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Whatever craziness is going on with the streaming channels(their main crime , it seems, is losing their individuality -- I can get The Sopranos on Max OR Hulu OR Prime), the ability to take a tour through movies unseen for years(like To Sir With Love -- Columbia seems to have taken a bunch of movies out of their vaults for Amazon prime) or fondly remembered for their cheese factor(Earthquake and -- Charlton Heston sure made a lot of money in 70's cheese, but wrecked his career in the process; it was like a "retirement fund sacrifice.")
Its kind of fun, and yes, a journey to a past of movies long gone, the good AND the bad of them.
(Which reminds me: during this week I also watched Dog Day Afternoon -- which is very much a GOOD one from the 70s.)
Don't forget his hairy knuckles.
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Women love the strangest things!
This would be a heady set of hits for any movie star; and they dutifully put Poitier(as I recall) in the Number One movie star spot for the late sixties.
I recall seeing all three of these films in 1967(and I think into 1968 with In the Heat of the Night.) Each viewing came with a story: In the Heat of the Night -- a white bigot slaps Poitier and he slaps him right back(my grandmother gasped); Guess Who's Coming to Dinner -- an aged, frail but eloquent Spencer Tracy speaks of his love to a tear-ridden Kate Hepburn (my grandmother cried, which I rarely saw.) To Sir With Love -- I went with a bunch of kids because it was one's birthday and we all went "to the movies" with him and his mother thought To Sir With Love would be the right pick.
The thing of it was this: I was only the audience for In the Heat of the Night, because it was a murder mystery and liked mysteries and thrillers and action and Westerns. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and To Sir with Love were DRAMAS and I went rather reluctantly.
Watching To Sir With Love this week for the first time SINCE 1967 , it still wasn't my cup of tea. Poitier was good but the story line seemed to force everything: (1) these kids mock him; (2) these kids hate him; (3) these kids love him. The arc has to be what the arc has to be. And there was a "companion piece" movie in 1967 called "Up the Down Staircase"(which I also saw) in which flibbergibbet Sandy Dennis played Poiter's female equivalent in a tough NYC school. BOTH movies fought against the "horror movie vibe" of The Blackboard Jungle(1955) in which teacher Glenn Ford is up against a classroom of thugs and psychopaths and rapists and fights 'em all(with the help of side-switching thug ..Sidney Poitier. Full circle.)
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This would be a heady set of hits for any movie star; and they dutifully put Poitier(as I recall) in the Number One movie star spot for the late sixties.
I recall seeing all three of these films in 1967(and I think into 1968 with In the Heat of the Night.) Each viewing came with a story: In the Heat of the Night -- a white bigot slaps Poitier and he slaps him right back(my grandmother gasped); Guess Who's Coming to Dinner -- an aged, frail but eloquent Spencer Tracy speaks of his love to a tear-ridden Kate Hepburn (my grandmother cried, which I rarely saw.) To Sir With Love -- I went with a bunch of kids because it was one's birthday and we all went "to the movies" with him and his mother thought To Sir With Love would be the right pick.
The thing of it was this: I was only the audience for In the Heat of the Night, because it was a murder mystery and liked mysteries and thrillers and action and Westerns. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and To Sir with Love were DRAMAS and I went rather reluctantly.
Watching To Sir With Love this week for the first time SINCE 1967 , it still wasn't my cup of tea. Poitier was good but the story line seemed to force everything: (1) these kids mock him; (2) these kids hate him; (3) these kids love him. The arc has to be what the arc has to be. And there was a "companion piece" movie in 1967 called "Up the Down Staircase"(which I also saw) in which flibbergibbet Sandy Dennis played Poiter's female equivalent in a tough NYC school. BOTH movies fought against the "horror movie vibe" of The Blackboard Jungle(1955) in which teacher Glenn Ford is up against a classroom of thugs and psychopaths and rapists and fights 'em all(with the help of side-switching thug ..Sidney Poitier. Full circle.)
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Of Hitchcockian note: "To Sir With Love" begins with Poitier taking a crowded bus to his school assignment and a heavyset, not terribly attractive woman(in a head scarf making her look like Andy Capp's lady, Flo) taking a seat next to Poitier and crowding an amused Poitier while talking her sex life with the equally plain woman in front of her.
