Thats one of his movies I could never get "into".

After the movie they'll be airing his "Ol' Blue Eyes is Back" performance which filmed his return to singing in 1973 after he retired for awhile. I'd recommend watching that... some of his great songs will be performed (although his voice wasn't at his peak).

I hope they show him singing "There Used to be a Ballpark".

I'm with you. I couldn't get into that movie either. It was ok, but not great.

They had one of his performances on prior to the movie too. I'm not sure if it's the same one or not.

EDIT! It is the one they had on earlier. It's worth seeing again.

I'm watching it now.

Its hard to realize that Sinatra was as old (at the time of this performance) as I am now.

You see the stars in the stands watching him? So far I've seen Richard Conte (one year after playing Barzini) and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Yeah, I saw Sammy after I saw Lucille Ball and Tony Bennett.

One of the big pictures they have in the center of the stage he resembles Paul Newman a great deal.

Well, that was certainly disappointing.

I have the album (and bought it when it first came out) so I know what the music sounds like, but this show was boring.

Oddly enough, I THINK I saw it on tv when it aired backed in 1973... I THINK I liked it at that time.

I guess an hour show was all you got back then. He could have sung "New York, New York", or "My way". Anything but "Send in the clowns". I've never been a fan of that song.

"Send in the Clowns" was a big song from a Broadway play that was newly popular at the time and the idea was to show Sinatra was still current.

Personally, I like the song, but not Frank's version.

What are you doing up so late?

I take advantage of days when I don't have to get up at 4:00 in the morning.

Plus, I took two naps today.

A nap sounds nice. I think I'm gonna take one now.

Sorry for the delay, but after recent server problems, I can finally post my review of CAPRICORN ONE, which was on TCM two Saturdays, late at night. Man, I sure hope my WHERE EAGLES DARE review happens before July.

I'm sure Geoff will be "greatly helped" by my review.



CAPRICORN ONE (1978) - ***

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mouUUWpEec0

After the American space program's miraculous turn-around in the 1960s from a joke who's rockets exploded on the launch pad to the monumental triumph of Apollo 11, people in the 1970s really thought that the manned-mission to Mars was simply inevitable. In 2008, we're still waiting, and experts think that at best, it won't happen for another 20-30 years. The fact that we landed a man on the Moon forty years ago, but with fustrating minimal progress since then, is probably why conspiracy theories about NASA faking the Apollo missions still persist today.

But such beliefs were born in the 70s, the decade of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, where our paranoia at our government was culturally-high. From these days came Peter Hyams' high concept flick CAPRICORN ONE, a mixture of crazy people's ramblings and a good old school conspiracy thriller.

You have NASA about ready to launch its first manned-mission to Mars, only for the crew to be pulled just before ignition. As the empty rocket flies off to the Red Planet, the grounded astronauts learn from NASA Chief Hal Holbrook that weeks earlier, NASA discovered that the machinery was botched, and the crew would surely die.

Really, for a movie full of running, helicopters, and bullets, the memorable scene is when in his monologue, Holbrook goes off emotionally on not just the American government, but the culture itself, for abandoning the trek into space simply for sitcom reruns. You may hate what he does, but can you really blame the guy?

Anyway, since NASA can't afford anymore expensive humiliating failures because their budget is inches away from Congressional castration, Deep Throat talks the astronauts into cooperating to help fake the Mars landing.

So for like 8 months, you have The Juice in O.J. Simpson, ole Sam Waterson, and James Brolin locked up at an abandoned Texas airbase, filming close-up interviews and FX footage until the real rocket blows up upon re-entry. Since this is a cover-up, and astroanuts were publicly declared dead by NASA, they wise-up and escape into the desert.

Hyams is one of those filmmakers who's always been a better producer than director (look at his casting!), but I must say that even if ONE is by-the-book and never escapes its autopilot narrative, he still shoots a solid piece of genre entertainment, much like his 2010 and OUTLAND.

