Watch List for 11/10/2025
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| I Like Stan Best When Winning, So Tend to Gun the Remote After This Scene |
Watched: (and) Skipped Through, plus The Man I Love
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| Here's One Time You Could Show Up for Act Three and Get the Best of a Movie |
Reap the Wild Wind has good things, but a far-in court trial isn’t among them. DeMille, knowing or not, provokes fast forwarding here. I say no to Lynn Overman and pitch parts of Susan Hayward to get quicker with the squid. Had I but spared college companions to lulls in 1974, theirs a restless itch felt by default for having dragged them to it. Not to revile Reap, thanks to much being good about it, plus visual enhance Blu-Ray supplies. Speaking of fruit with worms to discard, there is The Razor’s Edge and Anne Baxter dipso narrative endlessly fussed over. Dropping her sharpened this Edge from ungainly 145 minutes to manageable 100 or so. Not to discount Razor merits, what’s good being terrific (Power, Tierney, especially Clifton Webb, Elsa Lanchester, Herbert Marshall, let’s have all there is of these). Picking my own company on film is what we all prefer to do in life, to edit chat among folk onscreen as if able to do so with acquaintances off. If only. Next of late: Skyscraper Souls and an easy fix, keep Warren William and can the rest. Not that I dislike Wallace Ford, Anita Page, Jean Hersholt, but beside William they evaporate, or in my case, go by like blurs while I press forward to get him back. And adios Jeanne Crain and Jeffrey Lynn from A Letter to Three Wives plus Ann Sothern and Kirk Douglas except when Florence Bates is around. This picture, much as I admire it, belongs to Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas. Did Mankiewicz, Zanuck, and company realize these two were the whole show? Me with my push-button votes yes. Lastly, Jerry Lewis, but why linger long on this? You’re Never Too Young and The Nutty Professor each resolved to about forty minutes, enough being enough. Will I be able to get through The Day the Clown Cried even when finally permitted to look at it?
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| Is This Where Gable Learned That Hand Trick He'd Use in Publicity for Band of Angels? (see index) |
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| For Me, Dolores Moran Had More on the Ball Than Bacall ... Warners Should Have Used More of Her |
Warners had celebrated jazz as dark-lit enterprise in a short subject called Jammin’ the Blues, out in 1944 and confirming that jam sessions happen best at night after business hours and all of squares figured to be tucked in and ready for when AM alarm sounds. The Man I Love takes stylistic leaf from Jammin’s one-reel book to establish the Lupino character and define that of Bruce Bennett, director Raoul Walsh capturing well the isolation of those who live altogether for their chosen art. Melodrama is incidental to what story and these characters are really about. Best then to let Warner mechanics go expected way and enjoy what The Man I Love reveals about truly alternate lifestyle that was jazz music, even as the film focuses on hit standards most of which went back a ways, these a bridge mainstream audiences could easier cross and associate with movies viewed before plus songs heard previous, and often. We listen to accompany for The Man I Love and visualize Warner cartoons where tunes got used, that or Steiner’s score for Saratoga Trunk, background against bustle at Robert Alda’s nightclub. The Man I Love was shot during mid-1945 but not generally released until early 1947 after select ’46 holiday opens, though service personnel saw it during the interim as with much Warner output. Lacking King’s Row pedigree perhaps, but The Man I Love similarly gave opportunity to WB players otherwise ill-used or miscast after initial impressions wore off, these including Andrea King, Martha Vickers, Dolores Moran, Bennett and Ridgely. The effect is of workshop participants displaying what they learned over contract terms not so productive as they hoped. The Man I Love offers such opportunities and is outstanding if not largely ignored, at least till Warners announced Blu-Ray release and has bumped broadcasts at TCM to High-Def. Also there is footage added that wasn't there before.
posted by John McElwee at 5:52 AM
11 Comments:
Was there a moment when running time joined color and wide screens as lures for the postwar audience? Certainly drive-ins and kiddie matinees made Quantity a major selling point, but was there also a tendency to lengthen/pad A movies (and even Bs) to promise Value for Money?
Yes, too long and theater operators would lose showings per day. But under a certain length a movie doesn't look worth the time and expense to get off the sofa. As a kid I had the idea that a proper movie was about two hours, and under 80 minutes better come with a second feature or at least a short or two.
Still fascinated that once upon a time, the great film comedians could pull off a top-of-the-bill classic in under an hour. And TCM has plenty of 30s As that fit a 75-minute slot with room to spare.
Dan Mercer defends Jeanne, but not Jerry:
Adios Jeanne Crain? I'm not sure that I can agree with you.