Its a funny opening bit, setting the "London stage" for Poitier's story but -- I looked closer at her, checked her IMDB credits and I tell you what -- its "Mrs. Rusk" -- weird mother of psycho killer Bob Rusk -- nuzzling against Poitier. The actress's name is Rita Webb.
Rita Webb only has one line in Frenzy ("Pleased tuh meet ya, I'm shuh") but she stuck out as somewhat too weird a mother for the the dapper Rusk -- until we later found out that Rusk was a sex killer and then we figured ...she had to have had something to do with his development AS a sex killer.
And here she is, crowding the handsome Sidney Poitier and getting a lot of lines and I was STILL creeped out by her.
Rita Webb gets later, sympathetic scenes in To Sir With Love, as we learn she is the mother of one of Poitier's students, one with the highest grades, and very much Poitier's ally -- working as she does, from a farmer's market fruit stand that predicts where her "son," Bob Rusk, will work in Frenzy.
Everything is connected. And To Sir With Love, like Frenzy, was filmed at Pinewood Studios near London.
To Sir With Love was part of the Ultimate Sidney Poitier trifecta of 1967 --- three major hit movies in one year, two of which were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, one of which WON the Best Picture Oscar:
To Sir With Love(with its Number One radio hit single)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner(Spencer Tracy's final role; Kate Hepburn and Poitier around him;a Best Picture nominee.)
In the Heat of the Night(the Best Picture winner)
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Over at Amazon Prime, a feed of Columbia films i haven't seen or haven't seen in years are still turning up.
I looked at "To Sir With Love" from 1967. Sidney Poitier as an engineer who can't land an engineering job and in the meantime makes ends meet as a school teacher in a slum school(of sorts) in the East End of London. (It did not strike me as a true "slum" given that the youth in question seemed to have parents with jobs and at least an inkling of manners for Poitier to bring out in them.)
I remember how Lulu's rock song was all over the radio in 1967 -- as with Georgy Girl from the year before and ITS theme song, there is a strong dose of nostalgia just in hearing that song again. And it gets played a FEW times in the movie. And Lulu herself is one of the students, doing "double duty" as theme song singer and actress.
There are two other British actresses of note in "To Sir With Love" and I always used to confuse them and in this movie, they are properly separated by AGE: Judy Geeson(as a teenage student with a crush on Poitier) and Suzy Kendall(as a peer teacher held out as a willing age appropriate girlfriend.) Geeson and Kendall were two pretty "birds" of the Swinging 60s and into the 70s, but of the two it was Kendall who had the chops to be a full on sexpot (see: 1970's Darker Than Amber, with macho Rod Taylor as private eye Travis Magree and Kendall usually in a bikini.)
But I digress.
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Yeah, the more I think about it, the less "damaged goods" DeNiro is.
Perhaps more importantly, DeNiro -- as one of an ever-waning group of "70's greats" (Nicholson and Hackman are retired; that leaves Pacino and Hoffman...who is metooed out of existence) -- can pretty much switch from "Scorsese prestige" to Dirty Grandpa at will.
Plus: I thought Dirty Grandpa was pretty funny primarily because of DeNiro's charisma in it. A sex symbol for old men!
Also: I will take the point that there can be a handsome prison warden(Quasimodo not required), but I just remember thinking that Redford looked so PERFECT when he went in undercover as a CONVICT. Maybe the "fake convict" part is what I really didn't believe. You'd think in real life, a male convict entering the cell block would have a really bad, chopped up haircut(Steve McQueen wore one in The Getaway for the opening scene in which he is released.)
Yeah, the more I remember Brubaker, I think I had trouble with Redford looking so great as an "undercover convict" rather than as a warden.
Redford looking so great didn't quite fit the movie either I thought
I was thinking the same thing but, then, I thought it's not like one has to look like Quasimodo to be a prison Warden.
I had the same issue with "Jeremiah Johnson," which was based on the real-life Liver-Eating Johnson, who notoriously ate the liver of the braves he killed because the Crow believed the liver was vital for the afterlife. He was also known as Crow Killer and killed braves for 25 years, attaining legendary status, but finally made peace with the tribe. Redford just didn't look the part. Yet without Redford we probably wouldn't have the movie. And, even if we did, it wouldn't have been as successful/popular.
