Salon.com: Out of the Past
Bruce Calvert
Out of the past
It's easy to laugh at classic Hollywood movies. It's harder to grasp that
they're America's truest and most necessary cultural heritage -- and wicked,
brazen, unsentimental fun besides.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Charles Taylor
March 25, 2003 | When I was in college in the early '80s, a film professor
showed the durable '40s soaper "Stella Dallas" to a class I was in. The picture,
which features a great performance by Barbara Stanwyck, elicited barely
controlled hilarity. The students were laughing at the soapiness of the movie,
and implicitly at the stupidity of an audience that could swallow something like
this tale of an ambitious, vulgar woman's struggle to rise in the world. Taking
the lectern after the movie, the professor, an elegant, erudite man who looked
like the dashing offspring of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Lord Buckley and who'd
seen generations of young smartasses come and go, fixed the class with a wry
stare and said, "Wait till you see how 'Kramer vs. Kramer' looks in 20 years."
Right now, we're at a stage in our cultural history that makes it crucial we
address the question of how we view movie history and the movie past. We've
gotten so used to the availability of movies on video and DVD that we can forget
we are still at the beginning of a new era comparable to the introduction of
public libraries. More movies are now available to more people than ever before.
Look at any of the Web sites or magazines that list DVD releases week by week
and you see Hollywood classics, foreign films that haven't been available for
years, barely known films by famous directors (the Criterion DVD of Ernst
Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" also contains a 1917 Lubitsch silent), all
manner of exploitation and cult movies. I recently called the home video
division of a major studio to inquire whether it planned to release a certain
title from their back catalog and was told that the studio plans to eventually
release its entire catalog. We no longer have to read about certain movies and
wait for them to show up on TV or at a repertory house; in most cases we can
just buy them or rent them. This would have been unimaginable 25 years ago, and
implausible five years ago.
But at the same time as all these movies are available, we need to ask who is
seeing them and how they are being seen. When I was in college, my fellow
students groaned when they had to watch a silent movie. Today, I'm told, some
students groan when they have to watch a film in black-and-white. Talking to
several friends who teach film in colleges and universities, I've encountered
mixed responses. One has been lucky enough to consistently attract students who
are ready to learn about these movies and to watch them as something other than
curios. Another describes the task of trying to get her students interested in
older movies in Sisyphean terms. My own experience with younger people
interested in movies has involved some of both -- their interest in older movies
ranges from passionate curiosity to guilt over what they haven't seen (but which
doesn't motivate them to see those films), to a total and unapologetic lack of
interest. I have to say the latter two responses are the ones I most frequently
encounter.
So the question remains -- how do you interest people whose idea of a classic
old movie is "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in "Stagecoach," "From Here to Eternity,"
"Imitation of Life," "The Lady Eve," "The Best Years of Our Lives," "Hallelujah,
I'm a Bum!" "Destry Rides Again," "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Swing Time,"
"Double Indemnity," "Rio Bravo" and hundreds of others, let alone "The Birth of
a Nation" (without which, all of us making or writing about movies would be
doing something else) or "Sunrise"?
Since almost all of us grew up watching movies, we never feel that we have to
learn how to watch them, in the same way that we have to learn how to read
novels, listen to opera, watch dance or look at paintings. Part of the pleasure
of movies is the energy that can seem so much more exciting and immediate than
all that approved high culture. Too often, the people who have set out to teach
us how to watch movies are so deadly serious they wind up killing the fun of
movies. I grieve for students being told that virtuous, socially conscious
warhorses like "The Grapes of Wrath" or "High Noon" are examples of the height
of American movies. Or they embrace big spectacle so uncritically that it
negates any distinction or discrimination.
Criticism of old movies has for too long been divided between the academic and
the fanatical. When you read the excesses that the French and American
auteurists gave in to -- refusing to separate a director's good work from his
bad work, elevating the shabbiest little B movie to a monumental work of art --
you may learn to mistrust all critics who make big claims for Hollywood films.
But the excesses of the auteurists were not without their benefits. Americans
have always been distrustful of our own culture, echoing the line Paul Reiser
speaks in "Diner": "People come from Europe." There is something antithetical to
the American character in believing that movies that are familiar and
pleasurable to us are also works of substance. The British critic Robin Wood
once wrote of Howard Hawks' movies that we have to be careful of underrating
Hawks because we enjoy him. And the same is true for the best of Alfred
Hitchcock, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Lubitsch, and others. Finding the art in
those movies shouldn't have to mean negating our pleasure or turning them into
something they aren't.