Such a one as her could be wife or lover or the mother of one's children in a relationship endlessly perfected.
At least, I think so.
I appreciate your point--enjoy the gold, burn the dross--but there may be other compensating factors not strictly related to the film.
As for example, "The Nutty Professor," where you might save that last 40 minutes by not putting it on at all.
I'd sooner say "adios, Jerry" than "adios, Jeanne."
I've probably said this before here, but once you've seen enough B-movies on TCM, anything over 75 minutes seems too long.
If you fast forward through any non-Marx scene in The Big Store, it isn't a bad little movie. There's something about its vaguely run down look that appeals to me.
Fast forwarding? Eileen Heckart in THE BAD SEED 1956 & as much of Nancy Kelly as possible & Sara Berner in REAR WINDOW 1954, hoo boy, does she ever overact
THE MAN I LOVE has been on my watch list and I finally watched it yesterday. Ida Lupino is a wonderful actress, and I think she's very underappreciated.
I took my son with me to see Del Toro's version of "Nightmare Alley" (may have been my Dec 17 birthday in 2021) - - Reading that it would have an ending more like the novel made me feel that it could surpass the older version (with Tyrone Power). It did not. Too unrealistically stylized. Thought the physical issue with the scheming psych lady was over the top. And the ending sequence was only a tie with the original.
Just watched two Lupino Blue-Rays from Warner Archives: Out of the Fog and The Hard Way. She was the best, hands down.
Dan Mercer casts his vote for Dolores Moran and Martha Vickers:
Among the "ill-used and miscast," it would have been interesting to have had lunch with Dolores Moran and Martha Vickers at the Warner Bros. commissary while "The Man I Love" was being made. The conversation could have begun with, "So, what was it like to work with Lauren Bacall?" I'm sure their response would have been something like, she was alright when you were facing her, but what a b--ch she was behind the scenes. Not that she necessarily was, of course, there was just a lot of smoke generated by the fires intended to benefit her.
Moran's part of Helene de Bursac in "To Have and Have Not," a film suggested by a novel of Ernest Hemingway, was supposed to be a lot larger, something commensurate with her being billed as another new talent, along with Bacall. However, Bacall was a protege of Howard Hawks and Bogart had become involved with her, so it wasn't a big surprise when they figured that no one in the audience would ever buy Bogart's Harry Morgan ever being interested in anyone other than Bacall's Marie "Slim" Browning. As Bacall recounted in her autobiography, the result was that her part became a lot bigger and stronger. To drive home the point, she was even given lines imitating the Bursac character that just buried that one. As it is, I prefer Moran over Bacall even in her abbreviated appearance. She's prettier, more voluptuous, and with an open sensuality that comes across as more natural and appealing than Bacall's rather contrived rendition of the "Hawksian" woman. But this was the big break that Moran did not get, so a few films later, she took a chance on love and marriage.
Martha Vickers had made a sensational impression as the wanton little voluptuary, Carmen Sternwood, in the initial version of Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep," but it left the studio with a problem: between Vickers and the way the film addressed a very complicated plot, Bacall was being overshadowed. Those two cigarettes in the ashtray as the film concluded were supposed to signify another great romantic pairing of Bogart and Bacall. Instead, the two of them seemed to be folks on the same platform waiting for different trains. So, a good deal of the film was reshot or re-edited, and Bacall was given the spotlight she needed, though at the expense of making the film not only complicated but incomprehensible in part. No matter, those new scenes in themselves were awfully good. All of Vickers' scenes but one were reshot, something Chandler noticed when he saw the new version. He thought Vickers had been terrific and regretted the way her part had been cut down. So did she, as it interrupted the trajectory of the stardom the studio had in mind for her. After a few more films, her movie career petered out and she made the transition to television, when television was what you did when you weren't big enough anymore for the big screen. Her personal life remained, shall we say, "interesting," with three marriages, including those to latter-day Mr. Hollywood, A. C. Lyles, and Mickey Rooney.
John, THE HARD WAY is one of my all-time favorites! I plan to show it at my Classic Film Club in 2026.
Of course I zip through great chunks of movies I've seen a Godzillian times. Will skip everything in THE ROARING TWENTIES, just to revisit the last 15 minutes one more time. The kick in a piece like this is hearing people gripe about the stuff that's the treasured cream to different folks. Sorry, Randy J., I LOVE all the can-you-hear-this-in the-back-row over-the-topping in THE BAD SEED. And come to think of it, Sara Berner's big moment in THE REAR WINDOW is kinda a highlight to me too!
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