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From: Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-18 (Saturday)
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2025 14:13:54 -0800
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On 1/19/2025 12:14 PM, anim8rfsk wrote:
> Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
>> On 1/19/2025 9:10 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:
>>> Yesterday was 1) football, and 2) streaming TV series. I barely got to
>>> soaps:
>>
>>> What did you watch?
>>>
>>
>> I decided to watch movies from the 1940s by watching:
>>
>>
>> His Girl Friday (4K disc) 1940 comedy directed by Howard Hawks and
>> starring Cary Grant as a newspaper editor who cooks up a scheme to trick
>> his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell) to continue working at his newspaper
>> instead of running off to get married to Ralph Bellamy.  Between running
>> cons on Russell, Grant keeps framing Belamy for minor crimes.  In the
>> backdrop of all of this Russell is investigating an upcoming execution
>> which is politically motivated due to the killer (who may be mentally
>> incompetent) shooting a Black police officer and the governor needing
>> the Black vote to get reelected not stopping the execution.  I found the
>> humor for 1940 to be pretty good.  At one point I had to rewind it back
>> to confirm what I heard.  Grant's character is talking to someone about
>> Bellamy's character and is asked, what does he look like.  Grant says,
>> he looks like that guy from the movies, Ralph Bellamy.  Now I recognized
>> Bellamy's name in the credits because he starred in "Trading Places,"
>> but I didn't know he was famous enough that you could make a joke about
>> him in 1940.  This is one of those old movies with lots of fast talking,
>> and people talking over each other.  Even with subtitles it was hard to
>> follow the dialogue at times.  I never saw this movie (or heard of it)
>> before now.  But it's another movie in one of the 4K box sets I own.
>> And I'm determined to watch all the movies in those box sets.  Overall,
>> it wasn't bad.  And today I plan to finally watch the rest of the movies
>> (dramas and romantic comedies) in the set that I haven't gotten around
>> to yet.
> 
> I saw this for the first time sometime in the last year probably on TCM.
> But I can’t remember more than the first half hour or so of it.
> 
>>
>>
>> Casablanca 1942 (4K disc) - The classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart
>> as an American nightclub owner in German occupied Casablanca during
>> WWII.  Bogart gets torn between helping his former lover and staying out
>> of the way of the Nazis.  Probably the most shocking thing about this
>> movie was the discovery that there was gambling taking place in Rick's
>> nightclub.  This movie is not part of any box set.  I just happen to
>> like the movie so I bought it.  And now I had a good excuse to watch it.
>>   This was my first time watching this disc and as I put the disc in, I
>> was hoping there would be a commentary, and it turns out there is a
>> commentary, two in fact, with one being from Roger Ebert.  Ebert does
>> great film commentaries and this was no exception.  He gave an in-depth
>> commentary about the making of the movie and all the historic events
>> that was taking place at the time the movie was made. He talked a lot
>> about the production code of the time and what was and wasn't censored
>> as a result.  He said Warners were very anti-Nazi, before being
>> anti-Nazi was fashionable.  And almost the entire cast and all the
>> extras were made up of real refugees from Nazi Germany (or invaded
>> countries) and in the scene where the nightclub patrons sing to drown
>> out the Nazis, the tears in the extra's eyes were real.
>>
> 
> I love this movie.

One of the first things Ebert said on the commentary is everybody loves 
this movie.  Even people who don't like old black and white movies like it.

  The great love of my life dumped me for a guy named
> Victor and against all odds we somehow all ended up being friends.
> 
> I first saw it in a revival theater I was doing the advertising for on a
> double bill with Play It Again, Sam.  They would run them together, so the
> end of Casablanca became the beginning of Play It Again, Sam as one big
> continuous movie.
> 
> 

Isn't that a Woody Allen comedy?  Checking...Yes, it is a Woody Allen 
comedy.  Although I just know the name, I don't think I ever watched it 
before.


>> I was going to try to squeeze in "The Maltese Falcon" before watching
>> Casablanca, but when I went to watch it I discovered it wasn't available
>> to stream for free on any of the usual streaming channels. Oh well.  I
>> didn't really have time to watch it anyway.
> 
> I think I have all of these stored on the DVR that I no longer have access
> to.  A great film. Don’t bother with the earlier versions, except as
> curiosity.
> 
>>
>>
>> The Big Sleep (TCM) 1946 directed by Howard Hawks. The movie stars
>> Humphrey Bogart as a detective hired to look into a blackmail scheme.  I
>> saw this once before but didn't remember it all that well.  I had the
>> movie sitting on my DVR for over a year.  It would have ended up getting
>> deleted unwatched if I didn't have Casablanca to pair it with.  That
>> plus it also had the same director of "His Girl Friday" made me want to
>> watch it again.  I didn't care much for it.
> 
> Really? I love this movie. Who killed the chauffeur?
> 

I have no idea.  I think I stopped trying to follow the plot and zoned 
out about half way through.

Although one thing I noticed was in the "Casablanca" commentary Ebert 
talked a lot about how short Bogart is and the various tricks they used 
to make him appear taller than his costar, while in this movie it's 
almost a running gag the various comments about how short Bogart is.

> The cab driver (an uncredited Joy Barlow) and the bookstore clerk (an
> unrecognizable Dorothy Malone!) are worth the price of admission all by
> themselves.
> 
>