Rinaldo

Not that I'm Everyman, but for whatever it may be worth: Sorcerer came out during my prime moviegoing years, when I went a lot. I enjoyed Star Wars like everyone else that year, and might have seen Sorcerer, but the descriptions didn't make it sound that attractive to me. And after The Exorcist, I was feeling out of sympathy with what Friedkin wanted to put on the screen (a feeling that would be confirmed 2 years later when he made Cruising). So I gave it a miss, and fact I have yet to see it.

Well, "recommendations" in a very specialized sense, but... you get it. I have never had the chance to see Skidoo myself. I have set the DVR and am determined to see it through. (I have seen The Big Cube though. I look out for George Chakiris movies. It remains mysterious to me that after the Academy Award for West Side Story, he didn't flourish more. He himself has said that he had a knack for picking the wrong roles.) If you added The Cool Ones to this lineup, it would be the perfect triple bill of late-60s "not getting it" bombs.

Early Saturday morning: Watch out for two Inadvertent Camp Classics of the late 1960s: Skidoo and The Big Cube. Both of them dealing with "oh dear, what are these kids up to these days?" with surpassing ineptitude. Skidoo, a big Otto Preminger extravaganza that disappeared instantly (and everyone agreed to speak of it no more), starring Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, and Frankie Avalon. And Groucho Marx as God. And hippies and Transcendental Meditation. The Big Cube, already seen from time to time on TCM, gives us late Lana Turner as an esteemed great lady of the theater, with a rebellious daughter who's somehow Swedish and who's mixed up with drug pusher George Chakiris. And mostly Mexican cast and locations (finances, y'know). And psychological illness overcome. And we are left in no doubt that LSD is Evil.

The New Yorker review agreed with you, @graybrown bird, as it said In fact, Burl Ives won a Supporting Actor Academy Award for this role, rather than being nominated for (as people rather expected) his role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that same year. My own focus when I see The Big Country is similarly away from the story and stars: It's Jerome Moross's score, one of the handful that set the standard for what a "Western" score is supposed to sound like.

I am, but the stage show rather than the movie. I've gotten into relatively heated "discussions" with friends who think Burton's ST is a model of how to make a Sondheim movie. (For me, it's more Into the Woods, which itself makes lots of changes but to me they're all justifiable.) For me, leaving out the choral-narrative frame around it makes a huge difference, and so does stripping out all the humor. But I recall seeing Sweeney Todd very early in its Broadway run. Many people in the audience HAATED it. Constant walkouts, sometimes accompanied by "tut-tut"s or invective directed at the stage. Then I found myself in NYC the following summer, and went again. Now it was culturally approved: the critical consensus had settled on positive, it had won a bunch of Tony awards including best musical, the cast recording had come out and been heard... it wasn't any better a show, but audiences had been told it was OK to like it.

You're right about Kahn being the original casting (I saw her listed in Variety and everything...). As you say, stories vary. In terms of feature films, she'd only done the two Bogdanovich films, What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, before this (both being out-there characters), and one story is that she turned up on set looking much younger and prettier than expected, and Lucille Ball wouldn't have it. Another is that she was being too eccentric and method-y in her first readings, and somebody got spooked that she wasn't going to be funny. Another is that she was hoping to be released so she could do Blazing Saddles. Pay yer money and take yer choice....

Boy, I have no idea. Hugh Jackman seems right, as he would for many leading musical roles (for years he wanted to make a new Carousel movie -- he did do a one-night concert years ago -- but the elements never came together, and now his time for Billy has surely passed). But Sutton Foster as Marian? She's wonderfully talented and likable, but this role has always been the province of a true soprano (Barbara Cook, Joan Weldon, Shirley Jones, Meg Bussert, Rebecca Luker, Kristin Chenoweth), which Sutton F has never pretended to be. Clearly they're reconceiving the role vocally, and I always resist this process, which goes on everywhere -- eliminate the need for "special" voices, transpose and rearrange so that anyone can sing the roles. But I'll be going in any case, because I have to see for myself. I wouldn't presume to advise anyone else, though.

