After twenty years, I saw the movie I'd been looking for. How was it?

Cafe Society
1

Sometime in the nineties, Siskel and Ebert did a segment on their movie review show where they chose some films that had not done well when released but nevertheless thought deserved to be rediscovered. One of Roger’s was “Cattle Annie and Little Britches”, from 1980, about two young women who become Old West outlaws. Hmmm, I thought, sounds like fun - must check it out.

That turned out not to be easy. None of the VHS rental places had it. It never showed up on the schedules of local revival houses like the Brattle Theatre, but I kept my eyes peeled.

Finally, paydirt - it recently got a DVD release, and was on order at my neighborhood library, so I reserved it, and on Saturday I took it home and sat down to watch my Obscure Object of Desire at long last.

Disappointing! Amanda Plummer, with the crazy eyes (Hunna Bunna from “Pulp Fiction”) was suitably wild as Annie, but a very young Diane Lane as Little Britches was pretty bad, a very flat performance (she has improved), and the two had no chemistry. Worse, they didn’t have much to do until the end, considering that their characters were the movie’s title.

I wanted to see two fierce women cut a swath through cattle country, robbin’ and shootin’ their way to glory, but they’re really just a sidebar to Burt Lancaster as the aging leader of a gang which has fallen on hard times, not a lot of drama in that, and Burt does his Dapper Gentleman thing, the sort of role he does on autopilot, no rough edges, and very unconvincing as leader of a bunch of trainrobbers.
Not a terrible movie, but certainly not what I was hoping for. Sorry Roger.

Have you ever waited a long time to see a film? When you finally got a chance to see it, was it all you were hoping for, or a big letdown?

2

When I was a newly minted adult living in Marina del Rey in 1985, In had a friend who wanted to be an actress. She went off to make a movie somewhere in the Caribbean or something and I watched her apartment and cat. I moved away and lost touch, and I always wondered what the movie was, and did her career take off.

When IMDB came on the scene, I kept looking for her. Years after that, about 2000, someone made a listing for her, and it turned out that film was her only credit. Now I had the title!

I went to ebay, and coincidentally someone was selling a VHS copy. It was like fate. I bought it, and finally saw it after all those years. My friend looked exactly as I remembered her, obviously, since I hadn’t seen her since 1985, when the movie was made.

As for the movie? it sucked.

I watched in in FF and it still dragged.

3

I looked for a copy of Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet for years; it was the only part of his “Animal Trilogy” that I couldn’t find. Finally managed to pick up a copy, and it was pretty terrific.

Some movies never got proper distribution, and even in the days of the video store, they were notoriously hard to track down. Sometimes you luck out and it appears online (methods omitted, but no, I’ve never used torrents). It took twenty-five years, but I finally found a copy of Terminal City Ricochet. Still haven’t watched it, though.

4

Not a movie, but a TV episode. I got into Star Trek when I was 11 or so, watching syndicated reruns. It was on weekends, so two per week. Over about 10 months in 1977-1978 I saw the entire run, except for Plato’s Stepchildren with its famous interracial kiss. Managed to miss it again on the next cycle. The show moved into a 5 nights a week late night time slot. Our TV broke the week it came up again. By the time my parents got around to getting a new TV, Trek reruns had stopped.

In college, a different station was running it in production order with The Cage added to the package, making a nice even 80 episodes. I knew they were in the third season, but didn’t have an episode guide handy in those pre-internet days. Went out drinking with some friends, and up on the bar TV is the episode title - yep, the only one I haven’t seen and I’m in an extremely noisy bar and the sound is turned down anyway. Turned my back on the screen to avoid spoilers.

Finally, in the mid 1990s, a new restored syndication package arrives (episodes are supposedly uncut for the first time since the 70s). I decided to rewatch the entire run, and this time, almost two decades after becoming a fan, I finally see Plato’s Stepchildren!!

Um… wasn’t really worth the wait. I mean, it wasn’t Spock’s Brain bad, but it was not very good at all.

5

I have a few:

Roseanna’s Grave - I saw the trailer for this at an art theater when I saw the movie Hamlet(Kenneth Branagh). I thought the trailer looked really interesting, but the movie had a very limited release and I could not find a proper copy of it at a reasonable price for a long time. I don’t know where I found it, but I did…it was really boring!!!

Made In Heaven - I saw this movie on TV as a kid, sometime around 1988 or 1989. Loved it as a kid, had ZERO idea what the title was and was never able to find it again. I posted a straight dope thread about it and it was discovered. I eventually found a stream or DVD of it and watched it. This was really good! Not amazing, but it lived up to my memory. Very cute.

Box of Moonlight - another movie I only every saw the trailer of. It had no major release and was hard to track down for a couple of decades. It was pretty good, but nothing super amazing.

6

The real pair were 13 and 16.

7

Even though I have an automatic aversion to movies where Heaven is a for-real place full of angels and stuff, I might have to take a look.

I saw that when it came out. Tom Dicillo ( director / writer ) has done some slightly off-kilter movies, like “Johnny Suede” and “Living in Oblivion”; this one had an interesting premise (construction manager’s project is shut down, he gets paid but is left at loose ends in an unfamiliar town) but it didn’t have a convincing resolution.

8

Interesting. In the movie, Annie was the older of the two.
That article has the whiff of mythmaking, but I guess most Western yarns do.

9

My response only tangentially fits the OP.

Decades ago, Siskel & Ebert raved and raved about the gospel documentary “Say Amen, Somebody”. They just could not stop praising (heh) it.