I do dig that when a certain snooping NASA employee disapears into thin air at a bar during a meeting with reporter Elliot Gould, Hyams has no cut away or extraneous scenes showing what exactly happened to him. The audience knows simply that the nerd is as dead as fried chicken, and thats all we need to know. Likewise, as the helicopters with machine guns stalk the astronauts down one by one, we never see their actual demise, but only the emergency flares they fire into the sky in defeat. Again, nice touches for a disposable flick.

If anything, my only serious problem with CAPRICORN ONE is that James Brolin is just rather damn boring as both an actor and as an action figure. You know, the Anti-Josh Brolin.

What if they had Waterson, not Brolin, shoulder the movie's 3rd Act? I mean, we always see Waterson as a prick or brainiac at the movies or TV, but unlike Brolin, he's fun to watch in general, even in the worst LAW & ORDER episodes. His non-action cinema personality would have made us accept the possibility of him "buying the farm," unlike Brolin.

I did notice with ONE that while the movies of the 2000s and 70s share an outright distrust of the establishment, the main difference I see is that the films in this current epoch of Iraq and Katrina display more a lack of confidence with governmental operations.

If ONE had an unstoppable governmental cabal with the guns, money, and courts to back up their power, then THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM is about those same people utterly disorganized and impotent when the shit hits the fan. Hell, alot of people probably don't buy the 9/11 conspiracy nonsense simply because that evil operation worked.

That said, the black/brown guy still dies.

James Dean was originally signed to play the role of Brick, but died a few months later. It would have been he and Liz Taylor's second film together. But yes, it is generally regarded as one of Newman's two best roles. (I haven't seen much but another role I loved him in is "Road to Perdition." So amazing to see an aged actor still capable of giving an inspiring performance.)

Another fun fact I learned the other day is Humphrey Bogart stood only 5'8'' tall! I realize actors are generally on the smaller side, but, Lauren Bacall has to be 5'11'' and the two stood eye to eye in every picture.

Bob Hope was 5'11'' & 1/2, which surprised me as I thought he would be much shorter. Let's see, who else can I remember: James Dean (5'8''), John Wayne (6'4''), Jimmy Stewart (6'3''), Frank Sinatra (5'8'' & 1/2), James Cagney (5'7''), Gene Kelly (5'7''), Fred Astaire (5'8'' & 1/2), Robert Mitchum (6'1'' & 1/2), Sidney Poitier (6'2'' & 1/2), Henry Fonda (6'1''), Clark Gable (6'1''), Cary Grant (6'1''), and Montgomery Clift was only 5'10''; I figured him to be much taller.

I'd highly recommend a few other Newman roles that you might enjoy - "The Hustler", "Hud", and "Cool Hand Luke" from the 60's. In later years, two roles stand out - "The Verdict" and quickly becoming another of my favorites, "Nobody's Fool" (a charming movie).

BTW - I enjoyed him very much in "Road to Perdition", too.

He was fantastic in The Verdict. It was slow-moving, but one of the best courtroom dramas ever.

Somebody Up There Likes Me

"Dont worry 'bout a ting, Ma"

That was a really, really good movie. Both Paul and Sal were excellent in it. Also, I just love Pier Angeli.

By the way New Yorkers, how authentic was Newman's accent in the movie?

(NOTE: I meant to post this weeks back, since it was on TCM late one night during a Jerry Goldsmith special, which included a screening of CAPRICORN ONE. Shit happens.)



THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978) - **1/2

When a grand heinous crime has been committed, but public desire for justice is denied because the perpetrator has escaped justice, the culture will create resolution for itself. As we saw in David Fincher's brilliant ZODIAC, the Zodiac Killer is never caught, so Hollywood has Clint Eastwood confront and blast away a Zodiac-esque serial killer in DIRTY HARRY. Boom, case closed.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL itself deals with Josef Mengele, the infamous "Angle of Death" at Auschwitz who conducted horrible unspeakable human experiments. The greatest Nazi war criminal never to be apprehended, he fled to South America and continued hiding until his drowning in 1979, and if rumors are to be believed, the Mad Doctor continued his scientific abomination with help from the military dictatorships of Argentina and Paraguay.

