. I thought she was much more highly regarded.
I wouldn't read too much into the interchanges of a half dozen contributors here, me included. In the world at large I think it's fair to say that she is highly regarded, and even some (not all!) of us with reservations admire and enjoy a substantial number of her performances enormously. Me again included.
4 hours ago, Wiendish Fitch said:On one hand, I love Pauline Kael, but on the other, I can't really rush to her defense when others criticize her. Heck, sometimes even I find myself thinking, "Damn, woman, don't you like anyone or anything??".
I own all Kael's books and read her obsessively when she was at The New Yorker. I would still say I'm a fan, but I've come to a more measured appreciation since her retirement, and can certainly see her vulnerable spots. Not the ones that are sometimes wrongly used to attack her, like Renata Adler saying she liked only violence etc., or Stuart Byron deciding she was homophobic (completely without foundation). But the way she would go off on a long binge that could seem only distantly related to her ostensible subject. Contrary to your quote about not liking anything -- yes she did have her dislikes (Greer Garson indeed, or musicals that were insufficiently fluffy and unpretentious), but I'd say she was much more prone to pages of praise. Sometimes (Nashville) I absolutely agreed with her; other times (Brian De Palma, and read her laudatory reaction to his The Fury sometime) I was bewildered as to what she was seeing. But really, I don't look to a critic for consumer advice, I want her to make me a better more receptive moviegoer, and she could be a wizard at that.
My thanks to @Charlie Baker for the recommendation of The Man with a Cloak. Lots of fun to watch, and I think it'll stick in memory -- it's unlike other movies of its time. I'll have to check to see if I have the Carr story somewhere in the house, I don't remember it but I do have a whole shelf of Carr. And the Raksin music lived up to the advance description. Unlike other movie scores, by him or anyone else.
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Thanks for the alert, @Charlie Baker. Looking up The Man with a Cloak, I discovered 2 additional enticing facts about it:
- It's based on a story by John Dickson Carr, one of my very favorite mystery authors. (And I can't think of any other screen adaptations of his work.)
- It has a well-regarded and reportedly unusual score by the great David Raksin (most recognized for Laura, but of course he wrote dozens of other movie scores over the years).
So I definitely don't want to miss this one.
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With the discussion about Meryl Streep we've been having, both extremes being represented along with muddling in the middle, I recalled that Pauline Kael devoted a paragraph to thoughts about Streep's potential, at the end of a negative review of Silkwood -- so, quite early in her career. Here it is:
QuoteMeryl Streep has been quoted as saying, "I've always felt that I can do anything." No doubt that's a wonderful feeling, and I don't think she should abandon it, but she shouldn't take it too literally, either. It may be true for her on the stage, but in movies even the greatest stars have been successes only within a certain range of roles. Katharine Hepburn didn't play Sadie Thompson or Mildred Pierce, and Ginger Rogers didn't appear in The Swan. Anna Magnani didn't try out for Scarlett O'Hara, Bette Davis wasn't cast as the second wife in Rebecca, and Garbo didn't break her heart over not doing Stella Dallas. Part of being a good movie actress is knowing what you come across as. My guess is that Meryl Streep could be a hell-raising romantic comedienne. (A tiny dirty laugh comes out of her just once in Silkwood, and it's funkier and more expressive than any of her line readings.) She has the singing voice for musical comedy, and the agility and crazy daring for knockabout farce. And maybe she can play certain serious and tragic roles too -- she was unusually effective in her supporting role in The Deer Hunter. But in her starring performances she has been giving us artificial creations. She doesn't seem to know how to draw on herself; she hasn't yet released an innate personality on the screen.
We'll all have our own opinions about how true any of that is, and (if we buy it) to what extent Streep did eventually change her ways of creating character onscreen. But I thought it was an unusual enough paragraph (PK didn't go off on tangents like this for just anybody) to merit sharing here.
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12 hours ago, EtheltoTillie said:
It was also the first time I realized how much I disliked Streep’s overacting.
