'Liberty' to 'Locke': My Life at the Movies on Quora, 2018-2021

 

 

‘Liberty’ to ‘Locke’

 

 A Thousand         responses

 

 Seven Thousand         upvotes

 

 Two Hundred          followers

 

 

                                     

 

    

   Alan Jarman

 

 

  My Life at the Movies on Quora

                     2018 - 2021

         

 

                                                         F    A    N    F    A    R    E

 

I started writing for Quora -- responding, almost exclusively, to questions about vintage movies -- sometime in late 2018. For a few months, I received no more than a handful of questions, in total; but, one day, an answer mentioning “The Woodsman” (which most Quora readers had not heard of) “took off”, as they say, and instead of a half-dozen requests a fortnight, I began to get that number – and more – in a day. By the beginning of 2021, I found that I had written just on a thousand answers, covering movies from “Liberty (1929) to “Locke” (2013).

 

My decision to keep my own copies of answers I wrote was not, despite appearances, solely for the sake of vanity (although that did play a small part, also; it was, I concede, satisfying to “revisit” some of the older answers and find some of them reasonably-well thought-out). A little more important to my decision was the gradual realisation that the stories I was relating were chapters – often exciting and memorable ones – in my own life, and were probably revealing more about myself – for better or worse – than about the movie era of which I claimed a modicum of expertise, and, as such, could well stand as a part-biography for some thirty years of my life (had I found a Quora-like forum for writing about record albums, and jazz music and concerts, then recollections preserved there might have well taken care of most of the remaining years, and, as well, have afforded me the chance to write about already-frequently-documented artists -- Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, June Christy -- from a different perspective!). More importantly than either of those reasons, however, was, that I kept my own archive simply because I doubted whether Quora’s system would perform that task ‘ad infinitum’ (one answer, to a question about artists’ opinions of their own work – I had chosen Saul Chaplin and “The Anniversary Song” – seemed to have fallen through the cracks at Quora); being essentially lazy, I wanted the facility to “plunder” earlier responses for “new” answers to questions which were near-repeats of older ones..

 

This actually occurred frequently, since I was usually only asked to respond to questions about the movies, stars, and directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the only era for which I could contribute useful information and insights which had not already been covered by Quora’s many movie experts (for most of whom the movies of the Golden Age were ancient history, with information about their making obtainable only in books). My particular advantage over this “new breed” was that I had seen many of these movies, not by downloading or researching, but in real cinemas with real audiences, when they were in their first release. I knew the audience reactions, the magazine articles, the gossip surrounding their making. When Ingrid Bergman was banned from re-entering the United States for “moral turpitude”, I was “there”. And when the Marilyn Monroe calendar hit the headlines, and films in which she was merely a bit-player were hastily re-bannered outside cinemas with her name above the title. And, again, when the abrupt withdrawal and re-editing of the 1954 “A Star is Born” outraged both fans and its makers, and the subsequent denial to its star of the Best Actress Academy Award outraged just about everybody else (even members of the Academy, some of whom resigned in protest). It was only a small era of Hollywood history, the three decades when I actually knew something about the movies… but while it was on, I drank deeply of its riches, and the memories it implanted are still vivid.

 

Whether these memories and these answers are actually worth preserving is a moot point; certainly, they are not something that anyone would choose to read from cover to cover. But they were fun to write, and, every now and then, one would get an upvote (or several); if it was in any way controversial, I could expect a slew of comments, some of which might even be positive (although I was criticised for finding shortcomings with “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Shawshank Redemption”, which seem to be the two favourite films of just about all of Quora’s movie-buffs). One very brief post (less than a hundred words, dashed off in just a couple of minutes), “took off” beyond all expectations: read by (so far) over 668,000 movie fans, upvoted 4,300 times, shared on 32 other sites, and eliciting 148 comments ….and still growing every week! My fifteen minutes of fame? Since it was about one of my favourite musicals (“Summer Stock”), I am gratified that it might possibly have sent scores of people to Youtube or to the video shop to check out my comment (about just one shot!) for themselves.

 

Anyway, saving the ones I liked best (not the whole thousand!), and making at least one paper copy for the bookshelf somehow seemed like a worthy project during the restrictions of 2020. Hopefully, someone will like one or two of the answers, and perhaps learn something about Hollywood that he/she didn’t know already (if it’s an answer about “I Could Go On Singing”, “A Star is Born”, “All About Eve”, “The Court Jester”, “Carousel”, “The Bad Seed”, or “Judgment at Nuremberg”, he/she will have to be prepared to learn it half a dozen times; considering the unique qualities of those movies, however, for this imposition I make no apology!)

 

Why has no country succeeded in movie making as much as the USA has?

 “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….” says the inscription on the Statue of Liberty; it didn’t say, “give me your lazy, well-fed, idle people who already have the opera and the ballet and all the amusement they could possibly need”. And the poor, the oppressed, the disadvantaged were the people who populated this new land, at last being given the opportunity to live their lives on their own term: by their wits, their enterprise, their imagination…. all essential qualities of the entrepreneur.

But it wasn’t easy; there wasn’t a great amount of time — or money — left over at the end of the day for sorely-needed leisure or escapism. Americans didn’t invent the movies — a Londoner named Edward Muybridge is credited with doing that, and his idea was first taken up and improved on by two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere — but it was the Americans who took the concept to their hearts. For a few dollars, any one of those young entrepreneurs could shoot a few minutes of film (the subject didn’t matter all that much, some were nothing more than shots of the streets in their neighbourhood), hire a hall and project his “movie” onto a screen. For about a nickel the people who were toiling on those same streets could sit in that hall (called a “Nickelodeon”) and forget how hard the life was outside.

The movies weren’t called “entertainment for the masses” for nothing. The masses unhuddled themselves long enough to clamour for more of the same, and there was always another enterprising young producer/director/writer/cameraman/projectionist ready to meet the demand. Movies very soon became an industry; they may not have made the first, but the Americans were making the most, and they were learning how to make them better than their counterparts in Europe. And all this was happening even before one of those entrepreneurs, D.W. Griffith, looking for a more-favourable climate than New York could provide for his new movie, “In Old California”, decided to film it in a little village seven miles (and a two-hour ride by streetcar!) from Los Angeles, called “Hollywood”.

By the time people like Cecil B de Mille (who later claimed to be the first person to shoot a movie in Hollywood) followed Griffith’s lead and began shooting in the wide open spaces around “Hollywoodland”, American movies were a major industry. There wasn’t, it has to be said, a great deal of competition from other entertainment mediums in this new, rough country, so movies developed faster there than anywhere else in the world. The relatively-unscathed position of the victorious USA after World War I (no shot was fired on American soil) meant that the new money following the conflict didn’t have to be spent on rebuilding, so it could be spent on creating. Talented filmmakers from countries like England (Charles Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Alfred Hitchcock, for example) and Germany (Fritz Lang, Eric von Stroheim and F. W. Murnau) began to gravitate to Hollywood, where there was ample opportunity to use their talent, and money to fund their increasingly-ambitious projects; they, in turn, improved the product in Hollywood by showing the Americans some of the film-making techniques they had learnt in their “old” countries.

No other nation, for many years, had any hope of catching up to the USA when it came to the silver screen!

Which movie trilogies have the most inspired you? Why?

 “That’s Entertainment”, “That’s Entertainment Part 2”, and “That’s Entertainment Part III”. All three are brimful of some of the greatest movie talent that the western world had ever seen or heard. There are singers, dancers, comedians, songwriters, musicians, choreographers, arrangers, directors… and, of course, there is Arthur Freed, whose work is represented in all three movies, far more than anyone else’s.

Freed truly was an inspirational figure for anyone interested in the music of the twentieth century. He started as a songwriter (he wrote the lyrics to “Singing in the Rain” not too long after the century started), and performed on-stage with the Marx Brothers back when there were five of them, and their mother in the wings. Eventually, Hollywood beckoned; he started his movie career at MGM as associate producer for “The Wizard of Oz”, and did so much uncredited work in shaping the movie (it was he who “pushed” for the casting of Judy Garland when the studio heads wanted Shirley Temple as box-office insurance, he who insisted on reinstating “Over the Rainbow” when the studio heads kept ordering it cut, on the grounds that a ballad near the beginning of a movie would hold up the show) that he was rewarded with his own music department: the ‘Freed Unit’, which he proceeded to people with the most creative musical talents — from home and abroad — that anyone had ever seen. Over the next twenty years he produced forty musicals, and, taken as a package, they are probably the forty best musicals ever made, each one a master class in what can be done with a musical movie format if you have enough talent at your disposal…. and are prepared give them free rein to explore and develop those talents.

Of course, the three “That’s Entertainments” weren’t ALL about Arthur Freed’s productions; Jack Cummings and Joe Pasternak, for instance, are generously-represented also. But I think it is fair to say that there would have been no “That’s Entertainment” series — not even the first one — if there had been no Arthur Freed. The Freed Unit was the body that inspired everyone working in musical movies — even abroad (for example, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Oliver”). Arthur Freed helped give me a life-long love of music; and these three musical compendiums will surely do the same for grateful audiences and potential artists for decades to come.

Can you recommend a disastrous disaster movie?

How long a list do you want? “Krakatoa East of Java” has possibly the worst reputation of any of them, because, as every school child over the age of nine was able to point out, Krakatoa is actually WEST of Java, and you would have thought that the producers would take just forty-five seconds to look that up first, before they got a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign going. But there is no shortage of challengers for its position in film history: “The Swarm”, and “When Time Ran Out”, and “Meteor”, and “The Poseidon Adventure” (both of them) and the one where they stop the lava by building a wall across the street of a major city, and …. come to think of it, has there ever been a GOOD one?

Why are zombie horror movies rated so low?

Perhaps it’s because the movement of the zombies — like sleepwalkers — has become a cliche which every elementary school kid has ‘down pat”… and their parents and grandparents had it ‘down pat” before them. It’s hard to take the zombie concept seriously when you can mimic exactly how it’s done.

What are some famous movie scenes that would have come out even better if some other actor played it?

Francis Ford Coppola assures us that the production team of “The Godfather” did not want, and positively refused to accept, Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, and that Coppola had to make all sorts of promises about keeping Brando in check in order to persuade the backers to (reluctantly) change their minds. If Brando had come through for Coppola and given a performance for the ages — and he was perfectly capable of that, as he later proved in “Last Tango in Paris” — it just might have been worth everyone’s trouble. But Brando chose to play it like a star plays a featured part that he wants people to notice, and it was never possible to suspend disbelief whenever he was on the screen (which, thankfully, wasn’t very often).

The irony is that the actor that OUGHT to have played Vito Corleone was right there, in the movie! He had, unfortunately, a very minor part, no more than three or four lines in total. In other movies, he had been the lead, so it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t at least considered. But Coppola wanted Brando as box-office insurance, so poor Richard Conte missed the part that might have made him a household name. And “The Godfather” missed out on having the Vito Corleone it deserved.

What role, in the movie-making process, is most pivotal in coming up with a great quality movie, realistic and with high attention to detail?

Well, the director is the creator of what you see on the screen, so it would be nice to say that his is the pivotal role. But I guess, in actuality, it is the producer, which is why the director never mounts the podium to pick up the Oscar for best picture of the year.

The movie is “born” in the mind of the producer before anything is actually committed to paper or film. He puts up the money, which largely determines who he can hire to write it, direct it, act in it, and shoot it. If he has enough money for these people to make it “great quality”, “realistic” and with “high attention to detail”, then these people can go ahead and give him the best film for his money. But the director has to work within the constraints the producer imposes on him: he may hate the writing, or he may not get along with the principals, or he may think that the background music is all wrong. But he has to put up with this situation, and do the best he can under the circumstances.

The producer can replace the director, and frequently does (“Gone with The Wind” had four or five directors working on it, and producer Selznick even came down to the set and himself directed a couple of scenes)… the director, unfortunately, does not have the right to create a better movie by firing the producer!

What movie had the biggest impact on you?

Easy one: “A Star is Born” (1954). I was two weeks past my thirteenth birthday, and that is a good age to be “impacted”. And Judy Garland was just the performer to do it. At singing…. well, she was light years ahead of ANYONE back then, and still is today (in fact, when you set her records beside the music that passes for entertainment nowadays, she seems better than ever). In acting she was, as both Louis B Mayer and Jack Warner have said, the greatest of them all. And as a concert performer…..well, her night at Carnegie Hall is widely acknowledged as “the greatest evening in show business history”. I loved her at thirteen and I love her at seventy-seven, and her movie of “A Star is Born” STILL knocks me out.

Do movie stars ever respond to letters they receive?

I really think the answers given so far are a little pessimistic. But maybe I am just living back in the old days when being a movie star was a full-time job and replying to fan mail was considered an essential part of the daily grind. But I have a friend who received hand-written replies from both Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Perkins, and there seems no doubt that both really were written by them; one, because Katharine Hepburn was just too “down to earth” to bother with secretaries to do that kind of thing for her, and two, because Perkins’s reply wasn’t to some sort of gushy “I love you Tony” fan-letter, but was to a request for information about a photograph of him that appeared in a magazine (it showed him at home, with a photograph of Judy Garland on his dresser, and my friend had asked him, “how come?”). He happily chatted on about it, and sounded rather like he might have written a fan letter or two himself.

For myself, I only ever wrote one fan letter in my life, and I also received a hand-written reply which was clearly the real thing, because the content was far from a “I-am-so-thrilled-with-my-fans” type of thing that secretaries are expected to write (and then to enclose an “autographed” photo), but was perfectly honest about the lady’s current career and the state of jazz music by the 1980s.

What are some scenes in movies that went wrong but were left in the film?

I don’t think anyone yet has mentioned four from the forties and fifties, when everything was so controlled that nothing was ever allowed to go wrong…. normally. But, in “Road to Morocco”, when the camel placed behind Bing Crosby and Bob Hope as they swapped insults suddenly turned and spat straight into the eye of Bob Hope, Bing’s reaction was one of the funniest things in the movie, so the whole incident stayed in.

Talking of reactions (but probably not noticeable on a small TV screen), the big scene in “The Towering Inferno” was when a huge cascade of stored water from above was released to “drown” the burning building, and the stars were strapped into the set that was about to be destroyed around them. It must have been because they found it was too expensive to rehearse it, or maybe it just happened before Fred Astaire was ready, but at the first explosion of entering water, the poor man (used to daring feats while dancing, but not while strapped in) nearly jumps out of his skin! No one acts THAT well!

One of the better-known accidents that was left in a movie was in “On the Waterfront”, when, walking with the star (Marlon Brando) through a park in a location scene, Eva Marie Saint drops her glove. Without missing a beat, Brando, staying in character, picks it up, teases her with it, pulling away just as she reaches out for it, playfully puts the tiny thing on his own hand, and, for the next few minutes, makes it a feature of the whole scene. Director Elia Kazan decided that it deserved to stay in the finished movie; Brando subsequently won the Academy Award for the role. In his acceptance speech, he did not acknowledge the glove.

Finally, poor Jane Russell in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”. When I first saw the movie, I assumed that her tumble into the water in the last few seconds of her musical number, “Ain’t there Anyone Here for Love”, was all part of the staging. However IMDb assures us that it was an accident: one of the dancing divers supposed to sail over her miscalculated, and poor Jane was knocked, very heavily, straight into the pool and, for a few seconds, quite disappeared under the water. Apparently, director Howard Hawks thought that kind of visual “gag” was just what the movie needed, so he used that “take”, simply adding a tag later, with Jane in the pool singing the final couple of bars.

What movie did you see where you immediately knew you wanted to buy the soundtrack?

This is an easy one for me to answer, because it actually did become the first soundtrack I ever bought, though I had to wait a while to get it. It was “Carmen Jones” (1954), the Otto Preminger film which made stars of Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, and Pearl Bailey (although, of those, only Pearlie May did her own singing in the movie). It was one of the movies that made me love musicals, and I still have that soundtrack (probably bought in 1956) in my collection.

The second was “A Star is Born” (also 1954); although I wanted it more than any other, just about everyone I knew had a copy, so I could always visit and listen to it when I wished (which was often!)

What is the most under-appreciated movie of the decade?

I can’t quite decide whether to choose “Locke” (2013) or “Boyhood” (2014), so I think I will take the easy way out and opt for both. I feel they are both destined, eventually, to be regarded as classics, because, like “Citizen Kane”, they really try for something new and different. They are like no other movies.

“Locke” is a story with a single character (the title character, played by Tom Hardy), a single setting (the inside of his car as he drives), and a single journey, which takes the length of the movie. During the journey he sends and receives calls: you hear the conversations, but you never see the people he is calling. From this simple premise comes a film which has you on the edge of your seat, not because of the story, but because of the audaciousness of the film-makers thinking they could pull off a “stunt” like that. You are constantly wondering when they are going to give in to the temptation of abandoning their crazy idea and give their audiences something conventional. But they never do; the cameras stay on Hardy all the way until the story resolves.

Apparently, the film was shot in its entirety, and without cuts, three (or was it four?) times on successive evenings, same time each day. While the movie was scripted, no one stayed within the written script for the entire journey, which was, by the way, a real journey with cameras simply positioned in a couple of fixed points around the car. The calls that Locke took were, in fact, real calls, coming from a cast of actors stationed in a quite-separate location; while these characters had a script, they were encouraged to improvise, and to throw a few spanners in the works just to see how Hardy would react. Tom Hardy had a cold on at least one night of the shooting, but he just brought along a handkerchief and proceeded, undaunted. Then, after all journeys had been shot, the film was cut together with the best parts of each, to make up a single journey. How imaginative is that? “Locke” was the first film I had seen in years that gave me what movies, back in the forties, fifties and early sixties, used to give me routinely: we came out of the cinema talking excitedly about what we had seen…..and we kept talking about it for hours, all the way home. I don’t think I had done that since “Judgment at Nuremberg”!

“Boyhood” was a totally-different concept, but just as daring and just as crazy and just as impossible, you would think, to bring off. The idea is simple: sign up your actors, give them characters to play, and then tell them they have to commit for the next TWELVE YEARS, moving in and out of the movie while they pursued the rest of their careers, and that the script would be written over that time to reflect what was happening in their own lives and how each felt about the character he/she was playing.

Since the main character starts as a boy of six, we follow his life right through to age 18, and we watch the people around him growing old as he grows up. And, amazingly, while there were some genuinely big stars in some of the roles (Patricia Arquette was his mother), no one “bailed” mid-shooting; they all stayed with it, year after year, adding to it and using their own life experiences to enrich the story they were telling. Nothing at all like “Locke”, which was shot in under a week!

But both movies have two things in common: one, they are unique, and give you a movie-going experience unlike anything you have had before; and two, they both played to near-empty houses on their first release, and quickly disappeared from sight. Yet the wolverines and the fantastic fours and all the dark knights were making tens of millions in a weekend, just down the road.

Maybe, sometime in the future, “Locke” and “Boyhood” will get the recognition they deserve. I recall reading that “Citizen Kane” wasn’t a great commercial success when it was first released, either.

Is there any actor who has lost his life in real stunts?

Vic Morrow and his two child supporting players weren’t doing a “stunt” in “Twilight Zone: the Movie”, but the shot they were involved in was an elaborate one requiring them to run through “jungle” and water while several cameras positioned around the set, plus one in a helicopter overhead, captured the scene. The helicopter — apparently at the explicit instruction of the director — moved closer and closer to the ground to get the “optimum-impact” shot, and there was a horrendous accident which killed all three of the actors involved in the scene and injured several other people on the ground. The film eventually proceeded, but with some rewriting necessitated by the death of Morrow, who was one of the leads.

What movie/TV shows were made notorious by one actor’s performance?

Sometime in the early sixties, Frank Sinatra, as part of a world tour, visited Japan, and became sufficiently involved in Japanese/American relations that, among other innovations, he decided to produce and direct a war film showing both sides of the story: the Japanese soldiers spoke Japanese and were decent honourable people; their screen time was equal to that of their American counterparts; and they were capable of kind and merciful acts, even in war time. In many ways “None But the Brave” was an innovative — and important — project, far ahead of its time, and deserved to be given a serious reception.

However, as well as a film-maker and innovator, Sinatra was also a brand new father-in-law, and, possibly eager to give daughter Nancy’s new husband (Tommy Sands) a “leg up” in the cinema world, cast him in a major role for which , even before he opened his mouth, he seemed far too young and immature.

Then, unfortunately, he opened his mouth; it was immediately apparent that young Mr Sands wasn’t really suited for ANY serious role at that stage in his career. His overacting was like nothing anyone had ever seen in a major movie, and Sinatra, as director, apparently seemed content to let him go ahead and sabotage the movie. It was a serious error on Sinatra’s part; the film — whether because of Mr Sands’ acting or because audiences assumed that if he was going to direct with so little control, Sinatra can’t have been serious about his project in the first place — sank without trace and is today given little of the acclamation it deserved.

What movie do you wish you could experience for the first time all over again? 

Virtually all of the movies I love! And the wonderful thing is… I have actually been able to DO that: experience them, as if for the first time, again and again!

My good fortune is due to the fact that I have been blessed with two separate families of children, spanning over a quarter of a century, and, since then, yet another generation of grandchildren. As I sit there, watching some of the great old movies that film societies and the like have revived for our pleasure, I am seeing the movie through their young eyes and getting that first-time thrill over again.

It happened just last year, with “Kiss Me Kate”. And the year before that, with the 1954 “A Star is Born” (which gets revived so often that I have been able to introduce just about all of my children to it on the big screen, which is, of course, the ONLY way to fully-appreciate it). Before that it was “The Quiet Man” and “Some Like it Hot” and “The Court Jester” and “3:10 to Yuma” (1957) and “The Postman Always rings Twice” (1946). If I were alone, I would merely be seeing a great old movie and enjoying it for myself; sitting next to my children and grandchildren, however, it is fifty years ago and I am watching these films just as these young people are…. for the very first time.

What is one of the most underrated film soundtracks from the 1970s?

Since James chose musical movie soundtracks, I will go the other way and choose background scores. My choice is a movie that appeared right at the beginning of your chosen time-frame: “Airport” (1970). It was the last hurrah for one of Hollywood’s greatest, Alfred Newman, who wrote the music for just about every 20th-Century Fox movie you can name…. in fact, he wrote the 20th fan-fare, and then, when the studio pioneered the use of CinemaScope in 1953, he wrote the “extra” bit at the end which played behind that trade mark.

Newman had left Fox — and movies — well before 1970, so I have no idea what got him into the recording booth one last time, and at Universal of all places, but he wrote one of his best-ever scores (and that is saying something — just check the list of his two-hundred-plus scores on Wikipedia) for “Airport”; frankly, and no disrespect meant to Burt Lancaster or Dean Martin or Van Heflin, or Maureen Stapleton (who was in it for only five minutes, but just about walked away with the movie), Newman’s music was the best thing in the picture.

He died before the film went into release, but either Universal didn’t know, or care, about Newman’s standing in the Hollywood musical community, or else it was too late to insert a tribute notice into the film’s titles, because his passing wasn’t acknowledged in the movie. But his music remains; and movies in the golden age were better because he was there.

What films in the last 10 years have the best dramatic dialogue? 

Probably movies that started life as plays, such as “Doubt”, “Frost/Nixon”, “August Osage County” and “Fences”. With no great store of special effects to fall back on, stage plays often have actual words put into the mouths of the characters, and, occasionally, these words are worth giving close attention to.

Do they actually light buildings on fire in movies? Is it all special effects?

Clearly, it would need to be special effects in all but a tiny number of cases, because there is always the chance of the need for a retake or four. And sometimes actors have to run through fires, so it’s imperative that you know exactly how much flame and smoke you are going to produce; a real fire is not so easily controlled.

One case where the fire was absolutely real was in “Gone with the Wind”. It wasn’t really Atlanta that was burning, it was Skull Island… or, to be more precise, the gates and wall that kept King Kong from destroying the native village. The set needed to be taken down, anyway, and setting it alight was probably the quickest and cheapest way to do it, so they simply did the deed and sent a horse and cart with two people in it driving close to the flames. Apparently, it was quite a spectacle, and the star of a forthcoming Selznick production (“Rebecca”) came along to watch, bringing with him his wife, Vivien Leigh. At that time the part of Scarlett O’Hara had not been cast, so that was a fortuitous day of sightseeing for the Oliviers!

There was also a 1933 Australian movie named “The Squatter’s Daughter” in which the climax was played out with a raging wildfire (Australians call it “bushfire”) as the background. The production team simply drove a few miles from Sydney and started their own bushfire, which quickly went out of control and endangered everyone’s lives. Undaunted, the director ordered the actors to stand there and act, with trees blazing behind them. No one, luckily, was injured (seriously, anyway), but the populace in the nearby towns and villages was far from pleased with the crew’s reckless endangerment of their homesteads and livestock. Seen today, the bushfire scenes are breathtaking, and you marvel at the technology of the time to produce such amazing special effects. But, in reality, all it took was a match, and actors and crew willing to risk their lives for a movie!

What is your favourite thriller movie?

This is just for openers, as I note no one has essayed an opinion (and no wonder… there are a lot of thrillers, and one needs time to think)…. but certainly “The Manchurian Candidate” was a good one; the last fifteen minutes is definitely edge-of-the-seat stuff, and the preceding two hours has been engrossing and intelligent, so a good time is had by all.

In your opinion, what is the best movie set in, or involving, a haunted house?

All the previous answers were interesting, and I particularly agree with David and Su, who voted for “The Haunting”, and also Su’s other choice, “The Uninvited”.

But the best is actually neither of these; has everyone forgotten “The Innocents”, based on “Turn of the Screw”, which is particularly brilliant because you leave the cinema never really sure even whether the house WAS haunted… maybe the governess imagined the whole thing? It’s the kind of film you leave the cinema and want to talk about it to someone…. and it’s worth the price of admission just to watch the opening credits and listen to the child’s voice singing that eerie song which, I promise, will stay with you for years.

What are the weirdest examples of movie logic we just accepted as children?

 “Stop! Come one step closer and I will push this button and destroy the world!” Nowadays, there may well be such a button (and it may even be red), but that was a climactic line used in countless serials and sci-fi b-movies in the forties and fifties, and we kids never really wondered about exactly what the button was connected to, or how the villain was able to talk his carpenters into installing it in the first place.

Which actors have turned down an offer to reprise a role?

Sean Connery got so fed up with playing James Bond that he categorically stated — after the somewhat-unrewarding 1971 effort, “Diamonds Are Forever”— that he would never, ever do another movie built around that character, which, of course, left the field open for George Lazenby and Roger Moore.

Connery kept his vow for the next decade; eventually, however, he was tempted to put on the Bond suit just one more time (for a different production team), for a remake of his earlier film, “Thunderball”. His wife, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, came up with the perfect title for the new movie: “Never say Never Again”.

Which actor portrayed a character so well that no other actor could ever replace them?

I really don’t think there is such a thing as in irreplaceable actor, as every generation seems to turn up new performers who take on roles from the past and put a new “spin” on the characterisation. However, just to put a name in here as an answer to your question, I don’t envy the actor who has to take the part of Sir Wilfred in any remake that might be planned of “Witness for the Prosecution”; Charles Laughton is not easily replaced!

For you, who is the most impressive famous actor or actress still alive? Why? 

I have to say that the majority of my most-impressive actors and actresses belong to the Golden Age of Movies, so I can’t really sneak them into the answer to this question, no matter how tempted I may be (in the case of the absolute-top of my list, however, even though she made her last movie in 1963, it seems like she hasn’t really left us, as she is the subject of a major feature film currently in cinemas world-wide, and a documentary that aired in the US only last weekend; but I will do the decent thing, and not mention her by name… this time!).

So, of the ones that are around today, I would have to vote for John Malkovich. He is really a most amazing actor, taking charge of the screen so completely that it’s impossible to look at anyone else. I saw him just a few nights ago in “Ripley’s Game”, and the very next night happened to re-visit “The Godfather”, with Marlon Brando. I doubt if I will give Brando’s “adequate” performance another thought, but I was so entranced by Malkovich that I can’t wait to run his movie again… I haven’t even put it back on the shelf.

It’s always that way with John Malkovich; I remember seeing him, some thirty years ago, in a TV movie directed by Paul Newman of “The Glass Menagerie”, and I have been a firm fan ever since; he added an extra dimension to his character (Tom Wingfield) that I had never seen before in this much-performed work, which happens to be just about my favourite play. He is one of the few actors whose name is sufficient to make me watch the movie, and even when he plays — as even the great ones have to do sometimes — a walking cliche, such as the bad guy in a Clint Eastwood movie about an attempted assassination of the President, he brings to the part such a freshness and an energy that you forget that you’ve seen that very same character in just about every movie Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner or Harrison Ford made during the whole decade. And when he gets a GOOD part, such as he had in “Ripley’s Game” and “Portrait of a Lady”, then the sky’s the limit.

What are some of your favorite non-English movies?

There are dozens! It seems every country has its “golden age of cinema”, and every so often a movie comes along which smashes through the language and cultural barriers and leaves a lasting impression. A few years ago the country was Iran; I quite gave up going to see the dross that was coming out of Hollywood whenever there was an Iranian import on offer; as Hollywood movies became more and more “dumbed down”, the Iranian product seemed to become more and more moving and profound: The Color of Paradise, The White Balloon, A Separation, Children of Heaven….. and the list goes on. Many I can no longer recall the titles of, as they had a limited release with minimal publicity; but they made going to the movies such a pleasure at a time when Hollywood was doing everything in its power to make it a sore trial.

My main moviegoing years were in the fifties and sixties, so foreign-language films in those days were usually French, Italian, or Swedish. There was one, in particular that I remember with such fondness that, on a recent trip to Paris, I spent hours trying (unsuccessfully) to find it on DVD. Its French title was “Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray” and it was released internationally as “Sundays and Cybele”. A simple black-and-white movie, with a budget of around nothing, it was just so lovely to look at that one kept returning to it, as one does to a great piece of music. It would have to stand as my choice of “favorite non-English movie”.

What are the dangers of child actors acting in A rated movies? Does it affect their psyche.

Certainly, it can, if they are required to act in scenes which exploit their innocence. As far as American movies are concerned, you’d have to ask Jodie Foster (“Taxi Driver”) or Brooke Shields (“Pretty Baby”) whether their roles, and some of the things they had to do on-screen, left any emotional scars, but, if not, they must have been extremely well-prepared by their caregivers! I seem to remember that, as an adult, Brooke went to court to point out that she had been exploited as a child, and didn’t really understand the implications of what she was being required to do until she was older.