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That's an interesting comparison. "Brubaker" was a surprise hit -- but so was "Jeremiah Johnson." As I recall "Jeremiah Johnson" was such a big hit that they kept re-releasing it over and over in the early 70's(VHS had not yet arrived.)
I suppose that this proves that Robert Redford was such a hot star(and a hot looker for the ladies) that he could lend himself to "miscasting" and still deliver a serious , hit film.
At least in Jeremiah Johnson, after an early scene clean shaven(and oh so pretty) Redford disappears into a big red beard and a mop of unruly hair for the duration of the movie. We know that studio moguls often STOPPED their stars from wearing a beard(or only allowed it for a little bit -- John Travolta in Urban Cowboy) , but Redford stuck to his guns and played JJ with a big beard(again -- red, not blond like his hair.)
Conversely: the "rough" Jeremiah Johnson and Brubaker were hits, but as I recall the quite-fun "The Hot Rock" made no money at all. Redford fits that one.
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Yes, and while Guy had the motive, his character saved him from fulfilling the quid pro quo Bruno offered him, and on a proverbial silver platter. He fought Bruno, he fought murder. There surely must have been a few fragments of evidence favorable to Guy, more than a mere cigarette lighter. Suspicions of people who knew him well enough to understand that he had been, of late, under great stress, a moral stress unrelated to anything he had actually done; more like a dark shadow he was running away from; and it was not a figment of his imagination.
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Though Hitchcock often used "the wrong man" plot, he often had to keep things moving fast so as not to expose the "plot holes" that might exonerate his hero. Guy Haines here, Cary Grant in North by Northwest(who is actually WITNESSED with his hand on the knife in the back of a man he did NOT kill.)
But who knows? Hitchcock gave a pretty accurate account of the wrongful arrest and trial of a REAL man(Manny Ballestrero, played by Henry Fonda) in The Wrong Man, and captured the "everyday horror" of incarceration and the cost of trial to prove innocence. (And Ballestrero was only accused of being an ARMED robber.)
And this one: Hitchcock made a movie called Frenzy(1972), in which a "wrong man" is convicted and incarcerated for the sex stranglings of the right man. The real case was based on the wrong man who was HANGED for the killings of a London killer named John Christie. In real life, the wrong man not only got convicted, he got killed. (England ended the death penalty thereafter.) And the right man -- John Christie -- WAS eventually found out.
So in movie terms, maybe Guy Haines could have beaten the wrap.
But in real life, a few guys did NOT.
To me, a central irony about Strangers on a Train is that the supposedly "foolproof" murder plot -- "You kill my victim, and I'll kill yours" -- only WORKS if the one WITH the motive has an airtight alibi at the time.
For instance, if Guy had REALLY agreed to the murder plan, he would make sure to be at the home of Ruth Roman and her Senator father in front of witnesses when Bruno did the killing. Or maybe he would make sure he was in California when his wife was killed near DC.
But Bruno didn't TELL Guy when he was going to kill Miriam...he just went off and killed her and THEN told Guy. So Guy became the IMMEDIATE suspect and...in the soup.
Which begs this question: maybe Bruno figured on implicating Guy in the killing of Miriam ALL ALONG. Pop his little idea "on the train" (figure Bruno knew that Guy would be on the train, maybe had been stalking him) go ahead with the murder, make sure that Guy is fingered for it...proceed.)
And it was his last film before his psychiatrist killed him.
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Robert Walker's "against type" success in Strangers on a Train is loaded with tragic irony. After years of playing "the boyish good guy," he flips to villainy(see also: Anthony Perkins) and was set for a career where good guys AND bad were in his reach. Walker himself KNEW he was in a big hit and with a new career on the way.
But he had issues with drinking and medications and evidently a "Hollywood Dr. Feelgood" and others forcibly gave Walker a shot while he was already drunk...and probably killed him. At age 33. He didn't even finish the movie he was making -- My Son John -- his only film after Strangers on a Train. His "death scene" in "My Son John" was cobbled together with footage from Strangers on a Train.
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His son was great also as Charlie X.
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Robert Walker died at 33. His son with Jennifer Jones -- Robert Walker Jr. -- ended up being one of those "spitting image lookalikes" that people sometimes sire. (Like Jane Fonda from Henry Fonda.)