Personal viewpoints, etc., but I would never have said that "overacting" was the word. That said, I did (and do) find that many of her early film performances seem to come off "constructed" rather than lived -- as if she saw her job as building a character entirely separate from herself. That may work onstage, but the camera seems to want something different. Then around 1990, something seemed to shift. It's probably not that simple, but I date it from Defending Your Life, in which she played a contemporary woman not unlike herself, with no heavy plot responsibilities. She was silly and offhand and seemed like a real person, and from then on her performances seemed to include herself, with extensions and variations as needed, rather than subtracting herself, and I've invariably been convinced.
(By the way, I've felt the same about some other good stage actors taking years to learn how to "be" onscreen, using their technique in the right way. As far as I can tell, that's part of a life in acting, however much training one has had: learning on the job and eventually arriving at the optimum way.)
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13 hours ago, Palimelon said:
That and the aforementioned Dancing at Lughnasa?
That got enough attention to get her a nomination, at least. But I haven't heard anyone mention The Seduction of Joe Tynan or Falling in Love in a very long time. And now that I think about it, what about Plenty? I recall it dimly as being at least watchable and moderately absorbing (Fred Schepsi directing a David Hare script from his own play, with a varied British cast around her), and can't see why it should have so totally vanished from collective memory.
As for Still of the Night, I recall going to see it. Anything else? A lot of quiet static scenes, carefully posed for the camera. And Streep's hair seemed awfully important as part of the visual composition, as I recall. But it was clearly an effort to make a certain kind of homage to older movies, without any of the liveliness that was also part of what made them work.
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On 8/9/2024 at 6:04 PM, ratgirlagogo said:
hey included How the West was Won (all two hours and 45 minutes worth, with a tiny amount of Thelma)
I dare say Marlene Dietrich fans feel similarly this year, with 2h47m of Around the World in 80 Days included for the sake of her flash of cameo (one among dozens).
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6 hours ago, Suzn said:
Thelma Ritter so deserves a day! My favorite role of hers is in All About Eve
A widely shared sentiment (and with justice). My only problem with the role (and I'm aware I'm far from the first to say it) is that she vanishes halfway through. There's no reason she couldn't have remained in the movie for more of its duration. For that reason I stick with Rear Window as my favorite TR. In any case, both are sure to be included, next time we get a Thelma Ritter day, just as they have been in past ones.
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1 hour ago, Milburn Stone said:
His intro makes me really want to see The Mating Season!
It's turned up from time to time. I saw it as part of my mop-up of the Mitchell Leisen oeuvre. Unlike others of his late-in-career films, this one stands up pretty well, though the central premise (new bride Gene Tierney assumes that her visiting mother-in-law is the new cook, and said MIL chooses never to correct her) takes a lot of swallowing. It does give Ritter a meatier role than usual, and despite the movie not being considered a major release it won her one of her Oscar nominations. And the cast is good -- Tierney, John Lund, Miriam Hopkins, et al.
Anyway, I rather expect that some SUTS soon will give Thelma Ritter a day again.
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11 minutes ago, Milburn Stone said:
I would love a Thelma Ritter Day. I wonder if why it hasn't happened is TCM maintaining too rigid a definition of "star."
It did happen, so one needn't speculate. Here's an Osborne intro from 2014 for The Mating Season.
I think several of their "stars" over the years have not been headliners. We've had the likes of John Carradine, Katy Jurado, S.Z. Sakall, just from a quick search. That's not to say I wouldn't love to have a Thelma Ritter Day again soon, because I would. Almost everyone seems to love her when they discover her; one of my pastimes is watching YouTube reactors discover certain old movies, and it's a certainty in Rear Window that they'll flip for her. (The only problem is that, as usual, the actor gets credit for the writer's lines.)
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I just finished watching (rewatching, I guess, but after 23 years...) the TV The Letter with Lee Remick et al. It's good. The overall hypocrisy and colonialist smugness, which is an integral part of this story, is given its weight without being overdone, and all the actors do their part to bring the story to effective life. Of course it doesn't replace the ones with Eagels or Davis, but it doesn't have to; we can keep and enjoy them all.