Alas, I can't. All I know is what can be found in any R or H bio: that they wanted a follow-up to Oklahoma! (it used a lot of the same personnel) and they saw something in Liliom that would work for them. As I mentioned, Molnar's play ends with the guy (Liliom, later to become Billy) hitting his daughter after being allowed to return from Beyond, and then being led off by his guide, to what fate we can imagine. And Julie (same name in both) then has the line about being hit, but there I find it unobjectionable because he's not redeemed and the end is tragic, so she's just saying the sad truth from her miserable outlook. Molnar (who by 1945 was living in NYC) is said to have loved R&H's new ending; but if that's true, I cynically wonder if he was (a) initially overcome by the power of the music, and/or (b) aware of the royalties he was going to be earning (and probably, at that point, very much needed). At the risk of further beating an already-expired horse, I'll add that (possibly without meaning to) I was talking more about Carousel onstage than onscreen. For one thing, I honestly don't think the movie is that good -- there are better R&H film adaptations out there (for one thing, the 10-minute musically continuous scenes are all gone, but that's not the only reason). For another, the time, effort, and expense required to mount any stage production (as opposed to airing a movie, or indeed picking up a book etc.) implicitly says "We have something important to share, with something vital to say to all of us."

It's instrumental during that speech (at least onstage; I can't swear that this is retained in the movie as I haven't rewatched it in a while, but I would think it is because in a couple of minutes into Billy singing "Longing to tell you but afraid and shy" etc. I don't know if we're as philosophically aligned on this point as you think. Yes, I'm a purist in some ways about trying to make older stage pieces work without alteration; but in a few instances I now think the gap can't be bridged without intervention. (As movies continue to exist unaltered, each of us decides individually how we feel about it, which may include deciding not to watch it again.) Writers from another time, with the best of intentions, may have been oblivious to something we now find too fundamental to ignore. The idea that "he really loves her deep down, he just can't express it except by hitting her" is one I can no longer accept as a redemptive excuse for Billy, not with the awareness we've achieved (and are still struggling to achieve). And Molnar, the author of the source play, didn't think so either: after Liliom gets a second chance and hits Louise, he's taken off to hell and gets no third chance. End of play. I think it's possible to imagine a drama in which Billy and Julie are both victims of their upbringing, in which they knew violence as part of their parents' marriages and continued it as part of their own, and Louise will be the one to, as we now say, break the cycle. But Hammerstein didn't write the text to support all that. Directors and actors love to imagine that it can all be done by acting, but I've never seen it really achieved, and my opinion is that it can't. It's a complicated, uncomfortable situation: on principle I tend to think "Accept a work as it is, or leave it alone," but this is one that tests me. We'll each have our own feelings about it, and I've already gone on more than long enough. (Especially as I see in the stats that I'm the most frequent poster in the TCM topic, and by a huge huge margin. I'm embarrassed to find myself such a windbag, and I try to refrain from saying anything these days. Obviously without success.)

As far as that goes, no disagreement. And the whole idea in the later scenes that we can somehow get another chance with those we've wronged, and make things right, has tremendous resonance for most of us, I would think. The problem is in some of the actual lines that have to be said, like Julie's assurance to Louise that a man hitting you can feel like a kiss, and not hurt at all. The most recent Broadway revival simply cut that one; and the director of the previous one (Nicholas Hytner) now says that he should have cut it too -- it's not just the character who thinks so, the whole show does ("If I Loved You" is underscoring the speech, to assure us that it's true).

Yeah, Carousel has not survived the years well, to put it as mildly as possible. It's perhaps R&H's richest and most ambitious score (onstage at least; the movie cuts the music content way down), but I can't summon any defense for the show as a whole. Actors & directors still seem to want to revive it and find a way to lean into the tragedy and make it relevant (or palatable), but I don't think the text is there to support that. Carousel may be best experienced as individual numbers, out of context. The Carousel Waltz is magnificent, the musical scene in which Billy and Julie meet (barely present in the film) is an almost operatic bit of composition, and on its own without story context, "What's the Use of Wondrin'" is lovely and moving.

There are also always those (they're all over forum discussion of TV, and I've learned to say nothing and leave) who say "Now I can't see Actor X as anything but Role Y." Which always seemed absurd and short-sighted to me, as if acting didn't exist. (I love to see actors play varied roles.) But he did make Norman Bates exceedingly vivid, and the movie itself made a deep impression. In its wake he apparently looked for roles in obscure European films for several years. The most successful of his later roles still used him as an eccentric, repressed, rather odd person (Evening Primrose on TV, Pretty Poison, Murder on the Orient Express).

I haven't seen this, and I don't doubt you're right about the effect of the movie, but I suspect this is the only sort of role Anthony Perkins was getting offered after Psycho. I generally am a disbeliever that any single movie "wrecked someone's career," but in this one case I've come to believe that it's true. Look at Tony Perkins in earlier movies like Friendly Persuasion and (especially) The Matchmaker, and he's a charming charismatic young man with a bright future, someone I'd have liked to see onscreen a lot more. But it didn't happen that way, and the permanent aftereffect of Psycho probably couldn't have been predicted in advance. (I'm not discounting that there may have been other contributing factors in his life, too; but I don't think this one can be ignored.)