If you are talking about horror movies, however, I think the risks of significant damage are fairly small. Children seem to love the game of horror, and songs about (for example) chopping off heads have been popular with preschoolers for a couple of centuries. They are “in” on the joke, and they know the monsters (or whatever) are just costumed actors, whom they probably have lunch with in the studio canteen. Their main “horror” would be the same as for all the other actors: not knowing their lines, and being bawled out by the director!

What is the best quality of your favourite actor?

That would be James Mason, and there are two reasons for this choice.

First is his voice; listening to him read lines was like listening to great music, and I always looked forward to his movies just to hear his readings. He could make even the most mundane line sound fresh and wonderful!

Second is that he wasn’t too worried about his image, and would take parts because they interested him, not just because they would gain him new fans or please old ones. He wasn’t the first choice for his best movie (the 1954 “A Star is Born”, starring Judy Garland and produced by her husband, Sidney Luft); both Garland and Luft wanted Cary Grant, but, after reading the script, Grant turned them down, on the grounds that his fans would be unhappy to see him in a role where he had to slap a woman…. and then, to make things worse, commit suicide at the end. Mason liked the role, though….. and gave a performance for the ages, one that was every bit as great to watch as Judy’s. He also took the role of paedophile Humbert in Kubrick’s controversial “Lolita” when Noel Coward turned it down; it was a risky venture which was unlikely to bring him new fans, and was even likely to be banned in some places; but he found something interesting and challenging in the part, and that’s all that mattered. I admired his bravery.

What little known movie can everyone watch tonight that will leave them utterly shocked? · 

“Fail Safe” is pretty shocking, and the thing that makes it especially so is that you know, deep down, that the “solution” which the American president works out in order to prevent an all-out nuclear war, is exactly what he WOULD do if the crisis described in the movie actually happened.

But I won’t be a spoiler and say more here; if you download the movie (Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Dan O’Herlihy; directed by Sidney Lumet) I can promise you that, a few minutes before the end, you will surely give vent to a shocked, audible gasp.

Which movie has left you dumbfounded?

The Ross Hunter-produced wide-screen musical (with “songs” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David) remake of the classic “Lost Horizon” comes immediately to mind here. It’s the kind of movie you watch with your mouth open, unable to comprehend how it could all possibly be so inept yet still up there on the screen, charging people to see it. It’s not, of course, the only movie ever made which you watch open-mouthed; what makes this one different is that it had money spent on it — a LOT of money — and several big-name stars who should have known better somehow managed to get involved (even Charles Boyer, who had an almost-unblemished record of good movies, was talked into it). The hapless cast sang (even when they couldn’t) and danced (even when they couldn’t), and the script-writer and choreographer both matched them mis-step for mis-step.

When I saw, on screen, the name ‘Hermes Pan’ as choreographer — he worked with Fred Astaire and choreographed some of the best of all the Hollywood musicals, including “Kiss Me Kate” — I could only imagine that he had a nine-year-old son named after him, and he let the boy do the choreography just for a lark. But you can’t find easy “outs” like that for Liv Ullman, for Peter Finch, for OIivia Hussey, or for Sally Kellerman. Had they no power over the songs they were handed to sing? Couldn’t they have done what Judy Garland did when she was handed a trite song for “Valley of the Dolls”: simply say, “No, thanks,” and send the composer back for another try? Critic Roger Ebert summed it up rather amusingly: “I don’t know how much Ross Hunter paid Burt Bacharach and Hal David to write the music for “Lost Horizon,” but whatever it was, it was too much. Not that the movie would have been better if the music were better; no, the movie is awful on its own. But the music is really bad.”

Alone among the stars, Bobby Van, the only real musical performer in the cast, manages to make his song sound almost acceptable. Almost.

How would you describe your favorite movie/TV show/book in the least appealing way?

The Wizard of Oz: a girl arrives unexpectedly in a strange town full of misfits, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with two other misfits to kill again.

(This is not mine… I read it somewhere some months ago, and never forgot it).

What's an otherwise fantastic movie with a terrible ending?

The 1956 movie, “The Bad Seed”, was a very-effective and faithful adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson play (many of the stage actors brought their Broadway performances to the movie) about a sweet little eight-year-old who is already a serial killer and has plans for future victims; but the film-makers were also victims, as they had to bow to the various censorship rules still rigidly-enforced at that time.

The play’s ending — Mum gets wise, gives her daughter a fatal overdose, then blows her own brains out, whereupon the child is saved, living to plot anew — was enough to give all the censorship boards and Legions of Decency heart flutters, and the only way the film could be assured a general release was if the whole ending were turned on its head: Mum shoots herself in the head, all right, but she’s such a bad shot that she survives, even at that close range, while her wicked daughter goes out in the rain and gets struck by lightning (talk about divine retribution!), thus restoring the balance required of movies of that time. In five minutes the screenwriters completely undid the good work that the cast and playwright had spent two hours building up.

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, after the lightning has died away and the world is at peace again, out comes the cast for stage-type curtain calls. And when Patty McCormack, the tearaway star of the movie as the evil little girl (she was remembered for that part all her working life, and was selected for a part in the recent “Frost/Nixon” because she had made such an impression on the director, himself a child actor of that era), comes out for her curtsy, she is put across the lap of Nancy Kelly (Mum) and given a sound thrashing — all giggles — for being a naughty little girl.

“The Bad Seed” is, for the most part, a terrific movie, and you ought to watch it; but turn off the picture as soon as Rhoda comes skipping into the hospital waiting room to cuddle her grateful Dad, while the neighbour (the next victim, as we know) says to the assembled well-wishers that it is so lucky that the bereaved husband still has his little girl to comfort him. That’s the ending you could only have seen on the stage!

What is your least favorite scene in your favorite movie? 

My answer to your question is a tribute to the writing and directing of Joseph L Mankiewicz, who was responsible for my favourite movie, “All About Eve”. I have seen it countless times, so it wasn’t hard to play it at rapid speed in my head. I searched and searched, looking for the one scene, even half a minute — perhaps a scene that Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, George Sanders and Thelma Ritter weren’t in — where the movie didn’t sparkle. Marilyn Monroe’s few minutes, perhaps? But, no, George Sanders’ dialogue when she was on-screen was so brilliant, and her part so shrewdly-written for her exact type, that you never even noticed her limitations. Hugh Marlowe’s work, perhaps? But, once again, he was always involved in rapid-fire exchanges with either Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, or Celeste Holm, and his major function — which he did admirably — was not to get in their way.

Finally, I had to give up. There is no “least-favourite” scene in “All About Eve”….. only the words “THE END”, and even then you have that wonderful Alfred Newman music playing behind them!

What was your first movie in theatres?

 

I think it would have been “City Lights”, Charles Chaplin’s 1931 silent movie, which I saw (in revival) before I started school (so it would have been around 1946). I still remember the opening scene of him waking up in the town square, cradled by the statue of some political or military hero. I also remember the ending, where the blind girl he has helped deserts him…. at the time I thought that was the saddest thing I had ever heard of!

 

What movies are unremarkable but have great soundtracks? 

“The Pride and the Passion” is a beauty, The film, in spite of stars like Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren, and a budget of several million dollars in 1957 (when a few million dollars went a long way!), the film is entertaining, but no more (it is, however, a little better than Sinatra’s own public critique of it: “an underwhelming achievement”). But George Antheil’s soundtrack score is worth listening to in its own right.

A whole slew of “unremarkable” films — from around 1953 —benefited from the music of Bernard Herrmann, who like to keep busy, even if the movie was clearly going to be no “Citizen Kane” (his first significant score). Not many people are eager to take another look at “White Witch Doctor”, “Beneath the Twelve Mile Reef”, “King of the Khyber Rifles”, “Joy in the Morning”, “Blue Denim” or “It’s Alive!”; however, even if there was nothing much to look at up there on the screen, Bernard Herrmann’s music was always immediately-identifiable, interesting, frequently challenging, and invariably better than anything else in the movie (only Hitchcock seemed to be capable of giving him material worthy of his talents).

What are some good movies to watch for a good cry? 

“The Yearling”, made in 1946, would probably still top the list, for me, in this category.

A beautifully-made film, coming from MGM at the height of its powers, it is based on the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; at its centre is a boy on the threshold of adolescence, whose only role model is his father, a simple, decent man who deals with life honestly and without bitterness and has tried to instil these values in his son by example rather than by preaching or scolding.

The yearling of the film’s title is a baby fawn which the boy rescues and raises to adulthood… but, of course, the “real” yearling is the boy himself, and how he deals with the first real crisis in his life, one that will pit him against his parents and drive him from the only home he knows. It is masterfully directed by Clarence Brown, and has some of the best movie music you will ever hear (composed by Herbert Stothart): these people, working within the studio system, had the time and resources — and the encouragement — to take that little bit extra care, and get it right. It also has what I think is possibly the best-ever performance by Jane Wyman (as the boy’s mother), who, a decade after this, was practically a director’s first call if you wanted someone to star in a movie made to give audiences “a good cry”…. she eventually made these films on autopilot, but in this one she gives the character every nuance gleaned from the novel, and a little more. She wasn’t the first choice for the role, but she makes it her own.

“The Yearling” is, quite simply, unforgettable.

What is your favorite Phillip Seymour Hoffman role (regardless of whether you liked the movie)?

His portrayal of the priest in “Doubt” was, I think, just about the most memorable aspect of a movie which was excellent in every respect. If a great performance can be measured in tiny gestures, there was one gesture he made in one scene in that film which still resonates with me, years later: announcing his imminent departure (against his wishes) from his parish, he tries to keep it light and casual as he bids farewell to the members of his congregation (which include, of course, the students in his school); noticing one boy, he aims a pointing “gotcha!” gesture at him which seemed so real that I could only imagine that this actor had done his homework and observed real priests in real-life situations. A tiny moment, but surely acting is all about such tiny moments. He’s a great loss to an industry which has need of talent like his!

What is the one movie that always cheers you up? And why?

 “The Court Jester”. With the possible exception of the best Marx Bros movies, “The Court Jester” is just about the funniest film since sound. Why? It just has the most-perfect coterie of British actors (although it’s not a British film): Cecil Parker, Basil Rathbone, Glynis Johns, and Angela Lansbury…. and then there was Mildred Natwick putting the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle…. and Danny Kaye snapping in and out of his trance, and….. well, it was just one of those movies where everything went gloriously right!

What movie was ruined because an actor gave an amateur performance?

There is, I expect, always a danger when a director sees himself in the leading role of his movie, because, try as he might, he is unlikely to be able to distance himself from the performance sufficiently to know how it will be judged by audiences. Roman Polanski directed some of the most interesting movies of the second half of the twentieth century; “Chinatown” (in which he allowed himself a small role) is often cited in the top twenty of savvy moviegoers. However, in “The Tenant” — a strange, brooding film which was so hard to follow that it definitely required a leading man we could become involved with and care about — his directorial decision to play the leading role (and he was in just about every shot) was, for him, a major, if uncharacteristic, misjudgement; as a director, he commands your attention, but, as an actor he loses it almost instantly. Today, “The Tenant” stands as just about the only one of Polanski’s films that is unwatchable; one critic who saw it at the Cannes Film Festival commented that it was a wonder no one was killed in the rush for the exit doors at the end of the screening!

What movie does your favorite actor or actress openly regret making?

 

I would expect many actors and technicians would have privately expressed the wish that they had never been involved with “The Conqueror”, but Agnes Moorehead was the one who said it publicly. It has become known in Hollywood as the “killer” movie, responsible for the deaths (by cancer) of its director (Dick Powell), two major stars (John Wayne and Susan Hayward) and several supporting players (Moorehead being one), technicians, and even visitors to the set!

Most of the outdoor scenes for this otherwise-laughable bio of Genghis Khan were shot in Utah (as a stand-in for Mongolia), about 100 kilometres from where the US’s nuclear bomb testing had taken place… altogether eleven above-ground bombs had been set off there (critics would say, today, that the movie made it an even dozen) and nearly 100 other nuclear tests of one type or another.

Of course, no one knew, back then, about the dangers of radiation; in fact, when they returned to the relative safety of Howard Hughes’s film studio in Hollywood, Hughes even had 60 tons of the sand from the site shipped back to the studio, for “matching” of studio and location shots. Everyone connected to the movie — 220 people, it was calculated — was exposed to the deadly radiation, and in the next 20 years ninety-one of them had developed cancer, fatally in just on fifty cases (one of the first to be told that his cancer was terminal was supporting actor Pedro Armendariz, who committed suicide on learning the news). Two of John Wayne’s sons, and Susan Hayward’s son, visited their parents on the set sufficient times for them to be affected, also.

Agnes Moorehead was one of the last to be diagnosed, watching as her co-workers gradually succumbed; she knew she was living on borrowed time, and when she finally learned that her turn had come, ruefully commented, “I should never have made that movie”.

What was the last movie that you rented?

Ever since I bought my first VCR player (long before DVD and blu-ray) I have made it a practice never to rent a movie… if it’s worth seeing, it’s worth keeping, I always said. In my entire lifetime of movie-watching, then, I have only ever rented a single movie! I admit that this was because the store simply wouldn’t sell it to me… at the time it was brand new.

Of course, I eventually managed to purchase a copy, but I admit that the evening I rented it, it was worth all the signing up and proving my identity, etc. I had a great night!

The movie was “That’s Entertainment III”. The one with all the outtakes we had never been allowed to see. Released in 1994. I guess that dates me!

What is your favorite movie? What movie impacted you the most?

Interestingly, for me they are two different question with two different answers, although I suppose if I were a REAL movie afficionado, I would have one movie which was both.

My favourite movie — the one I just plain love watching the most, and never get tired of, is “All About Eve”. It is the most deliriously sumptuous blend of great script, great performances, and great music, and I simply never get tired of it.

The movie that “impacted” me the most, however, would have to be “Citizen Kane”, the first time I saw it in a university theatrette in the 1950s. The reviewer Pauline Kael said it better than I could ever have said it, and in fewer words: “It’s as if you’ve never seen a movie before”. I guess people seeing it for the first time today couldn’t get that same thrill, because the movies learned from “Kane”, and its techniques gradually became commonplace. But when it first came out, there was nothing with which to compare it; even fifteen years afterwards, it was still something to take your breath away.

The second film that impacted the most would have to be the 1954 “A Star is Born”, which, in a single two-and-a-half hours’ screening, showed me the very best in acting and singing that I had ever seen, or would ever see. The only reason it doesn’t step up there and take the place of “Citizen Kane” was that it was, basically, a one-woman show, and the direction and script were tailored, quite “routinely”, to show off the talents of that one woman. So, unlike “Kane”, it didn’t take your breath away by taking chances; with Judy at the top of her game, it was on a safe bet and it knew it.

What's the most extravagant gesture a Hollywood celebrity has done for a fan that you know of?

That honour would have to go to Frank Sinatra, although there are so many of those gestures on record coming from him, that it’s hard to know where to start. For the most part, however, the beneficiaries of his generosity seem to have been people in “the business”, like actor Lee J Cobb and singer Sylvia Syms, so you may think that examples such as these fall outside the guidelines of your question (although they were still fans as well as professionals, and Syms, at the time Sinatra quietly and anonymously turned her career around for her, had never even met him).

However, Sinatra could reach out to fans who weren’t in the business, too, and there is one particular instance on record which resonated with me personally, since it concerns a record collector whose vast collection of Sinatra records was his pride and joy (could have been me!). This particular gentleman was involved in a particularly unpleasant divorce (are there any other kind?) in which his departing spouse was better-prepared, more-shrewdly advised, and more-ruthless in her desire to punish; the break-up actually got into the local paper where they lived. The husband lamented, to the journalist, that it was bad enough that he had lost his life-savings and most of the furniture, but that his departing wife had even disposed of his priceless collection of Sinatra records… and he had owned just about every record Sinatra had ever made.

Some small time later a delivery truck pulled up outside the door of the man’s home. Sinatra had gifted to him his own collection of his records — everything he had ever recorded. As usual with Sinatra, it was all done quietly and with a minimum of fuss, and the two men, as far as I know, never met. I suppose that this, really, is only a small gesture compared to some of the other deeds Sinatra carried out in his long and distinguished career (such as building a children’s hospital in post-war Japan); but it remains, I feel, one that tells us a lot about the man behind the voice.

What are some examples of terrible acting performances in great films?

Very few, for the simple reason that if you are watching terrible acting, you seldom think “Wow! This film is great!” A really bad performance torpedoes a film, and the actor and the movie sink together.

To me, the actor whose overdone performances can usually be counted on to torpedo a movie is Rod Steiger, but when I looked down the list of the top 100 movies of all time, the first one I came upon with Steiger in it was “On the Waterfront”, and I have to admit that director Elia Kazan kept him firmly under control in that one, and he was actually good. I didn’t keep going to try to find, for instance, “The Big Knife”, because I had a feeling that, even if they went as far as the top 1000 movies, that title would be unlikely to show up!

Not too far under “On the Waterfront”, however, I came upon “Apocalypse Now!”. It wouldn’t be one my top 100 movies, but IMDB put it as number 31, so I guess most people think it’s great.

So I have found what I was looking for. I loved Brando’s performances in “Waterfront”, in “Julius Caesar”, in “Streetcar Named Desire” and in “Last Tango in Paris”, and he even had his moments in turkeys like “The Fugitive Kind”, but I have to say that I thought his performance in “Apocalypse Now!” was absolutely appalling. He was the only big mistake Francis Ford Coppola made with that one, even more than in “The Godfather”, in which he was pretty bad also (but everyone else was so good you could just about love the movie anyway… and his screen-time didn’t last long). But when he turned up in “Apocalypse”, there was no one else onscreen to watch, and the result was a devastating blow to the movie (I haven’t seen the redux edition, although I have it at home; did they perhaps cut down his footage in that one?)

One of the great mysteries of Hollywood is why the mature Brando seemed hell-bent on sabotaging his own movies and his career along with them. His resume should have included the words “Can supply own torpedo”.

What are the films in the IMDB top 100 that you don’t like?

Just for a start, “A Clockwork Orange”, which I think throws movies right back into the old Cecil B de Mille theory that you can put just about anything on-screen, no matter how violent or perverted, and the audience can have a great time watching it, so long as you say that the reason it’s up there is so you can condemn it. De Mille used to do it in a voice-over: “… and they descended into licentiousness and committed all kinds of corrupt and evil acts”…. and since he was saying how TERRIBLE these things were, he got away with showing them on-screen, for our enjoyment (while we’re deploring them)! Is there any real difference with this one… except that Kubrick doesn’t do a voice-over?

And, to pick another a bit further down the list: “Giant”. Don’t get me started! Honestly, I tried to like it when I watched it a few weeks ago for the first time since it came out. After all, it IS George Stevens, one of Hollywood’s most distinguished directors (even though, that reputation must have taken a beating after “The Greatest Story Ever Told” came out with his name on it); but “Giant” is a giant bore, and the grade-school symbolism of the two babes in the playpen together at the end (I think they played “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” in the background while showing close-ups of brown eyes and blue eyes, but maybe Stevens didn’t quite go THAT far!) is an insult to the audience. It doesn’t deserve to go anywhere near the top 100… or 1000.

Is there an actor or actress whose voice you love? 

James Mason. His speaking voice could make even the most banal line spring to life; when he had some GOOD lines to say (for instance, as Brutus in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, as Norman Maine in the Judy Garland “A Star is Born”, as Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, and as Humbert in “Lolita”), listening to him was like listening to beautiful music.

Has anyone here seen “The Last of Sheila”? The most impossible-to-unravel whodunit you ever saw in your life (well, what would you expect; written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins), with so many twists and turns that there was only one thing the director could do at the end: choose one of the characters who hadn’t been killed to stand there and explain the whole thing to the other survivors (and, in doing so, explain it to the baffled audience). Pages and pages of dialogue… so who could possibly deliver a speech like that without having it drowned out by audiences stampeding for the exits? The director, Herbert Ross, was no fool; there wasn’t much for James Mason to do in the first hour-and-a-half of the movie, but, boy! That last twenty minutes was like the best meal your ears ever had.

What media experiences have most impacted your life? Could be movies, books, albums, videos, anything else.

From the time I was around eight I used to go to the movies every Saturday (paid for by lugging second-hand newspapers, tied with rope, to the local greengrocers). By the time I was eleven or twelve, I had seen a lot of movies, and was starting to know a good performance when I saw one.

Two weeks after my thirteenth birthday, I chose to see a brand-new movie that had been getting a lot of controversial publicity before (Australian) release, mainly centred around the fact that the Academy Awards people chose NOT to give the best-actress Oscar to its leading lady, and most of Hollywood (and, it seems, the western world) was crying “Foul!”

The film was “A Star is Born” — the GOOD one — and, fifteen minutes into the movie, the leading man (James Mason) walked into a late-night bar where a girl singer was singing, just for herself. The song was “The Man That Got Away” and the girl singer was the lead, Judy Garland. In four minutes I learned just how great singing could be (in the next two and a half hours, I learned the same about acting).

My musical tastes were formed on that day, and, of course, Judy opened the doors, for me, to countless other singers, male and female, and countless other superb musicians. I learned a great deal that day (including a skepticism for the Academy Awards), and my life has been immeasurably enriched.

I have had many great experiences in the sixty-five years since — movies, albums, concerts — but that was the day that started it all. I can honestly say that I came out of that cinema a different person from when I went in.

What are some spontaneous movie dialogues that are considered iconic?

Can I repeat, largely, part of an answer I gave to an earlier question a few months ago? It, also, dealt with the “improvised” scene, the times when the players simply threw away the script and seized the moment… and the director just stood back and let them do it, with results right up there on the screen for you to see.

There are surely many more of these than we will ever know about, but some have become celebrated, and none more so than the famous “hospital-waiting-room” scene (filmed on a single take with no attempt made to cover the fact that the cameraman and lighting people, aware of what they were witnessing, were moving their equipment around in order to capture a once-in-a-career event), in Judy Garland’s last movie, made in her beloved England. This is from my earlier answer:

“….the most astonishing seven-and-a-half minutes of “acting” you are ever likely to see was an unscripted scene, done on one take, in the 1963 film “I Could Go on Singing”: unable to find much of worth in the script that was handed to them, Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde met privately to work out what THEY wanted from the scene; the following morning, Bogarde took the director aside and said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but just don’t yell “cut”!” To his credit, Ronald Neame didn’t, and the result was possibly the most extraordinary piece of self-revelation by a major star ever caught on camera… and in wide-screen Technicolor! For this reason alone, the film remains a treasure for the ages.”

It was said that those who were present as this scene was taken were walking around in such a daze afterwards that other people in the studio were coming up to them and asking, “What the devil has happened?”. The most-common response was a single word: “a miracle”. I promise you, it is something to hear — and see — even if the rest of the movie can’t deliver a script to match it (it can, however, show you some great singing by the best female performer the world has ever known).

Which is the most inspiring movie you've seen, and why?

If you are seeking an answer to which film made me FEEL the most-inspired, I guess it would be one of the movies based on the story of Anne Frank, whose words, in her diary, have always affected me greatly; and I must say that she has, in the main, been treated pretty fairly by the movie-makers, especially George Stevens in the 1959 adaptation of the stage play.

However, if you want to know the film that gave me the most practical inspiration — that actually changed the course of my life with a single viewing — it would have to be a tiny British movie that few people have even heard of and hardly anyone else remembers: “Mandy”, starring Jack Hawkins and Mandy Miller.

I was a young twenty-something teacher (the only one) in a tiny country school, with no real ambitions for the future, other than to do what I was doing better. One evening I sat down to watch television, and the late movie that night happened to be “Mandy”, of which I knew absolutely nothing. By the time it was over, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and within a few years I had left the school where I was teaching, and the area, and had begun training as a teacher of deaf children. I did that for the next thirty years, some of the most rewarding years of my life. That’s a year for every three minutes of the movie’s running time! And, you know, I have never been able to catch “Mandy” again (that was forty-nine years ago); it changed my whole life, but it only stayed for that one evening!

Which overrated movie did you not like?

There were things to like in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, but, as its reputation grew steadily over the years, I felt that its shortcomings became more and more obvious. Some of it is just plain boring.

Today its main contribution to the industry would seem to be that it proved, once and for all, that science-fiction didn’t have to be a poverty-stricken movie genre; that you COULD make it look better than laughable if you just threw a lot of money at it.

I respect it for doing that; but it still doesn’t make me like the movie.

What Hollywood scenes have had the maximum retakes?

There is a dance duet number between Gene Kelly and (newcomer to dancing) Frank Sinatra in “Anchors Aweigh”. It’s the number where they wind up leaping across rows of beds in a navy barracks. I don’t know whether it has the most retakes of any scene in movie history, but I read that it was — especially for Sinatra — a very hard scene, and they filmed it more than seventy times before it was finally decided that Frank had got it right. And it’s great… although I think that, even after so many takes, you can catch him, just once or twice, snatching a quick look at his feet!

What movies sounded good on paper but because of bad directing, acting, or writing came off bad?

I don’t think that “Sweeney Todd” came off “bad”, exactly, but when you look at the source material and then see what’s up there on-screen, you can’t help feeling disappointed. On-stage, the great music had been sung by some equally-great performers (Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury, George Hearn) and was thrilling to listen to; on-screen, they “got by”, and, in the case of Helena Bonham-Carter, barely. On-stage, the music and lyrics reigned supreme, and the story was crafted around these; on-screen, it was presumed that audiences went along to hear a good story, and so the music was just something you got as an added extra (in some cases, I hear, it was worse than that; young Johnny Depp fans didn’t even know there WAS any music, and felt cheated when they had to put up with songs interrupting their pleasure of watching their idol; presumably, they were grateful that Tim Burton had decided to shorten just about all the songs, and even to leave out some of the best music altogether, in an effort to appease distributors who demanded that the film stick to movie, rather than Broadway, time constraints).

The acting was still good (some of the supports, such as Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, were better than good); the writing was still good (it was, for the most part, the words we’d heard on the stage, only edited-down so we didn’t have to listen to nearly as many of them); the direction was still……. well, I guess it just had different aims to what I’d hoped it would have (I happen to love Sondheim!), and I will have to give Tim Burton just a little credit: if it hadn’t been for him, and the fact that he had two big-name stars ready to help him with the project, we probably wouldn’t have had a movie version of Sondheim’s masterpiece at all. So some of the movie’s shortcomings can be excused on the grounds that Burton probably knew — maybe better than Sondheim — how to get bums on seats. But the movie remains disappointing; the filmed record of the London stage production is infinitely more-rewarding.

Is it true that all celebrities are obnoxious?

Goodness, no. Some of them are absolutely lovely, either because that is just the way they are, or because they have realised that their elite status has been granted to them, not simply from their own efforts, but through the teams of co-workers, supporters, and fans who have lifted them into their privileged position.

I don’t know in which of those two groups of celebrities Liza Minnelli should be placed, but I have read countless stories of how she has gone out of her way to help her colleagues, with absolutely no thought to whether or not she might have been compromising her own position of pre-eminence. The great dancer of the 30s and 40s, Martha Graham, dedicated her autobiography to Liza, and if you read what’s inside the covers, you will soon understand why. Like just about every other star, Martha reached the point where she had been superseded by others, and she was eventually reduced to living quietly and modestly in New York, virtually forgotten by the industry which she had helped to elevate and enrich. But not forgotten by Liza, several generations younger; Liza befriended her, showed her the respect which her contemporaries had neglected to do, and even gave her her last hurrah (when, in the street, a cluster of fans surrounded Liza and ignored Martha Graham, Liza explained that her friend was actually one of the great dancers of all time, and that they really should be getting her autograph — which, of course, they instantly proceeded to do).

Kay Thompson was one of the great behind-the-scenes talents at MGM in its golden days, and could sing and dance with the best of them (and at one stage had the highest-paid cabaret act in the world); she was a close friend of Judy Garland’s, whom she coached in her early days, and, consequently, was Liza’s godmother. But she, too, was eventually ill, alone, and forgotten; Liza moved her into her own apartment and took care of her through her final years. When Kay’s illness made her irascible and impossible to live with, Liza actually took a second, nearby apartment and lived there, still visiting Kay every day (in Liza’s own apartment!) to ensure she had company and provisions. Then, after Kay died, Liza designed one of her shows around Kay, in tribute.

And then there was Gwen Verdon’s sickness during the run of “Chicago”, which wasn’t a success in its earliest days and was always on the brink of closing; Gwen’s forced withdrawal for a month seemed to be the final straw. But “Chicago” had been written by Liza’s dear friends, Ebb and Kander, so she quietly stepped in, putting her own plans “on-hold” and offering to play Gwen’s role, without remuneration, until Gwen was able to return. There was just one hitch, however: a star being replaced by a bigger star just wasn’t done, and the worry was that Gwen would feel that she simply couldn’t return after her recuperation, because the role would, by then, be “owned” by Liza. So Liza worked out the solution. No signs, no publicity, nothing in print that mentioned the name “Liza Minnelli”. The audience would go to see Gwen, and an announcement as the curtain went up would say, simply, that at this performance the part of Roxie Hart would be played by Liza Minnelli. And everyone benefited: with Liza in the part for around a month, “Chicago” started to be better-appreciated by audiences. When she left, and Gwen returned, all talk of closing the show had ceased, and “Chicago” today stands as one of the best-loved and most-frequently-revived shows of its era. Ebb and Kander say, gratefully, that Liza SAVED “Chicago”, and she didn’t have a single thing to gain from her gesture.

Everybody says things like that about Liza; the word “obnoxious” is one that nobody uses in the same sentence as “Liza Minnelli”.

Can you think of any instances where an actor was shocked to be written off a show?

I heard that Sid James was fairly shocked when his long-term partner, Tony Hancock, suddenly announced that he was planning to go into the next series without Sid’s participation. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been, however; Hancock had previously let go some of his other long-term stalwarts (such as Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques) from his radio and TV shows, since it seems that he was on a quest for some kind of “purity” in comedy that could be achieved only by a sole performer. Well, Hancock was certainly the right man for that job, and even without James (who was, really, the perfect sidekick for him, and things were never quite the same without him), he created some wonderful solo comedy half-hours. But, of course, it still wasn’t “pure” Hancock, because he was still speaking words his team of writers (Galton and Simpson, who, like James, might have been sent from Heaven for the task of making Hancock the pre-eminent British comedian of his era), had written for him; eventually, to the horror of just about everyone who loved him, Tony soon decided that he didn’t need his writers, either.

