Yes, but I came in late, after everyone was murdered, so I had a hard time following it. Maybe it was supposed to do this, but I found myself not knowing who was working with/for whom and who was good or bad. The ending shocked me, as I thought it would go the other way. Maybe leading the way for a MF 2?

Yeah, it's a typical hard-boiled script: very surreal in its narrative development, so that you lose track of what is actually at stake (nobody cares who shot Spade's partner!). The novel is apparently very similar...

... in the same vein, Chandler's The Big Sleep is just as episodic and even more convoluted. It has a murder whose killer not even the author himself knew. (Incidentally, FWIW, the Howard Hawks adaptation stars Bogart as Marlowe, a PI not unlike Sam Spade. Check it out!)

************SPOILER ALERT*************

Since it seems the sort that TCM would show, I'll chip in here:

Just watched Key Largo (1948/Huston). Great; how many actors can Huston cram into one frame? Brilliant - talk about immersive, impressive and symbolic composition. It'd be interesting to watch again just to see who is where in each of the frames, and their relationships to one another. Bogart plays second fiddle to Edward G. Robinson, but then so does everyone - Robinson's always brilliant, and if Claude Rains was able to delight and compliment Bogey in Casablanca, Robinson tends to overpower him here (effectively and deliberately so); for more subtle, complimentary performances, check him out in Wilder's masterpiece (and with it, the best film of the 1940s), Double Indemnity.

Rio Bravo is a 1959 western film, directed by Howard Hawks. It stars John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, with Angie Dickinson, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, Estelita Rodriguez and Walter Brennan and was shot at Old Tucson Studios, just outside Tucson, Arizona.

Rio Bravo is generally regarded as one of Hawks' best, and is notable for its lack of close-up shots. It features a long opening scene with absolutely no dialogue.

Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) arrests a murderer, Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), the brother of powerful rancher Nathan Burdette (John Russell). The rancher's men then quarantine the town in preparation to breaking Burdette out of jail. The only help Chance has are his deputies Dude (Martin), an alcoholic, and Stumpy (Brennan), a cripple. Tensions are further strained by the presence of a young gunslinger, Colorado Ryan (Nelson), and the arrival of a mysterious woman, Feathers (Dickinson), who becomes romantically involved with Chance.

The film was made as a response to High Noon, which is sometimes thought to be an allegory for blacklisting in Hollywood, as well as a critique of McCarthyism[citation needed].

Wayne teamed up with director Howard Hawks to tell the story his way. Hawks was offended by High Noon as he didn't believe the marshal, played by Gary Cooper, would ask the townsfolk for help. Wayne was a conservative and a firm supporter of blacklisting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Bravo_%28film%29



Dean Martin & Ricky Nelson - My Rifle, My Pony, and Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IpEnsdXwFM
Dino only sings a cpl of numbers in Rio Bravo, but rest assured that they're solid GOLD!
It's no wonder that Dean Martin is/was the 'King of Cool'.

Ricky Nelson - Get Along Home Cindy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPYCJlFfhW8
Nelson then decides to change the pace and break into a more Rocking number.

DVR ALERT FOR SUNDAY, FEB. 24th -

TCM is airing two great movies :

"Boy's Town" at 10:30 a.m. (Eastern) (with Spencer Tracy)
AND "The Bell's of St. Mary's" (with Bing Crosby) at 12:30 p.m.

DVR ALERT - TUESDAY, Feb 26th 3:45 p.m. (Eastern) on TCM

"Some Came Running" with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. Sinatra's best film, its a stylish and great paced transformation of James Jones' wonderful novel.

DON'T MISS IT!

Agreed on this on. It's one of Sinatra's best and most unacknowledged triumps and one of Vincente Minnelli's best films.

