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Lemmon again with the lovely Juliet Mills in Avanti!, 1973...
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/i...yLpVOymYzXn5lW
Juliet Mills gained 25 pounds within six weeks to take on the role of Pamela Piggott.
Billy Wilder cast several non-professionals in supporting roles. Guidarino Guidi was a Rome actor's agent who called Wilder about getting jobs on the film for various clients and was instead cast as the maitre d' of the Excelsior Hotel; Raffaele Mottola was hired as the film's dialogue coach and then persuaded to play the passport official at the start of the film; and the elderly Armando Giovagnoli, playing the nonagenarian Baron, was Wilder's chauffeur on the film. The famous make-up man Harry Ray, who worked on a number of Wilder films (and was, for a time, Jack Lemmon's personal make-up man), was cast as Dr. Fleischman, the dentist on Wendell's plane - perhaps because of his close resemblance to Billy Wilder.
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something really corny to start with;
Desert Mice, 1959... not mine but a free prime offering..
watching these occasionally let you appreciate real films more lol.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ilmPoster.jpeg
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The Wooden Horse, 1950... Ian Dalrymple and Jack Lee read the book and bought the film rights. They out-bid John Mills who also wanted to make it. "I expect John would have been very good in it also," said Jack Lee "probably better than Leo Genn, who was very stolid as an actor."
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...iejYUeotoWH_0j
Peter Butterworth was one of the vaulters who covered for the real-life Wooden Horse escape. He auditioned for a part in the film after the war, but was turned down on the grounds that he didn't look convincingly heroic and athletic enough.
Eric Williams, the author of the book that this film was based upon, was in fact one of the escapees (the story is autobiographical). When he originally wrote the story under wartime censorship he called himself "Peter Howard".
Filmed on location in Germany, in a specially reconstructed POW camp, as all the existing ones were still holding displaced persons at the time. (This was only made 5 years after the end of the war.)
Some serving Royal Air Force personnel appeared as extras, including a number who had actually been POWs at Stalag Luft III.
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Millions Like Us, 1943...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...ItnATGhJTu9Vkx
Grandpa Jim comments that his daughter Phyllis has progressed from dating "local lads" to "the United Nations". Interestingly, although the international organization with that name did not exist until two years after the film's release, the term "United Nations' was used to describe the allied forces arrayed against the Axis Powers. FDR used the term frequently.
The fourth cinematic appearance of Charters and Caldicott, played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. They previously appeared in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (1940), films also written by Sidney Gilliat and co-director Frank Launder. They also appeared in Crook's Tour (1940), which was adapted from a BBC Radio serial. Although this was their final appearance as Charters and Caldicott, Radford and Wayne appeared together as similar comic characters in other films, such as Passport to Pimlico (1949).
The film was passed for US release by the Production Code Administration on condition the word 'hell' be deleted throughout, but apparently this situation was never satisfactorily resolved and the film was never theatrically released in the USA. It was initially telecast in Los Angeles Monday 10 July 1950 on KECA (Channel 7); New York television viewers saw it for the first time Sunday 14 January 1951 on the DuMont Television Network's International Playhouse.
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classic comedic genius now.... Blazing Saddles, 1974.
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/p...ster_209_4.jpg
When the film was first screened for Warner Brothers executives, almost none of them laughed, and the movie looked to be a disaster that the studio would not release. However, Mel Brooks quickly set up a subsequent screening for the studio's employees. When these regular folks laughed uproariously throughout the movie, Warner Brothers finally agreed to take a chance on releasing it.
Supposedly, this movie officially marks the first time the sound of farting has ever been used in a film (at least according to the filmmakers in the DVD documentary). According to Mel Brooks, they came up with the idea after watching numerous old westerns where cowboys only consume black coffee and plates of beans, concluding that such a food combination would inevitably lead to farting.
For the desert shoot, Slim Pickens stayed on the location in his RV and would sit out front in the evenings with a campfire and his Winchester rifle.
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The Searchers, 1956..
https://img.texasmonthly.com/2011/05....1&q=45&w=1250
Beulah Archuletta (Look) was found crying in one of the tipis by John Wayne in between shooting scenes. When Wayne asked her why she was crying, she responded that she was going to miss her son's wedding because she was filming her scenes at the time. Wayne stopped production of the film for a few days and flew her to California so that she could attend the wedding.
