I Just Watched...

[Fedya]

I assume you're referring to cheek by jowl? It can't be neighborhood, since that's obviously spelled correctly.

I just found it interesting that Mitchum's character was out one night attending to a farmer who got kicked by a horse, and the farmer's wife asked Mitchum to visit the Gloria Grahame character on the way back to town, as though they were obviously close together.

And the horse symbolism when Mitchum is finally unfaithful with Grahame is one of those unintentionally funny moments.

[LawrenceA]

Yesterday:

Mondo Trasho (1969) - The first feature from director John Waters opens with a live chicken being beheaded. There's no real plot, just various characters (played by Waters regulars like Divine, Mink Stole, etc.) wandering around and getting strange encounters. This was very low budget, with no live sound, and no real dialogue, only dozens of songs from Waters' record collection. That soundtrack is what's kept this from ever getting an official VHS or disc release. For Waters completists only.

More Dead Than Alive (1969) - Mildly enjoyable, though unexceptional western with Clint Walker as a paroled gunman trying to go straight who gets work in Vincent Price's traveling medicine show. Also with Anne Francis. I watched it for Price, who seems to be having a good time.

Nocturno 29 (1969) - Spanish arthouse weirdness. There's no plot, hardly any dialogue, and lengthy stretches where the only sound is a mechanical whirring. It's supposed to symbolize something about Franco's fascism. Okay.

One On Top of the Other (1969) - Italian psychological thriller from director Lucio Fulci. A doctor (Jean Sorel) becomes obsessed with a stripper/prostitute that looks just like his recently deceased wife (Marisa Mell in a dual role). Also with Elsa Martinelli and John Ireland. Fulci is obviously aping Vertigo, with a lot of late-60s "groovy" production design and frank sexuality thrown in. Also known as Perversion Story.

Knock at the Cabin (2023) - The latest from director M. Night Shyamalan is an adaptation of a novel by Paul Tremblay. A gay married couple and their young adopted daughter are on vacation at a secluded cabin in the woods when four strangers arrive and make a startling claim. The less said the better for anyone wishing to watch. I thought it was better than Shyamalan's last couple of film (Old, Glass), but for me it still didn't add up to a lot. Wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista is good as the leader of the strangers.

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956) - Glossy mystery from director Henry Hathaway, with Van Johnson as a blind playwright in London who overhears a kidnapping plot and tries to thwart it. With Vera Miles. I enjoyed this more than I expected (I'm usually not too thrilled with Johnson), and would call it the pic of the day.

[Detective Jim McLeod]

More Dead Than Alive (1969) - Mildly enjoyable, though unexceptional western with Clint Walker as a paroled gunman trying to go straight who gets work in Vincent Price's traveling medicine show. Also with Anne Francis. I watched it for Price, who seems to be having a good time.

[
Knock at the Cabin (2023) - The latest from director M. Night Shyamalan is an adaptation of a novel by Paul Tremblay. A gay married couple and their young adopted daughter are on vacation at a secluded cabin in the woods when four strangers arrive and make a startling claim. The less said the better for anyone wishing to watch. I thought it was better than Shyamalan's last couple of film (Old, Glass), but for me it still didn't add up to a lot. Wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista is good as the leader of the strangers.

I have seen these two.

The first is definitely worth it for Price fans, he plays the part with a lot of gusto and uses language we never heard from him before ("you're a big sonvab!tch!")

The M.Night film started off being very intriguing, as with other of the writer/director's films, the reveal is not quite worth the wait. However I gave this grudgingly positive review because of Bautista, he has a great screen presence.

[Sue Sue Applegate]

I believe my mother has seen the film in a theater, and was so thrilled when it came on an independent station in Houston. She almost insisted I watch it, and I was so young, the horse symbolism eluded me, but the images of that open heart surgery episode is still with me. Kramer hammered that into my psyche.

[Fedya]

Yeah, Charles Bickford (the patient in the heart surgery episode) is one of the stars who delivers a fine performance. Broderick Crawford shows he could be more than just a tough guy, too.

[EP Millstone]

Not As a Stranger (1955) . . .

. . . which had a cast that was a bartender's dream: Mitchum; Lon Chaney, Jr.; Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin; Myron McCormick; Frank Sinatra.

"It wasn’t a cast, so much as a brewery." -- Robert Mitchum

Director Stanley Kramer described the shooting as "ten weeks of hell."

