What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[LizzieMaine]

lol
I think I might have the same movie recorded and never watched. I've recently been going through my unwatched DVDs and came across this one. I put it in the pile to watch. I've been putting it off -- I find most full-length movies from this time period (1912-1916ish) to be unwatchable.

It's that whole tableau style that i find tiring -- a title card explains what's happening, and then you see the actors all lined up in a medium shot acting out what was described. And then on to the next scene and on and on for five reels. Plus -- and it amazed me to realize this -- there isn't a single closeup in the whole picture. Griffith had been doing closeups for five or six years by this time, so it's not like they were unknown -- I would have expected DeMille to at least have some awareness of how to do them and why they were important, even at this early stage.

There's some good things about the movie, though -- Farnum, for all his doughiness, is a pretty subtle actor, given the limitations of the technique and the material, and the Indian actress who plays his wife, Red Wing, aka Lillian St. Cyr, is also good, even though she mostly just gets to suffer nobly.

 

[AmateisGal]

"High Society(1956)", strangely enough. Anything that stars Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong is bound to be good. My only regret is that I didn't discover this little gem sooner.

LOVE this movie!

 

[Black Dahlia]

Eyes of Fire (1983). A weird film...I liked it!
X
BD

 

[EmergencyIan]

1959's "North By Northwest." It is a very good movie, in my opinion. I also really enjoyed the wardrobe, the vehicles and seeing what the different locations looked like in the late 1950s.


- Ian

 

[Engrishman]

LOVE this movie!

The Crosby-Sinatra duet called "Well, did you evah?" is barrels of fun and I can't stop singing it.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

'The California Kid' with Martin Sheen and Vic Morrow, made for TV flick from 1974. One of my favorites.

 

[Widebrim]

'The California Kid' with Martin Sheen and Vic Morrow, made for TV flick from 1974. One of my favorites.

Boy, Tom, I remember watching that on TV when it came out. First production that I saw Sheen in.

 

[The Good]

Last night, I watched the 1987 film, Wall Street. I thought it was pretty good.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Fantastic film, ain't it? As far as 1970's made for TV movies go anyways!

Boy, Tom, I remember watching that on TV when it came out. First production that I saw Sheen in.

 

[Amy Jeanne]

Future Shock (1972)

lol lol lol lol lol

 

[DanielJones]

This morning it was 2010 (1984). It's funny, I actually liked that one better than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Keir Dullea seemed ageless. A movie that depicts the Soviets not Russians, still in the Cold War. Of course back in the mid 80's we were still making films that depicted them as the Monster, little did anybody suspect the collapse. This is still one of my favorites though.

Cheers!

Dan

 

[Miss Golightly]

Winter's Bone - very good.

 

[Amy Jeanne]

Everybody's Doing It (1938) with Preston Foster and Sally Eilers.

Cute, but very weak script.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Air Tight," a 1931 Hal Roach two reel comedy starring "The Boy Friends," a sort of collegiate version of Our Gang featuring wacky teen-age antics. There's a lot more messy slapstick in these films than is usual for Roach productions, but the kids are engaging -- especially Dave Sharpe, who went on to become a famous stuntman and could have been a romantic matinee idol if he'd been six inches taller. Mickey Daniels, on the other hand, may be the ugliest fellow ever to earn a living as a movie actor.

This series, which only ran for two seasons, is priceless in another way -- as a document of teen fads during the post-flapper/pre-swing era. Anyone got a sweatshirt with snappy slogans written on it in laundry marker?

 

[John in Covina]

"Air Tight," a 1931 Hal Roach two reel comedy starring "The Boy Friends," a sort of collegiate version of Our Gang featuring wacky teen-age antics. There's a lot more messy slapstick in these films than is usual for Roach productions, but the kids are engaging -- especially Dave Sharpe, who went on to become a famous stuntman and could have been a romantic matinee idol if he'd been six inches taller. Mickey Daniels, on the other hand, may be the ugliest fellow ever to earn a living as a movie actor.

This series, which only ran for two seasons, is priceless in another way -- as a document of teen fads during the post-flapper/pre-swing era. Anyone got a sweatshirt with snappy slogans written on it in laundry marker?

