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gromit
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2020 4:05 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
Lancaster is terrific in Elmer Gantry.
And Atlantic City is a nice late career turn.

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bartist
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2020 11:01 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Befade wrote:
Oh well....I always watch movies with snow or swimming pools.....
Speaking of Swimming Pools....Reminds me of The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. I’ve been rediscovering him on the Criterian channel. Just streamed Criss Cross where he plays a man so desperate to get back with his ex wife that he attempts to pull off a heist with disastrous results. And Come Back Little Sheba playing an alcoholic husband married to the Oscar winner Shirley Booth. I’m becoming a huge fan.....


Will check out that latter, which I've never seen, thanks. I totally understand moving to the southwest and wanting to see movies with snow. When we were in Oregon, with pretty much no snow in the winters, it seemed sort of unnatural, even though it was nice not having the nuisance factor of snow. But snow is beautiful. For a while, anyway.

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bartist
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2020 11:09 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Though "The Plague" was adapted to screen in the nineties, with William Hurt as Dr Rieux, I've imagined that an earlier adaptation (which AFAIK doesn't exist) could have cast Burt Lancaster in that role. When I read the novel by Camus (it's great, strongly recommend!), I envisioned a sort of French Burt Lancaster in the lead role.

And Billy could play that old Spaniard who never gets out of bed and spends a lot of time shelling peas. Seriously, he'd be great.

I'd like to play the old man who stands on his balcony and spits on cats below. My loogie skills are considerable.

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billyweeds
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2020 5:52 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Hate to rain on this parade, but I'm not a big fan of Burt. I lovelovelove him in "Sweet Smell of Success," and he's fun in "Trapeze" and oddly convincing in "The Swimmer" even though IMO he's seriously miscast. (The movie would never have gotten made without him but he's not my idea of a Connecticut WASP.) But in general I think he's lacking in nuance as an actor.

But thanks, Bart, and any time Burt wants to reanimate and star in "The Plague" I am there as the Spaniard.
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Befade
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2020 10:40 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
There’s something different about him. Can’t pin it down. Not a typical Hollywood actor. I’d like to see the Rose Tattoo again.

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carrobin
Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2020 2:40 am Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC
We had Burt Lancaster at our film class--I think it was after our screening of "Atlantic City"--and he was one of the most charismatic super-personalities I've ever seen. He took over the class, much to our professor's chagrin (which amused the students), barely letting him get a word in edgewise. I couldn't help wondering what the set must have been like when he and Kirk Douglas were co-starring.

Incidentally, one of the things I really enjoyed about the class was judging the effects of charisma; Robert Redford practically glowed (the whole class was urging him to run for president), and James Earl Jones filled the auditorium with his gravitas (which sounds boring, but he wasn't). Some had charisma on screen but very little in person. And there was the elderly couple on the front row at one class who were barely recognizable until they went on stage and suddenly they were Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, looking 20 years younger. I miss that class.
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Befade
Posted: Wed Sep 23, 2020 8:32 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Lucky you, Carol‼️

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Befade
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:22 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
I’ve never liked Westerns...the shoot ‘em ups, the cowboys and Indians. So imagine my amazement when I became enthralled with a genre I’d never heard of: the Western Noir. Just watched 2 with Glenn Ford and Blood on the Moon with a luscious Robert Mitchum. And.....they were filmed in my neighborhood! I really like the noir plotting and the emphasis on morality. Of course there’s no way of settling differences without guns. Makes me think of the way things are in this country now. Was America founded on gun power? What other country has western films? Is gun power the American way? All these uppity former slaves need to be put in their place mentality???

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gromit
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:44 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
I never much liked Westerns (or war films) until I decided to watch a whole bunch earlier this decade. I like the sense that you're on your own and that danger is always lurking out there, and there's an element of desperation just to survive. Some of that is very elemental. I'd rec Johnny Guitar, Naked Spur, The Yellow Sky off the top of my head.

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Guns certainly make the USofA uniquely dangerous. And these days gun laws are becoming more permissive than ever, resulting in the dangerous absurdity of young men walking around in public with military type weapons. It's so ridiculously unsafe and likely just a matter of time before a pair of weapon-toters at a BLM rally or other public gathering undertake a mass killing. It's not hard to see what is coming. I was hoping the crazed spectacle of heavily armed men in the balcony above the Michigan legislators was going to be a wake up call and turning point. Instead we're going to wait for something really ugly and on an unimaginable scale before some might take notice. It's scary when insanity becomes the norm.

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Befade
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2020 6:22 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Thanks for your recommendations, Gromit. I believe I’ve meant to see Johnny Guitar because Joan Crawford is in it and I watch her in anything. My other 2 likes were The Violent Men and Lust for Gold. Next up a Fritz Lang film: Rancho Notorious. They’re also very macho: the loner, his whiskey, the devoted woman or not, plus the gang of bad actors.

What you say about gun violence now is not unimaginable. That’s one reason I’ve given up watching the news. I believe intuitively that when you hold a gun it speaks to you. It says shoot.

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carrobin
Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2020 10:04 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC
Though I've never been a big fan of westerns, there are a few I love, such as "3:10 to Yuma" (the first title I thought of on the mention of "western noir"--both the Glenn Ford original and the Russell Crowe remake are well worth seeing) and "Lonely Are the Brave" (if that can really be called a western). Also "The Magnificent Seven" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," of course, and "Silverado" was enjoyable.

Most Americans want fewer guns and stronger gun control, but the NRA is still controlling the politicians. And there's definitely a gun-loving streak in the American consciousness, maybe left over from the days when the continent had to be heroically seized from its original inhabitants.
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gromit
Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2020 12:42 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
The NRA has mostly crashed and burned. It became a huge grift just like most GOP/right-wing endeavors. When you believe in ultra-capitalism the end result is almost always fraudulently profiting off of those you can dupe. You know, like Trump University When money-making is the holy grail, laws and ethics are for suckers (govt's the problem, so why follow its rules?). And then of course you plow some of your ill-gotten profits back into buying off and corrupting the politicians so that the rules favor or don't apply to you.

The Supreme Court really farked things up with their myopic 2nd Amendment rulings. What used to be an extremist argument, pushed by the NRA for decades, has become the law of the land. And GOP state legislatures have been extremely irresponsible with their carry laws.

Guns are just so easy to use and so deadly in their effect that it's crazy to let people walk around US cities heavily armed as though they were posted to Afghanistan. It doesn't help that political polarization is crescendoing, while these days people take offense very easily and are loathe to back down. Plus a dash of our rather violent culture (if it bleeds, it leads; video games, shoot 'em up action movies, Tv, etc)

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billyweeds
Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2020 12:11 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
My favorite Westerns are "High Noon" and "Shane," and (if it can be called a Western) "Lonely Are the Brave."

"Johnny Guitar" and "Rancho Notorious" are insane semi-feminist variations on the genre, with awesome contributions by Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in the former and Marlene Dietrich in the latter. Nicholas Ray directed JG and Fritz Lang RN. Weird and wonderful.
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Befade
Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2020 2:29 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Gromit......I see an editorial in your future. NYT? “Why it’s better to live in China than the USA during these troubling times.”

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gromit
Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:03 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
My mother would end phone calls "Okay, be safe" and I'd usually respond that it's very safe here in Shanghai, that they live in NJ, with crime and drugs and guns, so they were the ones who needed to try to stay safe.

It's nice living in a land without gun ownership.
You see this reflected in Europe too, where terrorist attacks often occur with knives, like the one in Paris last week, or the one in London last year where the knife-wielding perp was attacked with a narwal tusk. I mean one dead and two injured barely makes the news in the US.

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