It says a lot for the character and loyalty of Sidney James, I think, that, when Hancock, alone, eventually began to falter and was involved in a couple of projects that, to put it bluntly, bombed, Sidney unhesitatingly offered to come back and help out, for old times’ sake. But Hancock’s vanity, of course, wouldn’t let that happen, and he died, soon afterwards (in Sydney, Australia), at his own hand.

How can films have influence on how people view the government?

Whether you are talking of the government, a private company, the police, or a whole race of people, movie-makers are experts in swaying you to their own point of view by the way the material is presented. They say that when the old-style cowboy-and-Indian movies were being made, early in the sound era, that even Indians used to go to the movies and root for the cowboys!

What movie soundtrack became a best-selling record?

Many examples over the years, but the earliest I remember would be “High Noon”. The producers hired Tex Ritter to sing the song behind the titles, and snatches of his vocal kept repeating as the story unfolded; I don’t know whether it ever hit Number One on the Top 40, but for a while there you could hardly turn on the radio without hearing it!

What's the worst historical anachronism you've seen in a movie?

There are a lot of those around! The photograph of Maximus (Russell Crowe) addressing the crowd in the Colosseum in “Gladiator” while an aeroplane flies overhead in plain sight went viral, and I am sure you would find it if you googled. There is a story that one of the assistant directors in the 1959 “Ben-Hur” wasn’t too careful about where he parked his car at the Circus Maximus set, with the result that it can be spotted sticking out from a pillar. I can’t find it, but I can attest to the fact that, in “The Bounty”, Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) and William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) sit discussing their proposed 1789 voyage while a car with headlights on drives past in the background.

Even though I never caught this myself, there is reportedly a soldier in “The Last Days of Pompeii” who wears his wrist watch while on duty. Easier to catch — you can’t miss them — are the zippers down the back of Paulette Goddard’s dresses in “Sins of Jezebel”.

Dialogue anachronisms are probably the most prevalent; pity the poor scriptwriters who have to put words in the mouths of ancient Romans or Ancient Greeks. William Faulkner, apparently, was the original choice of screenwriter for “Land of the Pharaohs” (three, in all, were credited), but he eventually gave up and withdrew, because, as he said, “I didn’t know how ancient Egyptians talked”. Faulkner shouldn’t have worried; neither, it seems, did the four screenwriters of the 1956 epic “The Ten Commandments”, in which Nefertiti (Anne Baxter) complained, about Moses (Charlton Heston) that “he spurned me like a strumpet in the streets!” Richard Burton spoke normal 20th-century English while he was crucifying Christ in “The Robe”, but some time later, when his conversion to Christianity isn’t bringing him the rewards he had hoped for, he abruptly switches to 17th-century King James English: “My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” (it’s hard to believe that a well-read actor like Burton wouldn’t have realised the idiocy of the switch, but, apparently, at that time in his career he wasn’t in a position to tear up the line and storm off the set!) I didn’t see “King Richard and the Crusaders”, so you’ll have to check for yourself to see if Virginia Mayo, as Lady Edith, really did (as reported) complain to George Sanders (King Richard), “War! War! War! That’s all you ever talk about, Dickie Plantagenet!”

Which is your favorite comedian in your favorite comedy movie?

I have to say that, in my humble opinion, some of the funniest comedies, ones that gave to the world some of the most-skilled movie comedians, were made before the development of the sound film. The funniest movie ever made, I think, was a silent movie, “Liberty”, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Chaplin’s “City Lights” was also rather wonderful, but although I always admired Chaplin, I could never call him my “favourite comedian”; in the silent era, I would have to acknowledge Buster Keaton as the king of them all.

Sadly, Laurel and Hardy and Keaton and Chaplin started to falter when they had to cope with sound and dialogue (though Buster Keaton still had the best-timed line in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, made in 1966), and their sound successors — Abbot and Costello, the Three Stooges and Martin and Lewis — never even came close to mastering the timing and the underplaying that made the old masters great. Only the Marx Brothers seemed to stand out in the early sound era, and “Duck Soup”, “A Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races” really are side-splittingly funny. Perhaps Groucho Marx, then, earns the title of my “favourite comedian”, at least in that era.

When the Marxes, too, started to falter (in general, comedians don’t age well), the Brits stepped in to fill in the gap. The brilliant Alastair Sim, Tony Hancock, Terry-Thomas, Margaret Rutherford and Cecil Parker were the names you looked for if you wanted to laugh out loud, rather than snicker, which is all that most of the Hollywood comedies (Francis the talking mule, Ma and Pa Kettle, etc) were good for. A small British production company called Ealing Studios produced a succession of brilliant little films, any one of which might be worthy of the title of “favourite comedy movie”; backed into a corner, I would have to vote for “The Ladykillers” as being the best of the bunch here.

It was a host of marvellous English ensemble players that picked up a Hollywood comedy of the fifties and ran away with it: “The Court Jester” starred Danny Kaye, and I have to admit that he was just wonderful in that one, although there is little other of his output that is anywhere near as good. Perhaps he was inspired by his supporting cast: Cecil Parker (who had worked for Ealing), Basil Rathbone, Angela Lansbury, Glynis Johns…. all British and all wonderful. “The Court Jester” is the funniest Hollywood comedy since the Marx Brothers were at their peak, and I have to admit that there are few videos in our home which are put in the player as frequently as this one. Since then, Woody Allen (especially “Play it Again, Sam” and “Annie Hall”) and Mel Brooks (especially “The Producers” and “To Be or Not to Be”) would probably be King of the Hill.

I guess I haven’t really answered your question, because I haven’t managed to pare the list down to one absolute-favourite movie and just one favourite comedian. But I am only the first answer to your question, and I am sure the next respondents will be able to hit the bulls-eye!

What is the best horror movie of all time in your opinion?

 

I think I would plump for Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, even though many people would dispute it being characterised as a horror movie, since it is noticeably lacking in the blood-and-gore that most people associate with the genre. But “Rosemary’s Baby” has something going for it that few other horror movies have ever had: conviction. While it’s happening, you believe every word of it…. a tribute to Polanski and to his stars, Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.

 

What actors missed out on big film opportunities because they were trapped in a contract for another project?

A film about the life of Lawrence of Arabia had been “in the works” for several years before David Lean actually embarked on the project, and the young British actor Dirk Bogarde was considered a “shoo-in” for the title role. When the movie was ready to get underway, however, Bogarde’s home studio reminded him that, under his contract, he had one more film to make for them in his series of “Doctor” movies: a simple-minded comedy series which wasn’t at all challenging for him, but which invariably produced films that were popular with audiences and made a tidy profit. His contract was water-tight; he went into “Doctor in Distress”, which he could have played in his sleep (and which, today, no-one remembers), and Peter O’Toole stepped into the role that made him a star.

Dirk, of course, eventually proved his worth as a serious dramatic actor able to carry weightier movies than he had been given up to that time; but the loss of such a prestige project must have been a bitter pill to swallow!

Which actor/actress did not play as the main character in a movie/film/TV series but managed to steal the spotlight from the main lead?

MGM had the musical “Jumbo” (originally slated for Judy Garland and Howard Keel) on their books for several years before it finally went into production; by the time it got underway, both Garland and Keel had long-since moved onto other projects at other studios, and so the studio had to hunt around for new leads. The two they finally settled on, Doris Day and Stephen Boyd, had absolutely no chemistry together, and the movie looked like a fizzer. Fortunately, the two second-leads were cast with two old troupers, Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye, and they simply picked up the movie and ran away with it (something that would not have been allowed in the days when MGM was making the best musicals in Hollywood with “more stars than there are in Heaven”…. but “Jumbo” was made well after the era of the musical was well and truly finished, so no one at the studio seemed to care much about protecting the leads).

Why do people read reviews before watching a film, thus ruining their experience of the film and not having their own opinion?

When going out to the movies was, for me, a twice-weekly event (and usually double-bills, so that meant four movies, at least), I used to buy all the Sunday papers and turn to the movie reviews before I even looked at the headlines (normally, back then, you got a full page of reviews, as the major studios were still trying to send out a new movie every few weeks; so by the time you got back to the headlines, you were reading old news). I certainly don’t feel that it ruined “my experience of the film”, although I suppose that if the review was TOO deadly it might have forestalled any chance of my going out of my way to catch the movie. And I don’t think that it stopped me from having an opinion of my own….even though I expect it helped to mould my opinion, because I would try to look for the aspects of a movie that the reviewer had particularly liked, and also the aspects that he found especially deplorable.

As a teenager (and even for a couple of years before that) I believed that reviewers were experts and knew what they were talking about. I had teachers at school for English, Maths, and Ancient History…. the reviewers were my teachers of movies. And, like your teachers at school, I soon learned to tell the ones that were worth listening to and the ones that weren’t, the ones that knew their stuff and the ones who were faking it. Occasionally I disagreed diametrically with a critic’s summation, but I always read what he/she had said and tried to understand the logic in it. And sixty years later I still watch movies that they sent me off to, and see the same pleasures (and the same shortcomings) in them that they alerted me to.

Nowadays I don’t go out to see every movie, because, well, they just don’t make them like they used to. And I have stopped reading reviews, because I have come to realise that just about any movie can get a great review if the production company has the clout to “sway” the critic’s opinion (are there movies anymore that get BAD reviews?), so I fear they don’t make movie reviewers like they used to, either (when a real-life reviewer in a real-life newspaper can write, of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins”, that it is “fantastic, emotional, genuinely gripping”, you wonder what planet they’re getting their reviewers from; clearly, they are looking for qualities in movies that are very different from those that the reviewers of yesterday taught me to look for).

But there must still be reviewers out there who DIDN’T think “Batman Begins” was fantastic (except in the sense that it was impossible to believe a frame of it) and DIDN’T think it was even NON-genuinely gripping (except that you desperately hang in there worrying that, if you give in and go home right now, you may just miss the one good moment that would have made the evening worthwhile), and who found that the EMOTIONAL rush supplied by the movie was the feeling that, well, there goes another fifteen dollars down the drain. If you can find such a reviewer — one who isn’t afraid to use the word “stinker” every time it’s called for — then you might well find that reading his work will enhance, not ruin, your experience of the movie… and that, by educating the public to stay away from turkeys (and there must be a lot of those in an era where standards have plummeted to the point where Nolan is touted as a genius!), he might even be making production teams lift their game… which, surely, is the best reason for reviewers to exist in the first place!

What are some movies that take place in the same room for the duration of the film?

When I first read your question, the film that immediately sprang to mind was a film that didn’t take place in a room at all, but in an open lifeboat (does this count?); this was Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”, which was one of the movies (“Rope”, already mentioned by Peter, above, being another) Hitchcock made in the forties in which he gave himself an extra challenge just to see if he could pull it off. In the case of “Rope”, the main challenge was the nine-minute take, which meant that the actors had to be word-perfect and movement-perfect until the film in the camera ran out, or else do the whole scene again; in “Lifeboat” it meant that his players had absolutely nowhere to move, as the whole movie played out in that single setting.

In the 1950s Sidney Lumet, who had directed for TV but not in “the movies” made quite a splash with a tiny black-and-white movie called “Twelve Angry Men” which almost played out in a single room, also; there was a small prologue in a courtroom, an epilogue when the actors spill out into the street, and another scene in a washroom adjacent to the jury room, but 95% of the film’s running time was in the one setting.

Which movie(s) dialogue hit you hard?

 “Judgment at Nuremberg” was a film with a point of view, and had dialogue worth careful attention in just about every scene (Marlene Dietrich, like several of the actors in the all-star movie, took her role purely because she knew that these words had to be said, and — as co-star Spencer Tracy told her when she started to doubt the wisdom of risking her popularity by her participation — “you’re the only one who can say them”).

The climactic scene was the verdict at the end of the trial, delivered in a long and impassioned speech by Tracy, who, of course, was ‘the’ actor you chose for a role when you really wanted the audience to listen to — not just hear — the words. And they were strong words (written by Abby Mann) which deserved to be listened to more than just one time. This is why, in my opinion, “Judgment at Nuremberg”, especially in the beautifully-restored blu-ray edition, is a ‘must’ for any movie fan’s collection: when Tracy finishes speaking, you can stop and run the scene again!

What was Denzel Washington's film role that made you a fan for life?

I would have to opt for “Fences”, though, like the other answers, I saw “Glory” when it first came out; I admit to being impressed enough to check his name on the posters afterwards.

But it was “Fences” that made me wish I had seen him play it onstage so that I could have observed how he grew into the role and made it his own; and not only did I find his acting in this one more finely-tuned than I had ever seen on-screen before, I was quite blown away to see his name in the credits as producer AND director. Clearly, this was a labour of love for him — it was unlikely to be the number one box-office smash of its year, and his younger fans probably wouldn’t have tolerated it for ten minutes — and I felt privileged to share his passion.

How do movie actors memorize entire movie scenes?

Occasionally you will see single “takes” that last several minutes without a cut — Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope”, for instance, was made up of a succession of 9-minute shots, and the actors not only had to remember their lines and their “marks” and their lighting, but also had to contend with camera equipment and mikes moving around them, and even stage hands changing the position of furniture, or sliding walls in and out of position, while the scene went on! — but, in most cases, movie actors have it easy (compared to stage actors, anyway), because each shot normally lasts only a minute or two. The amount of dialogue committed to memory for each shot is no more than a few sentences.

But even that, it seems, is too much to ask for some actors. Marlon Brando, for instance, flatly refused to learn any lines for his few minutes of highly-paid screen time in “Superman” (I have heard the same was true of “Apocalypse Now”), so the words he was required to say were written around the set on the backs of sets, props, and even his co-stars, in order to make things easy for him.

And Marilyn Monroe had to say only three words (“Where’s that bourbon?”) in one of her scenes in “Some Like it Hot”, but she kept getting one or more of those words wrong, take after take, until her co-stars, and director Billy Wilder, were almost beside themselves with frustration (in the finished product, her face is actually turned away from the camera when the line is spoken, so who knows whose voice that really is, coming from the back of her head?)

What is the best movie that a child star played in as an adult?

There have been quite a few movies, made by ex-child actors, which have become classics in their own right and have revealed hitherto-untapped talent on the part of the star, but surely the one that is best-remembered and most-loved, both for the quality of the movie and the revelation of its star in the full bloom of her talent was the 1954 “A Star is Born”, in which Judy Garland (who had been appearing on-screen since 1929 — her first film was “The Big Revue”, while she was still known as Baby Gumm — when she had just turned seven) gave, at age 32, what was described by Time Magazine as “the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history”. So astonishing was her impact that, for half a century, upcoming musical talents such as Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga have looked to “A Star is Born” as the vehicle in which they might show that they belong “up there” alongside the great Garland; Judy’s film and performance, however, emerge as easily the best of the four “Star is Born”s; her reputation grows with each passing decade as her film is revived, restored, reissued and re-assessed.

If the success of a movie depends upon the script, content, and efforts of the director & producer then why do actors try to take the credit when the movie becomes successful?

I guess it’s because “successful” means taking millions at the box office, and, most of the time, that’s what the presence of a major star can guarantee. I expect there are people who go to see a movie because they know the name of the screenplay writer, or they like the output of a particular producer; and, certainly, there are people who follow particular directors. However, by and large, moviegoers go to see faces and personalities, and that’s what a star is qualified to supply.

Remember, of course, that a “successful” movie is not necessarily a good one! Relatively few stars would make the claim that it was their own contribution, rather than the work of the director, writer and producer, that made their movie great; but I expect there are a few who do!

What movie has a scene of phenomenal acting in an otherwise "ok" or "bad" movie?

Although it had an all-star cast and won an Academy Award or two, I couldn’t find much to love in “Airport” except for that fantastic music by Alfred Newman…. and one performance which was so good that it seemed like the actress had walked in off another set where they made the serious stuff. I am referring to the great Maureen Stapleton, who played the wife of the bomber (Van Heflin) who almost brings the plane down. When her character hears what her suicide-bent husband has done, she careers through the airport terminal saying, “He didn’t mean it… he didn’t mean it!” to the families of the passengers…. and for those few seconds, “Airport” is a top-class movie.

Should we also acknowledge Shirley MacLaine here, in two films: “Some Came Running” and “Sweet Charity”? Neither film is as good as you wish it had been, but she was better, in both, than anyone could have expected — especially in “Sweet Charity”, where she had to take over a part which Gwen Verdon had already made her own, on stage, and then keep up with Chita Rivera — the best dancer in the world at that time (maybe she still is) —and Paula Kelly in the dance sequences. Shirley has made some appalling movies in her time — “What a Way to Go!” and “Woman Times Seven” spring immediately to mind (thankfully, not for long) — but when she was given a good role, there was scarcely an actress in Hollywood who could touch her, and Bob Fosse (“Charity”) and Vincente Minnelli (“Running”) gave her full rein to show what she could do. So did William Wyler in “The Children’s Hour”, which she quite took from Audrey Hepburn (no mean feat)…. but it was much better, I think, than an “o.k. movie”, so it really doesn’t bear discussion here.

What is the worst an actor has conducted himself/herself on a movie set?

In Shirley MacLaine’s book, “My Lucky Stars”, she tells a bone-chilling story about an incident that happened on the set of “Artists and Models”, which she made right near the beginning of her movie career, and in which she supported two stars who had, until this one fateful day, been her idols: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

The film was directed by Frank Tashlin, a perfectly-competent and experienced Hollywood director who was one of Paramount’s stalwarts; but Jerry Lewis clearly thought he himself should be directing the film, and was giving Tashlin trouble with every set-up, every instruction. Whenever Tashlin would try to overrule Lewis, Lewis would insult and humiliate him in front of everyone, while Shirley MacLaine watched in horror at her idol debasing himself: strutting around the set chortling and ridiculing Tashlin, threatening to have producer Hal Wallis fire Tashlin and have someone competent put in charge, and so forth.

Finally Tashlin had had enough: he told Lewis he was fired and ordered him off the set. Lewis was absolutely astounded at anyone having the nerve to talk to him that way, and retorted confidently that he was going to get Wallis down on the set right then.

“You’re too late,” responded Tashlin. “I’ve already rung him, and he wants you off the lot and off the picture. You’re an obnoxious little prick and I won’t go on with the film until you’re off the set.” Shirley Maclaine reports that Lewis caved in completely, and, seeing that he had no support from anyone on the lot, went home crying in a taxi.

Of course, eventually Lewis and Tashlin came to some sort of agreement, and the movie continued, but not without collateral damage, and that was that Shirley MacLaine could never again see Jerry Lewis in the same light as when she had first been assigned to the picture (she did, however, maintain a lifelong friendship with Dean Martin, who broke up the Martin and Lewis team soon afterwards over his own differences with Lewis).

What movie do you absolutely hate? Why?

Charles Chaplin was one of the towering cinema pioneers and innovators right from the earliest days of the movies, and he would have to take his place in anyone’s list of the five greatest directors of all time. So when he makes a bad film, that’s a double whammy: it’s EXTRA bad because one of the cinema’s great directors put his name on it. And that makes you sorry and angry at the same time.

And there seems no doubt that “A King in New York” was a bad movie. It isn’t the worst movie I have ever seen, and it probably wasn’t even the worst movie of its year. But it was, I think, the worst movie ever made by a great Hollywood director.

It’s supposed to be a satire, so the idea is that he’s holding up a mirror to Americans while doing his funny bits. Fair enough; but it comes across as being mean-spirited, a quality which, I feel, sits uneasily in satire. He seems to be bent on revenge, and revenge does not suddenly become palatable because the perpetrator jumps into the bath fully-clothed (just to give a single example of a misfire; this time, he doesn’t even do it gracefully!)

Set in New York, it had to be made in Europe, as Chaplin had been denied entry to his adopted homeland because of his political beliefs. So his bitterness and desire for revenge were, at least, understandable. But I just wish that he’d kept those feelings to himself and not tried to put them on-screen for our “entertainment”. I also wish that he hadn’t put his son in one of the leading roles, and then, as director, encouraged the lad to give a harsh, strident performance which became increasingly difficult to tolerate with each interminable reel. I wish that he’d quietly shelved the film the night before its premiere, and sent along, in its place, a print of “City Lights” or “Modern Times”!

Which Hollywood celebrities do you feel bad for?

Lena Horne was beautiful and talented, and seemed the perfect addition to the prestigious Arthur Freed unit at MGM, where they were making the best musicals Hollywood (or anyone) had ever seen; but, by and large, she got a pretty raw deal from her home studio. Because she was African-American, she recalled, the “hairdressers for the stars” in the MGM make-up unit refused to so even touch her hair; she had to find another African-American who would come in and take instruction from the head of the department. Although she could act as well as anyone on the lot, MGM was loath to give her speaking parts in musicals where she would be seen among white people (she WAS allowed to speak in their all-black films, such as “Cabin in the Sky”; but there were very few of those); instead, she was “framed” (by shots of applauding audiences, usually) in “stand-alone” numbers which could be taken out of the movie without any noticeable break in continuity (so that the “trimmed” movie, minus Lena, could play in states which would have refused to show it if — since she wasn’t the ‘mammy’ type — she had appeared). Lena was naturally light-skinned, by African-American standards, but this worried MGM (for reasons I am not clear on; maybe they thought people might think she was trying to “pass”) and the studio developed a special make-up to darken her to an “acceptable” colour!

Lena was (she said with, a rueful smile) allowed to eat in the studio commissary, but was seldom asked to social gatherings, and made few friends (notable exceptions, it seems, were Judy Garland and Ava Gardner, who flatly refused to join in these racial “games”). With her looks, Lena would have seemed the perfect movie star, but MGM didn’t like her to look TOO attractive, because that was considered inappropriate for a person of her race (Vincente Minnelli, Garland’s husband, shot a musical sequence placing Lena in a bubble bath for the film they made together, but the scene was scrubbed from the final print).

Lena left the studio, finally, with her talent barely tapped, and instead made her reputation in cabaret and on the concert stage: a “late bloomer”, as she described herself.

You have the chance to watch a great movie all over again: experiences, feelings, all. Which movie and why?

For me, that would have to be the 1954 “A Star is Born”, because it came along at just the right time for me: I was thirteen years old and just starting to respond to musical performances and recognise talent when I saw it. And in “A Star is Born” I had struck the mother lode of singing and acting talent. I returned to school the following day and, according to my friends, remarked (of Judy Garland’s performance of “The Man That Got Away”) “I never knew people sang like that!”

I have been thrilled by great music and great movies many hundreds of times in the intervening years, but nothing, ever again, affected me quite like that movie. I spent years chasing it up in cinemas all over Sydney, and more years writing to cinemas which specialised in revivals asking (begging!) for it to be programmed.

What a blessing it was when VHS was invented and I could purchase my own copy! And now, of course, with DVD and blu-ray, I can re-visit the thrill of that performance any time I choose (and I do, often). Alas, however, I am no longer thirteen, so I can never really recapture that first-time feeling as experienced by someone on the threshold of adolescence; its release, right then, was one of those happy coincidences of time and circumstance which steered my life onto a whole new course.

What was the greatest Hollywood "fall from grace" that you have seen or read about?

Without doubt, the lovely Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. When David O Selznick brought her to Hollywood to remake, in English, a Swedish film (“Intermezzo”) in which he had been impressed with her freshness, she was possessed of a grace, elegance, and quiet beauty that was so at-odds with the usual “blonde bombshell-type” Hollywood star of the time that she became, whether she liked it or not, a kind of ‘Hollywood saint’. In fact, she was often producers’ first choice for religious-type roles, and actually had to fight for parts in which she could play a woman with “human flaws” (actually swapping roles with Lana Turner, who, originally cast as the streetwalker in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, was as tired of being type-cast — but, of course, in the exact-opposite mould —as was Ingrid).

In spite of her best efforts, Miss Bergman remained, in the eyes of the public, the epitome of saintliness, as was evidenced by her casting in “The Bells of St Mary’s” and in the title role (both on-stage and on-screen) in “Joan of Lorraine” and “Joan of Arc”. It was even proposed that a statue, to be erected in honour of St Joan, be modelled on her, and she was asked to pose for it (with commendable forethought, she gracefully declined).

Finally, of course, the bubble burst, and, having left Hollywood temporarily to make a film with a “hot” new Italian director whose work she admired (Roberto Rossellini), she had a very public and notorious affair with her director. She was neither the first nor the fiftieth Hollywood star to have been embroiled in a sex scandal, but, for Heaven’s sake, this was Ingrid Bergman! America was, to put it mildly, outraged. She was damned by the press, the church, and the public; eventually, even the US government got into the act, and she was denied re-entry to the United States, obliged instead to live in Europe for most of the remainder of her career (although, of course, her relationship with Rossellini soon ended, their films together having disappointed fans of both). She couldn’t even attend the Oscar ceremony a few years later when she won the Academy Award as Best Actress for “Anastasia”, and Hollywood directors seeking to use her services were obliged to make their films abroad.

Eventually, of course, America and Ingrid Bergman kissed and made up (she returned, eventually, to make “Cactus Flower” near the end of her film career); but, while it lasted, it was the most serious “fall from grace” that any Hollywood star had had to suffer, and several of Ingrid’s potentially-most-productive years as a Hollywood star were thrown away in the scandal.

Who are some actors who played a bad movie character so well that they received hate in real life?

Margaret Hamilton, in 1939, played the dual roles of Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie which has been seen by more people than any film ever made, “The Wizard of Oz”; and she played the roles so well that she made an indelible impression on millions of children all over the world, right down into the television era, when the movie played every year, without fail, on American TV. By that time, of course, she was an old lady and had long since retired from movies, and everyone who knew her in her private life said that she was a sweet, delightful person, as unlike her most famous character as it was possible to be. Nevertheless, every time she even went to the corner store, children would come up to her and demand, angrily, why she had been so mean to Dorothy!

What acting roles do you think were overlooked or underappreciated?

Mel Gibson as Hamlet. When the movie was announced, people laughed. Mad Max playing Shakespeare? Danny Glover’s mate in “Lethal Weapon” trying to read those immortal lines when his predecessor, no less than Laurence Olivier, had won an Academy Award for the same reading?

I admit I was one of the laughers. Until I saw the movie. Mel was actually rather splendid in the part, and gave many of the lines a freshness in the delivery that made you feel you had never really heard them before. Now, when his movies come out, I don’t immediately dismiss them as (to my shame) I used to; but I confess I am yet to see any of the Mad Maxes.

Who was the kindest movie star you have ever met?

There haven’t been all that many movie stars in my life, way out here in Sydney, Australia, but there were two (one is actually a cabaret and TV star, probably the greatest white jazz singer that ever was) that impressed me so much that I remember them fondly fifty years later.

The jazz singer was June Christy, who was one of a string of US cabaret artists who appeared at a venue called the Chevron-Hilton in Sydney in the 1960s (others included Mel Torme, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett, Eartha Kitt and the amazing Ethel Merman). Our group went to several of these, always carrying an LP or four which we would ask the waiter to take backstage for autographing. The waiter always came back with the stack of LPs duly autographed, except that, in the case of June Christy, he came back empty-handed. “Miss Christy asked if you would please come to her dressing room,” he announced, and for the next thirty minutes we were treated to an informal, friendly talk with one of our idols. I had sent in to be signed an LP of hers which she hadn’t managed to get for herself (which amazed me… but she said, “No, we just have to go out and buy it like everyone else”), and, on learning that it was still available in at least one Sydney shop, she asked for the address so she could go downtown and purchase it. On finding out that we had booked a table for the following night’s show, she asked would we come backstage again between sets. Of course we did, and on that occasion she called in the house photographer, had photographs taken of the group (she picked up the tab) and left instructions that every one of us was to receive a copy (mine is on the wall to this day). Finally, since the second show was her Sydney finale, she asked us if there was any song in particular we would like her to include, and she actually sang the one I requested (and told me an interesting story about the recording date). We never forgot her courtesy, friendliness, and thoughtfulness. She was as nice a human being as she was great a singer.

The second experience was with Johnnie Ray, who, interviewed on radio about his deafness (rather challenging for a major singer!), was asked if he had served as an inspiration for young deaf people; he answered that, alas, he had never been in a position to even meet any, but that he “would really like to do that”. A fast phone call to the radio station resulted in an offer to meet with a school unit of hearing-impaired children (ages 12 to 17) in the lobby of his Sydney hotel; he chatted with them for so long — comparing hearing aids with them, asking them about their ambitions, telling them about his home and his movies, and how he managed to hear the band when he sang — that his manager had to finally insist — several times! — that he simply had to break off, as they had a long car journey to his out-of-town venue for that same evening. The occasion must really have been quite an imposition on him (some of the children, awe-struck, just stood and stared), but he never for a minute gave the slightest indication that this wasn’t the thing he most wanted to do with his day. When he left, the children were absolutely beside themselves with admiration, and I expect that not one of them has forgotten the afternoon to this day. For myself, I decided, after dropping them home, to make that same long car journey, and gratefully caught his show that evening.

Why media posts often telecast death of old politician, actor or actress, as unfortunate, though person was too old and have had too many diseases?

Maybe they mean unfortunate for us, rather than for the recently-departed, since politicians, actors and actresses are significant figures who we enjoy following through the ups and downs of their careers and private lives. When they leave us, our lives are a little emptier.

I just watched "The Innocents" with Deborah Kerr, an extraordinary performance. What should I watch next?

Try “Seance on a Wet Afternoon” with Kim Stanley. Not the same director, and not the same star, but they both have that marvellous black-and-white photography, they’re both British-made, they both feature an outstanding lead performance, and they are both disquieting films with a supernatural theme. I bet you like it!

I think “The Innocents” is about the best film of its kind I have ever seen. I’m glad you watched it!

What are some of the hardest lines from any movie?

Alec Guinness’s last line — “What have I done?” —in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” might just qualify for the title here; even a distinguished actor such as Sir Alec couldn’t deliver it in a way that didn’t elicit titters from audiences, even though the scene itself was full of built-in suspense and the rest of the movie was not to be laughed at. Sir Alec won the Academy Award for that role, so, clearly, the rest of his performance was considered “spot-on” by his peers; but that one line may be what most audiences remember best, and I always wonder why the director didn’t just say, “Well, leave it out!”

What are the best movies which have no special effects, stunts or explosions?

Movies adapted from plays would probably give you the best chance of seeing what you want. In fact, I am so tired of “special effects, stunts or explosions” nowadays that the only times I can be tempted to go out to a movie is if it’s adapted from a play. In recent years, there were Denzel Washington’s “Fences” and Meryl Streep’s “August Osage County”. A few years before that, there were “Frost/Nixon” and “Doubt”. I guess you could keep on going back like this, all the way through “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” to “Street Scene”, “The Little Foxes”, and “These Three”!

