We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
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We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
Added Steve’s Richard Brooks video to this page. Our thoughts found on his channel are listed below.
Hmmm…Richard Brooks…my first thought was…is he still alive…then I saw the beginning of the video and realize he has been gone for 27 years! I think I have seen Wrong is Right…but remember nothing about the movie so not adding into my tally. After taking an 0 for in the 20s..ended up seeing 14 of his movies…or 70% of his Top 20. Favorites would be #11 Bite The Bullet, #7 Crossfire….probably my favorite of his movies, and #5 The Professionals….good cast in good roles in a good movie. I have seen all of his rated movies…but they are not ones I ever re-watch…though I know Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood are good movies….just not ones I enjoy watching. Good video. Voted up and shared
Hi Bruce, The Professionals is probably the most rewatchable of Richard Brooks movies, it’s like an American spaghetti western but without the Ennio Morricone music, it’s great fun plus all those great actors. I still haven’t seen Elmer Gantry or In Cold Blood. I will some day.
Your tally 14, mine 10, Flora way ahead with 23. Thanks for the comment, vote and share, much appreciated.
HI STEVE
Thanks for clarifying the Movita issue. Getting to make love to two of Hollywood’s greatest heart throbs -The King and The Mumbler – whether on screen or off: what woman could ask for more?
So Mr M married Tarita the leading lady of the Bounty 1962 remake immediately after divorcing the leading lady of of the first version. As the saying goes, “He didn’t hang around”
I read somewhere that Mr Mumbles [like allegedly BoJo] had many children legitimate and otherwise by his different wives and mistresses. He allegedly provided for many of his castoffs and their children on that island his. If that report is accurate he had at least had some sense of moral obligation.
in my teens and early 20s I never took much notice of the directors’ credits on movies [with a few exceptions such as Hitch and John Ford] and I was almost solely starstruck.
Accordingly Richard was mainly known to me as Jean Simmons’ husband [1960-1980] rather than for his own work. Of course the latter was a fine body of work which included the likes of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Professionals, Blackboard Jungle and Elmer Gantry.
Your video does a very good job of profiling that career and is given a 98% satisfaction rating by me.
Best material in the video is the following in my opinion. FL= foreign language one; L = lobby card. My pick of the POSTERS: 1/Light Touch 2/2FL for Battle Circus [“Bogart in love!” screamed out the 1953 trailer] 3/1st one for Take the High Ground [I saw it on a double bill with Colonel Wilde’s Saadia] 4/two for Storm Warning 5/Mystery Street 6/FL for Deadline USA 7/two FL for Bros Karamazov 8/FL for Soldier Blue 9/1st one for Sweet Bird of Youth 10/1st one for Brute Force 11/classy set for The Professionals 12/FL for Cat on Hot Tin Roof 13/set for Elmer Gantry 14/two FL for Key Largo 15/1st one for In Cold Blood.
Best STILLS: 1/Widmark and Malden [close friends off set as well] 2/Looking for Mr Goodbar 3/Rock in love 4/LC for Lord Joel 5/LC for Bros Karamazov [Monroe was initially down for the female lead but withdrew 6/Candice Bergen 7/Sweet Bird of Youth 8/Brute Force 9/The Professionals 10/Maggie the Cat 11/saucy one for Elmer Gantry-hooker Shirley here is a far cry from the nice girl of Oklahoma and Carousel 12/Bogie & Bacall – always photogenic as a pair 13/Ensemble in The Last Time I saw Manchester 14/Blackboard Jungle – the role that lifted Charlie Bill from popular leading man to mega star, him becoming America’s No 1 box office star within 3 years.
ADDITIONAL TRIVIA: The release of 1966’s The Professionals caused some consternation among Lancaster fans. Burt is top billed on the posters but on the actual screen the stars’ names appeared in the order in which the performers themselves first appeared in the movie. As Marvin is first to be seen his name therefore comes before Burt’s. Thus there was controversy in the fan magazines of the time about whether the arrangement was meant to signify that Marvin was the top billed one and was now a greater star than Lancaster. Such an idea was sacrilege to Lancaster fans [like ME it must be said!] as Burt had been a mega star for 20 years whereas Lee had become a top star only recently with his 1965 Oscar winning Cat Ballou performance.