Spurred on by the sales and the critical acclaim of his best-selling From Here to Eternity, James Jones set out to write yet another great American novel. The result was Some Came Running, the story of a war veteran with literary aspirations who returns in 1948 to his hometown of Parkman, Illinois, after a failed writing career. While it wasn't quite the masterpiece Jones hoped it would be, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in a bid to duplicate the success of the multi-Academy Award winning film adaptation of From Here to Eternity (1953), optioned the 1,200-plus-page book and cast Frank Sinatra as the lead, Dave Hirsh. Sinatra approved Dean Martin for the role of his gambling pal, Bama Dillert, in what would be their first film together. Martin, who had recently split from a partnership with Jerry Lewis, was just beginning to prove himself as an actor and would win some of the best notices of his career for his performance here. Shirley MacLaine was cast as the adorable floozy Ginny Moorehead, who falls for Hirsh. MacLaine garnered her first Academy Award nomination which she credited to Sinatra for his insistence on the film's ending being changed. Hailed as a masterpiece of American cinema, Some Came Running was a box office success, earning $4.3 million in rentals and being ranked by Variety as the 10th highest-earning film of 1958.

Highly admired in France and Europe and remaing a cult film to date among film-makers and audiences alike, Some Came Running remains a work of some stature in American cinema. Despite this it will be somewhat of a late arrival on the DVD format when it is eventually released on May 13th 2008.

Martin Scorsese included a clip from the film for his A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies; the film's final playground scene, to Scorsese, remains one of the best and most expressive uses of CinemaScope in American Cinema.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Came_Running


The scene that Scorsese speaks of is sheer aesthetic genius. Every time I watch it I enter a trance-like state that can only be described as hypnotic. It's a MUST see for all filmmakers.

You feel that it's his best, huh SC?

I think that it's ONE of his best.

For me, his best is Man With The Golden Arm.


DVR ALERT TUESDAY MARCH 4th 3:00PM EST : Body And Soul (1947) - A classic John Garfield movie!

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) is a film noir drama film based on the 1934 The Postman Always Rings Twice novel by James M. Cain. This adaptation of the novel is the best known, featuring Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn, Leon Ames, and Audrey Totter. It was directed by Tay Garnett, with a score written by George Bassman and Erich Zeisl (the latter uncredited).

Frank Chambers (John Garfield) is a drifter who stops at a rural diner for a meal, and ends up working there. The diner is operated by a beautiful young woman, Cora Smith (Lana Turner), and her much older husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway).

Frank and Cora soon have an affair after they meet. Cora is tired of her situation, married to a man she does not love, and working at a diner that she wishes to own. She and Frank scheme to murder Nick in order to start a new life together without her losing the diner. Their first attempt at the murder is a failure, but they eventually succeed.

Critic Stephen MacMillan Moser appreciated Lana Turner's the acting and wrote, "It is perhaps her finest work -- from a body of work that includes very few truly stellar performances. She was a star, and not necessarily an actress, and because of that, so much of her work does not stand the test of time. She is best remembered for the spate of films like Peyton Place and Madame X that traded on her personal tragedies, but Postman, which predates all that, is a stunner -- a cruel and desperate and gritty James Cain vehicle that sorely tests Lana's skills. But she succeeds marvelously, and from the first glimpse of her standing in the doorway in her white fuck-me pumps, as the camera travels up her tanned legs, she becomes a character so enticingly beautiful and insidiously evil that the audience is riveted."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman_Always_Rings_Twice_%281946_film%29


A staple of Film Noir, it's narrative centers around the moral ambiguity of the human condition and consciousness. Very powerful performances from Lana Turner and John Garfield, but I've heard it said more than once that Turner wished they would have cast her alongside someone more "good looking." She didn't particularly care for Garfield, who was somewhat of a bad-boy in Classic Hollywood. He was caught up in the Communist scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and supported the Committee for the First Amendment, which opposed governmental investigation of political beliefs.

Read the novel, Ice? I haven't (not seen the film either), but I read Cain's Double Indemnity, after seeing Wilder's adaptation. I saw it again recently on a big screen and was floored. One of the greatest US films ever made.

Lana Turner gives me shivers.

I'm writing an essay right now, actually, on the articulation of time in noir (narrative evocation of memory/desire, and the void left in the boundary between past/future (does the "present" even exist?)); concentrating on Double Indemnity, The Third Man and The Woman in the Window.

I haven't read either work, but thanks for pointing that out. If you like one then you should almost for certain like the other.

But as you said, Double Indemnity is one of the greatest films ever made. I actually think that The Postman Always Rings Twice has a few more of those "layers" of transparent subjectivity which form an opaque form of "objectivity". But Double Indemnity is certainly not lacking them either, obviously, and is a better overall watch, IMO.