What these movies often give you, in place of the special effects and stunts, is real lines for good actors to read, and characters you can believe in and care about. It was particularly gratifying, for instance, to see Denzel Washington give the performance of his life in “Fences”, because he was, before that, one of the actors I had started to dismiss because he had appeared in one too many movies like “Man on Fire”, which were mainly noted for their “special effects, stunts and explosions”.

What are a few incidents of kleptomania that involved a celebrity?

The Viennese actress who was the reigning beauty queen at MGM in the 1930s, Hedy Lamarr, can’t hold a candle to Winona Ryder when it comes to the value of her shoplifted booty: in 1991, at age 76, she was arrested for stealing exactly $21.48 worth of personal care items, in full view of store employees. The policeman attending the scenes said she was polite and co-operative, and, after processing the charge on-the-spot, without hauling the poor old dear off to the police station, he gave her a lift home in his police car.

It was her second arrest on this charge; the first was 25 years earlier, when the value of the goods shoplifted was $86. On that occasion she was acquitted.

What is the most underrated skill of an actor?

In the history of English-language movies, there wouldn’t be a half-dozen actors who could hold a candle to Spencer Tracy, judged by his contemporaries as the consummate actor; even Clark Gable admitted that he was scared when they had to do a scene together, and all he could hope for was that he didn’t come out of it looking like a complete fool. But, he said, anyone who thought he might be able to match Tracy in a scene was fooling himself; “the man is good… and he knows it! So don’t try competing with him.”

Spencer Tracy himself was inclined to be rather self-deprecating about the talent that had other actors ducking for cover; once, when asked what he looked for in a script, he replied, “Days off”, and left it at that. But he did give some advice, in that flippant way of his, to a young actor — possibly Robert Wagner — who asked what his secret was. “Learn your lines, don’t bump into the furniture, and never let them catch you acting.”

Now, the first two of those three are achieved by most actors every time they step before a camera (except for the poor actor who DID ‘bump into the furniture’ in “Star Wars”); it’s the third, I would suggest, that really counted with Spencer Tracy, and made him the best actor of his generation (and a couple of generations on either side). You couldn’t catch him acting. He just went out there and “lived” it until the director yelled “Cut”…. and then he could simply walk away from it and never think of it again. Like Sinatra, who admired him tremendously, he wasn’t mad on re-takes; after all, you don’t get re-takes in real-life situations, and that was what he was using as his template. He wasn’t an actor; he just “was”.

What movie got bad ratings, but you thought was really good?

 “The talents of the great Judy Garland are wasted in this movie, possibly the year’s worst.”

This was the opening sentence in my local newspaper’s review of “I Could Go On Singing”, released (and reviewed) in 1963; the review came out the morning after I had seen the film (in its opening week) and was still in a state of total euphoria over what an amazing achievement it was. The sentence — and, in fact, the whole review — hit me like a thunderbolt, and, fifty-six years later, I still remember that appraisal almost as well as I remember the movie!

My local reviewer wasn’t the only one to emerge from the theatre less than blown-away. “I Could go on Singing” was Judy Garland’s first musical since the now-legendary “A Star is Born” nine years earlier, and in THAT film she had virtually re-written the book on what one could expect from a musical. So when she finally returned to musicals, after some distinguished, but atypical, dramatic roles for Stanley Kramer, and a two-continent concert tour which had earned her a whole new legion of admirers and a slew of awards, AND, what’s more, let it be known that in this movie she was virtually going to be playing herself, singing on-stage to an audience just as she had at Carnegie Hall; well, hopes — not unreasonably — were high… to put it mildly!

Actually, the film did everything that it had promised to do. It showed us the mature Garland on-stage at the London Palladium, performing HER songs with HER arrangements and HER conductor (Mort Lindsey), and, when she wasn’t on-stage, it showed her delivering lines that were straight from her own life and could just as easily have been written by her (and, in one memorable seven-minute-take unscripted scene near the movie’s end, actually were). It is unlikely that any major star, before or since, has allowed herself to be so totally unmasked in front of a movie camera, warts and all….but genius and all, too. As the film progressed (the producers said), even Judy started to have misgivings about how unsympathetically she was allowing herself to be portrayed, and asked for some scenes to be “watered-down” just a little. But then she’d regain her courage and deliver lines on-screen such as “‘Impossible’ is a word that not many people use with me”, and “I’m ALWAYS a sellout”. There was her attitude to her audiences (“The hell with them! I can’t be spread so thin. I can’t be rolled out like a pastry so that everyone can take a big bite out of me”) and to her performances (“Do you think you can make me sing? You can get me there… but can you make me sing? I sing for myself. I sing WHEN I want to and WHAT I want to!”) Then there were the lines where she lamented what she had lost in her private life by pursuing public fame: “I’ve hung on to every bit of rubbish there is to hold on to in my life…. and I’ve thrown all the good bits away; can you tell me why I do that?”

What more, you might ask, could anyone have wanted from a colour wide-screen movie showing “the greatest performer who has ever lived” (Tony Bennett’s words) at the very top of her game? Well, critics lamented the fact that she was saddled with a “soapie” story about a world-renowned U.S. singer returning to England to claim the son she had abandoned as a baby. There was, of course, truth in what they said; the film might have been better if the story, rather than the child, had been abandoned. Nevertheless, the disappointment of the critics was, to say the least, “over-the-top”; the reviews turned what had been a lines-round-the-block opening week into a fair-to-middling run which eventually saw the film sink without trace for nearly half a century.

Nowadays, it is being re-assessed, and the reviews of the DVD and blu-ray editions are the kind of raves that the Garland admirers were giving to it on its initial release. The critics of the day could not, of course, have known that this was to be Judy Garland’s last movie, that within just six years her voice would be stilled forever. All the more reason why this film should be celebrated, and seen by everyone interested in musicals, or movies, or acting. It is, quite simply, unique; and this is how it should be, since it gave us a close-up look at the most unique musical performer of the twentieth-century.

Today, there are few films I watch as often as “I Could Go On Singing”.

What movies have taken the biggest risk with their subject matter?

As I read your question, I instantly thought of the two films made from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”. The first was made in 1962, shortly after the book’s release, at a time when the subject could not even be brought up in polite circles, so a lot of pussy-footing around the controversy had to be undertaken by the screenplay-writers… including quietly “upping” the age of the young lady at the centre of the story, so that the hero’s fascination for her wasn’t all that much more controversial than, say, Gary Cooper wooing Audrey Hepburn in “Love in the Afternoon”. The second film (1997) was able to TALK about its subject more openly, but by this time directors had to prove that they were not placing their under-age stars in any situations which might be seen as “inappropriate”, so there was a lot of use of body-doubles and one-shots, and even publicity given to the provision of a strategically-placed pillow when, in one scene, the young actress playing Lolita was required to sit on Humbert’s lap.

However, on reflection, I think a more-original approach to your question might be to mention a film I have never seen; nor has anyone else, as it was decided, by the people connected with its production, that maybe it took too big a risk with its subject matter, and might, therefore, be appropriately “shelved”.

Its name is “The Day the Clown Cried”, and it starred Jerry Lewis as (apparently) a clown who is sent to a concentration camp during World War II, and who took it upon himself to entertain the children who were on their way to the gas chambers, so that their last moments on earth had them smiling and laughing. Lewis was, it is said, very keen on the subject during production, but on seeing the finished product, he decided that it was simply TOO great a departure from his normal output and would be unlikely to be well-received by even his staunchest admirers. As far as I know, he kept a private print of the movie for his own personal use, but it was never theatrically released anywhere.

Which is the most successful Hollywood movie of all time?

I suppose there are several criteria for “success”, profit being the one that most readily springs to mind. But with the rapidly escalating costs of film production and ticket prices, it is no longer so easy to work out which film turned the biggest profit; the top spot is almost-always going to be claimed by a movie made in the last half-dozen years (according to the list supplied by Rohit (above), it’s “Avengers: Endgame”, made — you guessed it — in 2019).

Perhaps a better criterion for success is how many people have seen it, and how many of those remember it as a life-changer. In this case, I would have to nominate 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz”. It may not even feature in Rohit’s list of the top 100, but it is claimed that more people have seen this film than any other movie ever made, and it is remembered with extraordinary passion by nearly everyone who has ever seen it, regardless of their age. It’s currently eighty years old and still gaining admirers; I wonder will anyone even remember, eighty years from now, that there ever was a movie called “Avengers: Endgame”?

What actress skyrocketed to fame and success after doing just one film?

As Bradley said, there are a lot of such instances; one of the most spectacular was surely Barbra Streisand, whose first film was “Funny Girl” and who became a world-wide sensation (and Academy Award winner) after its release. Not that she was a complete unknown before that, of course: she had played the role on Broadway and, I think, in London prior to landing the lead in the movie version. But it was the film that launched her movie career; she abandoned the Broadway stage altogether when she found her unusual beauty was, in fact, acceptable to “movieland”, and — for a few years, at least —made one major hit film after another.

What movies that were “based on a true story” are almost entirely made up? 

As Richard Moss pointed out, musical biographies are seldom more factual than they need to be: the biographies of Jerome Kern (“Till the Clouds Roll By”), Rodgers and Hart (“Words and Music”) and Kalmar and Ruby (“Three Little Words”) occasionally gave a nod in the direction of the facts, but only when the facts fitted the plot, and not — as you might have expected — the other way around.

Getting away from non-musicals, while “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (just for a single example; westerns are also a rich source of taking someone’s name in vain in order to get a good story out of them) were, in fact, real people, I can’t imagine that either would have recognised their story if they had come back to us to view it on the big screen!

What was the weirdest tagline for a movie in history?

I always liked, “You can talk all you want about the man and the woman, but please don’t tell about the girl!”, which was used to promote Mervyn LeRoy’s “The Bad Seed”.

But the one that still makes me smile today was the line used to promote John Huston’s “Reflections in a Golden Eye”, which was, to put it mildly, not a crowd-pleaser when first released. To emphasize its adults-only plot-line, the tag used on posters was “Leave the children home.” At my local cinema, one cinemagoer who obviously didn’t think this production was up to John Huston’s usual standard, had pencilled-in, under the line, “Stay home with them”.

What's your favorite Mickey Rooney movie, and why?

David’s answer is exactly right; Mickey and Judy were just so “right” for each other, and their love and respect for each other in private life was so obvious to everyone watching them together, that their movies quite transcended their admittedly-“hokey” plots. Mickey and Judy gave us all a movie-going experience still fondly recalled seventy years later.

There is, of course, another Mickey Rooney; when Judy left us in 1969, Mickey had only just reached the half-way mark of his remarkable career, and, as might be expected for someone of his talents, he was able to re-invent himself as a serious dramatic actor, giving memorable performances right up to 2014, when he appeared in his last film, one of the “Night at the Museum” pictures. Of this later Mickey Rooney, a performance that I always remember with fondness was as the trainer/friend of Anthony Quinn in “Requiem for a Heavyweight”. This was, indeed, heavyweight stuff: no more trifles about putting on a show in a barn with Judy saving the day! But Mickey moved between genres, and between generations, with the ease and skill of the born trouper; his was, indeed, a remarkable talent.

What is the greatest movie of all time and what makes that movie so special? 

Speaking only of American films, the usual answer to the first part of your question is “Citizen Kane”.

For an answer to the second part of your question, well, whole books have been written on that subject, so I can’t even begin to answer in just a paragraph! Suggest you read Pauline Kael’s “The Citizen Kane Book: Raising Kane and the Shooting Script”. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s 488 pages long; it’s surprisingly readable (well, not so surprisingly, given the name of the author; she is a film reviewer of great repute, and her work is ALWAYS readable because she approaches her assessments from a fresh and original standpoint…. which is, of course, how Orson Welles approached the making of “Citizen Kane”.)

Which child star has been most successful?

Judy Garland. She conquered virtually every one of the entertainment media and went right to the top in each. She was, first, Baby Gumm in vaudeville, and was getting notices about stealing the show when she was seven and eight. By the time she was ten and had shed the “baby” appellation, stars like Mickey Rooney were going to see her on stage, and saying that she was “the best in the world” (Mickey’s assessment at the time). By sixteen she had helped make “The Wizard of Oz” (for which she won an Academy Award) into what is perhaps the most beloved film of all time (seen, they say, by more people than any other), and had a song written for her (“Over the Rainbow”) which was to be chosen, sixty years later, as “the song of the Millennium”.

Throughout the 1940s she was MGM’s top female musical star (which meant, of course, that she was Hollywood’s top female musical star), moving straight from one film to the next — and, also, straight for disaster, because the side effects of the pills she was taking to keep her going at such a pace were starting to show. MGM finally let her go, whereupon she returned to the stage, but this time headlining her own concerts at the Palace, the London Palladium, and, eventually, at Carnegie Hall, where she gave what is now considered to be “the greatest night in show business history” in 1961, at age 38. At the same time she was making records, and the two-disc album of her Carnegie Hall concert won just about every conceivable award that year, and has never been out of print (in one form or another) since.

Then it was back to movies: she was nominated for Academy Awards for two movies in succession (“A Star is Born” and “Judgment at Nuremberg”), and in the second of these she didn’t even sing, proving indisputably what people like Louis Mayer and Jack Warner had been saying for years: that as a dramatic actress she was also the best of them all.

And then there was television. A series of specials between 1955 and 1962 brought her new accolades and new fans, and also led to a 26-week TV series (1963–4) which, currently, is all over Youtube and is bringing her another legion of admirers, a half-century after her death (just look at some of the comments underneath the postings). “The greatest entertainer who has ever lived”, said Tony Bennett; and other luminaries, such as Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Elaine Stritch were quick to agree.

Judy lived for only forty-seven years; “She just wore out”, said daughter Liza Minnelli. In that forty-seven years she gave more happiness to more people than most entertainers could even dream of, given twice that time. She set the standard for those who have come after her. Yet she remains unmatched; generations come and go, but even today, those listening to her for the first time are swept away by the music she gave to the world. She was, quite simply, the greatest, and she set the bar so high that one wonders if she will EVER be surpassed.

Which actor lessened the quality of their movie with their lackluster performance?

After more than seventy years of moviegoing, I would have to say the answer to your question is, “hundreds”! For instance, as soon as I read the word “lacklustre” in your question, I thought of a whole series of disappointing performances by the great Marlon Brando in the middle of his career, when he seemed intent on trashing his reputation as the “great white hope” of American cinema. Just watch him work in “The Night of the Following Day”, “Sayonara”, “The Nightcomers”, “The Appaloosa”, “Candy”, “A Countess from Hong Kong”, “Burn” or “Morituri”. Or, better yet, don’t.

However, that’s only my personal opinion, so for a more authoritative answer to your question, I would turn to the great American director George Cukor, who had directed such top female stars as Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Judy Holliday and Vivien Leigh; in 1968, directing “Justine”, and finding his star (Anouk Aimee) less-than-co-operative, he was finally given to lament that it was “the only time I ever worked with an actress who wouldn’t even try”. Not even Cukor’s directorial skill, and the fact that Miss Aimee was indeed a beautiful woman who happily shed her clothes for the movie, could make this a film worth catching, and it (mercifully) sank without trace soon after release.

What are the most interesting movie soundtrack backstories?

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 thriller, “Torn Curtain”, must be the only movie ever made which had, around the time of its release, two totally different soundtrack albums.

Hitch had had a decade-long partnership with composer Bernard Herrmann, who had scored all his movies since “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956… and during that decade Hitch had created some of his most-memorable movies — “Vertigo”, “North by Northwest” and “Psycho” among them — which had been made infinitely more memorable by the original and creative scores which Herrmann had written for him. So it was only natural that Hermann was assigned to compose the score for “Torn Curtain”.

But Hitch was now working, not for Paramount and MGM (the studios behind his recent triumphs), but Universal, and this studio had noticed a decline in his box-office returns since the change. The reason, they felt, was that the music in his movies wasn’t “catchy” enough, that it didn’t contain a title song, and there was nothing that might become a hit in its own right (such as “Pillow Talk” and “Send Me No Flowers” had done for their Doris Day releases). “Torn Curtain” was to star the Day-like Julie Andrews, so their instructions, as conveyed to Herrmann through Hitch, were to write a “hit” score with a theme song.

Herrmann, however, was not one to compromise for the sake of the box-office. “You’re grateful enough to a doctor for making you well,” he famously said. “You do not also expect him to make you rich.” So what he produced for Hitch was his usual brilliant creative music, but with a startlingly original sound which owed nothing to the pop charts. With “Psycho” he had assembled an orchestra consisting entirely of strings; now, for “Turn Curtain” he had an orchestra composed of 12 flutes, 16 horns, 9 trombones, 2 tubas, 2 sets of timpani, 8 cellos and 8 basses. Where, Hitch wondered, was his theme song going to come from?

The answer, of course, was that Herrmann hadn’t given him one, and Universal conveyed its displeasure to Hitch, who abruptly discharged his long-term collaborator from this, their ninth (and last; the break was far from amicable) movie together. The studio demanded a whole new score from a whole new composer more sensitive to the box office returns and less-obsessed about the originality of the score. Enter John Addison, who wrote an efficient but very conventional score which included the element they thought would be sure to make the movie a hit: “Love Theme from ‘Torn Curtain’”. This was the soundtrack moviegoers heard on the movie’s release, and this was the soundtrack album they flocked — well, not quite! — to record shops to buy.

Fortunately, Herrmann’s score was preserved intact, and released separately soon afterwards, recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Elmer Bernstein (who would later re-score Herrmann’s original 1962 “Cape Fear” music for the 1991 remake). For a while there, the two soundtrack albums were sitting side-by-side in specialty record shops.

“Torn Curtain”, without Herrmann’s score, was not a success, and, in fact, Alfred Hitchcock’s films (he made only three more) never again achieved the acclaim that he had enjoyed when he and Herrmann were a team. Bernard Herrmann went on to write the scores for ten movies without Hitch, including “Fahrenheit 451”, “Obsession” and “Taxi Driver”.

What are some of the strangest facts about b-grade movies?

 

If, by “B-grade movies”, you are referring to the B-movies that Hollywood studios (both the majors and the minors) produced during (mainly) the 1930s and 40s in order to fill the lower half of double-bills, then the answer is that many of them introduced some top directors and actors both at the start of their careers (an example of this might be Robert Wise, who directed “The Curse of the Cat People” some time before he was handed “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music”), and when their careers — at least temporarily — were running out of steam (an example of this would be Mickey Rooney, who, in the forties, was the most-popular actor in Hollywood three years running, but, by the early fifties, was reduced to making a 79-minute black-and-white-programmer called “Quicksand”).

Another interesting fact is that some of these B-movies were exceptionally good. The restrictions on both time (“We don’t want it good,” said the sign above the desk of the head of Monogram Pictures, according to legend, “we want it Thursday”) and money which was imposed on the directors often forced them to think “outside the square” and film outside the studio, on the streets, improvising to suit the conditions. A four-day shoot was by no means unusual.

The major studios often allowed writers and directors of their B-releases to tackle subjects which simply wouldn’t have been acceptable in “A” movies, since there was little money at stake if the movie turned out to be unreleasable; in this way, maverick directors were able to bring in films with controversial themes such as the plight of unmarried mothers (“Not Wanted”, 1949, directed by Ida Lupino and Elmer Clifton), prejudice and vilification (“The Boy with Green Hair”, 1948, directed by Joseph Losey), God in modern-day America (“The Next Voice You Hear”, 1950, directed by William A Wellman), and the exploitation of children (“Child Bride”, 1938, directed by Harry J Revier). B-movies paved the way for some of the more-controversial A-movies which studios were able to produce in their wake.

What are some of the most flawed movie plots?

I’m sure, in my moviegoing career, I have seen hundreds of poor movies with drastically flawed plots, but if the movie isn’t worth remembering, a flawed plot isn’t going to count for much, either.

But there are two really fine movies — quite famous movies, one of which is always in the top 10 of the American Film Institute’s list of great achievements in cinema — which have always annoyed me because they have major flaws at the most crucial part of the plot, and I am always disappointed that, if the makers were going to take such care with the rest of the film, they didn’t take that extra ten minutes to “vet” the script to remove the “fatal flaw”.

The first is “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” — the original black-and-white one directed by Don Siegel. The body snatchers are pods which are placed (by aliens) by the bedside of citizens as they sleep, and which gradually suck the life out of the sleeper and replicate him exactly, so that when the pod eventually opens, it has made an exact copy (except, of course, that it has no human emotions). Our two heroes (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter) have managed to escape all attempts on their lives and have made it out of town and into the hills. Dana ducks into a cave for forty winks, and, a few moments later, out comes her alien duplicate. How did the pod get into the cave? Did someone plant it there in the hope that our heroes might happen by and choose the cave as their sleeping quarters? Why did this pod work instantly when everyone else’s pod took a full night to effect the replication? It was disappointing to see, in an otherwise classic little film that has spawned several remakes, its writers simply abandon the logic of their premise in order to get the film over and done with.

The second film is Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, which also deals in a duplicate: a man wants to kill his wife, so he hires a lookalike to take her place and act, over a period of weeks, in such a bizarre fashion that her eventual “suicide” would not be unexpected. Unknowingly, the hero (James Stewart) takes the impostor to a tourist-attraction mission, complete with tower, which has been selected as the place for the “suicide” (the murderer is already hiding in the tower with the body of his wife… lucky he happened to know exactly when Stewart would drop by!).

The impostor, as planned, runs up the stairs to the tower, a worried Stewart at her heels. As she reaches the top, the killer throws the body of his wife off the tower, so that it looks, to Stewart, like the suicide he has been fearing. Then the killer and the impostor calmly sit in the tower and wait, unnoticed, while Stewart, the police, the Nuns, and other assorted visitors deal with the body on the ground. No one bothers to go up into the tower to inspect the scene of the crime. No one notices an extra car in the car park, belonging to the killer and in which he had transported his wife to the scene of her murder. Eventually, it seems, the murderer and his accomplice blithely walk down the tower stairs, get into their car, and drive home, and no one happens to notice that this woman looks exactly like the one who has just “suicided”.

This whole premise — in a murder mystery story where careful writers are fastidious in dotting all the ‘i’s and crossing all the ‘t’s — is seriously flawed from just about every perspective; in spite of this, the film is universally lauded as one of the best movies ever made, and Alfred Hitchcock’s deepest and most meaningful film! However, the music, by Bernard Herrman, is sublime, so maybe everyone just listened to that and didn’t worry about the logistics of what would have to be the most unlikely successful murder ever put on screen.

What actor had the most successful career prior to becoming an actor?

Audie Murphy. He was only in his early twenties when he went into movies, but, frankly, he was so well-known and so well-respected by then that he probably need never have worked a day in his life.

Just 14 years old when World War II broke out, he enlisted the same week as he became of age, and proceeded to win every military combat award for valor available from the U.S. Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism: altogether, 33 of them, including the Congressional Medal of Honour (the highest decoration an American soldier can receive) and three Purple Hearts. And all before he was 21!

He returned home, to ticker-tape parades and elaborate banquets, as the most decorated soldier in American military history, and, not unexpectedly, made the cover of several national magazines, including Life; his face was instantly recognised all over the United States. Having been wounded three times, and suffering from malaria and post-traumatic-stress disorder, he could have lived very comfortably for the rest of his life at the expense of a grateful United States government; however, James Cagney was, at the time, starting his own movie production company, and he personally contacted Audie Murphy and invited him to join the team. Murphy agreed, and made something like 44 films, including playing the role of himself in the filmed version of his autobiography, “To Hell and Back”. He also wrote several successful country-and-western songs which were recorded by, among others, Dean Martin and Harry Nilsson.

Which current movie stars measure up to the best of Hollywood's Golden Age?

In acting ability, just about all of them. The stars of the Golden Age were rarely groomed to be great ACTORS… they were groomed to be, well, stars of the golden age! They were taught how to walk, how to sit, how to pitch their speaking voices, how to wear clothes and make-up, and how never to be seen looking anything less than their best. But most of the time they were required (as John Wayne nicely put it) not to act, but to “re-act”. Their job was to stay strictly within the confines of what they were good at, and never, ever to stray from the image that the studio publicity machine had built up for them.

Today’s actors don’t have a studio and its publicity machine behind them, and stepping outside their “image” is almost mandatory if they would like to work regularly. Rather than have roles built around their carefully-crafted persona, nowadays they are expected to become whatever roles their agent has negotiated for them. Consequently, they have to have a versatility that would never have been required of, say, Lana Turner or Marilyn Monroe. Someone like Meryl Streep has lasted because, it seems, she can play ANYTHING, and every time you go to see her in a movie, you are seeing someone new, someone you never suspected even existed. But with someone like, say, Clark Gable or Cary Grant, you went to see their movies because you knew EXACTLY what they were going to be like, and the fun was meeting someone with whom you were as familiar as you were with members of your own family.

None of this is to disparage the stars of the Golden Age, many of whom (Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn) had breathtaking talent and could just as well become legends if they were entering the industry tomorrow instead of three-quarters of a century ago. But when you went to see them on screen, you didn’t go to see them act; you went to see them ‘be’. It was like visiting the homes of old friends; for the movie-going public of the golden age, they WERE old friends.

But their status as stars seldom allowed them to show their fans what they were really capable of. As far as “acting” was concerned, they seldom did their best work on the screen; they went back to Broadway (which is where many of them had started) when they needed to challenge themselves or extend their range.

Which actor do you watch all of their movies or shows no matter what? 

James Mason. Listening him to deliver lines - even when they’re lines from one of his lesser movies, like “Prince Valiant” — is like listening to a great singer sing. His voice is like no other, instantly recognisable, yet so special that few impressionists try to imitate him in their acts (admittedly, Rich Little was an exception here, and he was amazing). It was James Mason, not Sir Laurence or Sir John or Sir Ralph or Sir Donald, who “turned me on” to Shakespeare when I was about 12 and went to see “Julius Caesar” (the one with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, in 1953). I don’t think I ever missed a James Mason movie from that day onwards.

Which of the actors didn't deserve the Oscar but were awarded?

I used to find one or two of these nearly every year (especially 1954), in the days when I used to follow the Oscars closely and even had my own “alternative list” for each year. But, of course, those were just my own uninformed opinions, and anything I could write here now would be exactly the same, and, therefore, have just as little ‘cred’.

However, actors, presumably, know when they have done their best work and when they have just “phoned it in”, so, in answer to your question, I would submit Elizabeth Taylor for the movie “Butterfield 8”. She was very vocal, right from the word go, about the quality of the script…. and of her own performance, having to read such rubbish; but she grimly went ahead with the project because of a contractual obligation to her ‘home’ studio. Her subsequent academy award might have been MGM’s way of saying ‘thanks’ for eighteen years of good service.

What is the best movie ever made in terms of its influence it had over people?

The answer to this question might just be “Mrs Miniver”, MGM’s pro-British, anti-Nazi film, which became known as “the film that Goebbels feared”.

When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the USA stayed neutral, much to the chagrin of both the Allies and the Axis countries, since it was pretty much a ‘given’ that, whomever the USA decided (eventually) to support, that was the side that would emerge victorious. Hitler, apparently, had great hopes that he might persuade the US to come in on the side of Germany; after all, he reasoned, the Americans had no great love for the British, having already fought (and won) one war against them. And there were a lot of German expatriates living in the USA (I read somewhere that, at the time war broke out, there were eight German-language newspapers in New York alone). So he set out, even before the outbreak of hostilities, to woo America, although his most elaborate effort in this regard — the inaugural (scheduled as the first of ten) flight of the Hindenburg from Frankfurt to New Jersey — was less than a rousing success! Nevertheless, it seemed, there was at least a chance that, were the US lured into the war, it might just sign up with Nazi Germany.

One group that was determined that this should not happen were the movie moguls out in Hollywood. They were virtually all Jewish, and they, better than anyone else, knew what was going on back in old Europe.

So the Mayers, the Selznicks, the Cohns, the Goldwyns and the Warners decided to do their bit for the British cause in the best way they knew how: by making movies about how brave and gallant the long-suffering Brits were, and how evil and dastardly was the Nazi regime. There was a whole raft of these movies in the crucial early forties, including Sam Wood’s “The White Cliffs of Dover” and Charles Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”; even Donald Duck got into the act with a cartoon called “Der Fuhrer’s Face”. But the main studio to get behind the pro-British “push” was MGM, who sent Mickey and Judy out on war bond drives and brought a contingent of British actors across the Atlantic to demonstrate to US cinemagoers just what stalwarts the British were. So we had Vivien Leigh in “Waterloo Bridge” and Robert Donat in “Goodbye Mr Chips”, and C Aubrey Smith and Dame May Whitty in just about everything!

And there was Greer Garson. As far as the British MGM contingent went, she was Louis B Mayer’s pride and joy, as she appeared to embody all the characteristics he wanted Americans to believe were essentially British. She was elegant, upper-class, well-spoken, dignified, almost angelic: the kind of woman you’d like your mother to be. He fashioned a series of films in which she could play ‘typical’ British femininity, fortitude, resilience, and devotion to the family, and one of the earliest ones was “Mrs Miniver”, in which she protected her family from the evil Germans while hubby was away assisting the Dunkirk evacuees, read “Alice in Wonderland” in a soothing voice to her children hiding in their underground shelter while bombs fell all around them, and still found time to attend to her roses. It was (in spite of how I have made it sound in that last sentence) a damned good movie, and won Academy Awards for best movie, best director (William Wyler), and, of course, best actress for Miss Garson; but, more importantly, it was an influential film insofar as it stirred up such sympathy for the Allies and their sufferings that poor old Adolph never stood a chance.

Winston Churchill himself said that “Mrs Miniver” did more for the British war effort than a flotilla of destroyers. As such, I think, it is a good answer to your question.

How did your favorite actor/actress get 'noticed'?

