Now Screening - What Are You Watching Right Now?

[struth]

on to The Testing of Eric Olthwaite now........Mum, I don't think I've seen black pudding as black as that......oh shut up you boring little tit

[struth]

escape from Stalagluft 112b....... all the best British officers were there and there was a waiting list of several years to get in

[struth]

Now on to Carry on Follow That Camel. Very underrated carry on this with Phil Silvers. Also Anita Harris displays her considerable charms. Always had a fancy for Anita.

[Roy S]

on to The Testing of Eric Olthwaite now........Mum, I don't think I've seen black pudding as black as that......oh shut up you boring little tit

Was that the one where his Dad pretended to be French so he didn't have to talk to him?

[struth]

Was that the one where his Dad pretended to be French so he didn't have to talk to him?

Oh, quelle journée au bas de la terre. Je suis très fatigué demain, Vera.

[struth]

Von Ryan,s Express is just started on film four.A Frank Sinatra vehicle but well done and superbly supported by the able Trevor Howard.

[Macca]

I was just watching Frank last night in 'Never So Few' knocking about in the Burmese jungle with Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. One problem with a lot of the Hollywood films from the Fifties and early Sixties was the pacing, especialy with the 'love interest' scenes which seem to drag on forever.

[struth]

I was just watching Frank last night in 'Never So Few' knocking about in the Burmese jungle with Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. One problem with a lot of the Hollywood films from the Fifties and early Sixties was the pacing, especialy with the 'love interest' scenes which seem to drag on forever.

Quite a good one that. ..and yes producers know sex sells so they'll pop a bit of skirt in anywhere. Was surprised Tom Hanks didnae find a nice bit when he was a castaway

[struth]

Tonight I'm going back to the great depression to watch John Ford's 1940 classic, The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, Grant Mitchell, John Carradine and Ward Bond. Screen play by Nunnally Johnston(The Mudlark, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation and the Dirty Dozen to name a few) from the superb book by John Steinbeck.

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they sought jobs, land, dignity, and a future.

Prior to filming, producer Darryl F. Zanuck sent undercover investigators out to the migrant camps to see if John Steinbeck had been exaggerating about the squalor and unfair treatment meted out there. He was horrified to discover that, if anything, Steinbeck had actually downplayed what went on in the camps. Banks and the large farming corporations that controlled most California farms were not keen on the original novel (it was banned in some states and in several counties in California, and the book was not carried in the municipal library of author John Steinbeck's home town of Salinas, California, until the 1990s) and were even less thrilled that a film was being made of it. The Associated Farmers of California called for a boycott of all 20th Century-Fox films, and Steinbeck himself received death threats. It was also banned in the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin because the poorest of the poor in America were portrayed as having a car. Just shows that a great book and film can hit hard.

The original story called for the pregnant Rosasharn, the Joad's lass, having a still birth and then letting a starving man feed from her breast. This was way too much for a 1940 audience and was cut, but it really would have been a stunning and heart rendering scene.

Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's influence: "The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel – in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms – of 20th century American literature." The Grapes of Wrath is referred to as a Great American Novel.

At the time of publication, Steinbeck's novel "was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read." According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month it won the National Book Award, favourite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Does the film do it justice...YOU BET! Fonda gave Fox a 7 year exclusive on him just to play what he called "The Part of a Lifetime"

If you don't have this, GET IT!

[struth]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Directed by Don Siegel and starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter and Larry Gates (watch out for a young Sam Peckinpah in a small role.
Based on the book The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, the screenplay is by Daniel Mainwaring who wrote the Big Steal screen play starring Bob Mitchum.

The story depicts an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in a small California town when alien plant spores grow into large seed pods, each one capable of reproducing internally a duplicate replacement copy of each human: As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical characteristics, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it; these duplicates are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers what is occurring and tries to stop the invasion.

Although the studio constantly demanded cuts to the budget, it made several tmes its price in the us alone and in 1994 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
The BBFC insisted on several cuts here, just to get an X certificate which is hard to believe now.

Some extra shooting took lace to change the ending as Siegel had shot it as the finish being McCarthy shouting in vain warnings to the passing vehicles. The studio insisted in the one you now see. Gig Young, Dick Powell, Joseph Cotten and several others for the role of Miles. For Becky he considered casting Anne Bancroft, Donna Reed, Kim Hunter, Vera Miles and others. Due to budget constraints the cheaper option was to take Relative newcomers McCarthy and Wynter.(worked out pretty well though). Remade in 78(which is also excellent) this is still the daddy of the genre, and was scary to the public at the time.

Producer Walter Wanger saw the final cut in December 1955 and protested the use of the Superscope aspect ratio. Its use had been included in early plans for the film, but the first print was not made until December. Wanger felt that the film lost sharpness and detail. Siegel originally shot Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Superscope was a post-production laboratory process designed to create an anamorphic print from non-anamorphic source material that would be projected at an aspect ratio of 2.00:1