IMDB: “The cast listing at the very beginning of the film is unusual in that the billing appears out of order. Lee Marvin is shown first, demonstrating a machine gun while his name superimposes on the screen. Robert Ryan is billed next over a sequence in which he knocks down a man for punching a horse, then Woody Strode is shown subduing an unruly prisoner that he’s just brought into a frontier town, and finally Burt Lancaster’s name appears over a humorous scene with Lancaster in bed with another man’s wife.”
Hi Bob, thanks for the generous rating, review, trivia and info, always appreciated.
Happy you liked the lobby cards, stills and posters.
Looking at your review preferences, you nearly always favour the foreign language posters over the yankee Americano posters, I don’t blame you they are usually more striking, more arty and more colorful.
The downside is we miss the poster tagline for the movie and sometimes the credits are in a different order. For instance the Spanish poster for ‘They Died With their Boots On’ has Anthony Quinn listed first followed by Errol Flynn, in a supporting role. 😉
I didn’t notice that about The Professionals, next time I watch it I’ll keep an eye on the credits order. It was probably unusual back then not to list the star first but they do it a lot now. Actually I just thought of another one – The Great Escape – the credits at the end showing each of the main actors is in reverse order with Garner and McQueen listed last.
Four Richard Brooks films score 10 out of 10 from my sources – Bite the Bullet, Crossfire, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood. Seven more score 9 out of 10 inc The Professionals, Key Largo and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof tops IMDB charts and In Cold Blood is no.1 at RT.
Bruce’s top 6 (on critics chart) –
In Cold Blood 9.0
Key Largo 8.8
Elmer Gantry 8.7
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 8.5
Brute Force 8.4
The Professionals 8.3
My Video Top 6 –
In Cold Blood 8.6
Key Largo 8.5
Elmer Gantry 8.4
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 8.3
Professionals ,The 8.1
Brute Force 7.9
Wow nearly exactly the same order, nice. Bruce more generous with the ratings.
Richard Brooks on working in radio with Orson Welles – “With Welles, everything began with the writing. And he was very good at it. He was a terrific guy. After I had done a few days’ work, we’d go over the scenes. He had such a remarkable memory that if we’d get into a dispute about the way the story should or should not go, he’d say, “Well, let’s see, now, in ‘Lear’ . . . “, and then he would review the whole of the second act of “King Lear”, doing all the parts! Or he could quote from the Old or New Testament by the yard. His wealth of information and background about story lines was inexhaustible. He was inventive. Fearless.”
HI STEVE: Thanks for the detailed response. I agree with your comments about the foreign language posters and would add that they also attract me because I will rarely if ever have seen before the FL ones that you select. Many of your posters that I don’t highlight are as good as the ones that I do pick, but often I will have seen the former so many times that something that is completely new to me will have more immediate impact. Heck I also have to avoid ways of giving you 100% satisfaction ratings – that would never do!!
Good quotes on Welles and interesting comments from you about billing. That reverse order arrangement that you spoke of used to be a big thing, particularly in trailers for, and end credits, to MGM films in the late fifties and early sixties.
I think that what they were trying to do was imitate actor’s curtain calls where the star appears last and takes a bow. I don’t imagine that the latter was the aim in The Professionals though as if it had been Marvin would not have appeared first and Strode/Ryan in between Lee and Burt: the latter pair were the top billed two stars on the posters and cast lists.
My own thoughts at the time were that it was a compromise means of letting Marvin and Lancaster share the top spot: Burt on the posters and Lee on the screen. If that was the case, in my book Lee hadn’t earned the concession: Burt was by far the bigger star over the years.
Anyway it’s all in the past now and in the present the most important thing I ca say to you is “take care.” Also be good because we we are fast reaching the point where “He’s making a list and checking it twice. And he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.”
STEVE
In the final line of my immediately previous post to you “whose” should of course read “who’s”. I had a boss once who could never work out the distinctions between were, where and wear.
I’m usually familiar with such distinctions but often don’t think about them until it’s too late. Sorry for offending that way on this occasion.