Apparently it's been widely recognized how good a dramatic vehicle Maugham's story is, as it's been filmed much more often than I'd realized. Besides the 3 versions we already discussed, movies were made in 1930-31 in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and much later another in Russian. And in the days of dramatic anthology series on TV, episodes were devoted to adaptations starring Madeleine Carroll, Sylvia Sidney, Siobhan McKenna (this one directed by William Wyler who did the 1940 film), Celia Johnson, Dulcie Gray, and Eileen Atkins. Plus, there's a musical and an opera.
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12 hours ago, voiceover said:
And what a cast!! Ian McShane played her lover; Jack Thompson (so wonderful in Breaker Morant) was her husband; Kieu Chinh (who was cast as a love interest to Hawkeye Pierce) was the victim’s wife. Wilfred Hyde-White was the judge!
And Soon-Tek Oh (memorable for years in a variety of roles that were unfortunately too small and too few for his talent) as the lawyer-in-training.
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It's true: such things do pop up unpredictably all over these days. Too often, alas, in muddy Nth-generation prints from someone's private library. Some of those apparently even gain quasi-legal status to be sold openly on DVD on Amazon (like the George C. Scott Jane Eyre, the 1969 David Copperfield with the amazing cast, and the Levinson-Link thriller Guilty Conscience, all of which I bought).
Be that as it may, I just checked and the 1982 The Letter is indeed on YouTube, and not in the Spanish dubbing that used to be its only online presence. This one was posted 4 months ago so I don't feel so bad about not knowing it was there. But I'll be watching it this weekend. On a brief check, the print looks rather soft-focus and washed out, but honestly in better shape than many from this TV era.
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15 hours ago, Charlie Baker said:
BD said in an interview once her two Oscars should have been for The Letter and All About Eve
I can get behind that. The Letter provides a great vehicle for an actress who's adept with subtext (different inner and outward personalities). Jeanne Eagels was also memorable in her early-talkie version that TCM shows sometimes. And I remember Lee Remick being perfectly suited in the telefilm from the 1980s. I wish there were a channel that made a specialty of airing such movies-of-the-week; the networks sure made a ton of them.
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1 hour ago, Palimelon said:
good film otherwise though
I agree about the quality of the film, and I don't suppose it really matters while watching that it's been pretty conclusively established that Lillian Hellman's story of herself and her friend Julia didn't happen -- or rather, happened to someone else entirely. ("Julia" most probably never existed, though there's room for some debate there. Any article about Hellman's "Pentimento" will lay out the saga; Nora Ephron has also written entertainingly and not unsympathetically about her initial idolization of Hellman, whom she knew, dwindling into later disillusionment.)
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4 hours ago, SomeTameGazelle said:
But recently I think I have seen some movies within the 25 years -- at least I was shocked to see the 2001 Moulin Rouge when they honoured Nicole Kidman.
They do allow themselves more recent titles in service of special topics, including days honoring specific contributors (which extends to Summer Under the Stars).
I noticed with Streep, they're including 3 relatively recent films of hers but are otherwise staying pretty early in her career, including Julia, her debut in which she's seen only in a couple of brief scenes in passing.* And that movie was nearly half a century ago, so it's fair to consider Streep a "classic" by now.
(*Though this pales in comparison to Marlene Dietrich, for whom they devote 3 hours to a movie in which she has only a quick jokey cameo -- Around the World in 80 Days, of course.)
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August and Summer Under the Stars are coming soon. This year seems to have a good mix of top classic names and less expected names. There are quite a few first-timers:
- Julie Andrews (8/4)
- Gordon MacRae (8/5)
- Peter Ustinov (8/7)
- Eleanor Powell (8/8)
- Meryl Streep (8/10)
- Anita Page (8/12)
- Jean-Paul Belmondo (8/13)
- Jerry Lewis (8/17)
- Jose Ferrer (8/21)
- Robert Shaw (8/23)
- Grace Kelly (8/24)
- Ossie Davis (8/27)
- Leo Gorcey (8/29)
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On 7/25/2024 at 3:34 PM, Charlie Baker said:
I might appreciate it more now if I revisit it, but I will admit the pacing and the running time don't make me want to rush to do that. I'll also admit that I really like some of Kubrick's films and some just leave me cold.