When she was two-and-a-half years old, and known as ‘Baby Gumm’, my favourite actress strode onto the stage of her father’s Grand Rapids, Minnesota, cinema (this was in 1924, when movies were silent and the programme was padded out by stage presentations) during the Christmas show and sang ‘Jingle Bells’. The audience applauded politely, so she sang it again…. and again…. and again. Finally, her father, Frank Gumm, had to go out on stage, throw her over his shoulder, and carry her off, still singing; however, her mother — Ethel Gumm, who was the piano player for the cinema’s live acts — saw a performer-in-the-making, and started adding Baby Frances to the live-act line-up (which already featured Frances’s two elder sisters). The three Gumm sisters were not, as it turned out, very good (the elder two would eventually drop out of the act, less than enchanted at playing second fiddle to their kid sister), but baby Frances was always a standout, and the act started travelling around the state, the mid-west, and, eventually, as far from home as Los Angeles, at the various vaudeville houses, with perky young Frances garnering all the notices… and — more importantly for her growing self-confidence — the applause.

One other thing that received notices, and was much-commented on, was the name: The Gumm Sisters, hardly the ideal name for a troupe that was becoming both known and respected (they were even featured in a couple of Warner Bros short subjects, with Frances getting solo spots from age seven: you can hear the group on Youtube at watch?v=sQTwvnBLzm0). A change of name to ‘Garland’ was suggested when baby Frances was about ten and listening to all the latest songs, including the Hoagy Carmichael hit, ‘Judy’ (which, she decided, sounded better than ‘Frances’ with her new last name). The following year she started doing the rounds of the studios in Hollywood, ended up auditioning for MGM, and the rest is history!

Why do Hollywood movies from the 1970s often have bleak, unhappy endings?

I fear that my fading memory has blurred the distinction between the sixties, seventies, and eighties, so I will have to accept your premise on trust. But I rather think you’re right; my reason is that films reflect the attitude of the times in which they are made, rather than the era in which they are set. And the 1970s stand out in my mind as the era in which I taught in a secondary school in Sydney for six years and got to know a large number of the pupils as they passed through. I was horrified (as a child of the fifties, during which we didn’t have a care in the world) to discover that these beautiful young people never believed for a moment that they would even grow up to get married and have a career, that it was only a matter of years or months before somebody pressed the wrong button and their lives, and the lives of everyone on Earth, would be wiped out in the blink of an eye. To them, studying for the future was studying for NOTHING, striving for mastery was an exercise in futility. I guess when the cinemagoers of an era have that sort of mindset, the movies can’t help but pander to that and reinforce it. The days of the MGM musical were well and truly over! Was “Testament” made in the seventies? It didn’t just have a “bleak, unhappy ending”…. it was bleak and unhappy right from the first reel!

What is the movie or series that you have binge-watched more than once?

There would be scores of movies that would fit this category, so I don’t think I could even begin to choose! TV series, however, is much easier, because there are only two: “The Judy Garland Show” (1963/4, 26 episodes) and the much-more-recent “Foyle’s War” (9 series). In both cases I bought the entire boxed sets of all episodes so that I continue to binge-watch whenever I feel “down”. Either one can lift my spirits within minutes.

Could Elvis Presley have become a serious actor?

Of course. He would have had all the training and opportunities that Hollywood at that time could have offered him, and he clearly had a lot of natural appeal, which is always a help. The problem was, I feel, that he was managed by people who thought it was better to simply keep reworking a formula which had made money in the past, and not to “rock any boats” by going into uncharted waters. So Hal Wallis kept putting him into those terrible movies which were quite indistinguishable from one another, and in which he didn’t have to do anything except be himself. And Col Tom Parker steadfastly resisted anything that might just alienate Presley’s existing fan-base, who, clearly, did not want their idol to try anything that might have been considered “serious”.

Thus, when Barbra Streisand was preparing her 1976 remake of the Judy Garland “A Star is Born”, she wanted Presley in the part of the on-the-way-down singer who destroys his own career even as he is building up that of his protege. Presley in the part of someone who was all washed up? Parker reportedly vetoed the proposal without a second thought, and Streisand missed the chance to turn her movie into a REALLY special event. What is worse, Presley, less than two years from an untimely death, missed the chance to establish himself as a serious actor.

What was a really memorable/good movie that got bad reviews? 

“The talents of the great Judy Garland are wasted in this movie, possibly the year’s worst.”

Not many people could, in 2019, remember, word for word, the opening sentence of a movie review published in 1963, but that particular sentence, referring to Ronald Neame’s “I Could Go On Singing”, has never left me. I had seen the movie the previous night, and was almost beside myself with exhilaration and that special pleasure one gets (all too infrequently) of being in the presence of genius, and that sentence — and nearly everything else in the review — was like a knife to the heart. Although I never again saw an appraisal of that movie quite THAT extreme, the plain fact is that none of the reviewers liked it much….back then, when it was brand new. They had been expecting another “A Star is Born”, and what they got was a somewhat simple-minded “weepie”… the kind of thing Universal was making by the truck-load in those days, to provide regular employment for some middle-aged actresses who were once box-office draws but had passed their prime (Lana Turner and Jane Wyman being the two stalwarts among them). And, their expectations dashed by the lacklustre story, they “turned on” the movie with a vengeance.

Thankfully, time has softened critical attitudes towards “I Could Go on Singing”, and it is now being re-discovered by people who know Judy Garland only from the legends about her career ups-and-downs and that extraordinary talent (she is described now as “the greatest entertainer who has ever lived”). Students of the Garland phenomenon see “I Could Go On Singing” as the one movie that shows her talent as a singer, as an entertainer, and as an actress, when she was at her performing prime. The Garland who delivered “the greatest evening in show business history” at Carnegie Hall in 1961 is the Garland up there on the screen, in wide-screen and Technicolor, with virtually no editing in the scenes when she is doing what she does best (one of the songs was recorded in a single take, live, without any post-recording). And there is not another film in the distinguished Garland catalogue that can say that…. not even the now-legendary “A Star is Born”, which gave audiences of 1954 what was described, then, as “the greatest one-woman show in the history of cinema”.

Even in 1963, Garland admirers knew that “I Could Go On Singing” was a very special event, one that would not be easily replicated (and it wasn’t; she never made another movie, and within six years, she was dead). But when it was released, reviewers looked at it not as a piece of history, but as a piece of cinema, and they were, quite simply, disappointed that Judy Garland should have become lost in the mire of a trite “Madame X”-type story about a mother trying to re-establish a relationship with a son she had abandoned as a baby. The film did well for a few weeks, and then, weighed down by those negative reviews, virtually disappeared for forty years. Now it’s on DVD and blu-ray, and the musical highlights (and at least one of the dramatic ones) are on Youtube for all the world to see, and to marvel at. The reviewers of the time couldn’t have known how little time the world had left to witness first-hand the talents of Judy Garland; people of today, realising that no one has come along since to seriously challenge her reputation as the greatest of them all, know better. “Memorable”, indeed, is the word for “I Could Go On Singing”.

Which actor had the best movie role with the fewest lines?

I expect that would be Jane Wyman in “Johnny Belinda”. She was the main character, and, in fact, took home the Academy Award that year as best actress, but she didn’t have a single line! She played a deaf-mute who lived in such primitive conditions that she hadn’t even been taught sign language (until, that is, a sympathetic young doctor came to town), so she had to do virtually all her acting with facial expressions.

There have been several other actors who have distinguished themselves in “silent” roles, so Wyman is certainly not alone in this category; Marlee Matlin, who is genuinely deaf, was also honoured with an Oscar for “Children of a Lesser God”…. but in that movie she was given at least one brief “oral” scene, just to show the world why many deaf people choose to remain silent. Jane Wyman, however, never even had that single line.

What actors and actresses have been injured during a movie?

Frank Sinatra broke his hand during a fight scene in “The Manchurian Candidate”. They kept the shot in the movie, as the director, who didn’t know what had occurred, didn’t yell “Cut”.

If you buy the DVD of the movie with its special features, you will see Sinatra describing the scene, and how the accident occurred (the other actor — Henry Silva —suddenly changed his action, and Sinatra, responding to where the actor SHOULD have been, slammed his hand down into a heavy table). He retained the use of the hand, but, as he shows in the DVD feature, it never quite “went back” the way it should have.

Who are some Hollywood celebrities that were married before their debut?

I’d like to answer “Mae West”, who was married at age 17, before she became a celebrity, and later denied (for some twenty-five years) that the marriage had ever taken place. However, this wasn’t really before her debut; it was only before her debut as “Mae West”. She had previously attempted to break into show business under two other names: “Baby Mae” (from age seven) and “Jane Mast” (around age 14).

What film would have been so much better if they left out one scene?

 “The Bad Seed”. The original, made in the mid-50s, not the TV remake.

It was based on a controversial play, about a child who is totally amoral, by Maxwell Anderson, and he had shrewdly ended the play at its most shocking moment: the little girl who is the “title character” has unexpectedly survived a murder/suicide attempt by her mother which was designed to prevent any further tragedies (however, Mum died in the attempt), and is free to perpetrate new atrocities (she has just set the gardener alight in his straw bed, and has designs on engineering the death of her upstairs landlady).

At the time the film was made, an ending like this just couldn’t be countenanced: “the code” was still enforced (although it was being attacked from all sides), and films which didn’t comply were liable to find bookings difficult. So, for a start, Mum survived; she’d shot herself in the head, but, it seems, not seriously. (Seriously?)

Next, evil little Rhoda simply HAD to suffer punishment at the hands of the Almighty. So she embarks on another scheme, and gets struck by lightning. It was hard not to laugh. Maybe they deliberately did it badly in order to show just what nonsense the censorship laws were…. whatever their motives, the strategy backfired, and a fascinating play was reduced to the usual Hollywood hokum in the last five minutes. A pity!

What are some small things you really enjoy seeing in movies?

I love it when an actor shows that he has “done his homework” and adds details, in his performance, that help flesh out a character even if they don’t have any bearing on the plot or the character’s subsequent actions.

An example of this which I have always remembered with pleasure (and real admiration for the writer/director Nunnally Johnson) occurred in a small, almost-forgotten (but unfairly so) whodunit called “Black Widow” (the 1954 movie, not one of the two more-recent movies with the same title). In it, the character played by Van Heflin, seeking to unravel a mystery, calls in on an acquaintance whose home he has never before visited (Otto Kruger). Kruger lets him in, welcomes him, and, as they talk, surreptitiously passes by the dresser, where he casually picks up a framed photo and turns it face down, without even pausing in the conversation…. as if he was not unused to doing this. It has no bearing on the plot and is never referred to again, but it brought an extra dimension to the character, and was one of the most intriguing ‘bits’ in the movie…. Johnson knew this character and his background, even if we didn’t need to, and used it to everyone’s advantage. How many films think to do this with minor characters?

Would you please name some movies Katharine Hepburn was in, preferably her best ones?

That would be a long list, Grace, as she kept her standard high (she was the first actress to win three Academy Awards). I couldn’t even begin to rank her performances, although I have always had a special fondness for the seldom-seen “Long Day’s Journey into Night”, which really was a tour-de-force for her.

She was brilliant in “The Philadelphia Story”, and you realise just HOW brilliant when you watch Grace Kelly in the remake and see all those sparkling lines fall flat on the floor. She sparred with Cary Grant in that one, and another pairing with Grant, in “Bringing Up Baby”, also yielded one of her best performances.

Everyone loved her pairing with Bogey in “The African Queen”, probably because they seemed such an unlikely couple. But, then, she seemed to be at her best with the rough “galoot” kind of actor to spar with: with John Wayne in “Rooster Cogburn”, with Burt Lancaster in “The Rainmaker”, and with Peter O’Toole (not usually quite as alpha-male as in this film) in “The Lion in Winter”.

And then, of course, there were nine films with Spencer Tracy, her favourite ‘galoot’ and the love of her life. Hard to pick just one or two, but I particularly cherish “Adam’s Rib” and “Woman of the Year”. She was a marvellous Amanda Wingfield in a made-for-TV version of “The Glass Menagerie”, and was perfect as the aging spinster experiencing a love she knows will end badly in “Summertime”.

Those are just a few, and you know I am going to press “submit” and then curse under my breath as ten more instantly jump into my mind before my finger has even left the button. But those will do, I think, for starters!

Has an adult actor ever reprised the same role they portrayed as a child actor?

Around 1956, nearly twenty after the series of Andy Hardy movies made Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland American’s most-beloved “teen team”, Mickey Rooney returned to the role in a little-seen movie called “Andy Hardy Comes Home”. Andrew Hardy was now a successful businessman making a nostalgic trip back to his old home town, and reviving memories which gave MGM the chance to insert clips from the earlier series. Unfortunately (but, I think, inevitably), the film never found an audience, and disappeared very quickly.

What makes a good movie scene? 

I expect the answer to this is much the same as “what makes a good stage-play scene” and “what makes a good chapter in a book”. You need to be able to identify with the characters, to put yourself in the place of at least one of them so that you are, essentially, living through the experience yourself (and maybe, by the scene’s end, have learnt a little more about yourself). Therefore you need to have characters that you can believe in and situations that are relevant to the ones you are going through in real life. In the case of a movie, the scene is helped immeasurably by actors whom you enjoy watching for their own sake, words that you remember afterwards (and may even quote verbatim in some cases) and behind-the-scenes technicians who know enough to stay behind the scenes, so that you don’t really notice their contribution at all (in the case of, for instance, sound mixing and lighting, that might be the greatest compliment you can pay them).

What are some shocking behind-the-scenes facts about movies?

Sometimes people get killed making them. This has always been true, even in the old “silent” days… in fact, one might even say ESPECIALLY in the silent days, when out-of-work extras, desperate for money, would agree to take part in dangerous stunts where safety precautions were minimal and nobody had tested the equipment to ensure that they knew how it was all going to turn out. Biblical stories — very popular in the pre-talkies era — needed spectacle to make the Old Testament come alive, and a few casualties per spectacular scene was considered, well, not good form, but perhaps unavoidable. The flood in “Noah’s Ark” didn’t kill as many people as the REAL one did, but at least three extras were drowned, and another had his legs amputated. The 1925 “Ben-Hur” had a scene (shot near Rome) where scores of extras were tossed into the water after two boats, one afire, collided; it is said that many of them couldn’t swim (nobody, it seems, had bothered to ask), and several were drowned (it is also said that this shot is still in the movie, and you can see them floundering); to avoid too many complications arising from such an unfortunate event, the company was hurriedly recalled to America, where things were much safer (only 100 horses were, reportedly, tripped and killed to get the footage needed for the chariot race scene).

Eventually, laws were made to protect horses and extras, but every now and then a stunt would go seriously wrong and another fatality would occur, such as in the 1965 “Flight of the Phoenix”, where, on the first try, the phoenix didn’t fly, and killed the stunt man attempting to fly it. Actor Brandon Lee was killed mid-shot in a scene (from “The Crow”, 1993) where a series of “blanks” was fired at him at close range; it seems that, as well as the blanks, the revolver also contained fragments of a “live” bullet which had been used for earlier scenes. The film-makers, eager to show their respect for audiences and their compassion for their deceased star, assured everyone that the shot used in the completed movie was from a different “take”, so you weren’t going to see the leading actor die right there on screen.

The most serious “recent” accident must surely have been in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” (1983), because there were three people killed, including the star of the movie (Vic Morrow) and two child actors (seven-year-old My-Ca Dinh Le and six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen), due to a malfunctioning helicopter which also destroyed the set and injured six other people, as the colour cameras rolled on. Some hasty post-production editing ensured you didn’t see that in the movie, but, as one would expect in today’s anything-for-a-thrill society, it’s all over Youtube.

What’s your favorite movie scene of all time? 

As anyone who has read any of my past answers will have discerned already, I believe that Judy Garland was the best of them all… not only the best singer (I would respectfully submit that, nowadays, that’s a “given”) and the best comedienne, but also the best dramatic actress (even Bing Crosby was quick to admit this; after saying she was the most talented person he had ever worked with, he added, “Sing, dance, act…. that gal could do anything”). Consequently, I have two scenes (neck-and-neck in my estimation), both involving Judy, which are my favourite movie scenes of all time.

I expect that the one I should mention first is the one I saw first, in 1955, because it was such a shock to see for the first time what Judy was capable of; although it shouldn’t have been, because for years — in “For me and My Gal”, “Meet Me in St Louis”, “The Clock”, “Easter Parade” — she was producing consistently-outstanding work in the “straight” (non-musical) scenes, often on astonishingly long takes; but these never quite got the accolades they deserved, because, after all, who looks for great acting in musicals? And, anyway, one went to a Garland film to hear her SING…. who cared what went on between the musical numbers?

But it was simply impossible to ignore what is now universally-known as “the dressing room sequence” in “A Star is Born”, the first film that was designed to show off her dramatic talents in equal measure to her musical ones. In one long (at least five-minute) “take”, she gave a performance which was almost-unbearable to look at, because it was impossible NOT to be aware that she was doing with the lines in the script exactly what made her reading of her songs greater than anybody else’s: she was LIVING every word, every thought, every emotion. It was almost a trivialisation of what was going on on-screen to describe it as “acting”. It was something more…. something they don’t teach you in acting school.

The second example of this extraordinary performer’s dramatic work was, therefore, less-surprising to her audiences than this one; the irony was, it WAS a complete surprise to her director, Ronald Neame, in her 1963 musical drama, “I Could Go On Singing”. You can tell he wasn’t “ready” for it, because the lighting and camera work, as the seven-minute single take unfolds and he moves his crew in closer to catch the event, is so clumsy that it looks for a while that everyone behind the camera is on work-experience (the lighting director actually shines the light straight into her eyes at one point). The script, and the character Judy was playing, were virtually thrown out the window, as Judy discarded “Jenny Bowman” and became Judy Garland, with all her troubles, her triumphs, her regrets and her attitude to her career laid bare, for all to witness. The camera stopped only when she stopped; no one was about to yell “Cut!” on THIS scene! Afterwards, I heard, the people at the British studio who had witnessed the shot wandered around the lot as if in a daze; people who weren’t there came up to them and said, “What the hell went on in there?” Their answer, simply: “a miracle.” These were people whose BUSINESS was making movies, who had seen it all…. or so they thought.

That scene was filmed more than fifty-five years ago; but even watching it today, you can’t help conceding that you have never, ever seen anything to match it. A miracle, indeed!

Are most child stars doomed ultimately?

Well, they’re doomed to grow up, but, then again, aren’t we all?

I think it’s a sweeping generalisation to conclude that, because some of the child stars of the past have had difficult lives as adults (one or two hardly even living that long), all child actors are going to rue the day that they said “yes” to that first role. Shirley Temple was one of the top box office stars in the world before she could even read the scripts that were sent to her, and there is little doubt that she was exploited by her home studio outrageously, tossed into one movie after another and never allowed to expand her repertoire (or even to let her skirts down). Yet by her mid-teens she had realised that it was time to move on, and in her subsequent career as Mrs Shirley Temple Black, she was US Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and Chief of Protocol of the United States. I can’t imagine she ever regretted not holding on to her movie career.

Nor did Margaret O’Brien, who came along soon afterwards and managed to have her cake and eat it too, reaping all the benefits of appearing with the greats (and holding her own with them), yet avoiding the pitfalls that she witnessed many fall into, eventually growing into a beautiful, articulate, well-adjusted adult. Mickey Rooney sustained a career for nine decades, and appeared, altogether in more than 300 films, as well as Broadway and television. He was a star all his life.

One could go on and on; for every Bobby Driscoll one could come up with a Freddie Bartholomew, or a Mark Lester. For every Corey Feldman or Corey Haim, one can come up with a Jodie Foster, or a Patricia Gozzi. Most of the child stars of the past did exactly what one of my favourites, Virginia Weidler, did: they saw that there was a time for everything, and a time to move on; when their star started to wane, they simply walked away from their movie careers without so much as a backward glance, and looked for new worlds to conquer.

What are the best Humphrey Bogart films and why do you think so? 

Kevin Wray has listed just about all the best ones, so there is no need to list any of those again. I would just like to mention one which he has somehow overlooked: “In a Lonely Place”, which was the one directed by Nicholas Ray and which co-starred him with Gloria Grahame. I always had a soft spot for Bogart’s performance in “The Caine Mutiny”, which I thought was a brave out-of-character performance, and quite an acting stretch; as great as he was, I could never work out why anyone would have ever considered him a likely Queeg.

Then I saw “In a Lonely Place”, and straightaway I knew where Queeg had come from. It’s a remarkable performance, one that most movie heroes would not have been brave enough to essay; thanks to Bogey, the movie is not easily forgotten.

What is the most cinematically perfect movie ever made?

There are quite a few movies which seem to me to be so close to perfection that you can’t imagine changing even a frame of them; almost without exception, every example I can think of came from the “golden age” of movies and was made by MGM, whose motto, “Make it big; Get it right; Give it class”, effectively meant that money was no object in producing a product of which the studio could be proud. Would it have been possible, for instance, to improve on “Meet Me in St Louis” or “The Band Wagon” or “Bad Day at Black Rock”?

But there is one that is perhaps bigger, righter and classier than even those three, and any of the others made by that studio. Made in 1946, it has been described as “MGM at the height of its powers”, and just about everyone who has seen it agrees it is, quite simply, unforgettable. “The Yearling”, directed by Clarence Brown, was a film in which money HAD to be no object, because it was a very difficult location “shoot” (unusual for those days, when nearly all films were shot on the back lot) which, at one stage, had to be abandoned for months when its elaborate set was washed away in a flood. It resumed shooting with a new director, and virtually a new cast to replace Spencer Tracy, Ann Revere and Roddy MacDowall… top MGM stars by no means easy to replace.

However, Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman rose to the occasion magnificently, giving, for Brown, more perceptive performances than either had ever given previously; while young Claude Jarman, Jr was, quite simply, sublime. That same word might also be applied to Herbert Stothart’s music and the photography by no less than three master cinematographers: Arthur E. Arling, Charles Rosher, and Leonard Smith.

Make no mistake about it, these people were after perfection, and, in my humble opinion, no film ever came closer to achieving it. They took the time to get it right. "Clarence Brown was a real perfectionist," recalled Claude Jarman, Jr, now in his late eighties. "I would say the average take for the movie was probably 20, 21 times. And today you see it done in two, three." Those were the days: make it big; get it right; give it class.

What is the best Original Soundtrack (OST) from a movie you like the most?

I am unsure whether you mean background scores or musical movies; if the latter, one has to be careful to choose musicals created for the screen, which, of course, is not the case with many musicals, who plunder their songs from other sources (such as Broadway shows). Original musical scores never got much better than 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz”, with a score written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg; ‘Yip’ Harburg’s lyrics never cease to amaze me, even to this day, and I don’t think there was another lyricist living who could have come anywhere near to matching them (Stephen Sondheim could match him today, but I hope that even Sondheim would acknowledge that Harburg’s work on this movie was beyond brilliant). And, of course, “The Wizard of Oz” produced the ‘song of the millennium’…. the unanimous choice, says Tony Bennett, of all the countries who voted in 2000: “Over the Rainbow”, which today has attained almost anthem-status.

If you are talking background scores, there are a dozen of them that bring the movie back to me when I hear just four bars: Bernard Herrmann’s scores for “Vertigo” and “North By Northwest”, for instance, or Herbert Stothart’s four minutes of symphonic music (inspired by Delius’s ‘Appalachia”) as young Jody Baxter frolics with the deer of the forest in “The Yearling” (this really ought to be part of the repertoire of some of the world’s great orchestras). Or any one of a dozen Alfred Newman scores; choosing just one score from the Newman catalogue is virtually impossible (his output was amazingly consistent) but, because of the subject matter of the movie for which it was written, I admit to a special fondness for his score for “The Diary of Anne Frank”. However, I concede that there are at least half a dozen that come within a hair’s breadth of that one; Newman, like Herrmann and Stothart, raised the level of movie music to heights never approached since.

What is the craziest stunt ever pulled off in a movie?

Go back to the silent era when comedy actors, with only visual gags to get them by, used, quite routinely, to get laughs — and gasps — by setting up bits of business which relied on split-second timing to avoid disaster. These actors virtually risked their lives as they stalled cars on railway tracks with engines roaring down at them, had pianos drop from a great height to within inches of them, and walked out onto the wings of planes in flight.

The best of the acting stuntmen — or stunting actors? -- was indisputably Buster Keaton, who risked life and limb in a series of short films and features, assuring his place in movie history, if only he lived through them. The stunt I always remember most vividly was in “Steamboat Bill”, when the entire front of a house collapses onto Buster as he pauses, blissfully unaware of what’s happening, directly in front of it. The attic window frame, hardly bigger than himself, has to land neatly around him if he is to live through this one.

Keaton did the stunt himself with a real, two-ton building facade …. and no trickery. Any tiny misjudgment when he positioned himself for the shot would have ended his career, and, most probably, his life. Keaton's third wife, Eleanor, attributed his recklessness to despair over financial problems, his failing first marriage, and the imminent loss of his film-making independence, as studios exerted more and more control over his output. Keaton made the shot not caring if he lived or died, later saying "I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing." The mark on the ground telling him exactly where to stand to avoid being crushed was…a nail!

Keaton was known throughout his career for performing dangerous stunts such as this one; some of his capers with a railway engine and sleepers on the track in “The General” are breathtaking in their audacity. In “Sherlock Jr”, he went too far: in a spectacular fall from a railroad water tower tube, his neck was fractured.

While silent comedians felt it necessary to outdo each other with “impossible” feats in order to keep the queues at the box office, even the straight-dramatic actors of the era were expected to just get on with it and do whatever the script called for, regardless of clear and present danger. Lillian Gish was one of the most important stars of her time, but even she was put at risk in “Way Down East”, in the climax of which she had to lie, supposedly unconscious, on an ice floe heading towards a waterfall, while Richard Barthelmess jumped from the riverbank onto another passing floe and made his way, leaping from ice-floe to ice-floe towards the one on which she lay, motionless. Then, scooping her up just in time, he had to get them both back to safety by leaping back from her floe, just as it toppled over the edge, to the next one, and to continue, with her in his arms, all the way across to the shore. If he had missed his footing, well, who knows? One can only hope that the producers ensured that the waterfall (which is seen only in part) chosen for this mad stunt had a fall of mere inches rather than hundreds of feet!

What movie have you literally walked out of because it was so bad? 

Considering how many thousands of movies I have seen since I began going to the cinema regularly, back in the late 1940s, not very many. In fact, I could probably count the number of times I didn’t bother hanging around to the finish on the fingers of one hand…. well, maybe two.

Of course, if you’re going to count the number of DVD movies I have put on and decided that I could use my time better watching the grass grow on my lawn, well, the answer would be very different! Frankly, most of the movies being made nowadays don’t really hold much appeal for an old guy like me, and it’s not at all unusual for me to “invest”, at a garage sale or op-shop, a dollar or two in a DVD of a recent movie I have at least heard of, and then “give it away” (literally AND metaphorically) after forty minutes of watching. In the case of “Caligula”, I didn’t even give it away, because I decided there wasn’t a single person I knew that I hated quite that much, to inflict something like that on them! I destroyed it and threw it in the garbage.

But you asked about “walking out”, which implies going to the cinema. The last time I can remember doing this was in the film of Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Leonardo di Caprio and Clare Danes). I was prepared to put up with the fiddling with the dialogue that is always necessary when Shakespeare is brought “up-to-date”, even though I did think, after di Caprio cried “Give me my sword!” and the camera gave us a close-up of a hand gun with the brand-name “Sword” emblazoned on it, that this was, frankly, an idea of monumental dumbness; I just kept sitting there thinking, “It doesn’t matter, the balcony scene will come along soon, and those beautiful words will make up for everything.” But Luhrmann had a surprise in store for us all, there, too: in a stroke of inspiration, he decided to set this scene with Romeo and Juliet in the water, gasping their lines while treading water in the local pond, or somewhere similar. In a similar stroke of inspiration, I caught the early bus home; I knew how it was going to turn out, anyway…. unless, of course, Luhrmann had another inspiration for the finale and had the lovers escape to another planet by hijacking a passing space ship!

What movies had the biggest impact on actors careers for the better or worse?

I would expect “for the better” would be more common than “for worse”, since just about every actor since sound came in has, sooner or later, made a film which, in hindsight, they wish hadn’t happened (or missed out on “the” role that would have crowned their entire career) …. yet most seem to recover from such setbacks.

But that single film that instantly catapults you from a supporting player, or even an extra, into an “A-grade” star happens frequently…. so frequently, in fact, that I guess I should content myself with a single example and then stand back while all the other answers come in.

So, just for openers, how about Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia”? It was one of the biggest roles of the decade, and, when he was cast, he was the veteran of just three movies, only one of which (“The Day They Robbed the Bank of England”) offered him billing on the poster in a size you could actually see.

Moreover, the role of Lawrence had been coveted by two major stars: first (several years before the film was finally made), Alan Ladd, who saw in the role the chance of a lifetime; secondly, Dirk Bogarde (who would have almost certainly played the part, but for contractual obligations to a rival studio for one of his ‘Doctor’ films).

In spite of the risk to box-office returns in not using a “name” star, Peter O’Toole was finally chosen, and was identified with the role for the rest of his career.

Why are they called movie trailers when they come before the movie is even out? 

I expect it harks back to the days when you could sit in a cinema through as many of the daily sessions as you chose, and see the film two or even three times. Then, as the movie ended, there would be a preview (or maybe two or three) of what you would see if you came in next week…. but it TRAILED the movie that you had just seen, possibly giving the projectionist time to get the film you had just viewed back “in order”, for the following screening.

What is the greatest movie we've never seen?

That is such an interesting question, Mina, although I admit I had to sit and think for a moment to be sure I knew exactly what you meant. But if you mean which film was all set to go, and then never happened — at least, not in the form the makers intended — then I think I’ve got the answer you are seeking.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “Carousel”, was chosen as the vehicle that would introduce to moviegoers a super-Cinemascope process called ‘CinemaScope 55’, which was a bit like a cross between CinemaScope and VistaVision. It was an important project, and the makers had an important cast lined up to go with it: Frank Sinatra, who had already recorded — to great acclaim — the number ‘Soliloquy’ from this show, and had won the Academy Award just two years earlier; and Judy Garland, who had just finished her outstanding cinema achievement, ‘A Star is Born’, and was in better voice than at any time in her career (up to that point, anyway; this was six years before her historic Carnegie Hall concert). The two were fast friends and had wanted to work in movies together for at least ten years (several pairings had already been planned — in “Anchors Aweigh”, “Easter Parade” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — but, in each case, their plan came to nothing). Now, in 1955, the thought of THOSE performers singing THAT music was enough to make everyone concerned with it anticipate that it would be one of the great movies of all time.