If learning to see movies for what they were was necessary for a generation that
grew up with those movies (whether on their first run in theaters or later on
television), it seems to me even more necessary for the young audiences who
don't show much interest in old movies, who regard them as curiosities at best.
Perhaps it's inevitable that movie audiences will always treat the conventions
of another time as fodder for a show of their own superiority. You can't blame
people for finding earlier styles of dress or speech funny in some way. The
sight of antiquated technology is always good for a laugh. I first became aware
of that during a college showing of Raoul Walsh's great gangster film "White
Heat." With the cops in pursuit of James Cagney's Cody Jarrett, we see banks of
enormous radio transmitters used to pinpoint his whereabouts. What the laughter
failed to take into account is why Walsh focused on those machines. The shots
serve a narrative purpose but they also point out their insufficiency to explain
the sociopath Cody or to mitigate the damage he causes. Walsh's point was lost
in the laughter.
That derisive hilarity almost always occurs on college campuses or at repertory
houses -- in other words, where it's presumed the audience has at least the
appearance of education and discrimination. "College-town movie houses," James
Harvey writes in his recent book "Movie Love in the Fifties," "may still have
pandemoniums ... but I doubt it, now that the movies themselves (now made by
wise-asses) make jokes about their own emptiness and make more noise themselves
than any live audience could (quelling the rabble by leading it)." But in some
ways, the pandemoniums are worse than ever.
The critic Howard Hampton points out that, with the exception of those who pay
attention to Turner Classic Movies, today's movie audiences grow up without the
constant experience of seeing old movies on TV. The result, Hampton concludes,
is that young American moviegoers now have no sense of the past as a real place,
no sense of the people on the screen in old movies (or the people behind the
camera) as having actually lived, no sense that those people tried, within the
strictures of the Hollywood system, to address their times and convey something
approximating real emotion.
If the reaction I encountered a few months back in New York City at a showing of
the 1940 William Wyler film "The Letter" is typical, contemporary movie
audiences now have no sense of past Hollywood films as anything but a collection
of antiquated conventions, attitudes and styles. "The Letter," based on a
Somerset Maugham short story and starring Bette Davis in one of her greatest
performances, is one of the most sophisticated movies ever made in this country.
It's a hard examination of the place where colonialism and race and sex
intersect. Set on a British rubber plantation in Singapore, the movie opens with
Davis shooting her lover to death in front of a group of witnesses. But since
the witnesses are all natives, there is never any question that she, a white
woman, will get away with it.
A few scenes after the opening, her husband (the marvelous, underrated actor
Herbert Marshall) turns up with their lawyer. Davis, who has changed into
another outfit, emerges from the bedroom, hand extended in greeting, and
welcomes the lawyer with "How good of you to come." The audience I saw the movie
with exploded in laughter. And it is funny -- but not in the way it was laughed
at. Wyler is showing us the grotesquerie of Davis' manner, the decorum that is
paramount whether you're mixing a cocktail or you've just murdered a man. The
audience had no inkling that Wyler was aware of the grotesquerie of that moment.
Nobody really acts like this, they seemed to think, so the whole film,
especially Davis' performance, became cause for derision. If "realism" is your
standard, then Bette Davis is doomed.
There is nothing natural about the way Bette Davis looks or acts. Her face,
marked by those big eyes, looking like a doe caught in the headlights and
already plotting her revenge; the way she carries her body in the film, each
movement tightly controlled; the odd husky lilt of her voice -- everything in
the performance is stylized. And since it was the style of another age, it
seemed automatically ridiculous to the audience, in a way that the conventions
they accept in contemporary movies wouldn't.
The swooniest, silliest moment I've seen in movies in the past few years, equal
to any of the melodramatic ludicrousness Hollywood ever produced, is the moment
in "The English Patient" where Ralph Fiennes carries Kristin Scott-Thomas'
corpse from that cave, the music swelling while her scarf billows in the wind.
