I Just Watched...

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TikiSoo
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by TikiSoo »

I have finally seen 1975's AT LONG LAST LOVE thanks to a fabulous poster here on the boards!

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How could I NOT want to see an early Peter Bogdanovich musical starring all my dear, favorite gals- Cybill Shepherd, Madeline Kahn & Eileen Brennan? Mildred Natwick is also in it as well as Burt Reynolds & handsome Italian singer Duillio Del Prete.

But it's the gals that shine here and thankfully this movie captures just wonderful performances by all. Seeing Madeline Kahn belting out a song (more than one!) brought tears to my eyes, as if a gift from beyond the grave. So wonderful all these performances are on film for future generations to discover.
I expected Kahn would sing ONE song, but each performer has SEVERAL solos each, as well as a few ensembles.

If you are a fan of old Hollywood musicals that are big on the visual element of costumes/sets and is carried through by the talent of the performers, this movie will delight you as it did me.
If you enjoy an interesting, involved story well, you will be bored by the first 10 minutes, because this movie isn't strong on plot.

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Cybill Shepherd never looked more gorgeous, although I do think the costumer should have done a better job of tailoring & fitting the dresses. The sets were amazing shiny in black/white/clear plexiglass just like the old RKO Astaire/Rogers movies. The Italian singer DelPrete fit in perfectly, but Burt Reynolds looks lost....I give Reynolds a LOT of credit for following through and doing his best in a genre he's obviously not comfortable in. He often reminded me of Clark Gable which is surely why he was cast.

I am SO HAPPY to have finally seen this movie & sincerely hope it gains better appreciation with time. Just like pre-code musicals, this movie perfectly captures the rediscovery & obsession of early Hollywood film in popular 1970's culture.

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Fedya
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by Fedya »

Not As a Stranger (1955).

Stanley Kramer is known for his "message pictures", and the way he wanted to drive home that message come hell or high water. In Not As a Stranger, Kramer turns that format over to a medical drama, and boy do we get the Kramer touch in spades. Robert Mitchum plays a driven medical student in the first half and small-town doctor in the second half. 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. Frank Sinatra plays a fellow doctor from med school days, and Gloria Grahame plays the vamp in the small town that for some reasons has farms cheek by jowl with a ritzy neighborhood.

Kramer shoehorns in as many medical drama tropes as you can think of into the 135-minute running time because dammit, he wants to make certain you get The Message. This results in a movie that is sometimes unintentionally funny, along with one where you can see the plot twists coming a mile away, especially when they're necessary to deliver The Message. It's not exactly a great movie, but it's also entertaining enough.

6/10.
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TikiSoo
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Re: I Just Watched...

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Fedya wrote: March 25th, 2023, 8:21 am 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.
(snipped)
for some reasons has farms cheek by jowl with a ritzy neighborhood.
Forgive me, but I do not know if these are misspellings or if I'm just not familiar with these colloquialisms/phrases. English isn't always a reader's first language.

It's not you, I'm often left behind in conversations that employ English "street" slang. Discovering obsolete slang is one of the aspects I enjoy in classic film. For instance "Take a powder!"
(I do know "ritzy")
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Fedya
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by 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.
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LawrenceA
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by 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.
Watching until the end.
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Detective Jim McLeod
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Re: I Just Watched...

Post by Detective Jim McLeod »

LawrenceA wrote: March 25th, 2023, 11:28 am
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.
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Sue Sue Applegate
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Re: I Just Watched...

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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.
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Fedya
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Re: I Just Watched...

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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.
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EP Millstone
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Re: I Just Watched...

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Fedya wrote: March 25th, 2023, 8:21 am 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.”
Last edited by EP Millstone on March 25th, 2023, 5:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Fedya
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Re: I Just Watched...

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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!'
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Swithin
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Re: I Just Watched...

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Fedya wrote: March 25th, 2023, 5:52 pm
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.

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Allhallowsday
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Re: I Just Watched...

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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...!"?

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LawrenceA
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Re: I Just Watched...

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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.
Watching until the end.
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TikiSoo
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Re: I Just Watched...

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Swithin wrote: March 25th, 2023, 7:59 pm 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:

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Fedya wrote: March 25th, 2023, 8:21 am 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"
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