But, gradually, the project fell apart. Judy was the first to bail, claiming that Sinatra had a slew of great songs in the show as written (including the memorable ‘If I Loved You’ and the already-mentioned ‘Soliloquy’, in fact a six-minute singing marathon encompassing several themes), while all she had was “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’” and half of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. She wanted Rodgers and Hammerstein to write a Soliloquy-type number for her, also; Rodgers, understandably, flatly refused to tinker with his pet show, even for Judy.

Then, when Shirley Jones had been brought in to replace Judy, Sinatra learned that he would actually have to shoot every scene twice: once for the new CinemaScope 55 camera and once more for the ‘regular’ wide-screen for theatres that didn’t have the new equipment. As far as he was concerned, they were asking him to make two movies when he had signed for just one. So he left, also.

“Carousel” eventually got made, and it was good. But neither lead could hold a candle to the two that 20th-Century Fox had let go, and, today, “Carousel”, as originally conceived, might well earn the title of “the greatest movie we’ve never seen.”

Do you remember where you were when you first heard the news that Marilyn Monroe passed away in 1962?

Exactly. It was when I was in my second year out of college as the teacher in a one-teacher outback school in NSW Australia. I was in my classroom before school, preparing the day’s work, when the school bus pulled up, and all my students (about 20 of them, assorted ages from 5 to around 15) traipsed into the room. A ten-year-old half-indigenous Australian boy came up to the desk and said, “Marilyn Monroe died”. I was amazed, not that she had passed away, but that a ten-year-old native boy on the fringes of the desert in Australia, where there wasn’t even any electricity (which meant, of course, no TV) or newspapers, and the train only ran three times a week, would have even HEARD of Marilyn Monroe!

What was the best true story ruined by a poorly done movie?

Well, just about every biblical picture has been appalling, and enough to turn you off religion for life. Even a distinguished director like George Stevens (not, at this stage in his career, at the top of his game) made a hash of telling the story of Jesus, with his decision to cast a Swedish actor in the role of the most famous Jew who ever lived (that’s not a criticism of Max von Sydow, who tried valiantly; but it was hard to accept his accent as he recited the Sermon on the Mount), and then to allow a roster of Hollywood guest stars to parade across the screen gracing the minor roles with their special brand of appeal: John Wayne as a Roman soldier carrying out the crucifixion, Shelley Winters as the recipient of one of Jesus’ miracles (“Oi’m cured! Oi’m cured!”), pop singer Pat Boone as an angel in the tomb; it seemed no bad decision was left untaken. However, I expect you were looking for something more-easily verified as a “true story” than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; so perhaps I should exclude this whole genre from my derision.

So, how about Clint Eastwood’s “The Changeling”? A skilled director like Eastwood can usually make you believe a story that is NOT based on fact, so how come audiences, watching his re-telling of a supposedly-true event, sat there (as I did) thinking, “I don’t believe a word of this!”

How did the Harry Potter film’s production team allow such bad child actors to be cast?

The production team are no fools; they knew that they were in for the long haul here, with a decade’s worth of sequels to follow. So they wanted child actors who looked like they might grow into acceptable teen and young adult performers. Also, I expect, actors whose agents were able to provide some assurance that they would be available, if necessary, as far into the future as they might be required (substituting an actor, especially in films aimed at children, who tend to “believe” in the characters more than adults do and just won’t tolerate a sudden change, is always a box-office killer).

Really, they did very well with their selection. The children they chose were likeable enough for you to want to follow their careers at the same time that you’re following the continuing adventures of the characters they play. All the main ones have made movies away from the Harry Potter franchise and have acquitted themselves well. And almost all of them fitted the roles to which they were assigned like a glove; the one exception to that, Emma Watson, who was always quite gorgeous when her preteen character was supposed to be plain and abrasive, has actually fared best of the lot, growing into a beautiful young woman who has learned her craft and has been an asset to nearly every movie she has appeared in.

What's the biggest plot convenience you have noticed in a movie?

At the end of “Gravity”, after Sandra Bullock has managed to stave off one crisis after another in her crippled spacecraft, finally bringing it back to Earth, she just happens to land in a pond so suitable for an easy landing that she can virtually open the door of the space ship and walk to shore. Yes, I know that five-eighths of the world is water, but, honestly…..

Are child actors much more talented than they used to be?

Thank God, no. There are laws nowadays to protect children from being trained like seals and forced to give up their childhood to demonstrate to the world (and to the people with the money) how “talented” they are. Nowadays, children don’t go to work at three or four, and become the family’s breadwinner at around the time they ought to be starting school. They aren’t forced to grow up on movie sets and lurch from one film to the other, with hardly a break to make a friend of their own age. They aren’t force-fed pills to keep them awake, or put them to sleep, or to stop them from gaining weight, or to delay the onset of puberty. Nowadays, we expect child actors to have a life outside of the movies and the singing and dancing academies. We have learned that “talent” often goes hand-in-hand with “victimhood” and “exploitation”. How many of the child stars of the twenties, thirties and forties never even made it into adulthood? How many of them were considered “all washed up” by the time they were into double figures, and, cast aside like so much detritus, watched their lives spiral downhill into homelessness, addiction, and institutionalisation?

When I say that today’s young actors are not as talented as the youngsters I have been describing above, I am not “putting them down”; nowadays I am often awe-struck by how well they can sustain a difficult role, sometimes (as with Onata Aprile in “What Maisie Knew”) for virtually every scene in the movie. They do a thoroughly-professional job, and their performance is the happy outcome of a combination of sound training, skillful direction, shrewd editing ….and, of course, talent. But it’s not the “do-or-die” talent that the poor kids of the “golden” days were expected to come up with week after week, because (as in the case of Shirley Temple), the employment of hundreds of people, and even the future existence of the studio, depended on them being able to deliver the goods, time and time again. That’s talent taken to a whole new level … talent you may even have to give your life for.

Who is the most talented child actor?

If you’d said “renowned” instead of “talented”, I could simply have agreed with Holly, and said Shirley Temple. I mean, from the time she was about four or five she was singing, doing dance numbers, stealing scenes from co-stars who had a quarter of a century more experience than she, and learning pages of dialogue which she could deliver, faultlessly, in a single take… and she couldn’t even read! No one has ever come close to achieving her status in the motion picture industry.

But Shirley had her limitations. The most crucial one, of course, was that she could really only play herself. Few people, recalling a scene from a Shirley Temple movie, would be able to tell you in which of her films it was featured; they were virtually all the same, and her studio seemed to have no interest in helping her expand her repertoire. Consequently, she “dated” more swiftly than just about any other child actor. By twelve, she seemed to be a little girl trapped in an adolescent body. As a teenager, she was particularly good at neither singing, dancing, nor acting. She left her studio to try her hand at MGM, the repository of all the great child actors: Jackie Cooper, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Freddie Bartholomew, Margaret O’Brien, Virginia Weidler. MGM gave its child stars the training and the opportunities they needed to move into adult roles. But they couldn’t do a thing with Shirley, and she left them after only one movie; she never really “clicked” in her few adolescent or young-adult roles for David O Selznick or John Ford, and eventually moved on to another (very distinguished) career.

So who gets the crown for pure talent, then? If you read the notices for “Baby Gumm”, the youngest member of the Gumm Sisters, who had been “laying them in the aisles” as a vaudeville attraction almost since she could walk, singing (as everyone said) like a young Helen Morgan; who was a star of radio and stage by the time she was twelve; who, with her name changed, went to Hollywood at thirteen and had composers, arrangers and directors literally fighting to attach themselves to her rising star; who, at 17, won an Academy Award for her acting (never mind that in the same movie she introduced the song that would be hailed, in 2000, as the “song of the Millennium”, and forever after indelibly associated with her); and then, after a movie career that spanned musicals, dramas, and “socially significant” pictures like “Judgment at Nuremberg”, went back to the concert stage and gave a series of world-wide concerts, one of which (at Carnegie Hall) has been hailed as “the greatest evening in show business history”; and THEN went on to make a twenty-six week television series which is now regarded as the pinnacle of the variety shows that were all the rage in the fifties and sixties….. well, there is really no question that she, and she only, could be called the “most talented” of the child stars. She is more than that: nowadays she is generally regarded as (to use Tony Bennett’s words) “the greatest entertainer who has ever lived”. She made millions of dollars for her employers and supporters, and the happiness she brought to her audiences is, quite simply, beyond costing. One ecstatic Youtube comment, under her 1964 video of “Carolina in the Morning” (which you ought to go and watch right now) summed it up for the whole world: “When I hear Judy Garland sing, I am happy that I’m alive”.

Are Hollywood child actors ever bullied at school?

I guess there was never a more-famous child star than Shirley Temple, and, in her case at least, the answer is “Yes”! In her early days she was schooled privately right on the lot, in between set-ups; however, when she was about 12 or 13 and no longer required quite as often (her star was fading fast by the time she reached puberty), she enrolled in a “regular” school with “regular” girls. Whether it was because she didn’t know how to act around them, or because THEY didn’t know how to act around a movie star, I don’t know; but, in her autobiography, she confesses to a miserable time for several months, unable to make friends and suffering constantly at the hands of the class bully, until she finally proved she was no different from her peers (she almost confesses to starting a fire at her school in order to increase her popularity!)

Who is the most overrated film director? 

Otto Preminger. His films are so sloppy he is practically telling his audiences that they deserve no better. Camera reflections in windows, mike boom shadows in the background, the shadow of a camera falling across the face of the actors. Just check “Exodus” for the best-known case of the latter, but “In Harm’s Way” must be the all-time classic for “goofs”, including a car which slams into another vehicle, and then suddenly changes make and colour as, in the next shot, it goes over a cliff. Preminger made some good films — 1954’s “Carmen Jones”, for instance — but I can’t think of a good one after that; there was just drivel like “Bunny Lake is Missing”, the mere mention of which must be enough to spoil Keir Dullea’s day.

What is the most uncomfortable movie scene?

There is a scene in “The Woodsman” (2004) which has no violence, no blood and gore, no nudity, not even any R-rated language. It’s just two people (Kevin Bacon and then-newcomer Hannah Pilkes, eleven years old) talking on a park bench, and, as they talk, both going through a serious emotional trauma. Their trauma is nothing to that being experienced by audiences watching the scene! If you check out some of the audience reactions on Amazon, you will see what I mean: “I absolutely could not finish this movie due to the subject matter. Why a movie like this has to be made is beyond me. Aren't we supposed to be watching movies to be entertained. Well, if that’s the case we are lost as humans because there is nothing entertaining….”; “I can only assume that the positive reviews are from people who don't have kids…..there comes a point where it is absolutely sickening. This is not entertainment”; “a very scary ride into the reality of likely the most taboo subject on the planet.”

Clearly, this is not a film for everybody, and this climactic park scene is enough to have most viewers reaching for the off-switch; I admit to holding my breath for practically the entire scene, not knowing whether to feel sorrier for the plight of little Robin (the girl in the park), or of Hannah Pilkes, the child actress who had to read some lines about things you wouldn’t even want her to know about (child actors have it much tougher today than in the Shirley Temple era!)

Yes, it’s not easy to watch, and, yes, you will feel uncomfortable for hours, maybe days, afterwards; but it’s played brilliantly by both parties, and you don’t doubt the honest intentions of the director and scriptwriter. I confess I genuinely respected the film (although I wouldn’t let my daughter act in it!), and I applaud the courage of Kevin Bacon for taking a chance with his image in order to dig for a truth most people prefer not to think about; but, today, the movie sits on my shelf, and I often pause at its spine when I am looking for a movie for the evening …..but I just can’t quite bear to put myself through that kind of trauma again.

What is a great movie that gets a lot of facts wrong?

I’m taking a lot of licence with your question here; it wasn’t a “great” movie, it was a stinker, and it is deservedly forgotten nowadays. And I don’t know about “a lot” of facts: I am only reporting about one error…. but it was surely a basic one!

In the early days of Cinerama and multi-track stereophonic sound, when the main selling point of a movie was whether it gave you something to look at that you’d never seen before, and on a 76-foot-wide screen, came the 1969 disaster-movie “Krakatoa, East of Java”, which may well be better-described as a “disastrous” movie (it scores a whopping 0% on the Rotten Tomatoes “tomatometer”) as, shortly after its initial release, the distributors hastily withdrew it and changed all the publicity material, eventually re-issuing it under a brand new name (which, unfortunately, didn’t turn it into a better movie).

The reason? Well, as thousands of moviegoers reported scornfully, Krakatoa is actually WEST of Java. Somebody obviously didn’t do his research!

Are there any hypocrisy-free actor interviews? I'd like to find something not scripted about an actor I like but it seems impossible

If what you are looking for is an interview in which the actor being interviewed chose to be himself, warts and all, rather than to play the age-old game of showing himself in the nicest-possible light (usually by using the power to “pre-veto” any questions which might prove less-than-comfortable for him to address), then I would recommend you watch a televised interview from 2016 with Jerry Lewis (posted on Youtube at /watch?v=s8SfWiNhTJo). Mr Lewis was well-known among insiders as a rude, arrogant, and impossibly-demanding performer with an over-inflated view of his own standing in the entertainment world, but he had always been careful to present a very-different face — the simple, modest clown with the heart of gold — to his adoring public. In this case, having just turned 90, he must have decided that he just didn’t give a damn anymore, and he really let the hapless interviewer “have it”.

Be warned, though; if you happen to like Jerry Lewis, this seven minutes of the least-charitable side of him may well change your mind!

What are some of the most absurd on-set demands that actors have made through the years?

Marilyn Monroe was so fanatical about being the blondest blonde in her movies that she used to scan the extras in crowd scenes, and if any of the ladies might be judged to be competing with her for “blondeness”, she had the unfortunate extra dismissed on the spot.

Unless it was a role he was passionate about, Marlon Brando (in the second half of his career, when he was feeling less and less passionate with every new movie) absolutely refused to learn any lines for his scenes, insisting that everything be written on ‘idiot’ cards and placed strategically around the set — even on the backside of his co-stars, it was said — so he could always find something at hand to prompt him. Since the actors complained that he never said the lines as written anyway, preferring to make up his own, to suit his ideas on his character, one wonders why he bothered!

Why did Doris Day outlive all her contemporaries in acting?

Well, not ALL her contemporaries: Olivia de Havilland will turn 103 on July 1 this year, and Kirk Douglas will follow, five months afterwards. But Doris Day did very well for herself, and I can think of a couple of reasons why she might have survived, and retained the respect and affection of her public, for so long. One reason is that she was smart enough to get out of movies while she was on a “high”. She had made a string of bad ones — commercial and critical ‘duds” — and her bankability was starting to slip dramatically; then she made “With Six You Get Egg-Roll’, which everybody seemed to like, and, instead of following up this unexpected success, she walked away with her head high. Smart thinking!

Another reason for her long, productive life was that she had found something to fill the void left by her early withdrawal from Hollywood. Her interest in animal welfare, and, in particular, her great love for dogs, kept her active, passionate, and, most importantly, sane. It was General Charles de Gaulle, I think, who first famously said, “The more I have to deal with people, the more I like dogs”. Most people who feel the same way have their lives immeasurably enriched by the relationship, and, as anyone knows who saw Doris’s TV 1971 special, she had dozens of them living right there in the house with her… and she knew the personality of every one! I guess after the phoniness of the Hollywood in which she worked for a quarter of a century, the “un-phoniness” of the canine mind was enough to keep her going for the next quarter-century, and then some!

Did people really enjoy the first ever R-rated movie? When was it released?

This will be a hard one to answer, since the ‘R’ rating was different in various countries, and it didn’t even exist in some countries until the late sixties. In Australia, for instance, it was introduced in 1968, and the first film released with an ‘R’ rating in this country was ‘Teorema’, an Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (who would, in successive years, be no stranger to having his films slapped with an ‘R’ rating!). For some time after that, the ‘R’ classification seemed to be the province of foreign-language films, imported from Europe — particularly Sweden — including a few “catch-up” films (such as “Night Games”) which had been denied release until the certificate was introduced; for the most part, these would have had a very limited release, and were more-or-less ignored by most ‘average’ cinemagoers. The art-house crowd, however, took them to their hearts, so the answer to your question would have to be “Yes, but by only a very small part of the cinemagoing public”. One or two English-speaking movies (“Blow Up”, “Zabriskie Point”) soon joined the list of movies to get an ‘R’ rating, but these weren’t exactly mainstream releases, either; it wasn’t until “Dirty Harry” got saddled with the ‘R’ certificate that a movie with this rating actually ‘took off’ in Australia.

Of course, other countries may have very-different histories with the ‘R’ rating. Australia, however, wasn’t a very progressive country in the sixties, as far as “adult” movies were concerned. Most of the time, we just banned them!

If you took away the ending of a film, which movie would have the best cliffhanger? Where would you end it?

The 1956 movie, “The Bad Seed”, was made at a time when evil HAD to be shown to be punished, and the little girl who is the “bad seed” of the title is about as evil as they come; the ending, therefore, had to show her coming to grief in a big way.

The movie was based on a Maxwell Anderson play, and there were no such constraints on the Broadway stage about whether good or evil would triumph. So the play ends with the mother shooting herself dead, but failing in her attempt to kill the daughter with sleeping pills. The girl’s father, blissfully unaware of his daughter’s true character, is heartbroken by the loss of his wife but consoled by the fact that he still has the girl.

The movie allows both mother and daughter to survive the shooting/pills (Mum must have been a particularly bad shot, since she is shown afterwards in hospital with her head encased in bandages), but it then proceeds to add several scenes, the only purpose of which is to set up the dramatic death of the daughter as she plots further dirty deeds (she is struck by lightning…. beat that for divine retribution!) The pasted-on ending is, frankly, hokey; a terrific evening at the movies was ruined in the last few minutes by this clumsiest of attempts to stick to the “rules”.

Perhaps it should have ended with the survival of the daughter (as in the play), but with a scene added to show that her adoring father is starting to tumble to the awful truth about her, and, further, to show her awareness of his suspicion. The audience would have left the theatre wondering who is going to kill whom in the days to come…. not exactly evil being punished, but at least the possibility is there!

What is one of your favorite movies from the 1960s?

“I Could Go On Singing”. It’s a time capsule. Without ever realising how important it would turn out to be, this relatively-minor British 1963 “soapie-with-songs” turned out to be not only the final film made by Judy Garland (unarguably THE greatest entertainer of the entire twentieth century), but the only one of her dozens of movies which captured the “real” Judy at the height of her powers, and at a stage in her life where she was, finally, confident enough to allow herself to be presented honestly. The musical numbers are not the highly-produced and choreographed confections of her MGM days, in which she played characters in make-believe settings; in “I Could Go On Singing” they simply give her her own stage, her own microphone, her own conductor, and orchestra, and an audience of genuine admirers. Then they simply “let her rip” and document the results, for better or worse.

The same latitude was taken in the dramatic scenes. In one memorable seven-minute “take” she abandons the script altogether and just lets her “character” (who is simply her, with the name changed) talk about her life, her work, her achievements, her disappointments, her attitude to her audiences. Talk about “cinema-verite”!

No one making this remarkable little film had any idea that this would be the last movie Judy Garland would ever make; that she would go directly from this project into a 26-episode TV series that is now the stuff of legend; that in six years she would be dead, at just 47. It caused, therefore, little comment when it was released (except among her staunch admirers, who didn’t mind seeing her THIS exposed, flaws and all); in the light of its historical significance, however, it remains one of the most-important movies ever made in Great Britain, and, without doubt, the most-memorable British film of the 1960s.

Why do parents treat their child actors like entitled brats?

Do they? This sounds like a rather sweeping generalisation, and perhaps you’d better come up with an example or two. I can only suggest a POSSIBLE answer: it just might be because the child earns more than the parents do, and, therefore, “attention must be paid”. Whether, of course, that equates with “entitlements”, is another matter.

However, there are several stories around of parents who have treated their actor-children more like money-making machines, and, instead of pampering them, have driven them mercilessly to go on to ever-greater heights, with lots of benefits to the parents but absolutely nothing for the child. There is a host of cases of children who had made a fortune in their acting years having to sue their parents upon reaching adulthood, because all the money THEY made had somehow disappeared. Between many child actors and their parents, there is, when the juvenile career is all over, frequently no love lost, and many now-grown actors look back on their childhood with bitterness, because their parents never allowed them to be “just kids”.

What movie was the most technically demanding for the actors?

Esther Williams, MGM’s “musical” star of the 1940s and 50s, could neither sing nor dance, but there was one thing she could do better than anyone: swim. Never one to let a unique talent go to waste, Louis B Mayer built, around her, something like 17 musicals, in which everybody else sang, danced, and played instruments, and Esther…….swam. And her swimming routines became, with every new movie, increasingly elaborate and more and more spectacular. As her budgets grew, the demands on her grew also, and, in order to get her current movie completed so she could move on to the next one, she began to spend more and more time underwater in the Metro tank, trying to do in one take what would previously have been done in three or four (with breaks in between for her to come up and breathe).

Neither the director nor the lighting and camera crew (all of whom were safely dry on the other side of the tank’s glass walls) seemed to realise she was, at times, literally dicing with death in these extended underwater scenes, so she was encouraged to push herself more and more.

Her 1950 opus, “Pagan Love Song” proved the turning point. While most of her movies had been filmed right there on the MGM lot, for this one, in spite of the fact that she was pregnant and not feeling her best, she had to go on location, and swim in Kauai. The film had already suffered one extended delay when her co-star, Howard Keel, broke his arm (you can see, in the finished movie, several shots of him carrying a towel casually draped over the plaster cast). Desperate to catch up when the company returned home (for her swimming sequences to be filmed in “her” tank), she pushed herself too far in one of the underwater numbers, and experienced “the rapture”: the feeling of calmness and serenity which are the signs of losing consciousness underwater and quietly drowning… in full sight of the entire crew!

Fortunately she rallied and saved herself, subsequently agitating for better working conditions. As it turned out, the “money men” in the East made the decision for her: noting that her (and everybody else’s) musicals were no longer raking in the amounts of a few years previously, the word went out: the musical is dead. Esther left her pool (and, in fact, her studio), and moved on to dramatic roles at other, lesser studios where, fortuitously, they didn’t have a pool.

What is the best tear jerker movie ever made?

For my money, it’s “The Yearling”, made all the way back in 1946. It very-effectively attacks your sensibilities (and your tear ducts) from (at least) three different directions.

First, a woman (played brilliantly by Jane Wyman) who has lost all her children (except one) in infancy, is so certain that she will lose the surviving one, too, that she deliberately rejects him so as to prepare herself for the inevitable. And, of course, then, at twelve, he runs away and she thinks her prophecy has been fulfilled.

Secondly, there’s the disabled boy, unable to play as young boys ought to be able to, but friends with the animals and the birds, and he’s convinced that one day he will just get up and fly away, like his “friends”….. and, of course, in a sense he does.

Finally, of course, there’s the fawn — the yearling of the title (even though the REAL “yearling” is the growing boy who learns about the “knocks” in life and how to deal with things when “life goes back on you”) — which the boy rescues and brings up as a pet; but it’s a wild animal, and, as it grows, it causes so much havoc that finally he is given the order: take the yearling out into the woods and shoot it. Few people who have seen the movie have been able to forget that scene!

“The Yearling” is, simply, one of the most memorable movies ever made. It doesn’t put a foot wrong: it’s beautifully-shot, in glorious colour, it has superlative acting by all the major cast members, the background score is breathtaking (even now, hearing the main theme, I start to tear up with the memories), and its script is faithful to the spirit of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings book on which it is based. I first saw it nearly seventy years ago, and I have never been able to get it out of my mind. Tear-jerkers are not by any means my favourite film genre, and I find it easy to despise films such as “Magnificent Obsession” and “Madame X”; but “The Yearling” easily breaks through my defences and leaves me a quivering mess, embarrassing myself in front of everybody! As was once said about it, it is MGM at the height of its powers.

Do you force yourself to finish B movies?

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a ‘B’ movie anymore… I was under the impression that these disappeared soon after the major motion picture studios were forced to sell off their theatre chains, with the result that they could no longer ensure that their “minor” product would ever find a screen.

Back in the days of double features, when ‘B’ movies took up the first 80 minutes of the bill, it was not uncommon to find that they were more interesting than the much-ballyhooed main feature. Occasionally I would have to grit my teeth and bear it as some Monogram western or Universal comedy wound its way toward the interval; but normally the ‘B’ movie was distributed by the studio that owned the after-intermission offering, so it usually had some redeeming features.

Robert Wise made ‘B’ movies, and Richard Fleischer, and Tay Garnett, and John Sturges, and Mark Robson, and even Stanley Kubrick; since there wasn’t much money involved, and shooting schedules often involved just a few days, the studios could afford to give these young directors free rein to learn their craft and experiment with new techniques; at the same time the studio heads could gauge audience reaction to their work, in order to see if they were ready for the ‘A’ list. And, when the movie turned out to be a “Narrow Margin”, or a “Cause for Alarm”, or a “Detour”, or a “Seventh Victim”, or a “Jeopardy”, or a “D.O.A”, then everyone was the winner.

Viewing their early output, and watching as they graduated to the ‘big time’ was one of the pleasures of moviegoing back then, and, therefore, forcing oneself to sit through to the finish was seldom an issue.

Which actor/actress who replaced someone did a horrible job taking over a role?

 

Betty Hutton in “Annie Get Your Gun”. I like musicals more than any other genre, and, as long as there is lots of singing and dancing, I am not at all choosy…. I like just about ALL of them. But I was never too sure about “Annie Get Your Gun” (even though it has one of the best scores ever written for a show), and for years (at least, until “High Society” came out) it was the only MGM musical I couldn’t warm to. And, finally, I knew why.

Musicals are surely the perfect examples of movie teamwork. Everyone strives to make everyone else look good. They sing together, dance together, play music together. The best musicals have this wonderful sense of “camaraderie” that you just can’t get from any other kind of movie.

Betty Hutton took over the title role in “Annie Get Your Gun” from one of MGM’s great team players, Judy Garland, who was, at the time, as sick as Hutton was healthy. But Betty Hutton was never a team player. She always looked like she was trying to take the scene from her co-stars. While she was on-screen, she was fiercely determined that you mustn’t look at anyone else. So she overplayed everything: she mugged, clowned, made an ass of herself; she did whatever it took to make you forget that Howard Keel, Louis Calhern and Keenan Wynn were in the movie, too. And she was, putting it politely, not great. Even if Judy had had to play the role from her hospital bed, she would surely have been better than that!

At Garland’s untimely departure, MGM felt that they didn’t have anyone in their own stable of stars capable of giving Annie Oakley her due, so they borrowed Betty Hutton from rival Paramount Studios. It was a crucial misjudgement: Betty Garrett was right there at MGM doing minor roles which underused her talent, and Nanette Fabray was waiting in the wings. Neither could hold a candle to Garland (who could?), but they had both learned the importance of giving your fellow players their chance to shine, which they did in such films as “On the Town” and “The Band Wagon”, two of the great musicals MGM was making around that time. With either of these ladies in the title role, “Annie Get Your Gun” would have emerged as a superior MGM musical.

But MGM turned its back on its own, and wound up with the first really unsatisfactory Metro musical (though there would be worse to come!) What would the ideal solution to their problem have been? Hutton’s co-star Howard Keel (who had far better luck a few years later when he starred opposite Doris Day in “Calamity Jane”, practically an “Annie” re-run) made the best suggestion during an interview late in his career: “On the whole, I think they should have waited for Judy. Letting her go was the only non-classy thing I ever knew MGM to do.”

What are some movie characters, ones with smallish roles, do you just love?

There are hundreds of these, so where to start? I guess Thelma Ritter is as good a place as any. She added spice to the mix of dozens of films which were infinitely better because she was in them, including the film which I always cite as my personal all-time favourite, “All About Eve”. In this one, she played Birdie, Margo Channing’s assistant, companion, and occasionally severest critic; it wasn’t a lead role, and she was in pretty exalted company in this particular film, since there were three exceptionally strong women’s roles (Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and, of course, the wonderful Bette Davis in what was probably her best-ever performance), but Thelma Ritter made an indelible impression in the part, and few people would not remember her as one of the highlights of this amazing movie.

What are some of the most long lasting friendships of Hollywood actors?

Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were friends several years before they made their first movie together; he had seen her on-stage before she was signed, at age 13, by MGM, and, according to him, had told her even then (around 1934) that she was “the best in the world”. They subsequently made nine films together, and, during Hollywood’s war years, travelled the country stirring up support for America’s war effort. They represented the youth of America, and everybody loved them. And it was clear to one and all that they adored each other.

In 1963, a revitalised (after years of illness) Judy Garland was given her own weekly TV series (it eventually ran for twenty-six episodes), which was to be a high-tone affair with a glittering array of top-drawer guests. By this time in his career, Mickey Rooney was considered much less than “top-drawer”, but Judy was adamant: “I can’t do the first show without Mickey”, she stated bluntly, much to the chagrin of the top brass at the TV studio, who had the last laugh on her by shelving that first episode for several months and broadcasting several later-filmed episodes before it. When viewers were finally allowed to see the Mickey Rooney episode, everyone agreed it was worth the wait; the mutual love and respect which these two troupers still held for each other spilled out of the screen and into living rooms all over the western world. Rooney actually said, on-camera, “This is the love of my life”….. and everyone could see he was telling the absolute truth. Six years later, Judy was gone, but Mickey Rooney continued to pour out tribute after tribute to the “love of his life”. They never had a romance, but in the often-phony world of Hollywood, they showed what true friendship could mean.

Why are so many films being remade these days? For example, A Star is Born. Wasn't the first good enough?

In the case of “A Star is Born”, the first two (Janet Gaynor in 1937 and Judy Garland in 1954) were certainly “good enough”; in fact, they were better than that: they gave fat acting roles to two fine actresses, both of whom took the bit between their teeth and were highly-praised for their efforts, which is surely what attracted Barbra Streisand to the project, and, most recently, Lady Gaga, both of whom wanted to show their hitherto-untapped ability, preferably in a movie with a pre-sold title.

I think the phrase “pre-sold title” is the operative expression here. The quality of the original film isn’t the main reason for mounting a remake; it’s the fact that you have a title people are already familiar with, and there will be a certain amount of goodwill assured towards your project. Sometimes the film being remade was pretty awful (the Lewis Milestone “Ocean’s Eleven” was so dull it might have been a good film for the cinema lights to be left on for, so that you could read during the screening); but if the basic premise, or a particular character, appeals to someone (as, in this case, it obviously did to George Clooney), then it’s worth keeping the title even if you change the story to a point where it’s hard to identify the source. The remake of “Planet of the Apes” had almost no relation to either the book or the original movie; but the title assured a few hundred thousand bums on seats, regardless of what the new movie was about.