Are these available on DVD? The Beau Hunks mention this Boy Friends series on one of the covers for the Little Rascals music CD's. Mickey was in the silent era Little Rascals and on the talkies era plays the Truant officer in one episode where the gang plays hooky the day the class goes to a great amusement park.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Very little of the Roach material is on DVD except for the Gang and a few random Laurel and Hardys. But nearly all the Roach talkie shorts show up on TCM as filler and as the occasional marathon. They ran several long marathons last month, which I managed to tape, and have been working my way thru -- they ran about half of the Boy Friends series, along with a *lot* of Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase, a bunch of Thelma Todd-Zasu Pitts/Patsy Kelly, and several Taxi Boys. The absolute gems of the bunch, though, were most of the shorts Harry Langdon made in 1929-30, which were all good and sometimes even brilliant.

That all of the Roach output isn't on DVD is a crime. They've been passed from owner to owner like a bag of old laundry for years, and nobody's cared enough to do anything meaningful with most of them. But TCM has TV rights for the next forty years, so we'll at least get to see them from time to time.

 

[Feraud]

Agree with Lizzie's comments. I love the Roach material and managed to dvr a bunch of the Laurel & Hardy, Todd/Pitts, etc. shorts.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I have seen a lot of that more obscure Roach stuff: One of my oldest friends is a hardcore film collector and a Roach specialist (for many years he held the title "Keeper of the Celluloid" with the NYC Tent of the Sons of the Desert)... and many of the 16mm prints that were the original source material for the shorts shown in TCM's recent marathons belong to him. So I actually watched the Taxi Boys and Todd-Pitts films a long time ago. And of course, Charley Chase is an unjustly forgotten master... though I prefer his silents to his talkies.

The only Roach films I don't care for are the Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts. As I've said here before, I just can't suspend disbelief that there isn't an offscreen director svengali-ing the kids. I don't have this problem with Laurel and Hardy, Chase, etc... because they were actually comic geniuses who weren't totally dependent on their writers/directors.

 

[Feraud]

That all of the Roach output isn't on DVD is a crime. They've been passed from owner to owner like a bag of old laundry for years, and nobody's cared enough to do anything meaningful with most of them. But TCM has TV rights for the next forty years, so we'll at least get to see them from time to time.

Who owns the rights to the Roach material?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Most of the rights to the sound films are owned by RHI Productions, run by a guy named Robert Halmi, who picked them up from what was left of Hal Roach Productions in the '80s. In the late 90s, he sold out to Hallmark, the greeting card people, who must've had some notion of using the films as fodder for the Hallmark Channel, but nothing much ever came of that, and they ended up selling them back to RHI a few years ago. Many of the films air on TCM today with Hallmark Pictures logos tacked on at the start or finish.

RHI, apparently, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, so if Time-Warner wanted to buy out the whole package for good and all, now would be the time to do it.

The exception is the Little Rascals material, which I think is still owned by King World Productions, which bought them in the sixties for TV syndication and made a fortune. They may have sold or leased some of the rights to RHI at some point, but I'm not sure what the current status of that arrangement is.

Roach himself messed around with the rights for a long time -- he bought them back from MGM, his distributor, in the forties, and leased them out to a theatrical reissue company and then various television packagers in the fifties. I think whatever entity remains of Hal Roach Productions still controls at least some aspect of the intellectual property connected with the films, and licensed many of them to be released on 8mm and 16mm by Blackhawk Films, back when people were buying new home-format film prints.

The silent Roach material is all over the map. Much, but not all, of the material originally distributed by Pathe up until 1927 is public domain, and you see it turn up in all sorts of DVD packages, some good and some lousy. The silent material distributed by MGM -- much of which is lost -- went back to Roach, but very little has been done with it, and what survives of it seems to be in limbo. A few of those films are PD, but most are still under copyright -- there were VHS issues in the '80s of some of the Laurel and Hardy, but little has been done with the other films.

The Library of Congress has nitrate negatives on most of the surviving Roach library, including all the talkies, and those negatives are the sources for many of the restored prints that show up on TCM.