Like @Milburn Stone, I echo these sentiments. I could appreciate its visual beauties and other technical achievements when I saw it on initial release, but once was enough for me. I too like some of Kubrick's movies a great deal: the consecutive quartet Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove. After that, really nothing except Full Metal Jacket (and that with some reservations). Yes, I'm a traitor to my generation and didn't feel anything for 2001.
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12 hours ago, EtheltoTillie said:
So they were showing The French Lieutenant's Woman. ... Anyone else have any more to say about this?
It's one of my favorite books ever (I'm a sucker for stories that have fun with the narrative frame, but I don't think it's just that). I knew it would be a challenge to film, and I was willing, in advance, to cut the movie some slack on that count... but as it turned out, I couldn't find that the chosen method worked at all. We lost a vast amount, and gained nothing. Harold Pinter has a lot to answer for.
Coincidentally (well before it was scheduled to air), I was thinking about The French Lieutenant's Woman, and wishing that somebody would try again. Perhaps as a streaming miniseries, to give it room to breathe, using an ongoing never-seen narrator and emulating the book's stylistic/narrative tricks and jumps. It would be worth trying.
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18 hours ago, EtheltoTillie said:
It really is a slog.
I remember my reaction when it first came out. I knew about it in advance and had been looking forward to it -- I mean, all the ingredients seemed tip-top, and I love musicals if they're done well. And then sitting in the theater, and getting that sinking feeling, "Didn't we just have a remake of A Star Is Born?" (OK, it's not an exact duplicate, but she ends way more "up" than he does.) And conceding the occasional pleasurable moment, but they're truly just moments.
The other sinking feeling of the same nature had come for me just 2 years earlier: At Long Last Love. I'd loved Peter Bogdaovich's earlier movies, felt that here was a filmmaker who had a real gift for popular entertainments that were old-fashioned in a good way. And he was going to give me a confection full of Cole Porter? Bring it on! Except, no. The story wasn't a story. There was no structure, no reason for the songs to happen (again, Writing Musicals 101 but Mr. B. never took that class). People always say it was bad because Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd couldn't sing but honestly, that was the least of the problem. Worse voices than his have sold a song through style & charm, and hers wasn't even bad, abstractly as sound. They just gave nothing of themselves to a song, each one was DOA. A sign of the malaise was that Madeline Kahn and Eileen Brennan, who did have all the musical skills, came off just as poorly. But I've gone off on too long a tangent already on a movie TCM never shows (nor should they).
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On 7/7/2024 at 4:11 PM, EtheltoTillie said:
NY NY still seems as terrible as it did at time of its release. DeNiro is just playing twitchy Rupert Pupkin/Travis Bickle. But I want to see the deleted scenes they're restored.
More crucial, to my mind, is that De Niro and Scorsese seem to encourage each others' weaknesses: De Niro imagining that being "real" means being self-involved and abrasive, with no generosity toward the audience for whom all this supposedly exists. He can be so great, but he needs a director who, without being a Philistine, will say No to him sometimes and shape him in more communicative directions. And Scorsese... well, every movie director seems to imagine he can make a musical, without having the respect for the form to learn how it works, and I'll leave it at that. (The list of forgotten failures is long.)
Have they restored scenes beyond the ones that got restored in the 1981 reissue? (Including the whole "Happy Endings" movie-in-the-movie with Larry Kert's only film appearance.)
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My Comcast TCM is in sync.
TCM: The Greatest Movie Channel
in Movies
I've not read a full-length bio of Teresa Wright, but it seems to me that she did have at last a moderately big career in movies -- 3 big ones that are still remembered, after all, along with others. Her contactual arrangement to allow her time for stage work (which was equally important to her) sounds similar to Margaret Sullavan's. And as in that case, it understandably meant that some of the prize roles went to others, who were on hand year-round. She did work onstage a lot, and in early TV, and those of course don't leave artifacts for us to watch now.
She had a public falling-out with Samuel Goldwyn, which was the ostensible cause of the ending of her contract. She made a public statement, which I quote because it has an interesting aftermath.
But then in later years, she looked back with this wry comment:
Of course in the 1950s, the whole contract system was falling apart even if those involved didn't always understand just what was different, and it was increasingly up to the actors to sustain and build their own careers.