Finally, if the original movie had been a rip-roaring success — for example, “The Ten Commandments”, “Ben-Hur”, “Mutiny on the Bounty”, “King of Kings”, “King Kong”, “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” — then remaking it seems the nearest thing you could possibly get to a “sure bet”, and that, in our present moviemaking situation (where a single movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars), must be a trump card when you’re looking for backers!

What are some of the most obvious stunt doubles you've seen in movies?

I was only around nine years old when I saw Cecil B de Mille’s “Samson and Delilah”, but even to my young eyes it was perfectly obvious that the ‘Samson’ who wrestled with the lion looked nothing at all like the ‘Samson’ (Victor Mature) who emerged victorious at the end of the scene. Apart from a black wig and the clothing, they didn’t even try (I suppose it’s not easy to find someone who will play around with a lion; it was, however, unfortunate that the person they did come up with was a short, stocky man with a quite-different body shape to their leading man).

One of the several film versions of “Dracula” stars Laurence Olivier as, I think, Van Helsing, who gets killed by a spear in the climax. The director must have thought he had a real look-alike for Sir Laurence, as he filmed the killing in a medium-close shot. However, he misjudged; despite the beard and the clothing, that’s obviously not Larry being pinned to the wall!

Which movie (and please only one movie, not 2 or 3 or 4) can you watch over and over and never get tired of ?

If I have to just choose one, it would be “All About Eve” (1950). Bette Davis, Celeste Holm and Anne Baxter are great to LOOK at; George Sanders and Thelma Ritter are great to LISTEN to; the screenplay (by Joseph L Mankiewicz) is probably the wittiest ever written; and that music, by Alfred Newman, stays with you forever. What’s not to love?

What movie plot-hole is impossible to ignore?

The sci-fi film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is deservedly one of the most highly-praised “B” movies of the entire 1950s, but, as well-written as much of it was, it seems that the writers went to sleep (as did most of the earthlings in the town which is the film’s setting) right near the end.

The basic plot was simply this: aliens who had landed on earth were growing, and distributing, human-sized “pods” which could grow a duplicate of a targeted human being, perfect in every respect except, of course, that they had no emotions. A pod was placed by your bed, and, while you slept, your “humanity” was sucked out of you while the pod grew stronger. By morning, you were a corpse; the alien replica could take your place.

Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, too smart for the takeover of their bodies, escape to the hills outside of town, from where they plan to summon help. Exhausted, Wynter ducks into a cave in the hills for a few minutes’ sleep; when McCarthy follows her, she is at the mouth of the cave, and she has become an alien.

So where did the pod that had duplicated her come from? Did the aliens come by earlier and put one in the cave, just in case she happened to drop by? They must have planted the new improved model, too, because it grows into her in a matter of minutes, which was not true of any of the other pods (one of the ways our heroes had stayed “pure” up until that time was by finding planted pods and smashing them before they could complete the duplication).

Clearly, the script writers decided that they’d change horses in mid-stream and dispense with their own logic of how the transformation was supposed to take place; suddenly, changing into an alien is just like turning into a vampire or the wolf man: no pod required.

What was Gregory Peck like away from the cameras?

From most reports, he would seem, in person, to be very much like his usual screen persona: very serious about his career and his family responsibilities, eager to be seen to be doing the responsible and honourable thing. He wasn’t the world’s greatest actor, and knew it, and, with what seems like genuine modesty, admitted that he was often the “fall-back” choice for some of his plum roles. “I was never sent a script for a comedy that didn’t have Cary Grant’s fingerprints on it,” he once said.

That modesty seems to be borne out by one interesting story that was told about his movie “Roman Holiday”. As the only “name” star in the film, his contract called for him to have sole billing above the title; somewhere underneath, Audrey Hepburn (in her first role of any size) was to be billed as “…and featuring” or “….and introducing”. Halfway through the shoot, Greg insisted that the billing be changed and that her name be placed alongside his, in equal size, above the title. He claimed that this was not courtesy on his part, but simple commonsense: “I could see that this girl was going to win the Academy Award and then we’d all look like fools.” Nonetheless, he had worked with many stars who would have gladly taken the opposite viewpoint, and guarded their sole position above the title to the last gasp; that is what you’re supposed to do when you’re a star. His gesture of humility says a lot about his character.

And also his gift of prescience. Audrey Hepburn DID win the Academy Award, and was a star for the rest of her career. She probably would have attained that status anyway, but Gregory Peck gave her her first big step up.

What movie has the most surprisingly good soundtrack?

Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1949) might be a good choice to start off a discussion about a “surprisingly” good soundtrack. British movies in the decade after World War II were often noted for their visual style and imaginative treatment in the face of severe economic constraints, but their musical background scores were, with few exceptions (e.g. “Things to Come”, “Hamlet”), predictable and undistinguished (many examples of what is now referred to as ‘Mickey Mouse’ accompaniments to the action on-screen). When principal shooting started on Reed’s film, there seemed no reason to think that his might be one of those exceptions.

However, Reed took his company to post-war Vienna to film on location, and at some point during the shooting he and his leading actors happened, on a “night off”, to visit a local night club. The entertainment that night was a zither player named Anton Karas, and as he listened to this unique sound, Reed had an inspiration. He hired Karas to write and perform the entire background score: no orchestra, no heavy-handed dramatic flourishes, just the sound of the zither punctuating the action. Heaven knows what the producers back home felt about this bizarre decision, but Reed’s hunch paid off big-time. Not only did Karas’s main theme — “The Harry Lime Theme”, named for the character played by Orson Welles — become a major hit, but the soundtrack quickly came to be regarded as one of the great imaginative touches in a film brimful of such touches (the lighting, the camerawork, and the mood set by the hosed-down cobblestone streets of night-time Vienna all conspire to make this a film to treasure).

There has never been a background score quite like the one written for “The Third Man” (although another British director — Henry Cornelius— borrowed the idea four years later for “Genevieve”, whose background score was written and performed by solo harmonica-player Larry Adler); Anton Karas’s zither is a major reason for Reed’s movie being universally acknowledged as one of the two or three greatest British movies of all time.

What do you think are some positive sides to bring a child actor, not including financial reasons?

I really don’t think there are many positive aspects for the child; most of the positive elements seem to be for the parents, who, of course, can sit back and bask in the reflected glory of their child’s “achievement” while conveniently averting their eyes from all the negatives!

People who aren’t stars themselves frequently want their children to be stars, and often pursue that ambition for their child regardless of the cost; but what about parents who ARE (or have been) stars, and know what kind of life their star-to-be is likely to be in for? Twenty-two-year-old Judy Garland — herself a former child star, and one of the few who successfully made the transition to adult stardom (but at terrible cost to her mental and physical health; she died less than a fortnight after her forty-seventh birthday) — was making “Meet Me in St Louis” with six-year-old Margaret O’Brien, MGM’s answer to Shirley Temple, when she confided to one of the other players on the set, “That poor child! She hasn’t got a childhood!” She knew, from bitter experience, just what a child has to give up in order to pursue a career in a profession which is rough enough to defeat 90% of the adult “wannabes”. Children love to act for fun; but when you find, before you have even become a teenager, that everyone wants to “take a piece of you, so they roll you out like a pastry” (again, the words of Judy Garland), then you quickly learn that all the fun is being had by people on the other side of the footlights.

What is the best cast listing movie that you saw, but the movie was just terrible?

There have been quite a few of these all-star disasters over the years, but three that stand out on my mind are 1970’s “The Phynx” (which may, and deservedly so, be quite unfamiliar to you), 1960’s “Pepe”, which is somewhat better-known (there was even a soundtrack album), and 1957’s “Story of Mankind”, which proved a sad ending to the film careers of both Ronald Colman and The Marx Brothers (who don’t even share a scene!)

“Pepe” starred a “hot property” of the late fifties, the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, who was being promoted as the next Charlie Chaplin, and the producers wanted to ensure that his first top-billed (in America) effort was a smash hit that would secure his future in Hollywood movies. So they hired virtually everyone who was available to do a “bit” to support him. Dan Dailey, Shirley Jones, Maurice Chevalier, Bing Crosby, Richard Conte, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr, Jimmy Durante, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Judy Garland (voice only, but she gets the film’s Academy-Award-nominated song), Greer Garson, Hedda Hopper, Peter Lawford, Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Joey Bishop, Ernie Kovacs, Kim Novak, Andre Previn, Donna Reed, Debbie Reynolds, Edward G Robinson, Cesar Romero, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billie Burke, James Coburn, Tony Curtis. A film with a cast list like that just has to provide a whale of a time for everyone, right? Wrong. Cantinflas returned to Mexico and never made another Hollywood movie, and the producers of “Pepe” blamed the failure of the film on “language difficulties”. I do not know if anyone in the list of big names above ever got paid.

The cast list of “The Phynx” is even longer, and some really unexpected people turn up, but I can’t really tell you much about it, including why the producers took the time and trouble to contact so many luminaries from Hollywood’s golden age (but who weren’t exactly huge drawcards by the seventies) and let them wander through this peculiar movie to no great effect or benefit to anyone, including themselves. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to recognise them, as most of them hadn’t worked in quite some time…. and, anyway, they weren’t always on-screen long enough for you to be sure which one you were watching. Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan, is in there somewhere, and so is Tarzan’s Jane, Maureen O’Sullivan. Clint Walker, Ed Sullivan, Virginia Mayo, Leo Gorcey, Marilyn Maxwell, Rudy Vallee, Martha Raye, Colonel Sanders, Pat O’Brien, Richard Pryor, Butterfly McQueen, Joe Louis, Guy Lombardo, Dorothy Lamour, Ruby Keeler, Patsy Kelly, George Jessel, Louis Hayward, Huntz Hall, Andy Devine, Cass Daley, Xavier Cugat, Dick Clark, James Brown, Busby Berkeley, Edgar Bergen, Rona Barrett, Patty Andrews, Rich Little, Sally Struthers, Joan Blondell, George Tobias, and even the Lone Ranger and Tonto (John Hart and Jay Silverheels) all turn up, and very soon go quietly back to where they had come from. You’d be unlikely to recognise all of them (and there were still more) in just one screening, and the film disappeared so quickly that few cinemagoers had the chance of going along for a “second try”. Not that many of them would have wanted to, anyway: “Rotten Tomatoes” quoted one two-word review which just about said it all: “a bust”.

Finally. “The Story of Mankind”, an ambitious title if ever there was one. Ronald Colman (whose last film this was) was the leading player (one might say “victim”) of this sorry spectacle, which used stock footage for virtually every one of the great historical scenes it re-created, leaving poor Mr Colman to link everything together with his elegantly-delivered on-screen commentary. He was supported in this misguided enterprise by a whole host of people who must, surely, have done it solely out of respect for his distinguished career: as already mentioned, the three Marx Brothers are in it, though in separate episodes, so you never get a chance to see what made them great, which was their teamwork; also stepping down a few rungs of their career ladders were Hedy Lamarr, Sam Harris, Virginia Mayo, Agnes Moorehead, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Charles Coburn, Ziva Rodann, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Cesar Romero, John Carradine, Dennis Hopper, Marie Wilson, Edward Everett Horton, Nick Cravat, Reginald Gardiner, Marie Windsor, Cathy O’Donnell, Franklin Pangborn, Melville Cooper, Francis X Bushman, and Harry Ruby. Irwin Allen directed. The appalling reviews didn’t seem to turn him off stock-footage “spectacles” with huge casts; he went on to make such unforgettable (no matter how hard you try) blockbusters as “The Swarm” and “When Time Ran Out”.

Which decade had the best gangster movies?

Jimmy Cagney (“The Public Enemy”); Edward G Robinson (“Little Caesar”); Humphrey Bogart (“The Petrified Forest”); George Raft (“Scarface”). It’s hard to think of a gangster movie made today in which one or other of our modern actors doesn’t pay homage to those four great “cinema gangsters”, all of whom burst onto the screen (and all, except Raft, at Warner Bros; but he soon got there!) in the 1930s, when the bootleggers and the Chicago mobs were still fresh enough in everyone’s minds for their films to seem like they came straight from the morning’s headlines.

All four came from the Broadway stage, and all had other talents which could have led to quite different careers: both Cagney and Raft were dancers, Robinson trained as a lawyer, and Bogey, who didn’t have that craggy face when he was an infant, was actually, believe it or not, a baby model (his beautiful face appeared on cans of Mellins and Gerbers Baby Food)!

The gangster cycle of the thirties did not linger for very long in the forties; the talk turned to enemies outside America and the country prepared for war. Suddenly, all four found themselves on the right side of the law, as war pilots (Cagney, “Captains of the Clouds”), FBI agents (Robinson, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”), spies for the Allies (Raft, “Background to Danger”) and Coast Guard artillery captains (Bogart, “Across the Pacific”). In Bogey’s film, however, he is quickly court-martialled, so it was some two years later that was he finally allowed to play a genuine hero, a tank commander in “Sahara”; his “late entry’ into the line-up of movie heroes might have been delayed because, according to reports, he really did look remarkably like real-life gangster John Dillinger (but, having joined the “goodies” team, he lingered long enough to battle Robinson in “Key Largo”).

As their careers progressed, all would occasionally return to the gangster roles which had made them famous, and, even in the late fifties, Bogart was still giving truly chilling performances as a cold-hearted killer, even to preying on children in their homes in 1955’s “The Desperate Hours”. Raft got to make fun of his own image in Billy Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot” (1959) and the original “Oceans 11” (1960). Cagney wasn’t exactly a gangster in 1959’s “Shake Hands with the Devil”, but, as a hot-tempered IRA leader known as ‘The Commandant’, his gangster experience was well-utilised. Robinson turned out to be the most versatile actor of the lot, playing generals, statesmen, doctors, and movie producers, but he would still pay an occasional visit to his “roots” in films such as “Robin and the 7 Hoods” (1964) and “Operation St Peters” (1967), by which time he was 74 years old. But the 30s remained “his” decade, as it did for the other three: the best decade for the gangster movie.

Who originally wrote the music for Titanic the movie?

Is this a trick question, perhaps? Walt Ruggieri has given you the answer that you could have found yourself by one minute of googling, and I have never heard any rumours that Mr Horner’s score was a last-minute replacement for an earlier attempt by somebody else, as sometimes happens (for example, when Universal put the hard word on Alfred Hitchcock regarding the fact that his recent films for them hadn’t exactly set the world on fire; its appraisal of the Bernard Herrmann score which Hitch had commissioned for “Torn Curtain” as being unlikely to produce a much-needed hit song resulted in Herrmann’s innovative score being subsequently replaced by a much-more-conventional one by John Addison, complete with the “hit” theme it craved. The film died at the box office just the same).

So, with your use of the phrase “originally wrote” in my mind, I am going to assume that you are referring, not to Cameron’s 1997 movie, but to the earlier (1953) film of the same name, directed by Jean Negulesco, and starring the great Barbara Stanwyck. In that case, the answer is Sol Kaplan.

How do actors feel after their movies get terrible reviews?

Unless they put their own money in it — which most actors are too smart to do — I imagine they would mainly be interested in how their own work in the movie was reviewed. Some actors talk about their “terrible” movies with unabashed glee: in his concerts, Sinatra never missed an opportunity to bring up “Higher and Higher” (“which we all know and love and quote from”), “The Kissing Bandit”, “Miracle of the Bells”, or “The Pride and the Passion” (which he cheekily referred to as “an underwhelming achievement”). Maybe it’s good for an actor to give a stand-out performance in a terrible film, occasionally; it makes him “one of us”, and endears him all the more to the mere mortals who are his fans.

Which movie was a one of a kind experience for you?

May I choose three? Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane”, Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” and Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark”.

I am not (quite) old enough to have seen “Citizen Kane” on its first release (in 1941), but I did see it for the first time in the mid-fifties, so I think I was close enough to the “source” to feel some of the same excitement as did those audiences who were at its world premiere. Critic Pauline Kael summed it up better than anyone: “It’s as if you’d never seen a movie before”. It really was; it just tried so many new cinematic techniques that audiences of the day were, quite simply, flabbergasted. Unfortunately, thanks to the genius of its creators, those techniques are now part of every movie you see; I say “unfortunately” because, if you see “Citizen Kane” for the first time in 2019, you couldn’t possibly get the thrill that the 1941 audiences got. To get that sort of thrill today, we have to look for something that “Citizen Kane” didn’t give us.

Which brings me to “Boyhood” (2014). While it was released in 2014, it was in “principal production” for the twelve years preceding; it followed the same actors through more than a decade of their lives, and the story was fashioned “on the go” to reflect what was happening to the actors in the “real” world. The leading character is first seen as a boy of six; by the end of the movie, he is a young man of eighteen, and all the other actors in the movie (it must have been a blessing that none of them died, went to jail, left the country or just lost interest over the twelve-year shooting) age right there alongside him. I have never seen anything quite like this in a movie, and I doubt if there has ever been anything to which it can be compared. It qualifies, then, as a “one-of-a-kind” experience.

So does “Russian Ark”, one of the very few films that impressed me so much the first time I saw it that I went back a few days later, just to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it up. On second viewing I was determined to “catch it out”, to see where it had cheated. But, no, it survived a second viewing with flying colours. It is, indeed, a nearly-two-hour movie filmed on a single “take”. It’s not just a tiny movie set in a single room… the actors, with the camera in tow, wander all over the Hermitage in St Petersburg (narrowly missing some of the priceless exhibits and taking you into areas the public would normally never get to see), saying their lines and participating in crowd scenes (I have read that there are over around two thousand actors in the movie, most in elaborate period costumes) which include ballrooms, orchestras, and military parades. And the camera just keeps on moving, seeking out what it has chosen to highlight. And nothing, it seems, went wrong. Director Alexander Sokurov was granted use of the museum for just one day, and this was his third “take” (something or other did go wrong during the first two, so everyone stopped and went to their starting positions for another try). A “one-of-a-kind” experience, indeed; and, as well, you get a tour of the Hermitage thrown in with the acting and the spectacle!

Who was the most impressive child actor in the past 30 years?

Abigail Breslin, Saoirse Ronan, Mischa Barton and Dakota Fanning could all lay claim to this title. Each gave a string of excellent performances which stood alongside the more-experienced adults in their movies; in fact, they soon became the main reason for going to see the movies in which they were featured.

All four now are adults, and are thus competing is a vastly-different arena. A few of their choices of adult roles made me think that, by the time they had reached their mid-teens, their best acting days were already behind them (it was particularly disappointing to see young Abigail Breslin, the first one that came to mind when I saw your question, in a film about a kidnap victim in the boot of a car — I have, mercifully, forgotten the name of the film — in which her main function seemed to be to run around in a purple bra); however, Saoirse Ronan seems to have made the transition more successfully than the others, and some of her recent performances (such as in “Brooklyn”) have been Oscar-worthy.

If you will include TV actors/actresses in your question, just about all the youngsters in the TV series “Modern Family” have brought something special to their role; in particular, Sarah Hyland — almost out of age-range for a “child” actress by the time “Modern Family” made her face instantly recognisable everywhere — had been impressing in such TV shows as “Law and Order: SVU” since she was a mere tot.

Who do you think is the best child actor of all time?

The most talented moppet of all time would have to be Shirley Temple, although she wasn’t really a great ACTRESS… she was just so good at playing herself, and she could do just about anything, much of it on single takes. If it comes to straight acting, however, there are a whole raft of people who were better than Shirley, as is evidenced by the fact that the producer, director, and composers of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939 were aghast when MGM tried to ensure the commercial success of their movie by demanding that Shirley temple be imported from her home studio to play the lead…. The creative team wanted someone who could play Dorothy and make you believe in her (and to sing some hard songs), not just let Shirley turn it into the “usual” Shirley Temple vehicle (fortunately for us all, their prayers were answered).

Mickey Rooney would have to be considered in any list of the “best” child actors. Freddie Bartholomew was, in his own right, one of the top child actors of his day, but when he (and several other of MGM’s child stars, including Jackie Cooper) was cast in a film with newly-signed Mickey Rooney, the group was absolutely amazed at how good he was, and everybody had to “lift their game” to keep up with the new kid.

I always loved Margaret O’Brien… she was second-billed in “Meet Me in St Louis”, and when you see it today, you’ll know why. Although she didn’t have the lead role, she was the one you watched whenever Judy Garland wasn’t on the screen, and sometime even when she was.

The 1936 film, “These Three”, had two outstanding child actresses in pivotal parts: Bonita Granville and Marcia Mae Jones. Granville was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, and Jones was so good in her part that, when the film was remade in 1961 (as “The Children’s Hour”), director William Wyler wisely saw to it that Veronica Cartwright (another excellent child actress) played her big scene with exactly the same inflections that her predecessor had given it.

Charles Chaplin made a silent movie called “The Kid” with Jackie Coogan, who is probably better-remembered today in that film than Chaplin himself! He must surely be in the short-list for “best ever” child actor. And while MGM’s Virginia Weidler never attained the reputation of her fellow juveniles Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, she was also quite wonderful in movies like “The Women”, “The Philadelphia Story” and “Babes on Broadway” (in which she had to dance alongside Mickey and Judy, and held up her end very well).

Then there were the two Patties: McCormack and Duke. They came to the movies from Broadway, repeating the roles (in, respectively, “The Bad Seed” and “The Miracle Worker”) that had made them famous, and they practically re-wrote the book on what could be expected from child actors. They paved the way for one of the most brilliant of all child actresses (and she became one of the most brilliant adult actresses, too): Jodie Foster.

Around the same time, Hayley Mills, in Britain, took what was originally a boy’s role in “Tiger Bay”, and sent critics into raptures (she was asked to play the title role in “Lolita” shortly afterwards, but her father, Sir John Mills, commented, “I wouldn’t even let her read the book, much less play the part”. Instead she went to Walt Disney, and made herself a household name in films such as “Pollyanna” and “The Parent Trap”).

To conclude with one that is not often heard about today, I would say that Patricia Gozzi, from France, was right up there with the best of them. Like Virginia Weidler and Bonita Granville, she chose not to pursue an adult career in movies, and so audiences saw her in only two major films: “Sundays and Cybele” and “Rapture”. But she approached acting with a wisdom beyond her years. And that last sentence reminds me to mention Peggy Ann Garner, who brought such delicacy and subtlety to her role in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” that it was hard to believe she wasn’t just living the role.

There are many more, including Natalie Wood (Miracle on 34th Street), Elizabeth Taylor (National Velvet), Roddy MacDowall (How Green Was My Valley), and Claude Jarman Jr, (The Yearling); but these ones, at least, are a good start!

What are some legendary movie mistakes that went unnoticed even by the most avid fans, but now we know?

Somebody, somewhere has doubtless observed every movie mistake that was ever made, and, nowadays, sites like Ratings and Reviews for New Movies and TV Shows - IMDb are great sources for checking out the list of errors for any movie you care to name. And some of them, such as Otto Preminger’s sloppy “In Harm’s Way” have twenty or thirty entries in the list.

In fact, when you’re talking movie mistakes, Otto Preminger’s movies would probably provide enough material to fill a book. He apparently wasn’t too worried about such details as microphone booms, or reflections which showed the camera crew, or “insignificant” mishaps like that. The most obvious example of a camera shadow falling across the faces of actors in close-up which I have ever seen was in a Preminger film — “Exodus” — and in one of his better films — ”Carmen Jones” — there are a few seconds there where Dorothy Dandridge walks past a row of shops, and the entire camera crew can be glimpsed in the reflection from the shop windows.

But you asked for ones that went unnoticed. I have one which I claim I saw, but nowadays the movie can only be seen on TV, and the mistake is just too hard to see, in this tiny format, for me to be positive that it’s actually there. But, if I am right, it seems to be one that has slipped by even the eagle-eyes of Imdb — or maybe they just didn’t look too closely at it, because it’s a prestige movie directed by one of the “pantheon” directors of Hollywood’s golden age, and it was released by Hollywood’s most prestigious studio — MGM — where clumsy mistakes just didn’t happen — or did they? The film is George Cukor’s “Gaslight”, and the last time I saw it on the big screen, I swear that there’s a shot where the camera is following a carriage as it passes the doorway of the house which is the setting for the drama, and then the carriage moves on and the camera continues towards the front door; and for a moment, in the right-side window of the house, THERE is the reflected camera crew for all to see. In “Gaslight”, yet! But I don’t know of anyone else who has noticed it, and everyone to whom I mention it is sure I am daft.

The most amusing story of a mistake that went unnoticed — at least, until it was too late to correct it before release — is told by Robert Wagner in his autobiography, and, if faithfully recounted, leaves several people with red faces, including, no less, the head of the studio (20th Century-Fox) where Wagner was working, Daryl F Zanuck, and one of the most respectable — and respected — leading ladies in Hollywood, Susan Hayward. Fox’s big hit of 1952 was a musical, and rated “for all audiences”: “With a Song in My Heart”. In such movies, nothing salacious was ever allowed to occur…. except, according to Wagner, that in this one, someone goofed; the film was in world-wide distribution when an exhibitor somewhere in small-town America wrote an indignant letter to Daryl Zanuck pointing out that he ran a family theatre, and what did Fox think it was doing sending him a movie where, in a dance number, the leading lady’s bare breast actually falls out of her costume for a minute? Zanuck, of course, scoffed at the suggestion; everyone in America had seen the movie, including him and, of course, the censorship board, and there was absolutely nothing amiss with it.

But he decided that it was at least prudent to run it in his personal screening room before replying to the complaint, and he took Wagner with him. Zanuck continued to scoff, and curse the time-wasting, for the first twenty minutes of the movie…. and then the scoffing stopped abruptly, and he called out “Stop the film! Run that bit again!” Then, it seems, there was a LOT of cursing! But since there were prints of the film running to packed audiences all over the world, and it would have practically bankrupted the studio to recall every single one and snip just three or four frames out of each, and since nobody else had complained about poor Susan’s costume mishap, he took the only commercially-viable option. He “doctored” one print, sent it to the exhibitor with a letter of apology for originally having sent him a print that should never have “got out”, and then went very quiet about the whole incident. And, apparently, he never heard another word about it from anyone in the world. I don’t know if he ever bothered to tell Susan Hayward that she was, unofficially at least, the first Hollywood actress to ever expose her breast in a mainstream movie, years before “The Pawnbroker” and “Blow-Up”; but, alas, now that the only place you’re likely to see “With a Song in My Heart” is on television, and everyone connected with it has passed on, the truth (or otherwise) of Wagner’s story can probably never be established. Unless someone out there has a VERY big TV!

That story brings me to one last case (a very noticeable “fix” this time, and another prestige movie) which is never talked about and which even Imdb admit is unexplained. In the big dance number between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in “Singing in the Rain” there is a sudden clumsy edit, with three or four frames cut out of a shot, disrupting the rhythm of the dance. It has always been like that, says Imdb, ever since the first screening of the movie (also in 1952…. a bad year for costume slips?) No one has ever come forward to talk about it, but, armed with the knowledge of the Susan Hayward incident, I think you can work it out as you watch the number. It’s not the same thing, exactly, however; Miss Charisse’s breasts are quite safe. But you can, I think, see just the beginning of something that might have embarrassed her if those three frames had not been cut out (maybe they should have cut one or two more), and in an MGM family film…. Heaven forbid!

What actor or actress complained about the breath of an actor or actress whom they had to kiss in a movie?

This is a sad one, but I guess it needs to be told. Jean Harlow, the “blonde bombshell” of the thirties, predecessor of Monroe, Mansfield, and (just to keep the alliteration going) Madonna, was ill for most of her adult life and died at age 26 from uremia and cerebral edema. Her kidneys failed while she was still working on “Saratoga” with Clark Gable (a frequent co-star), and while Gable — like everyone else at MGM — loved her dearly (she was, apparently, a sweet, naive person, very different from her screen persona), he watched in dismay as she became more and more bloated as shooting progressed, the urine normally treated by the kidneys having been diverted into her  perspiration and (relevant to your question) saliva, the only ways it could be expelled from her body. Just standing near Jean, and, especially, kissing her, became a sore trial. It lasted only a short time, however, as she never finished the movie (it was released after her death with three different body doubles deftly inserted into the scenes she was unable to complete, and some hasty re-writing).

Harlow was so loved by MGM that one of its writers said, “The day Baby died, there wasn’t a sound in the Commissary for three hours.” On the day of her funeral, the entire studio closed for the day.

Legend has it that Jean’s mother, a Christian Scientist, had refused to allow doctors near her, and so her illnesses went untreated. The story may, in fact, have had an element of truth in it in her early days, before she became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars (and she had certainly had a litany of illnesses since she contracted scarlet fever at 15; the list, in Wikipedia, includes influenza, septicemia, cholecystitis, a poststreptococcal glomerulonephritis, high blood pressure, and acute nephritis), but it seems highly unlikely that the powers-that-be at MGM would have blithely sat back and let the mother of one of their biggest assets make decisions regarding her ability to work for them in future (they quickly put Ethel Gumm in her place when she expressed concern about the regimen of pills being fed to daughter Judy Garland in her youth); and, anyway, the records show that Harlow was attended in her home by a doctor and two nurses during her final days, and that various pieces of specialised equipment were brought to her home from a nearby hospital.

Who are actors that absolutely stunned you with some performances ? You didn't know they had it in them.

The actor who immediately came to mind when I read your question was Robert Walker, in his memorable performance (as Bruno Antony) in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”. Up until that time he had been what is usually termed a lightweight; perfectly adequate for roles such as the young and romantically-inexperienced soldier who fell in love with Judy Garland in “The Clock”, or the young and romantically-inexperienced soldier who fell in love with Jennifer Jones (in real life, his young bride) in “Since You Went Away”. The recurring feature in his performances was his boyish naivety, which he did very well. And then Hitchcock got hold of him.

Bruno was, as most moviegoers will remember, the “let’s swap murders” character in the film that has been saluted countless times in other movies and TV shows. Walker took bizarre chances with the character at every turn, and such lines as “I’ve had a STRENuous evening” must have given the censors considerable angst in an era where effeminate homosexuality on screen was strictly a no-no. There was nothing in his background to suggest that Walker would ever take such risks with his image, but, suddenly, there he was, creating one of the most memorable characters ever to grace a sound movie. I can’t imagine that anyone who has ever seen the movie doesn’t remember, first and foremost, Bruno Antony.

