I’d read all the Dortmunder books as they were released and thought they were great. Also seen some of the movies based on them.
Who’d think to measure the height of the trailer by taking a photo of a woman in striped stockings?
It was in pretty frequent rotation on TV when I was a kid in the 1970s.
Interesting. I’ve seen it quite a few times over that period – at university showings, conventions, cable TV (TNT used to show it a lot), then on DVD (I own a copy). To me it’s not a forgotten fiilm at all.
To be honest, none of the Harryhausen movies are.
Here’s a forgotten one – Merian C. Cooper’s version of H. Rider Haggard’s She. I had read about the film and seen stills from it while growing up, but the movie never seemed to show up. That’s because the film was believed to be lost in an RKO archive fire. Fortunately, silent film star Buster Keaton had an original print in his garage (!), and it was restored. Harryhausen in 2006 worked on colorizing it. Harryhausen had been a notable critic of colorization – he especially hated the job they did on King Kong, saying that the foliage was all the same shade of green – but he made an exception for this film. Probably because they were originally going to make it in color, but at the last minute the studio changed its mind. Harryhausen’s version shows how it could have looked back in 1935.
It’s an impressive film. Also influential. I have no doubt that the look of the Evil Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was stolen from this film. Harryhausen himself re-used the avalanche footage for his first solo film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. And the audience chamber of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed clearly influenced the audience chamber of the Gran Lunar in his First Men in the Moon.
I’d hoped to show this version at next weekend’s Arisia SF con, but it got axed by the Powers That Be.
Jack Arnold once said that he wouldn’t mind if they colorized The Creature From the Black Lagoon, provided they got the colors right. He said that the Gill-man’s costume was a delicate shade of mossy green, but advertisers and toymakers always made the colors too garish.
If IMDB is to be believed, it was a dud of a movie.
I saw it on YouTube and didn’t even make it 10 minutes in before deciding not to waste any more of my time. I mainly remember it because I was in junior high, and some of us dubbed an overweight male teacher, you guessed it, “Rabbit Test.”
Agreed, it was garbage. Bad movie, dumb premise, poorly executed.
But I’m basing that on seeing it once 4 decades ago.
I am a Harry Anderson fan from way back, but He did a tv movie with Ed Begley Jr. titled “Spies, Lies And Naked Thighs” that seemed designed to kill his career. They made his character extremely boring, and the timing for the “comedy” bits was miss(as opposed to hit and miss),
The first movie I ever saw in a theater as a child was C.H.O.M.P.S. It has pretty much dropped out of sight.
I think that plenty of drive-in B pictures would fall into the “forgotten” category. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of:
Chato’s Land
Duel at Diablo
They Came to Rob Las Vegas
Electra Glide in Blue
Fuzz
Two-Lane Blacktop
Vanishing Point
Frogs
The Cheyenne Social Club
The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox
… and so on.
Whether these are any good or not is subjective. Whether they could be classed as A-pictures is also. Some of them have big stars, some of them don’t. I certainly liked a few of them when I saw them at the drive-in, but few made it to the late-night TV movie, or to home media. For the most part, it seems to me that they have been forgotten.
There was a TV movie in 1980 called Once Upon a Spy, with Ted Danson, Christopher Lee, and Mary Louise Weller. Anybody else remember that one?
I remember it vividly. Ted’s hairpiece deserved an Emmy.
“Electra Glide In Blue” is actually pretty good, although largely forgotten. IIRC, it also starred Robert Blake.
Anyone remember Ishtar, the 1987 comedy with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty?
I still recall how severely Siskel & Ebert trashed it. Ebert gave it half a star and called it “a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy.”
I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and was surprised to see it with 40% rating with plenty of solid reviews from several respected critics.
mmm
There has ben a re-evaluation of thast movie. Apparently they’ve decided the overboard condemnation of it when it first came out was unwarranted.
I can’t say I’ve never seen it. I know that it was by Elaine May, whose work has been realy good (although I think she’s virtually forgotten today). The only other thing I remember is that it’s the only movie that had posters that took up two sequential poster spaces
Neither Vanishing Point nor Two Lane Blacktop are forgotten. They are what is known as “cult classics”. VP was even (poorly) remade with Viggo Mortensen, a remake which has been rightfully forgotten. A well made gearhead movie never goes out of style. See also Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.
As for the others, I can’t dissent. I always sort of wanted to see Electra Glide but it never seems to turn up and I don’t want to buy it.
She was an amazingly gifted writer and improvisational performer. Arguably better in those roles than her partner Mike Nichols who turned out to be one on the most renowned film directors of that generation. By comparison, May had only middling success as a director. I guess to be remembered, you should probably do your best work last.
I thought of that movie, but couldn’t remember the title, when I thought of another TV movie, The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything.
I remember liking that one, but I can barely remember it. I’m thinking Pam Dawber (Mork & Mindy) & Robert Hayes (Airplane!) starred?
I’ve seen that. It’s based on a 1962 book by John D. MacDonald, which I’ve read. It’s based on the old trope of a Magic Watch that stops time for evryone, except the user. It was used in an episode of The Twilight Zone, for instance “A Kind of Stopwatch”, that actually aired after the MacDonald book was published.
A Kind of a Stopwatch - Wikipedia.
There was an Outer Limits episode with a couple of Martians (played by Barry Morse and a pre-All in the Family Carroll O’Connor) who use a similasr device (“Controlled Experiment”) to analyze a murder. It aired in 1964.
"The Outer Limits" Controlled Experiment (TV Episode 1964) - IMDb
I don’t know who came up with the idea – I doubt if it was MacDonald. There is, of course, a TV Tropes page on it:
There was also a segment of a Simpsons Tree House Of Horror episode where Bart and Milhouse had such a clock (IIRC, they ordered the clock from a comic advertisement).
ETA: silly me, now I see that even the preview for the TV Tropes entry is a still from that episode.
ETA2: I just begun reading the TV Tropes entry, but isn’t the brothers Grimm’s “Sleeping Beauty” the first literary example for the trope? It didn’t involve a clock or other device, but a curse that let anything be frozen in time.