Were a similar moment, shot in black-and-white, to be shown to a contemporary
audience, it's likely the theater would break out into hooting. And while the
suffering of a drama queen like Joan Crawford is a guaranteed pants-wetter today
(and in many of her films, it should be), nobody dares to connect Crawford's
brand of showy masochism to Isabelle Huppert in "The Piano Teacher," a
performance where the masochism of a Crawford movie is made literal, and all the
juice that might make it enjoyable is drained away. (It's the only performance
I've ever seen that might be described as drab flamboyance.) And nobody talks
about Meryl Streep, who I think gave the worst performance of her career in "The
Hours," in the same terms. A Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that showed a
middle-aged white man tearing up over a drawing from a poor African child would
be immediately (and rightly) treated as sap. But nobody gags at the same thing
in "About Schmidt."
The derisive laughter that sometimes greets old movies represents a way for the
audience to demonstrate their own hip superiority. But usually all viewers are
displaying is their own inability to see beyond the conventions of classic
Hollywood style. There's no reason to think that laughter is any deeper or more
comprehending a response than that of the people who claimed that Joyce wrote
gibberish, Stravinsky composed noise and their 5-year-old could do as well as
Jackson Pollock.
You do have to make allowances for people to get over the reinforced notion that
classic Hollywood stuck rigidly to safe, proper notions that never challenged
the audience. A friend of mine, a college professor who teaches film and
theater, had that experience a few years ago when he taught a class on "The Best
Years of Our Lives." The 1947 drama about three World War II veterans trying to
readjust to civilian life, directed by William Wyler, was a big commercial and
critical success. It won the Oscar that year and pretty much came to define
serious prestige Hollywood moviemaking.
Today it tends to be underrated, though it's a much more searching movie, much
more uncertain about the fates of the characters, than it's generally given
credit for. One of the returning soldiers is played by Frederic March. His
daughter, played by Teresa Wright, has fallen for another returning veteran
played by Dana Andrews, a man trapped in a loveless marriage. In an amazing
moment, after Wright and her boyfriend go on a double date with Andrews and his
wife (Virginia Mayo), the young woman returns home from her evening out and goes
into the parents' bedroom (Myrna Loy plays her mother) to announce, "I'm gonna
break that marriage up."
The movie has taken pains to establish that Mayo is a gold-digging floozy, and
Wright (a good actress) is the embodiment of the typical nice American girl. But
Wright's likability makes her declaration all the more startling. Her
combination of love (discreet but still present), sexual hunger and willingness
to play dirty to get what she wants is exactly the sort of thing nice girls
didn't express in Hollywood movies. The scene shocked the students in my
friend's class, who were not only surprised to see it in a 1947 film but on
another level must have been aware that they wouldn't see it in a contemporary
Hollywood movie. At least not without the character being portrayed as a
scheming threat to traditional values. Look at "Unfaithful," where Diane Lane's
entirely sympathetic portrait of a woman who gives in to her sexual desire to
cheat on her husband has to be portrayed, in the film's second half, as the worm
in the apple that destroys the safe haven of home and family. (It was
unthinkable to director Adrian Lyne that some marriages survive sexual
infidelity.)
We still tend to confuse permissiveness with inventiveness. Sure there are
things in today's movies that wouldn't have been possible in the '40s or '50s.
But ever since the demise of the audience that made the renaissance of American
movies in the early '70s possible -- that is to say, roughly from the time of
Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 -- we have been in one of the most
aesthetically and thematically conservative eras in the history of American
film. Daring today is probably defined by something like "American Beauty,"
which can't hide its contempt for either the characters or the suburban setting.
All that movie does, I think, is reinforce the audience's self-congratulation
for looking down on the affluent middle class. Whereas a movie like Nicholas
Ray's 1956 "Bigger Than Life," for all its confusion and Ray's ambitions to say
more than the story can support, is still lacerating about the stultifying
aspect of suburban life without hating the characters on-screen or inviting the
audience to feel above them. Can anyone imagine a contemporary mainstream
Hollywood drama (not a horror film or a thriller) whose hero (James Mason)
becomes psychotic because of his addiction to cortisone and uses the biblical
story of Abraham and Isaac to justify his decision to kill his young son?
Can anyone imagine a big action star today allowing himself to play the
obsessive madness that John Wayne does in "Red River"? Can anyone imagine the
depths of sexual obsession and madness being made as seductive as it is in
"Vertigo"? And hell, can anyone imagine romance being sold as a proposition that
offers lovers no guarantees but instead the pleasures and work of the journey
ahead, as it is in "The Lady Eve," "Holiday" or any of the great romantic
comedies that today's pictures try wanly to emulate?