But in 1976, Mengele was still one of the more notorius global fugitives, and that same year Ira Levin's best-selling novel THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL gave us a rather frightening, fantastically evil scheme being implemented by Mengele and the other outlaw Nazis of ODESSA: Cloning Adolf Hitler.

I've never read the book, but my mother swears to me that its leagues better than the adaptation (but don't all novel fans say that?) and I guess I'll have to take her word for it. As for the film itself, its both a good and bad movie.

The badness starts when BOYS opens with a lone American Jewish youth down in South America, risking life and limb to capture audio and visual evidence of what ancient Nazis and Neo-Nazi youths are planning...and he's played by Steve Goddamn Guttenberg. Yes, POLICE ACADEMY's Steve Guttenberg. Man oh man; I should have known that he would be an omen of things to come. It doesn't help that his usual whiney-voice refuses to let me take his character seriously, and plus he gets a kid killed in this movie.

Asshole.

Then there is Gregory Peck as Mengele. I mean, its gutsy casting to cast Atticus Finch as someone utterly evil, and certainly Peck's towering presence works for him here, but that super duper heavy black hair dye and German accent that's all over the place....silly is the word.

But to be rather honest, I almost was willing to forgive all that simply because of Sir Laurence Olivier. THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL was one of Olivier's paychecks for his family after being diagnosed with the muscle disease Dermatomyositis, but he's rather awesome as an aging Nazi hunter in world where the Jewish youth are too busy either dancing disco or snorting coke, and nobody else really gives a shit about war criminals thirty years on the lam. Plus, unlike Peck, his accent doesn't stick out for the wrong reasons. He scored an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for this flick.

A good scene, and probably why he landed that nomination, is when he is questioning a former Nazi mistress at a German jail, and you know if that if he could, and was decades younger, he would strangle her...but he can't, and she knows it. She even taunts him when he asks about the mysterious amount of orphan boys being sent to peculiar households around the world:

"Why you ask? I doubt you'll discover any secret grandchildren alive now!"

Wow, what a bitch.

There is some touches in BOYS that I liked, from ODESSA being is as strong by the end as it was in the beginning, and I even sort of dug how Mengele gets all upset when his precious experiment is threatened with cancellation by ODESSA's German Aryan stud beefcake henchmen when they're unleashed upon the guy's island labs. Twenty years down the drain this side of waiting for the fourth INDIANA JONES movie.

This includes the hocus pocus regarding how the cloned Hitlers around the world would repeat his psychological ascent through living in the same family conditions. Like a Michael Crichton book, I bought the idea behind a science fiction premise that I know is most likely impractical in real life.

Director Franklin Schaffner, who shot PATTON and the original PLANET OF THE APES, helmed for the most part a competent if unremarkable mystery thriller, but if you want a great example of everything good and bad about this movie, take the finale between Olivier and Peck. So much heat in that last confrontation, so much animosity by Olivier against Peck, and how is all that resolved? A fist fight.

Yes, old men duking it out, and its as hilarious as the cripple on SOUTH PARK, but I guess Schaffner didn't mean for this to be funny. Plus, there is a great throwaway shot when the "father" of one of the American Hitler clones tells Peck: "Hey, I got nothing against you Nazis and Jews, for the real problem is those blacks".... and really, that to me is a wasted cool idea.

I mean, if such an elaborate ambitious scheme as THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL was actually hatched, whom would the American Fuhrer lead the majority whites against? In the 1970s, probably the African-Americans.... but in 2008, more like Mexicans, or any Latino that the Minute Men think jumped the border fence. Of course, maybe Schaffner knew to make concept clear without hammering it into our skulls.