To sum up Double Indemnity I'll do my best Edward G. Robinson, it's wrapped up in tissue paper with pink ribbons on it. The entire film is like opening a beautifully wrapped package, peeling your way through layer after layer to then find the perfect gift. It's simply a PERFECT watch with the PERFECT pace, isn't it?


Ditto. Her life is really one of the more haunting and mysterious tales from classic Hollywood. She actually had to wear fake eye-brows throughout much of her life, after shaving them off to play an Asian during one of her early works. For some reason they simply never grew back. Imagine how crippling such a physical defect can be to an actress's psyche.

And I'm sure you're aware that she was involved in a very famous murder scandal against one of her husbands. Her 14 yr. old daughter--supposedly--was the culprit, acting in self-defense of her mother.


That should be interesting. I was aware of the temporal element in the narrative of Double Indemnity b/c of the flashback structure of the film. I haven't seen the other two nor was I aware that this theme replayed itself throughout noir. I'd be very interested to learn more about this.

I changed the link on this to one that includes the entire ceiling dance. It's a must watch!

Fred Astaire movies used to make me puke when I was younger. Now, I can't get enough of them.... he is really fun to watch.

Alzheimers?

Not at all... its the realization that this guy was simply amazing. You can't help but smile when watching him dance and his acting was actually quite good. He had impeccable timing and was fairly funny, too.

Grace thy name is Fred Astaire. For me, he embodied elegance. I can't ever look at anyone wearing a top hat and tails without thinking of him.

I have so many favorites of his that I won't even try to get into them now. I tend to prefer the roles in which he actually sings and performs--he's a wanna-be drummer in this one--but I watched The Man With The Golden Arm based on your recommendation (bought it at Walgreens for a buck a few months ago) and thoroughly had a good time with it. It was very controversial for the period b/c of it's portrayal of drug addiction.

The film has certainly achieved iconic status, and according to wikipedia: In the video game, The Darkness, this film can be watched on an old television set in a shopping cart, found early in the game in a subway station.

And, The movie opens with one of the most famous, influential and controversial title sequences in movie history, the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm, designed and conceived by Saul Bass as a means of creating much more than a mere title-sequence, but something that actually enhances the viewer's experience of the film by contributing to a mood built within the opening moments of a film. Bass would go on to create memorable title-sequences for more renowned films, notably for Alfred Hitchcock for films such as Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho.

As long as no one objects then I'll periodically post Classic Movie reviews as I find them in the other thread...

The Philadelphia Story is a 1940 romantic screwball comedy starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart. Based on a Broadway play of the same name by Philip Barry, the film is about a bride-to-be whose plans are complicated by the simultaneous arrival of her ex-husband and a handsome journalist. It is considered one of the best examples of a comedy of remarriage, a genre popular in the 1930s and 1940s, in which a couple divorce, flirt with outsiders and then remarry - a useful ploy at a time when depicting extra-marital affairs was banned in American film.

The American Film Institute ranked The Philadelphia Story #51 in its list of the 100 best movies in American cinema, #15 among the 100 best American comedies and #44 in the 100 best American romances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Story

***

The dialogue between these three *STARS* is what makes this one of the best movies ever -- it has to be one of the 'wittiest' scripts in Cinematic history. Katharine Hepburn is THE STAR, and the CENTER OF ATTENTION (of course); Cary Grant is HILARIOUS; and James Stewart won his ONLY Academy Award ever, for his performance as the 'handsome journalist'.

You have to watch it a cpl of times to get all of the jokes, it's great. And the ending is one of the craftiest I've ever seen--not THE USUAL SUSPECTS crafty, but you get the point.

A Place in the Sun(1951) is a film which tells the story of a working class young man who is entangled with two women, one who works in his wealthy uncle's factory and the other a beautiful socialite. It stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Anne Revere, Keefe Brasselle and Raymond Burr. The film is best known for the celebrated dance scene between Clift and Taylor, shot in extreme closeup by director George Stevens.*

The movie was adapted by Harry Brown and Michael Wilson from the novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser and the adapted play by Patrick Kearney. It was directed by George Stevens. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_place_in_the_sun

***

A Place in the Sun is enlightening, heartbreaking, and really one of those few films which maintain the perfect pace and keep you on the edge of your seat -- absolutely one of the all time greats. The film's narrative centers around Clift's moral and sexual ambiguity.