The values that American movies espoused in the 1930s (before and after the
introduction of the Hays code) were anti-authoritarian, anti-elitist, casual,
wisecracking, full of the self-deprecating confidence and energy and beauty of
American life. It became harder for movies to reflect those values once America
had entered World War II (in his "Wartime," Paul Fussell writes that the
function of Hollywood during war is propaganda), and then during the conformity
of the Eisenhower era.
There were plenty of Hollywood movies, maybe most of them, selling that
conformity. Still, some of the most genuinely surprising and shocking movie
moments I've had in recent years have been at older movies like Max Ophuls' "The
Reckless Moment" (remade as "The Deep End," a perfect example of how a
contemporary film waffles on the daring of its predecessor), Nicholas Ray's
"Bitter Victory," Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve," Mitchell Leisen's uneven
"Remember the Night," Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past" and Douglas Sirk's
"Imitation of Life."
These movies don't do what later filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Robert
Altman and Francis Ford Coppola did with gangster movies and westerns and crime
melodramas, injecting contemporary realism into familiar genres for audiences
who were tired of Hollywood's tendency to soften and reassure us. The directors
in the "golden age" of Hollywood were working in an industry where ambiguity was
frowned on, where narrative clarity was paramount, and where movies were
supposed to leave us in no doubt as to how to regard each character.
Those dictates weren't always a bad thing. At the very least they provided for a
level of craft and coherence largely absent from today's mainstream movies. The
amazing thing is how many directors, working within the strictures and
conventions of Hollywood, managed to work against that conformity without either
giving into self-hatred or wrecking an audience's pleasure.
The person who has done more than anyone else in recent years to help audiences
see classic American movies is James Harvey. In two passionate, invaluable and
readable works of intuitive scholarship, "Romantic Comedy: In Hollywood, From
Lubitsch to Sturges" and "Movie Love in the Fifties," Harvey has shown himself
to be extraordinarily responsive to what's on the screen. In a review of a 1966
Lana Turner vehicle called "Madame X," a durable weeper that had been made
several times before, Pauline Kael wrote, "We would be in the midst of some
gigantic confusions if the themes and story lines of all those movies with
pouting marshmallows like Lana Turner or iron maidens like Joan Crawford were to
be interpreted at the level of what we actually see."
Kael knew, and Harvey knows, that Hollywood trash can be reduced to rubble by
doing just that. But Harvey also knows that the daring of some Hollywood movies
can be confirmed by acknowledging "what we actually see." Without extrapolating
or making outsize claims that would render his opinions suspicious (here is
Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray's "Hot Blood": "If the cinema no longer existed,
Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it and,
what is more, of wanting to"), Harvey simply writes about what's on the screen.
Paying attention to the composition of shots, the rhythm of editing, the looks
on the actors' faces and their line readings, the nagging feelings that cannot
be resolved by genre conventions and the apparently happy endings that are much
more conditional and uncertain than they appear, Harvey makes case after case
for the daring of movies that were either overlooked or regarded as slick
Hollywood product.
Toughness is taken for granted in the considerations of the "uncouth" directors
who worked in B movies, directors like Phil Karlson or Samuel Fuller. It's much
harder to get people to see daring and tough-mindedness in the A-movies that
didn't resort to B-movie grunge. Audiences still accept the stylization of
screwball comedies and musicals. But the same stylization and heightened
emotional pitch in melodramas and even film noir, which would seem perfectly at
home in opera, often strike contemporary audiences as overwrought. But I think
the best way to evaluate American movies from the '30s through the '50s is to
decide how well they live up to Jean Renoir's famous remark: "There is no
realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth."
Harvey suggests that all we need do to respond to these movies is watch them.
But the question remains how moviegoers watch them when the conventions and
style they trade in are regarded as nothing more than a novelty of a dishonest,
naive past (as if we, like some descendants of Holden Caulfield, have cornered
the market on being wise to phoniness).
Critics and teachers can play only a modest part in helping audiences actually
see classic Hollywood films. It's an enormous undertaking in an era largely
defined by parody and ironic appropriation of the past. My gut tells me that the
key lies, as Howard Hampton says, in trying to make people conscious of the past
as a real place, and one where the limitations of "polite" society, on what
could or couldn't be discussed in movies or magazines or novels, doesn't mean
that people didn't confront the same questions about sex or love or work or
violence that we do. If it's possible to do that with 19th century novels, it
should be possible to do that with 20th century movies.