This title was nagging at my memory, though I'd never seen this movie. Then I finally remembered -- there's a play by that title which is credited as the source of the 1960s comedy The Honeymoon Machine (Steve McQueen, Brigid Bazlen, the Prentiss-Hutton duo), which TCM plays from time to time. The play was on Broadway in 1958, and apparently totally unrelated to the 1940 movie described above. I've been thinking this over, and have decided that each case is different. (I know, what an original notion...) I could propose to myself that often these foreign stars are singled out because of a distinctive look or "exotic" quality that doesn't work out satisfyingly when they have to act in English. But then I recall that exactly such circumstances worked out great for Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman. And Antonio Banderas in more recent times. So my profound conclusion is, there's no rule about it. Some foreign-language stars prove themselves good actors in American films, some don't.

In a way, yes. In another way, being in that kind of inadvertent camp classic offers its own cachet, probably more than any of the merely-forgettable movies she did make. That was part of the technique of making big-budget blockbusters then: ideally a star from each of the big international markets, to ensure all those audiences would show up. It would be interesting to see a film historian (like Jeanine Basinger) analyze how that thinking keeps evolving over the years for big productions. For instance, in the comic-book franchises now, are the already-known characters the stars, so it doesn't matter who plays them? But Grand Prix is certainly one of the prime examples of that kind of casting.

I see the symmetry of that, but then it would no longer be about Brooke & Cary being "the other two," the siblings whose lives get shunted aside as their less-prepared relatives outshine them in show business. Of course this wouldn't be the first series to eventually make its title inaccurate. We'll see, I guess.... As for the talented and adorable Josh Segarra, I second the recommendation for the two seasons of Sirens, which always seems to be around on some streaming service. I would also recommend a look at the 2009 reboot of The Electric Company, which must have been one of his first jobs at age 23. He had the leading role of Hector Ruiz, and had scenes and songs with other regulars Lin-Manuel Miranda and William Jackson Harper (of The Good Place).

The Innocents is wonderful all around, and she's on fire in it. The Turn of the Screw is a hard story to dramatize (my favorite composer, Benjamin Britten, made a terrific opera out of it), if one is going to maintain the ambiguity about the ghosts' actual presence. But the movie manages it miraculously, and she (after so much over-exposure in governess/teacher kinds of roles) delivers 100%. Another film in which Kerr is impressive (not shown this time, but a fairly regular visitor to TCM) is Edward, My Son, from early in her career. She has a secondary role in it, as wife to (miscast) Spencer Tracy and mother to the unseen Edward, but she's extraordinarily fine in her progression from middle-class young wife & mother to wife of unscrupulous tycoon to sloppy drunk (and self-aware, even self-mocking about it). Eh, there are worse things they could show again. Catalina Caper is at least modest fun in its mediocrity. (Though most fun of all as roasted by MST3K.)

Early alert: Friday afternoon at 1:30 pm ET, TCM is again showing The Cool Ones. I posted about it in July, and they didn't put it On Demand then, so if you're gnashing your teeth about having missed it then, this is your chance; set that DVR. It's truly one of the unintentional-camp classics, blissfully bonkers from start to finish. After it they're showing Catalina Caper, which I've previously only encountered (in abridged form) as one of the most entertaining early segments of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This one isn't any kind of classic; it's merely an unusually dopey beach movie, with a stolen treasure, Tommy Kirk, Lyle Waggoner, goofy villains, and musical performances from The Cascades and Little Richard. If you're into that sort of nonsense, it's worth a look.