Or maybe I need to quit reviewing crap like IRON EAGLE.

On a final note, Turner Classic Movies showed this and CAPRICORN ONE together as part of their showcase on the great late composer Jerry Goldsmith, but lets be honest, if TCM were wanting to actually highlight his best cinema soundtracks, they should have included PATTON and the first STAR TREK movie as well. While THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL did earn Goldsmith an Oscar nod, TCM might as well have re-titled their "The Films of Jerry Goldsmith" line-up into "The Films of Jerry Goldsmith We Could Afford The Rights to Tonight." Bitching aside, they did at least show THE WIND & THE LION, which has an underrated kickass Goldsmith score, so TCM is still cool in my book.

The accent was over the top, in an almost Dead End kids kind of way, but that was part of the film's charm.

Let's not forget that "Somebody Up There Likes Me" was Newman's first pairing with Steve McQueen.

It's one of my favorites. I wish they'd do a high quality dvd release.

MANY years ago, Paul Newman gave an interview to "Playboy" and he discussed how he researched the role for this movie. It ended up that he and Rocky Graziano would go out drinking every night and get snookered.

This was the first Paul Newman I ever saw (I was a young kid and it was on tv) and I thought he was a really cool actor. Little did I know then how much I was right.

Favorite line: when the trainer told him to get a cup (for inside the jock) and he replied he'd drink right out of the bottle.

SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME (1956) ***1/2

Newman does succeed in capturing the familiar Graziano mannerisms: the crude, New York-Italian accent; the mumbling; the sneers and pouts; the cocky strut, with huddled shoulders and shuffling feet. He has a nervous energy, wiping his mouth and nose with his fingers, rubbing his hands together, scratching his neck, and dancing around in one place, as if constantly facing an opponent in the ring.

This perpetual motion--even when he is seated--suggests a potentially explosive force that naturally finds release in fighting, and it contrasts with the generally listless movement of Brando and Dean. The role is tremendously showy, and it gives Newman a chance to play an extrovert, as contrasted with his character in THE RACK. And whereas his soldier was an intelligent man, his Rocky is almost subhuman, a purely physical being.

The film follows Graziano's impoverished childhood in New York's East Side slums, where he grows up in the streets, among hoodlums and gangs. His father (Harold Stone), a disappointed, third-rate ex-boxer, takes out his frustrations by drinking and by beating up Rocky; his mother (Eileen Heckart), is an unhappy, nervous wreck.

As a result, Rocky becomes a brutal delinquent, spending most of his youth in reformatories and prisons. Defiant, impulsive, striking out with his fists at anyone, he is seemingly incorrigible. Even the Army can't tame him--he punches an officer, goes AWOL and is sentenced to hard labor--but in prison he learns that he can turn his hatred into a living: instead of fighting the world he can punch one man at a time in the ring... He becomes a successful fighter, marries a devoted woman, Norma (Pier Angeli), and eventually makes it in the world, becoming middleweight champion.

The story is in the tradition of a number of fifties movies about delinquency and rebellion... Newman's portrayal of Rocky as an inarticulate teenager is similar to Brando's motorcyclist in THE WILD ONE, who also rebels against anything convenient and practical. But unlike the Brando character, Rocky develops from a causeless rebel into someone with a clear goal--to become a respected member of society--and this strong ambition allies him with many of Newman's subsequent characters.

In THE RACK Newman says he's "half my father's disappointment--half' my mother's hope," and the situation here is the same. Alienated from his vicious father, he runs out "to be something," and strikes back at the world... Their final confrontation, in which each recognizes his responsibility toward, and need for, the other, is a powerful moment; and the two reaching awkwardly for each other recalls the car scene in THE RACK. Another affecting scene is his mother's visit to him in prison, where she says he must help himself... This prefigures the mother-son confrontation in COOL HAND LUKE, except that in the latter, both realize that the rebel cannot change, whereas here there's hope that Rocky will turn his life around.