None of this is meant to be one of those old-fogey arguments to bring back the
wonderful pictures they made in the good old days. We can't forget that
Hollywood then, as now, produced more than its share of crap. And we have to
remember that some of the best filmmakers working today could simply not work in
those old styles (which doesn't mean that Hollywood in general couldn't learn
from its past standards of narrative coherence and craft).
Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" would seem to be an exception to that, a
re-creation of a past style of filmmaking without a trace of camp or
superiority. But it's worth noting that Haynes' film implicitly kisses that
style of filmmaking goodbye. Just as the three main characters (a suburban
housewife, a black man and a gay man) are left separate at the end of the movie,
leaving behind ways of life and an era (the movie is set in 1959) that will not
allow them their identities, so too Haynes seems to acknowledge that American
film had to go to a new place to be worthy of the stories those people will live
out in the next few years.
What I'm arguing here is that a certain segment of American moviegoers,
especially the younger ones encountering classic Hollywood style for the first
time, must show some care for our shared movie heritage. One of the staples of
every Academy Awards show is that when it comes time to present best foreign
film, someone will make a speech about how film transcends language and gives us
a glimpse into other cultures. Despite the hokiness of those speeches, that's
something that art-house audiences and world cinema mavens wouldn't disagree
with. Doesn't our own past deserve at least that much respect?
Bruce Calvert
(remove the xspam to reply)
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
http://home.attbi.com/~silentfilm
Archie Waugh
Archie Waugh
Mack Twamley
"Bruce Calvert" <silentf...@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:AE%fa.2790$S4....@www.newsranger.com...
> http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2003/03/25/classics/index.html
>
> Out of the past
> It's easy to laugh at classic Hollywood movies. It's harder to grasp that
> they're America's truest and most necessary cultural heritage -- and
wicked,
> brazen, unsentimental fun besides.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
> By Charles Taylor
>
>
>
> March 25, 2003 | When I was in college in the early '80s, a film
professor
> showed the durable '40s soaper "Stella Dallas" to a class I was in.
Sorry to nitpick right off the bat, but Stella Dallas was released in 1937.
A little far off the mark for a movie writer.
> The swooniest, silliest moment I've seen in movies in the past few years,
equal
> to any of the melodramatic ludicrousness Hollywood ever produced, is the
moment
> in "The English Patient" where Ralph Fiennes carries Kristin Scott-Thomas'
> corpse from that cave, the music swelling while her scarf billows in the
wind.
> Were a similar moment, shot in black-and-white, to be shown to a
contemporary
> audience, it's likely the theater would break out into hooting.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ludicrous? How would you have Fiennes carry her out of the cave, in a
wheelbarrow,
or on the back of a burro? sounds like the gent didn't like The English
Patient, and, like
Elaine Benes, yelled at the screen "so die already!"
A Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that showed a
> middle-aged white man tearing up over a drawing from a poor African child
would
> be immediately (and rightly) treated as sap. But nobody gags at the same
thing
> in "About Schmidt."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I did (gag). Nicholson was giving one of his less fine performances, and
there was
NO ONE likeable in the whole bloody picture. I was tempted to leave and
ask for
a refund halfway through this turkey, but morbid curiosity made me sit thru
it.
Now I wish I hadn't.
>>>
There's no reason to think that laughter is any deeper or more
> comprehending a response than that of the people who claimed that Joyce
wrote
> gibberish, Stravinsky composed noise and their 5-year-old could do as well
as
> Jackson Pollock.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lots of James Joyce IS gibberish, lots of Igor IS noise, and as for Pollock,
lots of
five year olds could do better. Three bad examples.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harlett O'Dowd
> > The swooniest, silliest moment I've seen in movies in the past few years,
> equal
> > to any of the melodramatic ludicrousness Hollywood ever produced, is the
> moment
> > in "The English Patient" where Ralph Fiennes carries Kristin Scott-Thomas'
> > corpse from that cave, the music swelling while her scarf billows in the
> wind.
> > Were a similar moment, shot in black-and-white, to be shown to a
> contemporary
> > audience, it's likely the theater would break out into hooting.