From Baby, I Don’t Care by Lee Server

"One day Broderick Crawford went berserk. The scrawny but fearless Frank Sinatra enjoyed needling the huge, powerful Crawford, likening the actor to the retarded character, Lenny, in Of Mice and Men. 'He could be mean, Sinatra,' said Edward] Anhalt. 'Why he was so mean to Brod, I don’t know. And you didn’t want to make Brod lose his temper if you had any sense.' Crawford –- Mitchum called him 'the Crawdad' -– took all the needling he could stand one day and attacked Sinatra, holding him down, tearing off his hairpiece and . . . eating it. Someone screamed, 'My God, Crawford’s eaten Sinatra’s wig!'

'Mitchum tried to pull them apart,' said Anhalt. 'He liked Brod, and he liked Sinatra, too. And like the Good Samaritan, he ended up getting socked for his troubles. And Sinatra took off, disappeared, having instigated the whole thing. So Mitchum’s fighting with Brod, and Brod throws him through the window onto the balcony outside. Mitchum was big and strong, but Brod was even bigger . . .

. . . At the end of one exhausting day -– blissfully without incident -– Kramer dismissed the cast with a polite request:

'Tomorrow morning we shoot one of the most difficult scenes in the picture and I want you all clear-eyed and no hangovers. Please . . . everybody promise me you’ll go straight home now and get a good night’s sleep.'

They promised. Kramer stayed late working with the film editor, then wearily got into his car and headed for home. He stopped at a red light on a seedy corner not far from the La Brea studio and saw a violent commotion outside a bar. He blinked a few times before he realized what he was looking at. It was three, no, four members of his cast, one of them lying sprawled on the asphalt, two in a ferocious fistfight. The light turned green and so did Kramer, cursing to himself and laughing mirthlessly; he drove on and didn’t look back.”

[Fedya]

Crawford –- Mitchum called him 'the Crawdad' -– took all the needling he could stand one day and attacked Sinatra, holding him down, tearing off his hairpiece and . . . eating it. Someone screamed, 'My God, Crawford’s eaten Sinatra’s wig!'

[Swithin]

Crawford –- Mitchum called him 'the Crawdad' -– took all the needling he could stand one day and attacked Sinatra, holding him down, tearing off his hairpiece and . . . eating it. Someone screamed, 'My God, Crawford’s eaten Sinatra’s wig!'

Fedya, It's nice to see you using a fashion designer as your avatar.

[Allhallowsday]

THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940) on TCM last night. Funny! The speech at the end is still wrenching.
Does PAULETTE GODDARD at the very end say... "Listen...!"?

[LawrenceA]

Today:

Santo in the Treasure of Dracula (1969) - More extraordinary nonsense from everyone's favorite silver-masked Mexican wrestler, Santo. Besides being a wrestler and crime fighter, it's also revealed that he's a brilliant scientist, and in his free time he's invented a time machine! He has to send back a woman (they have "stronger cells"), but unfortunately she ends up a century ago as the target of Dracula himself. There's too much packed in this film's mere 85 minutes to go into detail, but I will mention one unusual aspect. There were two versions filmed, one for domestic release in B&W, and a full color version for European release featuring lots of gratuitous nudity. That latter version is what I watched, under the title Sex and the Vampire. Unforgettable!

The Seed of Man (1969) - Italian arthouse post-apocalyptic tale about a young couple who move to a secluded beach house when a deadly plague sweeps the globe. This was okay, but nothing I'd recommend. The female lead is Anne Wiazemsky from Au Hasard Balthazar, while the male lead (Marco Margine), who looks like young Dennis Hopper mixed with Robert Pattinson, never made another movie.

Shadow of Death (1969) - A Spanish murder mystery/thriller with Larry Ward as identical twins, one of whom is married to Teresa Gimpera, and the other of whom is having an affair with her. Things get more complicated when a vindictive former lover (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) shows up. Blah.

Zeta One (1969) - Very silly British sex comedy, also released as The Love Factor, with Dawn Addams as the title ruler of an alien planet of women. They replenish their populace by kidnapping beautiful, accomplished women from Earth. With Robin Hawdon as a James Bond-esque agent, James Robertson Justice, Valerie Leon, and Yutte Stensgaard. Very dumb, but I bet pubescent British boys in 1969 loved it.