From an overall structural standpoint, I can see that it's unsatisfying to have a main recurring character just vanish, but I do think he and Cary had run their course once the final conversation happened. In my experience (which doesn't go quite as far as they did), a guy like that doesn't change so quickly. It's a messy gray area, as you indicate, and if I name names, it's not to point fingers at actors whom I in fact like. But after a few decades of straight actors getting cast in gay roles and proclaiming to the press "It was a real challenge to me 'cause I'm so super hetero!" and taking heat for it from the gay audience, we're now in a time of reaction when well-intentioned straight actors will downplay their sexuality in public arenas so as not to come off offensive when playing gay characters. When playing Next Fall on Broadway, Patrick Heusinger tried to avoid that syndrome by not answering questions about his personal life (though in one interview I read, he did eventually get caught by his pronouns and admitted the truth). While playing White Josh on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for four seasons, David Hull kept a low profile about his girlfriend, surely in part to avoid disappointing fans of the character. Of course The Other Two cranks all that up to a comically extreme level, as it does. But I can easily imagine an actor avid for a high-profile gay role in a franchise wanting not to put off gay fans by seeming obnoxiously straight in public situations, even as producers were reassured by his actual status. The only reference that comes to that mind for that fountain is its central place in Angels in America. But that doesn't involve sinking to one's knees. I see what you mean, but this one felt different to me -- at least I liked it better because it was less extreme: Curtis told him right away before it started festering. (I always found the teacher's reaction excessive: if Cary's a dick for one evening, tell him so and try again after a few days. There's no need to break up over it.) And I liked that as a fellow aspiring actor, he did understand the frustration. (As both actors must, themselves.) Getting somewhere as an actor is a long discouraging process. Jenna Fischer's book is especially informative about that, and one of the people she credits with encouraging her through the hard years is, coincidentally, Molly Shannon, whose biggest bit of advice was "Don't give up," adding that it took her a full decade of trying before she achieved visibility on SNL.

Jane Powell was a real trouper. When the movies no longer wanted her, she kept going on TV and onstage... intermittently, but persistently. In 2003, I saw her play the mother of Howard McGillin and Richard Kind in the Sondheim musical Bounce (in Chicago and then in DC). She has said that although she was initially excited to meet Sondheim and to create a role in a new stage musical, she was disappointed that the role wasn't more interesting or challenging -- and she wasn't wrong about that; it (and the show) sadly didn't amount to much. But it does show that her avidity to keep finding new things to perform never stopped.

That's been the hallmark of the series since it started, the thing that made it different from what it seemed in advance it would be. Given the premise "A 30-ish brother and sister, who are still struggling to find a place as actors, see their no-talent teenage brother 'jump the queue' and become instantly famous as a performer," one might reasonably expect them to be resentful and dismissive of him. But right from the beginning they've looked after him and cared about him, and that's why I love it.

The Sherman Brothers' Tom Sawyer too.

As interested as I am in the movie (I think I bought the original souvenir book from the roadshow showings), I somehow didn't know this. In fact, I'm still a bit incredulous: that crescent looked so vast and real, exactly like the ones that get filmed in London and Bath! I find that Shepperton does have a "back lot" that allows outdoor sets, so at least I don't have to believe that they built all that indoors. One of my favorite visual memories is the alley outside Fagin's lair, in which three-dimensional buildings blend with painted vistas, which usually isn't successful in other movies, but really works here. I should also mention choreographer Onna White, who was so brilliant at making group numbers convincing and exciting on screen. She didn't achieve the immortality of Robbins or Fosse or Michael Bennett, but the caliber of the work she did in The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, and Oliver! speaks for itself.

I would put it more strongly, and say that the movie Oliver! is a great improvement on the stage show (this almost never happens). The weaker songs are omitted (Bill Sikes's solo, for one, though it can be heard as instrumental underscoring -- "villain" songs are notoriously hard to write convincingly unless one goes all the way to opera), "Oom Pah Pah" is turned from a divertissement into a suspenseful plot moment, and the overall design is wonderful (one of the few times a mixture of realistic locations and stage-like sets has really worked). Ron Moody, Shani Wallis, and Jack Wild all provide terrific performances. And I have to give a special word (given my own speciality) to John Green for his extraordinary orchestrations, some of the best a movie musical ever had.

I'm no devotee of Al Jolson's performance myself, never have been (I've always preferred the controlled performers over the ones who "give" so much, they spill their guts on the floor). But there's no denying that he really was that huge, it's not a myth. The biggest songwriters were happy to write for him, illustrious singers were proud to duet with him. I think it is somewhat of a lost style now, hard to recover or to imagine how it ever worked; but we have the evidence that it did work. And it's tempting to say "it's not jazz" (that would be my first reaction too), but in fact it was. The word's meaning has evolved over time. We have a general understanding of what jazz is now, but it meant something different in 1920, when it was widely agreed to mean "the new American sound" (as opposed to European waltzes and polkas). It encompassed a vaudeville stomp as well as the most polite and smooth of theater composers (Jerome Kern was understood to write "jazz" back then). It's one of a dozen or more terms that I would make sure students understood on the first day of class, when I taught History of Musicals, because their meaning changed over the decades. It's one additional confusion on top of the confusion that Jolson can now cause; but I find it worth while to sometimes ask myself "Why was this once popular? / Why did that person become a star?" even if I can never actually share the feeling myself.