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Ludicrous? How would you have Fiennes carry her out of the cave, in a
> wheelbarrow,
> or on the back of a burro? sounds like the gent didn't like The English
> Patient, and, like
> Elaine Benes, yelled at the screen "so die already!"
I found the whole movie to be ludicrous. Harder to sit through even
than GLADIATOR. And yes, I *did* want to laugh at the screen when he
carried her out of the cave because it was so clear the film *wanted*
and *expected* me to be moved to tears. I felt Fiennes' character
deserved every bad thing that happened to him if only for robbing me
of $7 and three hours of my life.
Frederica
"Harlett O'Dowd" <chris.c...@worldspan.com> wrote in message
news:6b3e506.03032...@posting.google.com...
> I found the whole movie to be ludicrous. Harder to sit through even
> than GLADIATOR. And yes, I *did* want to laugh at the screen when he
> carried her out of the cave because it was so clear the film *wanted*
> and *expected* me to be moved to tears. I felt Fiennes' character
> deserved every bad thing that happened to him if only for robbing me
> of $7 and three hours of my life.
You know, I had completely blanked that film out until y'all jogged my
memory...and I'll get you for that, my pretties. I remember the
corpse-carrying part because I burst into quite inappropriate laughter.
That was the best looking corpse in movie history.
Frederica
TMRIEGLER
>I remember the corpse-carrying part because I burst into quite inappropriate
laughter.
>That was the best looking corpse in movie history.
Oh, I don't know. I think that Merle Oberon, meticulously madeup, beautifully
coiffed, in her stunningly white-sheeted nary a wrinkle or rumple deathbed and
nightgown being swept to the window by Lawrence Olivier wins for me.
Terri Riegler
"She died in a key light. Who gets to die in a key light?!"
Anne Meara discussing Garbo's death scene in CAMILLE
Frederica
"TMRIEGLER" <tmri...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20030326132717...@mb-fv.aol.com...
> Frederica wrote:
> >I remember the corpse-carrying part because I burst into quite
inappropriate
> laughter.
> >That was the best looking corpse in movie history.
>
> Oh, I don't know. I think that Merle Oberon, meticulously madeup,
beautifully
> coiffed, in her stunningly white-sheeted nary a wrinkle or rumple deathbed
and
> nightgown being swept to the window by Lawrence Olivier wins for me.
Yes, but Merle had JUST rung down the curtain. I'm still hazy on THE
ENGLISH PATIENT (and more than happy to remain that way) but hadn't Kristin
been dead for quite some time? Bodies certainly can mummify in desert
environments (rather like Siegfried and Roy) but even then, your mummified
corpse needs some serious moisturizing.
What an edifying conversation.
Frederica
Eric Stott
TMRIEGLER wrote:
> Frederica wrote:
> >I remember the corpse-carrying part because I burst into quite inappropriate
> laughter.
> >That was the best looking corpse in movie history.
>
> Oh, I don't know. I think that Merle Oberon, meticulously madeup, beautifully
> coiffed, in her stunningly white-sheeted nary a wrinkle or rumple deathbed and
> nightgown being swept to the window by Lawrence Olivier wins for me.
>
> Terri Riegler
Does anyone recall a very funny (at the time anyway) parody of the scene with Don
Adams? He struggles to lift, carry, pull, drag, throw his sweetheart to the window
as she continuously moans "HEEEEAAAATHCLIFFRFF- I MUST See the Heather before I
Die!" He finaly gets her the the window using a fureman's carrym only to hear
here inplore, (Her head is someplace near his knees below the window) "Heathcliff-
I cahn't see the Heather".
Eric Stott
Precode
Adams and Rickles did a ton of those back in the Kraft Music Hall
days; "The King Lives?" from ZENDA always cracked me up, as did FOR
WHOM THE BELL TOLLS:
Rickles as Tamiroff: "You t'ink you blow up de bridge? Nobody blow up
de bridge!" (Guzzles a bottle of wine, most of which runs down his
chin.)
Adams as Cooper: "Careful.
Some--of--that's--getting--in--your--mouth."
Now why doesn't someone put THOSE out on DVD?
Mike S.
(who also fondly remembers Adams' "Screen Test" game show)
Bob Tiernan
Precode wrote:
> Rickles as Tamiroff: "You t'ink you blow up de bridge? Nobody blow up
> de bridge!" (Guzzles a bottle of wine, most of which runs down his
> chin.)
> Adams as Cooper: "Careful.