I spent 25 years or so casually looking for it. Eventually I came across a DVD copy of it. I watched the first 10 minutes or so before becoming distracted with something. This was maybe 10 years ago. I have not yet got around to giving it another go.

mmm

10

When I was a kid, we set the VCR to tape Hitchcock’s Frenzy. I thought it was pretty gripping and we got to one scene where a character is raising a weapon to kill someone and…the tape ended. Groan…

A decade later, I finally got around to watching it again and I realised that we had literally missed the last minute or two of the movie. I guess I got some closure, but I almost think I would have preferred never knowing what happened in the end.

11

I distinctly remember seeing the trailers for Mondo Cane and Mondo Cane 2 in the mid 60’s and it wasn’t until 20 years later that I found them on video. This was during my splatter/gore horror movie phase during the 80’s and was disappointed that the movies were just “weird world” complications. Oddly, Mondo Cane 2 gave me a nightmare the night I watched it. No other film has ever done that. I’ve never watched either again.

12

A 1984 sci-fi comedy starring Bill Murray was shelved by the studio for decades.

It was directed by a Saturday Night Live writer and had a cameo from Dan Aykroyd.

How do you shelve a film like that for decades??

(The film borrows footage from a number of old movies, and apparently the studio found it too complicated to secure the rights to those scenes.)

I always wondered about that film.

It finally appeared on YouTube in 2011. It’s a surreal black-and-white film with a number of wildly original ideas in it. But it’s not a cohesive film or one that makes you laugh. It reminded me a bit of the works of Luis Buñuel.

13

This one is a failure, so far.

At the natural history museum I volunteer at we have an Arizona in the Movies exhibit.* One of the items there is a continuously running copy of the 1940 movie, Arizona, on a projector TV. Behind it is a green screen wall and a camera mounted just over a smaller monitor aimed so kids will appear layered on top of the movie.

One of the stars is Jean Arthur who I like but naturally, I can’t sit an watch the entire two hour movie; the sound is way down anyway. Intrigued, I look up the info on IMDb and the only home version available is VHS. This explains the occasional tape artifacts I’ve noticed. Checking various streaming services also came up dry. I’ll have to wait until someone decides to rerelease a B movie that didn’t do too well. The sets built for it still stand as a part of Old Tucson.

*It is a holdover from when the museum was the Southwest Museum and doesn’t fit the current mission. Plan is to send it over to the history museum in Phoenix “some day.”

14

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie I greatly desired seeing, sought far and wide to find for a long period of time… and failed to have been disappointed.

15

Mine is more like 40 years and I did actually see it in it’s entirety but couldn’t remember the name or even much about it except for it’s ending, which at the time creeped me the hell out. IIRC, I even described it in a thread here and one of you good folks helped me find the name of it, but I couldn’t find it to rent / stream.

The masterpiece of 60s schlock that is Death Curse of Tartu showed up on TCM the other day. No wonder I’d forgotten most of it (though it did coming yawning back to me as I watched). The ending is just as I remembered it and not very creepy, though I guess I can see why my 8 year old self thought so.

It’s one of those that was featured on a Sunday afternoon horror show like Elvira or Sinister Cinema. I’ve actually found several of those that scared the hell out of me as a kid and the results are usually laughable.

16

That is usually the case. Made In Heaven took me a long time to remember/discover its title and while it isn’t amazing, it was just about as cute as I remembered. Very nice and a pleasant surprise.

17

I wanted to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when it came out, and it was many years before I did. I really enjoyed it once they get to the factory, but I thought it took much too long for that to happen.

18
    1. The movie is “Times Square.” If you’re not familiar with this movie, the plot, such as it is, involves two teenage runaways on the streets of Manhattan, their misadventures, and the band they put together. The plot, though, is irrelevant. The movie is just a framework to carry the soundtrack which was chock full of the “New Wave” music that was in vogue at that time.

I was the sole soul in the theater, until about a half-hour later, when one other person came in.

Cut to a month or two later. Another movie is coming to this theater, which seems to be similar to “Times Square” in that it seems to be a musical set in the far-distant future of. . . 1994! Well, that interested me, so I went to a theater–on a Sunday evening.

At least in my town, Friday is usually the day when theaters change their movies, so this movie had been playing since Friday.

I go to buy my ticket. The ticket guy tells me "We actually won’t be showing this movie tonight. We haven’t shown it yet, and so far, you’re the first person that has even show up to see it since the movie started playing .

The name of the movie: The Apple (1980) I finally saw it 20 years later on cable. Definitely an *oddball movie and I’ll have to rewatch to see exactly what they were trying to say, but it was not a movie where I kept thinking, “OK, I see what’s about to happen next.”

*A movie that features Joss Ackland and Vladek Sheybal in singing roles is defintiely oddball.

  1. Ordinary People (1980) I thought from the scant references I had seen that this was some dumb movie about people being depressed about a suicide. Finally saw it about 10 years ago, and was I had misjudged, and really was (in my opinion) a good movie. Supposedly “The Pretender” Michael T. Weiss is in it, but the only possible place he could have been was a scene inside a diner. Correct me if I’m wrong.

  2. The Kremlin Letter (1970) A more or less forgotten John Huston movie. A group of WWII era spies get together for one last caper. Features George Sanders in drag. It requires watching several times because so much of the plot details are advanced in dialog. Definitely worth catching, IMO.

19

I saw the “I’m sorry Dave” scene in “2001 Space Odyssey” in a display in a museum. It really intrigued me and I wanted to see the movie for years. Turns out, that was really the only good scene in the movie.

ducks for cover

20

We just bought that one not too long ago. Looked intriguing, Hope it’s good.

Do the BIM!

I remember reading about it*, but (as far as I can remember! ) have never seen it.

.

*in Starlog, of course. They covered any movie or TV that even remotely connected to sci fi.