* Luckily that very famous scene is on youtube. It's not as beautiful as the goodbye scene at the Tiki-torch party IMO, nor the movie's final-farewell scene, but a nice example of the masterful aesthetics in the film.

A Place in the Sun - Famous Dance Scene
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEuFNnJSIw8
Elizabeth Taylor is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful people I've ever seen.

I actually have The Philadelphia Story ready to watch...

Noice.. I think you'll really enjoy it. The whole ambiance created by those three is very radiant. It's a beautifully made black & white picture. Absolutely one of my all-time favorites. It's great to enjoy with friends and a bottle of wine. And you're gonna fall in love with Katharine Hepburn's character.

Rope (1948) is an Alfred Hitchcock classic film notable for its single location, edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot, taking place in real time. It is the first of Hitchcock's films that was made in color.

The film was based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton, which was said to be in turn inspired by the real-life murder of a young boy in 1924 by two University of Chicago students named Leopold and Loeb. Hamilton, though, always denied the link between his play and the case.

Although it is commonly believed that all the cuts in Rope are hidden, in fact, only half are. Another misconception is that all the shots last ten minutes. Actually, of the ten shots used for the film, only three approach or exceed the ten minute mark. Five of the shots range between seven and eight minutes, and the penultimate and final shots last only about four-and-a-half and five-and-a-half minutes, respectively.

The extraordinary cyclorama in the background was the largest backing ever used on a sound stage. It included models of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings. Numerous chimneys smoke, lights come on in buildings, neon signs light up, and the sunset slowly unfolds as the movie progressed. Within the course of nine reels, the cumulus clouds, which were made of spun glass, change position and shape a total of eight times.

Much of the film is based on the idea that one might murder someone just to prove that one could. Some film scholarship has found links between this idea and literature and philosophy. Suggestions have been made that the novel, Crime and Punishment, and its protagonist Raskolnikov form a subtext to the film — whereby the film parallels the idea of murdering just for the sake of performing the act. References to Nietzsche abound throughout the film — particularly to his idea of the superman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(film)


Plot Synopsis:


***
One of the reasons I love the Classics so much is b/c their dialogue is chalked full of quips and witty responses, this movie is one of them.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment, is absolutely the primary subtext of this piece. The murderer in this film, like Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov, wants to get caught--they NEED to get caught--the only difference that Dostoevsky's protagonist is remorseful, even finding a certain salvation b/c of his crime. John Brandon (John Dall), though, wants to get caught for a much shallower and selfish reason; pride. Since the time of his youth, we learn that John has always been the type to seek approval by wanting to show others just how much smarter he was. He is an academic, and thus feels his academic superiority gives him a certain superiority and divine right over others -- a right so divine that he can even murder those he deems unfit. Subconsciously speaking, John wants his college mentor, Rupert (Stewart), to know just how smart he is, and that he was able to take (what he thought were) Rupert's ideas, and put them into practice.

And as Rupert uncovers the crime, he then begins to re-examine his own personal thoughts on Nietzsche's Übermensch. Ultimately though, although we see a change in Rupert by the movie's end, we see no real change in John. He did what he did b/c he felt it was done with just cause. And for that reason; we're not upset by the fact that Rupert calls the police and tells John that he MUST die -- John in fact would rather die than admit he was wrong. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, however, does not receive capital punishment and nor should he. Unlike John, he was remorseful for his murder -- even finding a certain solace and inner-peace in his rehabilitation process. A very stark contrast to John Brandon. Yes, this masterful film is absolutely the Hitchcock version of Crime and Punishment.

And a special praise must go to the cinematography (of course) but "hats off" especially to the casting department -- John Dall resembles a young Jimmy Stewart in both physical looks and mannerisms so much that it's hard to not think that the two are father and son. Hitchcock did an excellent job casting Stewart's protege, Dall gives what I perceive to be one of the more over-looked performances from the Classic age. And James Stewart really needs to be given more credit for the diversity of his overall work as an actor. I've mentioned before that he and Cary Grant (along with others such as John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart,etc.) more than any other actors, defined what it meant to be a actor in modern American cinema.



John Dall, Farley Granger and James Stewart