During filming, a Navajo child became seriously ill with pneumonia and needed urgent medical attention. John Wayne had his own airplane on location and had his pilot take the little girl to a hospital. For his deed, the Navajos named him "The Man With The Big Eagle".
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Dark Passage, 1947..
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/...0NQ@@._V1_.jpg
Bruce Bennett was in this . Bruce, aka Herman Brix, who was one of the first Tarzans... his name is ommitted oddly by google.
Bogart plays a man convicted of murdering his wife who escapes from prison in order to prove his innocence. Bogart finds that his features are too well-known, and is forced to seek illicit backroom plastic surgery. The entire pre-knife part of the film is shot from a Bogart's-eye-view, with the viewer seeing the fugitive for the first time as he starts to recuperate from the operation.
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another classic now... The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948. both humphry bogart and bruce bennett appear in this too.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...8DgMXFiV-0s0p0
John Huston was fascinated by mysterious author B. Traven, who was a recluse living in Mexico. Traven approved of the director and his screenplay (by letter, obviously), and sent his intimate friend Hal Croves to the location to be a technical advisor and translator for $150 a week. The consensus is that Croves was in fact Traven, though he always denied this. Huston was happy not to query him on the subject but his then-wife Evelyn Keyes was certain Croves was the mysterious author, believing that he was continually giving himself away, saying "I" when it should have been "he", and using phrases that were exactly the same as those to be found in Traven's letters to Huston. Traven was offered $1000 a week to act as technical advisor on the film. It is known that "B. Traven" was a pen name, and Traven's true identity remains a mystery to this day.
Well i always like a mystery so digging deeper... rumour had it that Life magazine offered a reward of $5,000 for finding the real B. Traven) induced a Mexican journalist named Luis Spota to try to find Hal Croves, who disappeared after the end of the shooting of the film in the summer of 1947. Thanks to information obtained from the Bank of Mexico, in July 1948, Spota found a man who lived under the name of Traven Torsvan near Acapulco. He formally ran an inn there; however, his shabby joint did not have many customers; Torsvan himself was a recluse, called El Gringo by his neighbours, which would confirm his American nationality. Investigating in official archives, Spota discovered that Torsvan had received a foreigner's identification card in Mexico in 1930 and a Mexican ID card in 1942; on both documents the date and place of birth was March 5, 1890, in Chicago. According to official records, Torsvan arrived in Mexico from the United States, crossing the border in Ciudad Juárez in 1914. Using partly dishonest methods (Spota bribed the postman who delivered letters to Torsvan), the journalist found out that Torsvan received royalties payable to B. Traven from Josef Wieder in Zurich; on his desk, he also found a book package from the American writer Upton Sinclair, which was addressed to B. Traven c/o Esperanza López Mateos. When Spota asked Torsvan directly whether he, Hal Croves and B. Traven are one and the same person, he denied this angrily; however, in the opinion of the journalist, Torsvan got confused in his explanations and finally admitted indirectly to being the writer. Spota published the results of his investigations in a long article in the newspaper Mañana on August 7, 1948. In reply to this, Torsvan published a denial in the newspaper Hoy on August 14. He received Mexican citizenship on September 3, 1951. A man named Traves Torstvan flew from Mexico City to Paris on Air France on September 8, 1953, and returned to Mexico City from Paris on September 28 of the same year. On October 10, 1959, Traves Torsvan arrived in Houston, Texas, from Mexico on a KLM airlines flight accompanied by his wife Rosa E. Torsvan, presumably Rosa Elena Luján. Torsvan states his citizenship as Mexican and his date and place of birth as May 2, 1890 (May 3 in the typewritten version of the document) in Chicago, Illinois. Rose E. Torstvan states her date of birth as April 6, 1915, in Proginoso [sic], Yucatan. These documents are evidence that Traven/Torsvan/Croves are one and the same person, and that rather than "disappearing", Torsvan took on his mother's supposed maiden name of Croves sometime after 1959.