> Some--of--that's--getting--in--your--mouth."
>
> Now why doesn't someone put THOSE out on DVD?
I'd like to see or hear some of Guy Marx's
routines. Maybe he didn't do many, but
he used to do an excellent Bogart and
Cooper skit with those two as frontiersmen
speaking with some Indians. Hearing Bogart's
voice speaking Comanche or something was
pretty funny. And Marx sounded like these
guys rather than sounding like an imitation.
Bob T
Jon Parker
silents I find myself curious about things I have never seen before, like
the coin operated gas meter in Chaplin's flat in "The Kid." It doesn't
detract from my enjoyment of the film, though, as I can figure out what it
is easily enough.
Cell phones are making a major change in the way movies, especially
suspense, plays out on screen. It's necessary now to arrange for the
protagonist to lose their cell in order to render them incommunicado.
Just this afternoon I was watching Doug Liman's "Go" (1999) and there were
moments when the fact that the characters had to go somewhere else to make a
phone call was mildly jarring. There's a cell in the movie, but it's in the
car of a rich playboy, and later in the film you have an entire group of
teenagers standing around with not a phone to be had. And this movie is only
4 years old.
Interesting article. Thanks.
j
Gregory Morrow
Jon Parker wrote:
> Cell phones are making a major change in the way movies, especially
> suspense, plays out on screen. It's necessary now to arrange for the
> protagonist to lose their cell in order to render them incommunicado.
>
Yeah, could you imagine _Sorry, Wrong Number_ with cell phones!?
--
Best
Greg ;-)
Greg Theakston
> routines. Maybe he didn't do many, but
> he used to do an excellent Bogart and
> Cooper skit with those two as frontiersmen
> speaking with some Indians. Hearing Bogart's
> voice speaking Comanche or something was
> pretty funny. And Marx sounded like these
> guys rather than sounding like an imitation.
>
> Bob T
Bob,
Look for the reruns of THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, sooner or later this
classic bit will turn up. Killed me as a kid.
Not to be a racist, but Marx is a classic abrasive Jewish commedian,
along with the likes of Gilbert Godfried and Joe E. Louis. Harsh, yet
kind of funny.
Where the Hell are all of the impressionists/impersonators
today?.....makes me long for a reissue of THE COPYCATS.
GT
TMRIEGLER
> Cell phones are making a major change in the way movies, especially
suspense, plays out on screen. It's necessary now to arrange for the
protagonist to lose their cell in order to render them incommunicado.
Greg wrote:
>Yeah, could you imagine _Sorry, Wrong Number_ with cell phones!?
Well, the one that will forever remain a period piece is DIAL M FOR MURDER. How
are you gonna count on someone getting out of bed, walking into the next room
and standing with their back to the French doors while answering the phone
nowadays?
Terri Riegler
"If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me."
Jimmy Buffet song title
Archie Waugh
TMRIEGLER wrote:
> Well, the one that will forever remain a period piece is DIAL M FOR MURDER. How
> are you gonna count on someone getting out of bed, walking into the next room
> and standing with their back to the French doors while answering the phone
> nowadays?
Even worse, when was the last time you saw a phone with a DIAL?
Archie Waugh
Stephen Cooke
Which is why they had to change the title for the lousy remake.
swac
Brent Walker
Or even a cord, what with all the wireless home phones. The denoument
to DETOUR would be a lot less likely to happen now.
Even the running gag in PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, only 30 years old, is
outdated now, with Tony Roberts calling his office every time he
changes locations to give them the new number he's at.
Brent Walker
TMRIEGLER
>Well, the one that will forever remain a period piece is DIAL M FOR MURDER.
How are you gonna count on someone getting out of bed, walking into the next
room and standing with their back to the French doors while answering the phone
nowadays?
Archie answered:
>Even worse, when was the last time you saw a phone with a DIAL?
Speaking of understanding things from another period, I attended a performance
of THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER two years ago. They program writers felt the need
to include a glossary to identify all the names that were to be dropped as well
as identify who the characters were based on. If you really want to have a cry
fest, try listening to Cole Porter's 'You're the Top' from the viewpoint of a
current day 17 year old.
Terri Riegler
"You're the top... You're the National Gallery. You're Garbo's salary. You're
cellophane."
(Then again, maybe they will get that cellophane reference after CHICAGO.)
