Forgotten Gems (A place to share movies lost in the mists of time)

Gee whiz, Annie...please write a review some day. You have a beautiful way with words.

__________________
"Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

Mark...Thank you. As with all of your reviews....I liked your review on Marty. And, I'm glad to hear you liked it as much as I did. I'll look forward to seeing any forgotten gems you'd like to share.


Why thank you Bri.
There is one review I was thinking about writing...but I dunno. Everyone's done a great job of writing reviews...and I'm not much of writer. Thank you very much for the compliment though. You are very sweet.

You're at least as good as any writer doing reviews on the site right now. You should give yourself more credit.

__________________

Thank you for the encouragement Mayhem. T'was very sweet of you. I had started writing a review, but got busy doing other things. Maybe I'll finish it one day.


For now I wanted to add another classic gem I saw a couple of weeks ago....



Midnight (1939)
Directed by Mitchell Leisen
Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett

Cast: Claudette Colbert (Eve Peabody), Don Ameche (Tibor Czerny), John Barrymore (Georges Flammarion), Francis Lederer (Jacques Picot), Mary Astor (Helene Flammarion)

If anyone liked It Happened One Night...you would probably find this movie every bit as charming. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s writing/story is just great fun. And, the cast works great together....especially Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche and John Barrymore.

This screwball romantic comedy has similar elements to other screwball comedies....mistaken identity and/or someone pretending to be who they aren’t and of course more secret thrown in the mix...but it’s so entertaining. The funny thing is...this movie seemed like a breath of fresh air, and I preferred it so much more over many of the crappy romantic comedies made in 2003. If anyone gets the chance to see Midnight...take a nice big whiff...I highly recommend it.


I haven’t seen alot of movies with Claudette Colbert, but I’m sure going to look for more now.

Saw this a couple years ago, and had never heard of it before. I remember when it came on I caught the beginning of it just killing time, but got so wrapped up in it that I had to finish it, even though I had to be somewhere. Great Jimmy Stewart movie.

aniko, you're a great reviewer...should do more of them..i completely agree with marty


i'm thinking of two forgotten gems both with henry fonda...

mister roberts and on golden pond...two of his best performances...(of course i can't leave out jack lemmon (mister roberts) and katherine hepburn (on golden pond)

two great films

I bought the following DVD for $5.99:



I only heard of one of the four films: One-Eyed Jacks (1961), starring and directed by Marlon Brando. This was originally a Kubrick project, but Brando took over.



This film had its moments, but they were few and far between. There were too many lulls in the action. Karl Malden also starred as the corrupt sherriff. There was a great scene in which Malden publicly bull-whips Brando and breaks his gun-hand.

The second film in the set is The Sundowners (1950), starring Robert Preston and Robert Sterling.



I think the distributers got a little confused because if you can see on the top picture, Robert Mitchum is listed among the stars included in the four films. However, Mitchum starred in another film with the same name in 1960. Ooops.

This film had a decent story, but the DVD transfer was the worst I've ever seen! The sound was horrible, and the acting wasn't that great.

The third and fourth films were the most enjoyable of the four.

The Big Trees (1952), starring Kirk Douglas.



If you like Kirk Douglas, like I do, this is well worth watching. He plays a greedy mill operator who wants to cut down some huge Redwoods in Northern California. Homesteaders are trying to prevent it. Douglas plays the heel through most of the film, but of course, he's the hero in the end.

The last film was my favorite of the four: Vengeance Valley (1951), starring Burt Lancaster.



Lancaster is the "good" foster son of a big-time cattle rancher. Robert Walker is the "bad" biological son of the same man. Lancaster loves and protects his "brother," that is until he sells the cattle without the family's knowledge and tries to skip out because he got a girl pregnant and her brothers are looking to kill the man who knocked her up. Whew! Lancaster figures out what's going on and saves the day!

These films didn't make the cut for my "Quick Reviews," so this seemed like the next logical place to write about them.

__________________
NEW (as of 1/24/05): Quick Reviews #10

two more

a little romance with sir lawrence olivier and a very young diane lane

allegro non troppo..an italian spoof of fantasia...

I have lost count, of how many times I have seen, this great movie.

__________________
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

By the way, "mists of time" has been bugging me. Isn't it "midst of time"?

Someone please confirm

Midst would probably work, but "mists" seems more hazy and dreamy...or something...

One of my favorite forgotten gems...

The Streetfighter with Sonny Chiba



Hell most of Kill Bill is based offa this, but it's FAR superior to Kill Bill. (It's just better in my opinion, Kill Bill got to dry after awhile.)

__________________
"I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards -- in the life of an artist."---Quentin Tarantino

Definitely superior to Kill Bill.

Maybe not the best movie about Jesse James but I always liked the fact they had actual brothers playing brothers in this…

__________________

Caught this on TV the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit. A bizarre cast of characters makes this extremely fun to watch.

Never Give an Inch

It's stars Henry Fonda and Paul Newman.

It's the story of stubborn independent loggers trying to do business during a strike.

Filmed in Oregon, directed by Newman.

Annie Hall (Woody Allen - 1977) and Harvey (Henry Koster - 1950) are two that come to mind.

Other than fifteen-year-olds who only watch Tarantino, Mallrats and The Matrix 24/7, who exactly do you think Annie Hall and Harvey are underrated or forgotten by in any way?!?

__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I think it's very possible that people for example born during the 1980's don't know about Annie Hall. And that even though they are very interested in movies and culture. My friend's girlfriend is 23 and she has never seen Taxi Driver and I doubt that she's ever seen Annie Hall. Allen and Scorsese are not making the movies they used to be making and I can kind of understand why they don't interest guys in their 20s as much as they interest us. Today it seems like the people who want to be in (at least around here) don't watch The Aviator but iranian and south east asian films instead. David Lynch perhaps, but not Allen.

__________________
The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

--------

They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

But that doesn't make every film made before 1980 a "forgotten gem". It means that not so surprisingly younger folks don't watch all that many older movies. In general. If you're going by the logic that Annie frippin' Hall is obscure and unknown then you can add every single movie made before 1977 except maybe three or four (The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Citizen Kane). I think the criteria needs to be a tad more stringent, yeah? If beloved Oscar-winning classics like Annie Hall and Harvey are "forgotten gems", then what isn't?