I’d just like to say that I’m happy to see a return of the Tri-Bad thread titles. They have been absent for too too too long.
And, yeah. Bowery Boys and Dead End Kids. That was some serious shit there. So bad, I watched Three’s Company at 3 in the morning
Well. We meet up again. I love the Blondie movies.
On Saturday I watched Scooby Doo. Not exactly riveting drama. But damn the guest stars were the best.
So I have a soft spot for those. We all have our nostalgic favorites.
Don’t make 'em great.
When I was growing up, in the 1960s, one local station ran Bowery Boys movies on Saturday mornings. I never liked them. They were cranked out by one of the bigger Poverty Row studios, Monogram. It got to the point that when I saw the Monogram logo, I knew it would be a crappy movie. The station would alternate them with other serial-type comedy movies from the 1940s. They showed a bunch of movies featuring a goofy teenager named “Henry Aldrich,” which was a spinoff from a popular radio show. Though made by Paramount, they weren’t very good either.
Ever see the Ma & Pa Kettle movies? They weren’t on TV often, but they were shown at a lot of the Saturday matinees I attended with my brother.
I especially remember the one where Ma and Pa went to New York, and Pa dumped a cup of water off the 103rd floor of the Empire State Building to see how long it would take to hit the ground.
Three or four minutes later, they were out on the street and the water landed on top of Pa’s hat.
On the subject of Lost Horizon: back in the mid/late-70s, in the dark days before cable and VCRs, one of the local TV channel listings showed Lost Horizon with Ronald Colman was going to be aired at some time in the middle of the night. So, despite that fact that it meant missing sleep on a week night when I was going to have to go to work the next day, I stayed up to watch it.
To my disgust, when the movie started, it was the 1973 musical version.I don’t know where the screwup happened, but the air in my apartment was blistered with threats to TV Guide and the network for interfering with my sleep.
My online listings said the original Gone in 60 Seconds was going to be on. I hadn’t seen it since it came out, so I made an effort to watch it. Turned out to be the remake. At least it wasn’t in the middle of the night.
Yes, that same station used to show those too, and some of the Abbott & Costello movies. Ma & Pa Kettle also got an occasional run at my local movie theater on Saturday afternoons. I’d practically forgotten about them. They had some funny moments. I think they first appeared in the A&C movie “Comin’ 'Round the Mountain,” then got their own series. Marjorie Main was perfect as Ma Kettle.
Does TCM ever show any of the Francis, the Talking Mule movies? My junior high school would occasionally show them in segments of ten or fifteen minutes during the lunch hour, but I saw all of them on TV and at Saturday matinees first.
Francis is the thing I associate most with Donald O’Connor, even more than Singing in the Rain or any of the other musicals he was in during the '50s.
DONALD: How did you learn to talk?
FRANCIS: Silly question. How did you learn to talk?
No Francis.
I remember one where Francis was made an Army mule. Can’t remember where I saw it.
The 1973 version is a notorious box office bomb. When Johnny Carson and his Art Players did their parody (Tibet Your Life) six months later, Ed introduced the segment by directly referencing the bomb with the implication that their version is worse!
I happen to have a couple of DVD box sets purchased from Carson Enterprises and Tibet Your Life is in one.
Actually, Ma & Pa Kettle first appeared in the 1947 movie The Egg & I, based on Betty MacDonald’s semi-fictional memoir of the same name. They were so popular with the audiences of that movie that they got their own movie series.
Wasn’t that Ma and Pa Kettle in Murder he said with Fred McMurray?
(A true was of talent in that movie, btw)
Ah, you are so right. I forgot about that one. I think in my entire life I might’ve seen that movie once.
I will admit that the main reason I knew this was because I had recently watched a TCM movie I had recorded and there was an ad for a (at that time) upcoming TCM presentation of The Egg and I which described it, among other things, as the introduction of Ma & Pa Kettle.
The complete soundtrack-but-with-pictures-inserted-for-missing-scenes in “Lost Horizon”? The same thing has happened with “A Star Is Born” (the Judy Garland version). There she and James Mason are talking to each other but we are looking at photographs of them. Only a few scenes, about a quarter of the way in.
‘TCM Under the Stars’ in August has been going on for years. Maybe they got tired of featuring only the Big Stars like Bette Davis and Cary Grant, and expanded to lesser lights. The B-list, or even C-list. Fred McMurray had a whole day of movies as did Leo Gorcey,
fred mcmurray had a movie career because "everyone else went off to war and by the time they came back people were used to him " or so he said in an interview once …
I recall an extensive restoration of Metropolis done about 20 years ago. I think they took the best examples of all the surviving footage, but there were still significant bits missing. I remember title cards that explained the missing action; can’t remember if there were still shots.
Since then, an even more complete version was discovered, and the new sections were added to the existing restoration. Still not absolutely complete, but pretty close.
My brother in law came into our family in “later days” after my parents had pissed away a small fortune in the vegas casinos. They were living hand-to - mouth in a trailer park. He always called them “ma and Pa Kettle” when he was out of earshot. Not wrong either! Ha!
I’ve always suspected that Double Indemnity was back-dated to 1938 because audiences would have wondered why Neff wasn’t in uniform in 1944.