Newman effectively portrays Rocky's sincere but clumsy attempts at tenderness with Norma; in subsequent films he would play many men who have difficulty being tender... Rocky is made even more sympathetic by his genuine concern for a fellow hoodlum (Sal Mineo), whose idolatry of Rocky as a father-figure evokes the similar relationship between Mineo and James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.

So you're the guy, who reads the articles.

People still bother with PLAYBOY outside of the articles?

That "other" content has become fucking obsolete in this internet age of Porn 2.0*

*=Same websites, if CNN is to believed, is draining millions out of the adult entertainment industry. That sucks.

Playboy has articles too? Haha, I never wasted time with print porn

Exactly.

Great review (above), pb.

He's become quite a damn good reviewer. You checked out his PRINCE OF THE CITY review?

Aw, shucks, guys.

High Society (1956) is musical film made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in VistaVision and Technicolor with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It was directed by Charles Walters and produced by Sol C. Siegel from a screenplay by John Patrick, based on the play The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry. The cinematography was by Paul Vogel, the art direction by Cedric Gibbons and Hans Peters and the costume design by Helen Rose.

The successful jazz musician C.K. Dexter-Haven (Bing Crosby) had married and divorced rich Tracy Samantha Lord (Grace Kelly), but remains in love with her. She, however, is about to get married to a bland gentleman of good standing, George Kittredge (John Lund). The intense and edgy reporter by the name of Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra) covers the nuptials for Spy Magazine, and falls for her as well. She must choose between the three very different men in a course of self-discovery.

The film stars Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Celeste Holm with Louis Armstrong, John Lund, Louis Calhern, Sidney Blackmer, and Margalo Gillmore.

High Society marked the final acting role for Grace Kelly before she became Princess of Monaco (the film was actually released three months after her marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco). At the time of the film's release, Sinatra and Holm were over forty and Crosby was fifty-three. Kelly, however, was only twenty-six and was actually the second consideration for the part of Tracy Lord, the original choice, Elizabeth Taylor, being unable to commit.

High Society would mark the first on-screen pairing of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, two of the most popular singers and actors of the 1940s and 1950s. They would act together again in the Sinatra-produced Robin and the 7 Hoods in 1964. This would be the second time that Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly acted together, the first time being in The Country Girl in 1954.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Society

I've already made known just how much I enjoy the original "The Philadelphia Story." This musical adaptation with Sinatra, Crosby and Louis Armstrong just really takes the story to another level. The music naturally ingratiates itself to the telling of the narrative. This movie is a perfect fit for Grace Kelly in her final role. She's delicate and debonair yet not afraid to lend herself to the film's comedic element. This production marks one of the greatest film spectacles ever!


High Society "Did you ever?" - Frank Sinatra & Bing Crosby
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKhi4BfDNZE
I seriously LMAO every time I watch Frank and Bing prance arm-in-arm out to the dance floor, only to headily retreat back in for another drink. I think that most men can relate to that.

Louis Armstrong - High Society Calypso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8thRkFJVNM&feature=related
I'd never seen much of him until watching this movie -- he was pretty much at the pinnacle of his fame here.

Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra 1956 High Society
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TdMn3SBJdg&feature=related
Louie and Bing with Cole Porter's music.

High Society - Mind if I make love to you? by Frank Sinatra
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpQIZEcpypI&feature=related
This is one of the most famous scenes EVER noted for its aesthetic value -- the reflection of the house and it's white pillars off of the swimming pool with Frank and Grace as its graceful epicenter; it's really just an extravagant and telling scene of the age!

Really, PB, it was an excellent review. Though it's far from a sophisticated film, it really launced Newman on his career because of his realistic and total-immersion performance. Nice work by Sal Mineo and Everett Sloan, too.