Hey Bob…I fixed your “whose” to “who’s”. I also corrected all your other previous errors….so now you comments show that (1) Joel Hirschhorn is awesome. (2) Myrna Loy is the greatest actress of all-time when looking at box office and (3) that Die Hard is a Christmas movie….lol. Just know I am here for you….lol. Welcome back.
Frank Lloyd had a prolific silent movie career from 1914 until 1928 which comprised at least 105 non-talkies. In the first two years [1914/1915] all of them were short films but the subsequent numerous feature films that he made included silents version of later talkies classics Les Miserables and The Sea Hawk. Frank’s talkies career included many prestige films and historians opine that his classic talkies have dated well.
In 1942 Frank produced but did not direct The Spoilers with Wayne, Dietrich and Scott, Marlene getting billed above both men but Randy out-billing The Duke even though the latter was the hero of the plot.
“Randolph Scott, and John Wayne also appeared together that same year in a movie called Pittsburgh. Scott was billed above Wayne in both movies, even though Wayne’s role was larger and more important in each, not only because Scott had been a star for much longer, but also because he was under contract to Universal, whereas Wayne was borrowed from Republic.”
That extract is from Wikipedia which fails to highlight that Dietrich was again the female lead and once more was billed above the two male legends. How times had changed 14 years later when 7 Men from Now [1956] came around and Marlene’s career was in decline and The Duke was too expensive to hire for the lead in the Boetticher film but Randy wasn’t! Marlene had just two more starring roles post-1956, Witness for the Prosecution [1957]and Judgment at Nuremburg [1961] and she was top billed in neither.
Here is my own pick of the most enjoyable material in your video. As usual FL=foreign Language and LC=lobby card. Best POSTERS 1/Splendid Road 2/FL for Shanghai Story [good to see a reproduction of this old 1954 poster again] 3/First one for Children of Divorce- Frank’s final completely silent film 4/Lilac Time 5/Servant’s Entrance 6/two for Rulers of the Sea 7/the first two for The Last Command 8/Divine Lady [Frank’s 2nd sound film-it had a musical score, some singing and certain sound effects but no spoken dialogue] 9/the set for Blood on the Sun 10/the set for Wells Fargo 11/the first two for Under Two Flags 12/1st and 3rd ones for Cavalcade 13/the set for Sea Hawk 14/FL one for If I were King 15/first two for Mutiny on the Bounty.
First class STILLS: 1/LC for This Woman is Mine 2/the young Cooper – wooden as usual 3/Al Leach with lots of hair! 4/Servant’s Entrance 5/Doug Junior [aka Jamar] 6/Hayden as Bowie 7/a very racy LC for Hoopla 8/LC for Blood on the Sun 9/McCrea in Wells Fargo 10/Berkley Square 11/LC for Sea Hawk 12/LC for If I were Joel 13/Gable and Laughton 14/and finally isn’t it strange to see The King without his moustache? My Joan said you had to see him minus it to realise how good looking he was in real life. I presume that that is Movita Castaneda with Gable?***
Your Lloyd video is short by your standards but you have included some fine vintage collector’s items from both the silent and talkies eras, so “Voted Up” with a 98 % personal satisfaction rating from me. Note Steve how the following text almost uncannily links two of my personal idols: McCormack is my favourite classical singer.
***“Movita Castaneda was an American actress best known for having been the second wife of Marlon Brando. She was eight years older than Brando. She is the mother of Miko Castaneda Brando and Rebecca Brando Kotlizky. She specialized in playing exotic women in American and Spanish language films in the 1930s, most notably as a Tahitian girl, Tehanni in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) alongside Clark Gable and Franchot Tone. Of that film she became the last surviving cast member prior to her death in 2015 at the age of 98, surviving Brando himself by 11 years. From 1939-1944 Movita was married to Jack Doyle an Irish boxer nicknamed The Gorgeous Gael who became a tenor and modeled himself on Irish legendary tenor Count John McCormack”
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info and trivia, much appreciated.
Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Looking at his filmography Frank Lloyd really only had one big famous classic to his name and that was Mutiny on the Bounty, the rest aren’t as well known to the casual film fan.