Precode
Which never explained why the answering machine didn't pick it up. One
simple line ("Honey, it's broken. I'll pick up a new one at lunch.")
could've solved that little gaffe.
How about PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM? That great running gag of Tony roberts
leaving his number everywhere he goes is now passe.
Great gag about dial phones: Shalom Harlow as the idiot supermodel in
IN AND OUT trying to "press" the holes in the dial.
Mike S.
"If I say it any louder I won't need a phone!"--Lou Costello doing the
"Alexander 2222" routine in WHO DONE IT?
Precode
FYI, his last name was Marks.
Mike S.
(who still remembers him from Joey Bishop's sitcom)
Archie Waugh
Brent Walker wrote:
>
> > Even worse, when was the last time you saw a phone with a DIAL?
> > Archie Waugh
>
> Or even a cord, what with all the wireless home phones. The denoument
> to DETOUR would be a lot less likely to happen now.
Well, I suppose you could try poking them in the eye with the antennae!
Archie Waugh
Robert Miller
>
The simultaneously impressive and mundane parade of relentless obsolesence
that marches before our modern sensibilities in old movies (fashion,
technology, morals...) sometimes has been rattled off the beat when the
post-production gnomes simply "weren't with it" as changes were either
happening or had already occurred.
A couple of my favorite irritations in this regard include when, in
mid-1960s movies, the script calls for some contemporary "rock 'n roll"
music to be heard from a radio or a live band, and what the sound editor or
score composer comes up with sounds like Si Zentner doing "Up a Lazy River"
instead of Paul Revere and the Raiders doing "Hungry".
Or when (at about the same time in history) some movie character enters a
phone booth and drops a dime in the slot of an obviously multiple
solenoid-based ("click-click") pay phone.... BUT the sound editor dubs in a
"falling-nickel GONG" effect instead.
And speaking of phones in movies.
ISTR in some early talkies where a character picks up one of the first
dial-phones and STILL asks "Central" to connect him to a verbally supplied,
supposedly local phone number.
Another techno-goof from that time lasted many years longer --- in the
movies in which EVERY home's (tube-type) radio set "warms up" INSTANTLY,
with a COUNTER-clockwise rotation of the volume knob!!!
--Robert Miller
Philip
"Robert Miller" <rob...@niu.edu> wrote in message
news:b6bdee$clv$1...@husk.cso.niu.edu...
>
> Another techno-goof from that time lasted many years longer --- in the
> movies in which EVERY home's (tube-type) radio set "warms up" INSTANTLY,
> with a COUNTER-clockwise rotation of the volume knob!!!
>
I saw a film recently where the main character was searching for something
on the internet, and it actually took more than 2 nanoseconds for the
relevant page to load. Spooky!
Archie Waugh
Robert Miller wrote:
> Another techno-goof from that time lasted many years longer --- in the
> movies in which EVERY home's (tube-type) radio set "warms up" INSTANTLY,
> with a COUNTER-clockwise rotation of the volume knob!!!
Huh. And YOURS didn't do that?
Archie Waugh
William Hooper
>> On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, Archie Waugh wrote:
>> >
>> > > Well, the one that will forever remain a period piece is DIAL M F
>> > > are you gonna count on someone getting out of bed, walking into t
he next room
>> > > and standing with their back to the French doors while answering
the phone
>> > > nowadays?
>> >
>> > Even worse, when was the last time you saw a phone with a DIAL?
>>
>>
>> swac
>
>Which never explained why the answering machine didn't pick it up. One
>simple line ("Honey, it's broken. I'll pick up a new one at lunch.")
>could've solved that little gaffe.
>
>How about PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM? That great running gag of Tony roberts
>leaving his number everywhere he goes is now passe.
>
>Great gag about dial phones: Shalom Harlow as the idiot supermodel in
>IN AND OUT trying to "press" the holes in the dial.
>
>Mike S.
>
>"If I say it any louder I won't need a phone!"--Lou Costello doing the
>"Alexander 2222" routine in WHO DONE IT?
Operator: "Louder, please."
Souse': "Louder please. If I spoke any louder, I wouldn't need a
telephone!"
W. C. Fields, two years earlier in THE BANK DICK
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Article poste via Voila News - http://www.news.voila.fr
Le : Wed Apr 2 09:06:11 2003 depuis l'IP : uslec-66-255-117-146.cust.uslec.net [VIP 9946225]