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[struth]

Strangers on a Train, 1951.






The final scene of the so-called "American" version of this movie had Barbara and Anne Morton waiting for Guy to call on the telephone. Alfred Hitchcock wanted the phone in the foreground to dominate the shot, emphasizing the importance of the call, but the limited depth-of-field of contemporary movie camera lenses made it difficult to get both phone and women in focus. So Hitchcock had an oversized phone constructed and placed in the foreground. Anne reaches for the big phone, but actually answers a regular one. Hitchcock explained that "I did that on one take, by moving in on Anne so that the big phone went out of the frame as she reached for it. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up."

In the scene where Ruth Roman and Patricia Hitchcock are watching the tennis match, Ruth gives Patricia a real U.S. ten dollar bill. Showing real U.S. money in movies then was illegal without permission from the U.S. Treasury Department. The Treasury Department later removed the prohibition for Psycho (1960) and later movies.

This was the last theatrical movie for Robert Walker, who died eight months after filming finished from an allergic reaction to a drug used to treat his alcoholism.

[walpurgis]

Strangers on a Train, 1951

I should get that, it's excellent!

[struth]

I should get that, it's excellent!

robert walker was great as the smiling nutter

[Macca]

This was the last theatrical movie for Robert Walker, who died eight months after filming finished from an allergic reaction to a drug used to treat his alcoholism.

Mixing alcohol and barbiturates, classic showbiz death. Would be safer to smoke crack.

[struth]

Mixing alcohol and barbiturates, classic showbiz death. Would be safer to smoke crack.

those alone are very dangerous as dosage can be different for every type and every person. as you say, adding another relaxant to mix and you can easily die.

[struth]

Golden oldie now with,...The Lady Vanishes, 1938. Hitch again...






In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred Hitchcock revealed that this movie was inspired by a legend of an Englishwoman who went with her daughter to the Palace Hotel in Paris in the 1880s, at the time of the Great Exposition: "The woman was taken sick and they sent the girl across Paris to get some medicine in a horse-vehicle, so it took about four hours. When she came back she asked, 'How's my mother?' 'What mother?' 'My mother. She's here, she's in her room. Room 22.' They go up there. Different room, different wallpaper, everything. And the payoff of the whole story is, so the legend goes, that the woman had bubonic plague and they dared not let anybody know she died, otherwise all of Paris would have emptied." The urban legend, known as the Vanishing Hotel Room, also formed the basis of one segment of the German portmanteau film Eerie Tales (1919), So Long at the Fair (1950) (in which the missing person was the young woman's brother as opposed to her mother) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Into Thin Air (1955), starring Hitchcock's daughter Patricia Hitchcock.

[struth]

The Long Riders, 1980... Keachs', Carridines' and Quaids' in this western.






The stagecoach robbery in which the gang forces Vernon to strip was loosely based on a real incident. The James Gang had learned that there was a Pinkerton Detective trailing them named Joseph W. Wicher. During a train robbery, they became suspicious of a passenger and forced him off the train to strip down in front of everyone. The reason for this is that Wicher allegedly had a tattoo on his body of his initials, "J.W.W". The strip down was so they could see if the man had the incriminating tattoo. Fortunately for the man, he wasn't Wicher. Several months later, the real Wicher was found shot to death on a country road in Missouri.

[Barry]

Murder on the Orient Express, 2017.

IMO, an awful version: too much build up to explain Poirot's OCD; too much CGI, and too much deviation from the book.

[struth]

This is the Albert Finney version of ...Murder on The Orient Express...1974.

A Stellar cast too....






84-year-old Agatha Christie attended the movie premiere in November 1974. It was the only movie adaptation in her lifetime with which she was completely satisfied. In particular, she felt that Albert Finney's performance came closest to her idea of Poirot (though she was reportedly unimpressed with his too-subtle mustache). The premiere was her final public appearance. She died fourteen months later, on January 12, 1976.

In 1929, a westbound Orient Express train was stuck in snow for five days at Çerkezköy, approximately one hundred thirty kilometers (eighty-one miles) from Istanbul, Turkey. This incident inspired the setting of the book and movie.

The final scene, in which Poirot relates his solution to the crime, had to be shot countless times, as it required more angles than could be captured in a single take, and more cameras than could fit on the confining dining car set. The multiple takes were especially challenging for Albert Finney, whose uninterrupted monologue was eight pages long, but many cast members later recalled the tedium of sitting motionless for so long, maintaining their physical posturing for continuity, bolstered only by their professional drive to provide support for Finney's tour de force.

[Lawrence001]

Watched a brilliant film on BBC2 at the weekend, Land of Mine. (I assume the title is a play on words but I prefer the title in the original Danish.)

It's about young German soldiers made to clear the mines on the Danish coast just after the war. I highly recommend it, it's currently available on iPlayer.