Archive 547

November 2023

Missile to the Moon 1958 – Review Coming

Review: Tormented, 1960

"The piano genius of jazz" Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) is on the brink of lucrative fame and fortune, about to marry the wealthy, young and beautiful Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders) and in general feels he has nothing but a golden future ahead. But not everything is rosy: he's got a problem, an inconvenient old girlfriend (Juli Reding) who won't cooperate now that the "good thing" between them has to be over to make way for Tom's ascension into high society.

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Review: Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023

I got to see this Michael Scorsese film while visiting a lightly populated area of Northwest Arkansas called Osage Valley. This area continues to hold many traces of the departed tribe which used it as a hunting ground (people can dig up stone arrowheads by the bucketful there, I'm told). The audience on a Sunday evening in November filled the theatre and patiently sat through the three-and-one-half hour tale showing the plight of the oil-rich Osage tribe in nearby Oklahoma facing a steady rate of murder among their members.

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Review: Dangerous Blondes, 1943

Light-hearted murder-mystery tale of a detective fiction writer (Allyn Joslyn) and his wife (Evelyn Keyes) who get caught up in helping the local police solve a murder at a fashion photography business. Though the story twists around without giving away any obvious solution and like a legitimate mystery keeps threatening to get more of the cast killed, the police only really have to wonder about who slew the wealthy Mary Forbes (Isabel Fleming) who is slashed across the throat with a "wound big enough to have been done by a bayonet," says the coroner.

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Review: Disputed Passage, 1939

Medical adventure story that is half spent in the training of the star John Howard (as up-and-coming Dr. John Beaven) at the hands of the intimidating medical genius Dr. Forster (Akim Tamiroff) who is also a cynical and relentlessly critical professor at a prestigious medical school. The other half of the film is Beaven's romance with Disputed Passage's headline star Dorothy Lamour (as Audrey Hilton) and we spend a good part of the later run time in China with warfare and disaster all around us.

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Review: Ulysses, 1954

Kirk Douglas is the wandering Greek hero who is trying to get home to his island home of Ithaka where his wife Penelope has been waiting for years. Silvana Mangano plays Penelope as a resourceful but trapped Queen who is besieged by a rowdy gang of suitors since Ulysses is presumed dead by (almost) everyone and Ithaka demands a new king. The suitors are a sorry lot of blowhards and conmen, but when Anthony Quinn (as the powerful Antinous) shows up to carpe deim the situation, Penelope rapidly runs out of delaying tricks and now must face up to a forced wedding.

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The classic Universal horror films, the "Dark Universe" franchise, and why "they appear to be collecting dust on a shelf" – Movie Web MSN

Speculative article about the travails of Universal trying to to capitalize on some of the most recognizable characters in the history of film, but unable to do so effectively.

The Dark Universe has become one of the biggest cautionary tales of franchise filmmaking of the last decade. Universal believed that they could build their classic monsters into a cinematic universe reminiscent of that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 2014’s Dracula Untold was intended to be the beginning of this universe, but when that movie failed at the box office, it was then decided that 2017’s The Mummy would become the new launching point. Well, that didn’t work either, as the Tom Cruise-led adventure film crashed and burned just as brutally as Dracula Untold.

Suzanne Somers 1946 – 2023

How Suzanne Somers was fired from Three's Company because she asked for equal pay – Yahoo News

About Suzanne Somers and how the Thigh-Master Turbo-Charged Her Career – People MSN

Fran Drescher, Kathy Griffin, Barry Manilow and more remember Suzanne Somers – MSN Variety

"Suzanne Somers’ husband recalls her final days" – NBC News MSN

Suzanne Somers dies, age 76 – Deadline Hollywood MSN

Suzanne Somers' IMDB Biography – IMDB Suzanne Somers

The "Permanencia Voluntaria" collection at UCLA

The words "permanencia voluntaria" translates to “continuous performance” which hearkens to when you could walk into a movie theater and the film program, feature film and the shorter films that were included were continually running in an endless loop.

The UCLA Permanencia Voluntaria archive and work concentrates on Latin American films, the link below is to a blog post talking primarily about The Calderón Brothers who were exhibitors, film producers and distributors from 1919 to 1990. It also has a particular focus on the first Mexican sound film Santa (1932) that was directed by Antonio Moreno and starred Lupita Tovar (probably most famous in America for her lead role in the much-lauded Spanish-speaking version in 1931 of Dracula shot on the same sets as the Lugosi version.

More info at Permanencia Voluntaria Blog at UCLA

La Fortuna Di Essere Donna – 1956

Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni and Charles Boyer

Sophia Loren is photographed without her consent while adjusting her stockings on the side of the Appian Way, a famous tourist roadway in Italy that gives a lurid context to the photo, suggesting she is a prostitute. When the image ends up on the cover of an Italian magazine, again without her consent, she commences to denying to everyone "that's not me!" in the now infamous photo.

La Fortuna Di Essere Donna – 1956 with Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni and Charles Boyer

Controversy around Marilyn Monroe statue in Palm Springs, California – Columbus Dispatch

A "Forever Marilyn" statue derived from the subway steam skirt-raising scene in Seven Year Itch is a cause of contention because it is centered on a street that has been closed to vehicle traffic for years and now the City wants to reopen the street, which means moving the statue.

Honoring Ozu Yasujiro – Something

Ozu Yasujiro, the leading Japanese film director behind classics including "Tokyo Story" and "Late Spring," has had his double birth and death anniversaries – Ozu died in 1963 on the day of his 60th birthday, a little more than a year after the release of his last film "An Autumn Afternoon" – celebrated throughout 2023 at places as varied as the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles’ Margaret Herrick Library and the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute."

Joan Collins, Marilyn Monroe and the "Wolves of Hollywood" – MSN El Pais

She was extremely friendly, so we started chatting. After a couple of martinis, she warned me about the harassment in Hollywood and the ‘wolves in this town,’" Joan Collins, 90, now reveals in her explosive new memoir, Behind the Shoulder Pads: Tales I Tell My Friends, which will be published on September 28..."

When The Dalton's Rode – 1940

Randolph Scott and Kay Francis share top billing in this very energetic western, but the real stars are Broderick Crawford as the leader of the outlaw Dalton Brothers and the stuntmen who pull off an escalating series of dangerous stunts which keeps this film churning forward. Jammed with humor (often via the caricatured hillbilly "Ozark Jones" played by Andy Devine) and with a not-so subtle script containing criticism of law and order gone corrupt and violence becoming an end unto itself, When The Dalton's Rode is not the average western however much the horseback chase scenes and robbed trains seem familiar.

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Marilyn Monroe's Brentwood home temporarily saved from demolition – Salon

Various forces pushing for it to be turned into a historical monument.

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