Now Screening - What Are You Watching Right Now?

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The Camomile Lawn, 1992.

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The Camomile Lawn, 1992.

this again... superb program

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Two Mules for Sister Sara, 1970...

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Charley Varrick, 1973..

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Prime Cut, 1972....A vicious Kansas City slaughterhouse owner and his hick family are having a bloody "beef" with the Chicago crime syndicate over profits from their joint illegal operations. Top enforcer Nick Devlin is sent to straighten things out.




Lee Marvin had a serious feud with director Michael Ritchie, because Ritchie wanted him to have love scenes with the too young actress Sissy Spacek(22 to 48). Marvin hated Ritchie for this lack of respect for Spacek. It was Sissy Spacek's feature film debut.

Gene Hackman accepted the secondary role of "Mary Ann" because it was his first offer of work after being unemployed for nearly six months since the end of filming on The French Connection (1971).

The submachine gun used by Nick Devlin in the last part of the film is the now rare Smith & Wesson model 76, a near copy of the Swedish M/45. It was produced in very small numbers in the late 1960s, and it was eventually discontinued due to lack of interest in such a weapon by military and law enforcement agencies. In US service, it was largely known as the "Swedish-K" or "K-Rifle. It was used by US special services (like Navy SEALS and CIA operatives) during the Vietnam War.

[walpurgis]

Prime Cut, 1972

Good movie. Not well known, I have the DVD.

[struth]

Man Hunt (1941), Holywoods version of Geoffrey Household's novel, Rogue Male starring Walter Pidgeon, George Sanders and Joan Bennett..



When this movie was made, America was not part of World War II. At this time, a number of Hollywood studios were pro-American involvement in the war. This movie is one of a number of films made during the late 1930s and early 1940s that represented pro-American intervention in the war. These films include: A Yank in the R.A.F. (1941), Man Hunt (1941), Foreign Correspondent (1940), The Mortal Storm (1940), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Sergeant York (1941).

Very little indeed remains of Geoffrey Household's original novel in this adaptation, but the author, interviewed about it over thirty years later, conceded that "Fritz Lang made a smashing film out of my book".

When Thorndike (Pidgeon) is captured, the George Sanders character inspects his belongings including his rifle, which bears the maker's name of "Hammond and Hammond, Bond Street". There was no such gunsmith in the UK and it seems likely the name is borrowed from a very famous gunsmith called Holland and Holland of Bruton Street, which is situated nearby.

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Great Expectations (1946), Classic David Lean drama of Dickens story. Sir John Mills stars.




Sir Alec Guinness admired the way Sir David Lean directed him, singling out a close-up in which he had to laugh out loud, and which he struggled to make look unmanufactured. Lean told him to forget about the whole thing, sat by his side, and made a little signal to the camera to start turning in the course of the conversation. He said something which made Guinness laugh and then said, "Cut." Guinness: "So he got this shot on a totally false premise, but thank God. I don't think I would have ever achieved it otherwise."

At the end, when Pip is persuading Estella to leave Satis House with him, a 'Chad' is clearly visible drawn on the screen behind him (Chads were a popular form of graffiti in the 1940s - a character with a big nose looking over a wall). Chad is a British term; the American equivalent would be Kilroy, as in 'Kilroy was here'.

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21 years later... Quatermass and the Pit, 1967.. Directed by Roy Ward Baker.





Professor Bernard Quatermass: The will to survive... it's an odd phenomenon. Roney, if we found out earth was doomed - say, by climatic changes - what would we do about it?
Dr. Mathew Roney: Nothing. Just go on squabbling as usual.

When Dr. Roney is picking at the eyeball of the dead Martian creature in his laboratory, the pupils of the compound eye are a rectangular slot shape rather then round like a human eye. This is reminiscent of a goat's eye, a creature that, for centuries, has been associated with witchcraft and sorcery.

A Sony CV-2000B Videocorder - a very early and primitive form of videotape recorder - is on display during the sequences in which the Martian race memory is both recorded and later played back to the skeptical military.

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Trading Places (1983)...



Ralph Bellamy (Randolph) and Don Ameche (Mortimer) make cameo appearances in Coming to America (1988) as the same characters; the two are now homeless, and Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) gives them a large amount of money to get them back off the streets.

This was Ralph Bellamy's ninety-ninth film, and Don Ameche's forty-ninth. This was Eddie Murphy's second film, and he joked: "Between the three of us, we've made one hundred fifty movies!"

The baggage handlers were supposed to be Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as the Mackenzie brothers from SCTV (1976). When they fell through, Dan Aykroyd or Eddie Murphy recommended Tom Davis and Al Franken from their Saturday Night Live (1975) days.