L'inhumaine (1924) - Silent French film with sci-fi touches. A world-famous singer (played by famous opera singer Georgette Leblanc) toys with her many suitors, leading to tragedy. The real star here is the amazing production design, from the sets to the costumes, as well as many dazzling cinematographic techniques deployed in novel fashion. Easily the best movie of the day, and the best one that I've seen in a while. There's currently a very good copy up on YouTube.

[TikiSoo]

Fedya, It's nice to see you using a fashion designer as your avatar.

LOL!

My avatar is a decade old photo too- I look like this now:

Olivia de Havilland essays a Swedish actress as Mitchum's wife because Kramer apparently couldn't get Viveca Lindfors and I'm not certain if Ingrid Thulin's career had taken off yet.

Sorry Fedya, I still don't understand what that sentence means. Must have a "simple" mind, I guess. "Honk, honk"

[Swithin]

Early in the pandemic, I read (actually listened to) The Last Lion, William Manchester's monumental three-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Although I knew something of the great man, and had even visited his house at Chartwell, Manchester's books gave me a deeper understanding of his long life and times.

I just watched Young Winston (1972), a fine movie with a great cast that offers, for a biographical film, a surprisingly accurate depiction of its subject. The movie runs from Churchill's early childhood through his young adulthood; from school days to India, the Sudan, and, most significantly, through his heroic exploits in the Boer War. It covers his first unsuccessful election through his ultimate election to Parliament and concludes with a brief mention of his marriage to Clementine Hozier, at the age of 34. The film focuses closely on his relationship with his distant parents: Lady Randolph Churchill (the social butterfly American Jennie Jerome, played by Anne Bancroft), and the strict Lord Randolph Churchill, played by Robert Shaw, whose illness is a major part of the film, syphilis finally being named as his disease, after a lot of beating around the bush. (Jerome Avenue, a major street in the Bronx neighborhood where I grew up, is named for Leonard Jerome, Jennie Jerome's father).

Simon Ward is excellent as Winston Churchill, as are the boys who play Churchill aged 7 and 13. Young Winston is directed by Richard Attenborough who seems to have rounded up many of Britain's leading actors to play minor roles, including Jack Hawkins, John Mills, Laurence Naismith, Robert Hardy, Colin Blakely, Ian Holm, Robert Flemyng, Patrick Magee, Edward Woodward, Anthony Hopkins, John Woodvine, Thorley Walters, Dinsdale Landen, and many others.

The screenplay was written by American Carl Foreman, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and was working in Britain.

[Fedya]

Sorry Fedya, I still don't understand what that sentence means. Must have a "simple" mind, I guess. "Honk, honk"

I miswrote. I meant to say "Swedish accent", not "Swedish actress". Why they made Olivia de Havilland (and Col. Potter) put on those ridiculous accents for roles that didn't have to be Swedish immigrants is beyond me.

[LiamCasey]

Early in the pandemic, I read (actually listened to) The Last Lion, William Manchester's monumental three-volume biography of Winston Churchill. Although I knew something of the great man, and had even visited his house at Chartwell, Manchester's books gave me a deeper understanding of his long life and times.

I just watched Young Winston (1972), a fine movie with a great cast that offers, for a biographical film, a surprisingly accurate depiction of its subject. The movie runs from Churchill's early childhood through his young adulthood; from school days to India, the Sudan, and, most significantly, through his heroic exploits in the Boer War. It covers his first unsuccessful election through his ultimate election to Parliament and concludes with a brief mention of his marriage to Clementine Hozier, at the age of 34.

I have also read and enjoyed William Manchester's three-volume biography of Winston Churchill. As a matter of fact, I reread the first two books after the third came out since 24 years had elapsed between the publication of (and, therefore, my reading of) the second and third books. Definitely recommended reading for anyone interested in the history of the first half of the 20th century. Good or bad, the man was involved in so many events.

However, the only movie that I've seen that focuses on Winston Churchill is The Gathering Storm (2002) with Albert Finney as Mr. Churchill and Vanessa Redgrave as his wife Clementine, and which is set during the 1930s when he was basically out of power but fighting against the rise of Nazism and his fellow politicians' appeasement of the same.

I do have both Into the Storm (2009) and Darkest Hour (2017) with Brendan Gleeson and Gary Oldman, respectively, as Winston Churchill on my watchlist. It appears that I should add this one to that list also.