Robert Walker Jr. never had the star career his father had -- be shifted to being a Malibu art gallery owner, I think -- but he was in enough movies to make his own mark(The War Wagon with John Wayne, a bunch of hippie/biker movies), and the Star Trek(which cemented him in THAT eternal franchise) and he did something very special: he lived to the age of 79 and in interviews as an older man (on the Strangers on a Train DVD, for one) ...he showed us what Robert Walker SENIOR would have looked like had he lived to his 70s!
Yup.
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Before Oscar nominations came out in 1961 for 1960 films, Anthony Perkins gave a print interview and opined on his chances: "I think I'm going to be nominated. Janet,, too."
He meant Janet Leigh. As it turned out, Janet Leigh WAS nominated(in the wrong category, Best Supporting Actress, and she lost, to Shirley Jones for Elmer Gantry.)
But Anthony Perkins not even getting NOMINATED for Norman Bates is one of the great Oscar mistakes(by the way, the MOVIE Psycho didn't get nominated for Best Picture, either.)
And yet: A full 9 years before Psycho -- in a more "innocent time," here is Robert Walker giving us an equally dynamic performance as a psychopath and taking over the entire movie(as Perkins would his) and...another Oscar boo-boo. As noted above, Walker's "psycho" performance pretty much set the stage for many psychos to come and unlike with Norman Bates, we KNOW he's the psycho from the get-go. In that way, Walker presages not so much Norman Bates as such later movie-long psychos as Max Cady in Cape Fear(Robert Mitchum, Robert DeNiro in the remake), Roat in Wait Until Dark(Alan Arkin), Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs(Anthony Hopkins) and, dare I say it, The Joker in Batman(Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger.)
How does Walker do it? He gets some great lines and some great Hitchcock camera angles, but he also has a great, sorta gay, sorta otherworldly voice and manner. He demonstrates great 'hetero" seduction skills luring Guy's ex wife to her strangling. He demonstrates great strength ringing the bell at the fairground(and pretty much winning the fight with Guy on the carousel before it collapses.) He's handsome and suave and crazy and goofy and cold..ever shifting. And evil...very evil in how he looks to pin everyting on Guy , right up to his last seconds alive. (Before his hand opens with the lighter in it.)
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Actually I thought everything in this movie was unrealistic and ridiculous. I know it's supposed to be a classic or suspense, but I found it very stupid and some parts downright hilarious when they were supposed to be serious.
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Take a time machine back to 1951, watch it again, and get back to us!
She could have become unconscious in half a minute from compression of her carotid artery, combined with lack of air. If he crushed her windpipe she might have continued to suffocate even after he dropped her on the ground and walked away
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This second "near miss" strangling perhaps illustrates that to REALLY strangle a victim to death...it takes a long time. I think some criminologists and/or doctors have clocked the killing time to an agonizing 7 minutes (and exactly HOW did they reach that conclusion? Watching someone get strangled? Calculating how long a person can live without oxygen based on other factors.)
The "successful" strangling of Miriam at the fairgrounds was actually pretty brutal to start, but 1951 censorship and Hitchcock's own great sense of style combine to "cut away" during the strangling so that it was distorted and reflected in the lenses of Miriam's fallen eyeglasses. "A great Hitchcock shot."
19 years after "Strangers on a Train" in a newly uncensorsed Hollywood(and London, where he made the picture) Hitchcock pictured the strangulation of a female victim in Frenzy and made it as disturbing as hell by LINGERING for many long seconds on the woman struggling, gurgling, losing consciousness and dying even as he cross-cut to the psychotic male killer's sweaty, sexually aroused face. That strangulation was more "personal" and lingering that the quick cut shock stabbings in Psycho...audiences were disturbed, not scared. (The 1972 R rating also allowed for the strangler to rape the victim first, though Hitchocck was rather careful not to show too much.)
And yet, the Frenzy strangling STILL didn't take as long as a real one would. We didn't need to see THAT.
The booze and a bit of weed are enough fun for anybody but that heavy stuff is best avoided.