Apart from Mutiny I’ve only watched two other Frank Loyd films and they are – Blood on the Sun and Wells Fargo.
I’m interested in seeing The Sea Hawk (1924) some day if it still exists, oddly enough battle footage from that film turned up in Flynn’s Captain Blood but not Flynn’s The Sea Hawk.
Two films scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – Cavalcade and Mutiny on the Bounty. There are no 9s but eight films scored 8 out of 10 inc If I Were King and Forever and a Day.
Trivia – Lloyd directed two Best Picture Oscar winners in the first 6 years of the Academy Awards existence – Cavalcade and Mutiny on the Bounty.
HI STEVE: Thanks for the detailed feedback. Granted Mutiny on the Bounty of 1935 is probably the classic that the Man in the Street most remembers Frank for if the Man thinks of him at all. However film historians and biographers contend that there was much more to his work than that movie: he was no “one trick pony”. Here for example is what IMDB has to say about him:
“Frank Lloyd was an unpretentious, technically skilled director, who crafted several enduring Hollywood classics during the 1930’s. In 1929, Lloyd became the second director to receive a coveted Academy Award, for The Divine Lady (1928), one of three films for which he had been nominated. He is Scotland’s first Academy Award winner and is unique in film history, having received those three Oscar nominations in 1929 for his work on a silent film (The Divine Lady), a part-talkie (Weary River) and a full talkie (Drag). He won for The Divine Lady.
However much of Lloyd’s acclaim is based on his work during the 1930’s. At Fox (1931-34), he directed Noël Coward’s Cavalcade (1933), and the historical fantasy Berkeley Square (1933) — both with meticulous attention to geographic and period detail. Immensely popular at the box office, the former won Lloyd his second Oscar and returned $ 5 million in grosses from a production cost of $1.25 million.
‘Berkeley Square’ was described by the New York Times as “an example of delicacy and restraint” and “in a class by itself” (September 14, 1933). Lloyd’s brief stint at MGM in 1935 culminated in the greatest success of his career. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) won the Best Picture Oscar in its year and heaped praise on the director for maintaining strong narrative cohesion throughout, and for eliciting superb performances from stars Clark Gable (as Fletcher Christian) and Charles Laughton (as Captain Bligh).
Lloyd continued in the same vein with the rollicking Foreign Legion adventure Under Two Flags (1936) and the sweeping (though historically inaccurate), big budget western epic Wells Fargo (1937). Also at Paramount, and, once again with his own production unit , he filmed the romantic story of adventurer-poet François Villon, If I Were King (1938), with excellent production values and superb acting from Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone.”
STEVE
The appreciation of Frank’s career that I gave you categorizes Divine Lady as a silent film but here is what Wikipedia says about that movie:
“The Divine Lady is a 1929 American Vitaphone sound film with a synchronized musical score, sound effects, and some synchronized singing, but no spoken dialogue.”
Accordingly as I said in my own comments 1927’s Children of Divorce starring Clara Bow seems to have been Frank’s final full silent film. He made adoration in 1928 but it too was synchronized in the way that Divine Lady was according to Wiki.
Thanks for the added info Bob.
Regarding your query on the still from Mutiny on the Bounty, I think that must be Movita in the close up with Gable. As you mention in your 2nd Frank Lloyd post there is that fascinating connection between the 1935 and 1962 Bountys – Brando and Movita Castaneda. They married in 1960 the same year that filming began on the remake, and were divorced in 1962. Brando than married Tarita the new Bounty’s leading lady.
My familiarity with Richard’s career relates to the period 1949-1973, from which I have seen 13 of his movies. My personal favourites among those 13 are Violent Saturday, Compulsion and especially The Narrow Margin.
Film historians and critics regard The Narrow Margin as one of the greatest B movies of the 1950s and indeed maybe of all time. You make it No 2 in your video’s ranking order; and it gets bucketloads of love from WH too: he gives it an 83% rating and ranks it the 8th best reviewed in the whole of 1952. I am sure that seldom or never have you pair both rated a B movie that highly.
The Narrow Margin runs for just 71 minutes and I saw it back in 1952 as the supporting feature to the comedy A Girl in Every Port starring Groucho Marx without his brothers. Critics/historians have long praised Fleischer for demonstrating via The Narrow Margin how much can be done on screen even within considerable economy of scale
Fleischer’s These Thousand Hills is just a routine western but I will always remember it vividly because when I watched it back in 1959 two other patrons in the cinema got into a fierce confrontation over which of them was entitled to the shared arm-rest between their seats. Their shouting match could be heard all over the theatre and eventually one of them lost patience and fled to a seat at the other side of the cinema, shouting back “I don’t care! Stick it!” [Possibly a pair or Mancunians with too much to drink!]
No Cogerson love unfortunately for Richard but your video does Fleischer proud and attracts a 98% personal satisfaction rating from me. Here is my own pick of the material in it.
POSTERS 1/two for Che 2/raunchy one for Arena [one of just a handful of movies in which Gig Young was the top-billed lead] 3/two for Conan 4/first one for Bodyguard 5/Trapped 6/1st one for These Thousand Hills 7/two raunchy ones for Armoured Car Robbery 8/the set for Bandido 9/1st one for Mr Majestyk 10/See No Evil [aka Blind Terror] 11/two for Barabbas 12/Violent Saturday [featuring Mature in his heyday and just one of many 1950s action features he made] 13/the set for The Vikings 14/the set for Fantastic Voyage 15/10 Rillington Place 15/two for 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Bruce credits that movie with an adjusted US gross approaching half a billion dollars. Wow! 16/two for The Narrow Margin.
Jacqueline White, the lovely blonde who played the heroine and love interest in The Narrow Margin is still alive at the age of 96. Narrow Margin was actually her final film even though it was made nearly 70 years ago.
Best STILLS 1/Sir Maurice with a rather worn-looking Golden Holden 2/Conan 3/two for Dr Doolittle 4/Between Heaven and Hell 5/lobby card for These Thousand Hills [featuring a team of 20th Century Fox’s 1950s contract players] 6/Bandido 7/Barabbas 8/Chuck and Eddie G 9/The Burnley Strangler 10/The Vikings 11/lobby card for Tora! Tora! Tora! 12/20,00 Leagues under the Sea
Hi Bob, thanks for reviewing my Richard Fleischer video, the generous rating, info and trivia are very much appreciated.
Happy you liked the picture gallery.
I didn’t expect The Narrow Margin to rank so highly, I only watched it once a long time ago so it may be time for a re-viewing. I was more familiar with the remake starring Gene Hackman and it’s been many years since I watched that one too. Maybe a double bill is in order.
I think 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a worthy no.1 on Fleischer’s filmography, a huge hit which was re-released many times in the 50s 60s and 70s. I saw it at the cinema a year after Jaws broke all records. Disney produced a new movie poster showing a great white shark attacking the Nautilus crew.
Two films scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – The Vikings and 20,000 Leagues. Three scored 9 out of 10 – Compulsion, The Narrow Margin and Fantastic Voyage.
Bruce’s top five –
The Narrow Margin 8.3
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea 8.2
Compulsion 8.0
The Boston Strangler 7.6
Tora ! Tora ! Tora ! 7.5
And my video top 5 –
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea 8.3
The Narrow Margin 8.2
Ten Rillington Place 7.9
Compulsion 7.8
Fantastic Voyage 7.6
According to IMDB Richard Fleischer’s favorite film of his was The Narrow Margin which was shot on a budget of $230,000 in just 13 days. Compare that with filming Fantastic Voyage – “The whole film took about a year to make – there were hundreds of days of actual shooting on it. But, even so, I love making big films. They’re a strain, but then, making any film is a strain.”
HI STEVE
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I liked the Hackman Narrow Margin as well but it was just a very loose remake of the 1952 classic, taking the basic idea of the earlier film and reworking and ‘modernizing’ around it. Overall they were I though two different films.
We should now have a further remake in which the witness travelling incognito under protection of the authorities is dressed up as Santa Clause to fool the villains and that film should be opened around Christmas time.
Anyway keep safe and have a good weekend.