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Yes, the issue here is not to "indict" anybody and everybody who have enjoyed booze, weed and perhaps other drugs(legality and addiction enter in, there) but to note that for a number of famous artists, these items were over-used to the point where 10 to 20 years of additional life were probably stolen away. Not to mention, somewhere around Straw Dogs, Peckinaph started directing his movies his movies drunk or drugged about half of each working day(He was hospitalized for booze on Straw Dogs and Dustin Hoffman threatened him with firing if he didn't sober up.).
I think you can literally see the results on screen in the choppy and disjointed look of films like "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" and "The Killer Elite." And yet, the first two of those three are STILL highly regarded, because Sam couldn't drink the talent away, totally.
One of the biographies on Peckinpah notes that while he was a longtime alcoholic, once James Caan came on as the star of The Killer Elite, the weak-willed Peckinpah suddenly had an ample supply of cocaine available and being used on the set by Caan and his entire entourage.
The cocaine habit pretty much wrecked Caan's star career in the mid-eighties -- once he rehabbed, he told producers "I will pee in a cup for you" to get roles --- but at least Caan survived and turned things around (he got the lead in 1990's Misery after every hotter male star in Hollywood turned it down, and made his "pee cup" speech to director Rob Reiner.)
Evidently, Peckinpah did not survive and turn things around. Booze and drugs brought him down...a heart attack at age 59. Though that story has a frustrating angle: Peckinpah MIGHT have survived the attack, but got medical attention too late. The heart attack began in Mexico; he flew back to Los Angeles for hospitalization and died HOURS later.
I found a Roger Ebert interview with Clint Eastwood, from the 70's, in which Ebert notes that while other male movie stars were working in pairs (Newman/Redford, Newman/McQueen, McQueen/Hoffman)...Eastwood had not chosen to work with a star of equal magnitude since the late 60s.
Eastwood said he was interested. "I talked to McQueen," he noted. And he agreed that a movie with Charles Bronson would be interesting.
He noted that he wanted to make one with John Wayne.
Side-bar:
The movie that never got made with Eastwood and Wayne was from a script called "The Hostiles" by Larry Cohen.
Page 502 of the Scott Eyeman bio of Wayne:
"Shortly after Clint Eastwood made High Plains Drifter in 1973, he optioned ('The Hostiles"), which involved a gambler to be played by Eastwood who wins 50% of ranch owned by an older man(Wayne.) The two men have to become partners , which is complicated by the fact that they can't stand each other. There's a battle coming that will destroy the ranch, so Eastwood, who knows about the situation, sells his half of the ranch back to Wayne, who is innocent of the underlying situation. At the last minute, Eastwood returns to help the older man fight off the hostiles."
Sounds interesting. But Wayne kept turning Eastwood down -- finally throwing a copy of the script off his yacht and into the ocean.
Wayne evidently didn't much like High Plains Drifter and Eastwood's "R-rated" take on the West.
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Interesting: in that interview with Ebert, the one equal star whom Eastwood did NOT mention was: Burt Reynolds. And as it turned out, Eastwood ended up on the cover of Time in 1978 alongside Reynolds ("The Macho Men") and in a movie with him in 1984(City Heat.)
The problem was: by 1984, Eastwood was aging but still bankable(Dirty Harry IV aka Sudden Impact was a 1983 hit), but Reynolds was suddenly a bit of a joke -- the Cannonball Run movies and Stroker Ace had devalued him. And City Heat was neither a very good movie nor a very big hit.
I still can't believe he turned down Sam Peckinpah.
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Bronson's reason given was brutally simple: "I won't work with a drunk."
The offer seems to have been made to Bronson after Peckinpah was photographed as a joke being given whiskey through an IV on the set of "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" -- which Peckinpah DID direct in many scenes while drunk.
The drinking -- and eventually cocaine(as promoted to Peckinpah by star James Caan on the set of "The Killer Elite" in 1975) eventually DID make Peckinpah virtually unemployable . He managed to get a final movie in the 80's called "The Osterman Weekend" in 1983, and then died in 1984 at age 59 of heart failure. His final "work" was a Julian Lennon music video!
I liked Charles'role in the Death Wish series (especially Death Wish 5), where he looked more ''distinguished'' and less threatening than he did in that rather depressing Western!
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Well he did Once Upon a Time in the West without his moustache. Perhaps the moustache "softened" his looks.
Also he was usually wearing a coat and tie in the Death Wish films. More distinguished that a Western star.