Walker didn’t win the Academy Award that year; he was up against everyone’s favourite, Humphrey Bogart, in “The African Queen” (Bogey was better, actually, in “In a Lonely Place”; tragically, Robert Walker died before he ever had a chance to show that his lightning could strike twice).

Who is the most impressive famous person alive today to you and why?

Stephen Sondheim. In the last sixty years — say, since the golden days of “The Music Man”, “Guys and Dolls”, “Street Scene” and Rodgers and Hammerstein — “American” musical theatre has steadily become either overblown and pretentious or trashy and trivial. The “juke box” musical, where the score is yesterday’s hit parade, inserted, seemingly, at random in the show just to give the audience something to sing along with, has become acceptable fare for less and less-discerning audiences; the main aim of recent musicals seems to be, not the advancement of the musical genre (the music, in many cases, is way down on the list of what makes people buy a ticket to a musical), but to show theatregoers that the stage can give you a spectacle equal to anything you’d get in a CGI movie.

But, as the musicals got worse, Sondheim dug deeper into his own musical intelligence, taste, and love of the theatre to create works that are, in a lot of cases, musically superior (and certainly more innovative) than those of the “golden era” of Cole Porter, Gershwin, Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Whether you’re talking music or lyrics, Sondheim’s creations have “genius” written all over them, and, without him, the second half of the twentieth century would have been a lean period indeed for musical theatre. He is a living treasure.

Do actors/actresses watch their own movies for fun? Why or why not?

Well, I guess that depends on the actor and whether they enjoy looking at their own work (some, I have heard, can’t bear it)! But your question reminds me of an amusing story that begs to be told: back in the fifties, four major stars — Ernest Borgnine, John Mills, Anne Baxter, and Angela Lansbury — were in Sydney making a movie (“The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll”), and one of Borgnine’s films (“The Vikings”) had its Australian premiere at the Sydney Regent while they were here. A big fuss was made of this event (hands in cement in the foyer, etc) and all four stars showed up to show off, as movie stars will. A quartet of us movie fans attended also, and bought tickets to the premiere, and entering the upstairs lounge, we saw, right in the front row centre, four seats roped off with “RESERVED” marked on each… well, no prizes for guessing who they were for, so the four of us sat ourselves down in the second row, directly behind those four seats. Within a few minutes we found ourselves sitting behind four major movie stars, one of whom was Anne Baxter, on whom we all had a crush (wasn’t she gorgeous?)

Anyway, the movie started and, of course, when Ernie Borgnine’s name came up on the screen there was the expected applause. He played Kirk Douglas’s father (a bit of a joke, because he is actually younger than Kirk!), which was not by any means the main role. Accordingly, Borgnine’s character meets a spectacular end about a third of the way through the movie. Mr Borgnine IMMEDIATELY stood up and left the theatre, never to return; clearly, if he was no longer up there on the screen he could think of better things to do than watch the movie!

But, at least we sat behind Ernest Borgnine for about forty minutes!

May a minor actor, who plays in a movie before the age of 18, watch the movie at the end?

A movie which is restricted to adults (over 18) may not be watched by a person under 18, even if that person happens to be a performer in the movie. It is likely, however, that the minor under discussion has at least watched his/her own scenes in that movie, since I presume watching “the rushes” (your day’s work at the end of each day’s shooting) is still common practice. Since children work under strict rules on a movie set, those “rushes” will not contain material that might be “restricted”; it is the editor’s job to cut the film together in such a way that the illusion of the child’s participation in “x-rated” scenes is created.

Can you explain the movie Inception in simple terms? 

Frankly, you’d be better off writing a letter to Christopher Nolan!

I actually saw this movie twice. The first time I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but I had heard that Christopher Nolan was supposed to be the hottest director currently working, and that, therefore, every film he made was automatically a masterpiece. So I decided that the fault was all mine, that my 20th-century brain just wasn’t up to the demands put on it by 21st-century geniuses like Nolan.

Accordingly, I watched it a second time. I understood it no better. All I did learn from the second viewing is that I may be better off avoiding Christopher Nolan’s movies (I loathed “Batman Begins”, too, but not because I didn’t understand it; I just think it’s lousy) and, instead, content myself with watching movies made, not by geniuses, but merely by artists and craftsmen who love the movies and have spent a lifetime working in them: people like William Wyler, John Huston, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Billy Wilder, Joseph L Mankiewicz, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Zinnemann, Robert Wise. None of these has ever been referred to as a genius, but at least they “speak” to me through their movies.

So I will follow the answers you get to this question with considerable interest. I know there are a lot of Christopher Nolan admirers out there, so I am sure I will learn a lot!

What actor/actress did their best work at the beginning of their career?

Marlon Brando. He burst onto the screen as a wheelchair-bound soldier who couldn’t be a husband to his new bride, in the controversial Stanley Kramer film, “The Men”, and the movie — and his performance — was suddenly on everyone’s lips. He followed that up with the filmed version of his now-legendary Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Then he played Mark Antony in the all-star movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, and, among a host of more-experienced Shakespearean players, garnered all the best notices. Then he became the favourite of the teens and the representative of the ‘rebel’ motorcycle set, with “The Wild One” (also for Stanley Kramer). Then he took “On the Waterfront” right from under Frank Sinatra’s nose, and, as Terry Malloy, the boxer who “could’ve been a contender instead of just a bum”, won the 1954 Academy Award. And THEN he tried his hand at a musical, and did his own singing in “Guys and Dolls”! By this time he was, deservedly, being hailed as the best thing that had happened to Hollywood in a decade; the question, “Is there anything this young god CAN’T do?” was being bandied about.

The answer, unfortunately, was “Yes”, and it wasn’t long before he started making bad choices and more-extreme demands. It seems that, like so many before him, he had spent too much time reading his own publicity, and, handed unheard-of privileges for an actor who no-one had even heard of five years before, began to assume he could do no wrong. He may have been right, in hindsight, to walk out of “The Egyptian”, as there seemed little chance that even his presence could have turned the ship around on that one; but firing Stanley Kubrick as director of his first western, “One Eyed Jacks”, and assuming the directorial role himself, was probably not his wisest move. Nor was having famed veteran director Carol Reed — who had made what is now regarded as the best British movie ever made (”The Third Man”) — taken off the remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty” (in which he played a very bizarre Fletcher Christian indeed) and insisting that the movie be made HIS way (to the consternation of his co-stars and the distress of MGM who watched their costs rising even faster than the ego of their star).

Critical and public reception to this movie — and, in particular, to his participation in it — sullied his rapidly-deteriorating reputation almost to the point of no return; when the multi-million dollar movie finally came out, audiences actually laughed at his performance. It would not be the last time this would happen.

Brando’s work, and off-screen behaviour, became increasingly erratic, and, even when he really tried to recapture some of his earlier creative genius, such as in “Reflections of a Golden Eye” (for which he was about the fifth person to be offered the role) and “The Fugitive Kind” (in which he mumbled so outrageously that it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying), he often missed the mark completely; audiences, smiles now frozen on their faces, began, quite understandably, to stay away.

Between “Mutiny” and his brief ‘renaissance’, “The Godfather”, there are a whole string of films that people choose not to remember nowadays: “Bedtime Story”, “The Chase”, “The Apaloosa”, “Morituri”, “Candy”, “A Countess from Hong Kong”, “The Night of the Following Day”, “Burn”, “The Nightcomers”. Sadly, it had to be said of nearly all of these that they might have been better if someone else had been cast in the lead. He eventually pulled off another great performance, in “Last Tango in Paris”, but the later years of his career were characterised by an increasing series of over-the-top performances in films such as “The Formula”, “The Freshman”, “Christopher Columbus: the Discovery”, and his absolute-nadir, “The Island of Dr Moreau”.

The tragic thing about all of these roles is that he DIDN’T just walk through them with the contempt that many of them deserved; it was obvious that he was really trying, but his failure to “pull off” even one memorable performance, in film after terrible film, stands — along with Hollywood’s post-1954 misuse of Judy Garland — as one of the great tragedies of American cinema.

What are some actors who appeared in remakes of their movies years later?

Clark Gable starred in “Red Dust” in the 1930s (opposite Jean Harlow) and starred again in the remake, “Mogambo” in the 1950s (opposite Ava Gardner).

Gene Barry and Ann Robinson were the stars of the George Pal “War of the Worlds”, and were given what amounted to a walk-on in the last couple of minutes of the Spielberg remake, playing the grandparents waiting at the door for Dakota Fanning.

Bing Crosby starred in “Holiday Inn” (with Fred Astaire), and in its remake, “White Christmas”. Fred Astaire was also signed for the remake, but dropped out because of illness (or perhaps because he had read the script, which would have amounted to the same thing!) and was replaced by Danny Kaye.

The 1953 movie “Invaders from Mars” revolved around the character of a young boy who is convinced his parents’ bodies have been taken over by aliens and tries vainly to convince the local police chief. The boy was played by Jimmy Hunt, who also appeared in the 1986 remake as the police chief; in an in-joke, his character visits the site where the young boy has witnessed the landing of the aliens, and says the line (quite irrelevant to the plot of the movie), “I haven’t been here for forty years”.

Not really applicable to this question, but worth mentioning here: when the musical “Chicago” opened on Broadway, Chita Rivera starred as Velma. By the time they got around to making the movie, she was too old to play that role, but she did actually appear, as one of the prisoners.

What was the classic song of the 20th century?

No question about this. “Over the Rainbow”, by Harold Arlen and ‘Yip’ Harburg, written for “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), and introduced, of course, by Judy Garland.

Until after 2000, few singers other than Judy ever sang it, because it was so closely identified with her; however, in 2000, the start of the third millennium, votes were taken for the top-achievers in the second millennium (William Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, was voted the Man of the Millennium). As Tony Bennett pointed out in a concert (available on DVD), not only was “Over the Rainbow” the winner of the title of “Song of the Millennium”, but, amazingly, it was a unanimous decision! I reckon you can’t argue with that!

Which actor or actress would you like to see playing in a genre of film or television show?

If the concept of the weekly musical TV show — such as “The Frank Sinatra Show”, “The Judy Garland Show” and “Dinah!” — could be resurrected, I would like to see Audra McDonald in a show where she could sing, both solo and with her guests, every week.

Is The Wizard of Oz really the most influential movie of all time?

I’ve never heard anyone claim that it was! I know it’s one of the best-loved movies of all time, and I know that it has been seen by more people than any other movie ever made, and I know that the main song from it was unanimously voted as the best song of the millennium, but I don’t recall anyone saying it was influential in the sense that movie-makers instantly rushed to copy from it. Certainly, 20th-Century Fox rushed in with their pale imitation, “The Blue Bird”, but that was solely because they were somewhat peeved that they had turned down MGM’s offer to have their contract player, Shirley Temple, play the lead in “Oz”, which would have been a tremendous boost to her career and to their coffers, so they decided to outdo it with their own version and their own dear Shirley. And I know that “Oz” had, of necessity, to invent so many new effects techniques in order to tell its story that it influenced the Special Effects departments of all the studios from that year onwards. But, “the most influential movie of all time”? As the two previous answers to your question have pointed out, surely that title belongs to “Citizen Kane”. And even in the area of children’s movies, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, which preceded “Oz” by two years, was surely the more “influential” of the two, as Disney never stopped remaking it!

Is there an actor who before they became an actor, their life was in a totally different place?

As both Malcolm and Wayne pointed out, the answer is, ‘countless’. But one of the most interesting is surely Audie Murphy. His ‘occupation’ before he became a movie star was, in short, ‘war hero’. At just sixteen years old, before he had had time to embark on any career, he joined the US military (falsifying the age documents), after the attack on Pearl Harbour. In the next four years he won no less than 33 awards for bravery, including the Purple Heart, the French AND Belgian Croix de Guerre, the French Liberation Medal, and the highest military award the United States bestows: the Medal of Honour, for single-handedly holding off an entire company of German soldiers while serving in France (he killed six, wounded two, and took eleven prisoners!) He fought at the Battle of Anzio, the Liberation of Rome, and the Invasion of Southern France, emerging as the highest-decorated American soldier in World War II… all before he had reached his twenty-first birthday!

He returned to America to a hero’s welcome; with his face on the cover of several magazines, including ‘Life’, it was not surprising that the film offers came rolling in (actually, he was approached by James Cagney, who was starting up his own production company). Ironically, in one of his earliest roles, in “The Red Badge of Courage”, he played the part of a young man branded a coward when he runs away from his first battle!

While pursuing his movie career, he also wrote a book (“To Hell and Back”) about his war experiences, and, soon afterwards, someone decided to make it into a movie. Guess who got to play the part!

Why did Emma Watson fail miserably in her acting career after Harry Potter?

Did she? I wouldn’t know anything about where she currently stands in the top 100 list of actresses, nor do I know the kind of fees she can command for her appearances; but I do know that I have seen her in several movies since the Potter days, and she acted well, I thought, in all but one (“Colonia”, which was a very demanding role and perhaps required someone with a bit more experience than she was able to bring to it at that time), and was certainly pleasing to look at in all of them.

In fact, I confess to a big dose of respect and admiration for her. Child stars, especially those who become household names before they’ve even reached double-figures, seldom make the transition to acting roles without major hiccups, both in their personal and professional lives; and she was so damned PRETTY in those Harry Potter movies that I thought she would be one of the ones that blazed bright and disappeared just as abruptly, for sure. But she didn’t; she took supporting roles when they suited her (particularly good, I thought, in “My Week with Marilyn”) and concentrated on building her career on a solid footing rather than expecting to be treated as a star on the basis of a single role. If your question implies that she isn’t making any money out of her career at the moment, well, that’s a pity. But she is still an asset to the movies, and I, for one, hope there are many bright days ahead for her. Don’t write her off yet!

What would you say is the best boxing movie of the 20th century?

That’s easy! Robert Wise’s “The Set Up”, with Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter.

If you watch it attentively, you will note that it’s shot in real time (as was “High Noon”, which got MUCH more recognition for doing the same thing…. but “The Set Up” did it first). It’s only about 73 minutes long, but that is exactly how long the drama takes to play out; it’s one short evening in the life of a boxer who is past his prime, and of his wife who can’t take the sordid life any more. Robert Ryan was one of the best actors of his era, and I don’t think I ever remember him better than this (maybe in “Billy Budd”, but it’d be a photo finish). And Robert Wise (who went onto to direct big-budget movies like “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music”) showed that his REAL mastery is the little black-and-white movies he made early in his career (he worked on “Citizen Kane” and some of the early Val Lewton RKO movies).

What famous actors have been arrested for a crime?

Tom Neal, who was the star of what is sometimes touted as the very best ‘film noir’, “Detour”, was jailed for six years for manslaughter.

The victim was his wife, Gale Bennett, who died, in their home, from a bullet wound (from Bennett’s gun) to the back of the head. Neal pleaded not guilty to murder, saying her death was an accident: the pistol, he claimed, discharged during a quarrel between the two. Failing to report the death, Neal left the house and went into hiding, leaving it to his lawyer to alert the police.

It was two days after the killing that Neal surrendered to police with his story about the ‘accident’. Notwithstanding the fact that the victim was evidently facing away from the gun when it was discharged, the jury believed him, and he was convicted of ‘involuntary manslaughter’. He died, of ‘heart failure’, just nine months after his release from prison.

What decade had the best movies do you think and why? 

Everyone, according to critic Pauline Kael, thinks the Golden Age of Movies was the time just before they were old enough to actually choose a movie and buy a ticket to see it. They may have heard people talk about the movies in their “golden age”, and seen the posters outside the cinemas and the advertising in the newspapers, but the movies themselves were just beyond their reach.

So I expect it’s no surprise that I, born in 1942 and a movie fan since 1949, would consider the best decade for movies was the forties — specifically, the movies from 1939 (the year of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz”) up to and including 1950 (the year of “All About Eve” — my very favourite movie — and “Sunset Boulevard”). This was the era that took in World War II and all the patriotic films which were made to promote the interests of the USA and Britain during this time; the era of Arthur Freed and the great musicals (his first film was “The Wizard of Oz”, which made a star out of Judy Garland, and in the next ten years the Freed Unit made twenty-four more musicals, fourteen of which starred Judy, his favourite performer and the greatest of all the stars of the forties); the era of the post-war cinema and the Cold War, with new themes and new problems for the movies to deal with; the era of the emergence of the film noir and its new kind of hero, as typified by John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Richard Widmark, and Robert Ryan; and the era when the studios were all ruled by a single hand, a “movie mogul” such as Louis B Mayer, or Jack L Warner, or Harry Cohn, or Daryl F Zanuck — men who had one thing in common (apart from, as Esther Williams liked to point out, a lack of education and ‘class’), and that was that they loved movies.

In the early fifties, the wheels started to fall off the movie industry as cinemagoers of the forties knew it: the McCarthy hearings into Communist leanings caused the blacklisting (and, on occasions, exile) of some of the greatest talents in Hollywood, both in front of the camera and behind it; the anti-trust legislation of 1948 eventually forced movie studios to divest themselves of their cinema chains, so that they were forced to compete with each other for bookings on the open market (this spelled the end of the ‘B’ picture, which was not expected to make money, but gave new writers, directors, and featured players the opportunity to take chances and extend their talents, assured that their films would at least be shown in their studios’ own chains); and television suddenly became a serious competitor to the forty-year tradition of going OUT to the movies, and sitting attentively for three hours

One by one, the expensive stars were let go by their home studios: Garland, Gable, Tracy, Astaire, Gardner and Kelly were all let go by MGM, and, in the same “clean sweep”, Louis Mayer himself was removed from his position as head of the studio which bore his name. At Fox, Zanuck (probably the most-intelligent and forward-thinking of all the studio heads) lasted at just a few years more. Talent and star-quality were considered less-important than 3D, CinemaScope, Cinerama, VistaVision and stereophonic sound, introduced in quick succession in order to give audiences an easy thrill they couldn’t get from ‘the box’ at home. Colour became virtually mandatory, even if it was cheap and appalling (like DeLuxe, Trucolor, Warnercolor, Ansco Color, and something called Gevacolor, little better than the ‘colour’ TV in use at the time, which was simply putting a perspex strip of three colours -- from the top, blue, pink, green -- in front of the TV screen). Film noir didn’t seem quite so ‘noir’ in colour, so it had to go; but the concept of the teenager was fast being established in people’s consciousness, so the old stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy found their formidable shoes ‘filled’ by teenage heart-throbs like Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Tommy Sands, and a whole lot of Bobbies and Johnnies.

In the decade after my beloved forties, the movies underwent a shift of virtually 180 degrees; alas, they would never recapture the qualities they had so easily discarded, and today’s cinemagoers are resigned, it seems, to act content with what is left. Nowadays, on the few occasions I visit the cinema, the audience scrambles for the exits as the credits start to roll: they couldn’t care less who wrote the film, shot it, produced it, or composed the “music”; they know it cost two hundred million dollars, and that a whole series of sequels is already in the pipeline, meaning they won’t be required to learn new characters and settings for the next three or four years; that’s all that matters. Everyone’s loss.

What type of movie would you say is more disappointing: a bad movie that shoots for the stars and tries to take risks, or an average movie that plays it so safe that it's extremely bland and predictable? And why?

The second type. Those films are the easy-to-forget ones, too. All the great movies — the memorable ones — are the ones that, when they were getting underway, had their more-experienced detractors who said, “But you CAN’T do it THAT way!” Orson Welles was probably the master risk-taker of all time, when he made his first movie, “Citizen Kane”. He was at-odds with the “experienced” film-makers of his time in just about everything he did: the non-linear narrative, the deep focus photography, the use of actors who had never been in a movie before (himself included), the editing, the repeating of scenes from a different perspective. He had his leading character, Charles Foster Kane, say, at one point (about running a newspaper), “You’re right… I don’t know anything…. I just try everything I can think of”. He approached his film exactly the same way, and produced something that is still influencing movie-makers today.

There used to be a slogan, touted by the Motion Picture Association, “Movies are better than ever”. The sad fact is, they’re not; and the reason they’re not is that we have too many film-makers who would rather play it safe and make what they know will make money, and too few like Orson Welles. There’s a reason for that, of course: nowadays, a movie costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and if it doesn’t catch on, well, that’s a BIG failure that can bankrupt a whole studio (as “Heaven’s Gate” did to United Artists). Charles Laughton’s amazing “Night of the Hunter” didn’t make any money, but the only one who suffered for it was Laughton himself, who didn’t get many more offers (and was so crushed by the public’s reception of his masterpiece that he wasn’t overly-anxious to get back into the arena, anyway). Film-makers like Laughton and Welles sometimes have to wait a quarter of a century for their innovative ideas to be recognised for what they are: a text-book for future film-makers, so that, indeed, movies can be better than ever. Want a few more names? Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Arthur Freed, Fritz Lang, Stanley Kramer, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock.

Innovators must all suffer all the heartbreaks in this most heartless of industries (and those ones sure did!); but we moviegoers are immeasurably enriched by the fact that they tried. Give me the risk-takers anytime!

Which actors have become better with age?

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Tony Curtis. He was signed, as a very young man, by Universal-International, not for any acting ability, but simply because he was a walking matinee idol. Back then, Universal was very much a minor studio, and they didn’t much care if their young stars received solid acting training or not; all the studio wanted to do was get their faces on screen, fast, and make some money out of them.

So Curtis went into his earlier films unprepared, to say the least, and there were some pretty appalling performances in those early days (“Yonder lies the cassle of my fodder!” he famously exclaimed in one Arabian-nights “epic”). Nobody cared much, of course, because there was always that face to look at, and Universal couldn’t have been happier; it was Curtis himself who realised that, if he wanted to make a permanent career in movies, he’d better have some acting talent to fall back on for when his good looks had deserted him.

Actually, he didn’t wait that long. It wasn’t too many years after his Universal days that he teamed up with Burt Lancaster for “Trapeze” and “Sweet Smell of Success”, and in both of these he accredited himself surprisingly well. Then there was his Billy Wilder-directed film, “Some Like it Hot”, in which he was confident enough to essay a comedy role originally written with Danny Kaye in mind, and bring it off brilliantly. Then he deliberately destroyed his handsome face with ugly-nose make-up for “The Defiant Ones”, and proved that he didn’t need his good looks, anyway. Quietly, through hard work, taking chances, and not blowing his own horn too much, he amassed a body of work that was as good as any of the theatre-trained actors that had started out around the same time as he. In his mature years, it was always a pleasure to watch Tony Curtis on-screen.

What are some examples of on-screen love between two actors but in reality they cannot stand one another?

Judy Garland’s anecdotes (on the Jack Paar Show and on her own 1963/4 TV series) regarding her fellow-MGM-stablemates were often wildly exaggerated and chosen more for humour than for accuracy; but, if she is to be believed, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy had such a disaffection for each other that, eventually, Louis B Mayer, noticing that their hostility was actually “coming through” in the rushes for “Naughty Marietta”, strode down onto the set in the middle of a scene and demonstrated to Jeanette how the farewell scene was supposed to be played… tears and all!

More reliable, perhaps, than Judy’s story, was the extreme animosity of Tony Curtis towards co-star Marilyn Monroe, who, apparently, made the shooting of “Some Like it Hot” a nightmare for him and everyone else involved (director Billy Wilder said later, “I should be awarded the Silver Star. I’m the only director in Hollywood to have made two films with Marilyn Monroe!”). After the famous ship’s stateroom love scene with the steamed-over glasses, Curtis said (out of Monroe’s hearing, of course), “It was like kissing Hitler!”

Why are British actors so good at playing American characters?

I’m not convinced that your premise is even true; are they, in fact, any better at playing Americans than American actors are at playing Brits (or Germans, or Russians, or all the other nationalities that Hollywood actors are required to tackle)? There’s no doubt that British actors are damned good; maybe this has something to do with their training, plus the fact that the British industry is less star-struck than the American film industry, and, therefore, English actors are expected to have “paid their dues” in smaller movie roles and on the stage — sometimes for decades (the excellent Michael Kitchen being a perfect example) —before they’re allowed to tackle “that” role. A TV series such as “Foyle’s War” (my personal favourite) is a constant joy to watch, owing to the parade of superb British actors passing through in every episode; you’ve seen their faces a thousand times, but you still don’t know their names, and, possibly, you never will. All you know is that they have honed their craft to a point which is virtually sublime, and we are all richer for it. Even if, at the end of the day, they still have to go home on the bus, because performing excellence (in Britain, anyway) doesn’t necessarily equate with fame!

What are examples of people who didn’t expect to become top-notch Hollywood celebrities?

I’m sure there are dozens of good examples for this scenario, but one that springs instantly to mind would be Leslie Caron. She was a seventeen-year-old in Roland Petit’s ballet company in Paris when first seen (but not forgotten) by Gene Kelly. A couple of years later, when casting his female lead in the forthcoming “An American in Paris”, he recalled the fresh-faced young girl who had impressed him back then, and sought her out. Surprisingly (he must have thought) she had absolutely no interest either in leaving her ballet company to go to America or in making movies — like many of her ballet company, she had, as she said afterwards, “quite different aims”. She was finally persuaded to accept, just for this one movie…. and stayed to make 44 more!

What are some movies where the supporting actor/actress took away attention from the main actor/actress?

John Malkovich spent his whole career stealing whatever movie he was in! So did Hal Holbrook. These actors didn’t often get their name above the title, and audiences often didn’t know them by name; but canny directors did, so they were seldom out of work. And whenever they turned up in whatever movie you were watching, you could always smile, sit back, and breathe a sigh of relief. You knew right then that, no matter how dreary the rest of the movie might be, you were going to have something to take home with you and remember with pleasure!

Sometimes the supporting actors simply had to step up and carry the movie, because there was no one in the lead roles doing anything to keep the audiences in their seats. In the good old days of the MGM musical, the supports — Jules Munshin or Phil Silvers or Marjorie Main or Betty Garrett— were always given their “bit”, but they were never allowed to steal the limelight from Gene Kelly or Judy Garland or Fred Astaire. However, by the time MGM got around to making the frequently-postponed “Jumbo” (which had originally been purchased for Judy Garland and Howard Keel), most of its great musical stars had been let go and were working for other studios (often in dramatic roles). So MGM went ahead with the movie with Doris Day and Stephen Boyd in the leads. With zero chemistry between the two, there was nothing for it but for the two “second-bananas”, Martha Raye and Jimmy Durante, to pick up the movie and run with it, and they grasped the opportunity with both hands. It was good to see them, but, at the same time, you knew that the future of the musical was in serious doubt when such a state of affairs was allowed to happen.

Are there any movies that have subtle signs that an actor or actress was sick when filming?

Robert Donat, the English actor who won the best actor Academy Award for “Goodbye Mr Chips” in the year that “Gone With the Wind” won just about everything else, was a severe asthmatic all his life, and often had to turn down roles in favour of admitting himself to hospital! In his later years, he worked infrequently. His last film was “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness”, playing opposite Ingrid Bergman, who adored him (as did, apparently, everyone else). By this time he was so ill that he had to have an emergency breathing apparatus at the ready, just off-camera, during the shooting. His last scene, a gathering at a table where he (as emperor) bids farewell to his long-term friends, was an emotional one even without the script: he was having obvious difficulty saying more than a couple of words between breaths, and it was clear that he was completing his work in the movie none too soon. His last line was, “It is time to go, old friends. We shall not meet again, I think. Farewell”, and on his delivery of this prophetic line, Ingrid burst into real tears right there on camera, which, fortunately, was an appropriate thing for her character to do, so it stayed in the movie. Robert Donat left the set and never returned to any set, dying very soon afterwards.

Similarly, Spencer Tracy was so ill by the time that producer Stanley Kramer was preparing his final pairing with Katharine Hepburn, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, that the insurance company refused to cover the film for losses if Spence should die mid-shooting. Both Kramer and Hepburn had to vouch their own salaries as security before the film could even proceed. In the last scene shot, with himself and Hepburn in a car at a drive-in food outlet, he looks decidedly unwell, and when he had said his few lines, he turned to Kramer and said, “Well, you can finish your movie now, can’t you?” Before that he had had a typical Stanley Kramer-directed “long speech” (he had already been given one of those in Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “Inherit the Wind”) in which he sums up the essential message which the film is determined to get across to its audience. This one, however, was different from those in the preceding films; although it looks like it might have been done in one single shot, it is actually snipped together, with reaction shots from his “audience” inserted to cover up the breaks, from many attempts, as Spence had considerable problems getting through the scene, and needed frequent rests between “takes”. The reaction shots of Katharine Hepburn, who stayed by his side even when she wasn’t required in the scene, show her with tears in her eyes and a look of profound respect and love on her face. She won the Academy Award for that role, but, in that scene at least, she didn’t have to act at all.

What are some movies where an actor/actress face is not revealed at all in the complete movie?

A film which I haven’t seen (but have always wanted to!) is “Lady in the Lake”, starring Robert Montgomery. It might be better, however, to say “starring Robert Montgomery’s voice”, since his character — the lead — was played by the camera: you saw what the character saw, other characters talked directly at the camera, and his voice responded. Only in one shot — when the character pauses as he walks past a mirror, and suddenly there is Robert Montgomery’s reflection looking straight at us — was the face of the leading man ever shown.

This technique was used again, in the opening scene of “Executive Suite”, when the camera becomes a key player (to whom others turn and say “Good morning” as he walks past them) who leaves his office and has a heart attack in the street (thus setting the whole story in motion), and we see the whole thing through the character’s eyes. But that was only for a few minutes. The only other time I have ever known a whole film to be made in this fashion was the movie “Mahommed”, where the prophet’s face could not be shown for fear of committing blasphemy; so the camera became the leading man.

Which leading actor and which leading actress who *never* appeared together would have enjoyed the best on-screen chemistry?

Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra.

Mind you, they did appear together on radio and television (Judy’s 1962 TV special, which also featured Dean Martin, is so well-regarded that re-releases of it are often called “Once in a Lifetime”), and they were both in one MGM all-star musical (“Till the Clouds Roll By”; however, their scenes were filmed separately and they were never seen together on-screen).

Gene Kelly, who was close to both of them, was always trying to work out a pairing, and at least three MGM movies in which he was slated to appear were planned for himself, Garland, and Sinatra (I say “slated to appear”, because, in one of them — “Easter Parade” — he himself had to drop out because he broke his ankle (Judy went on to appear with Fred Astaire and Peter Lawford); the other two — “Anchors Aweigh” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — featured himself and Frank Sinatra, but Judy was unavailable in both cases).

The closest Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra ever came to appearing, and singing, together in a major musical was the 1955 20th-Century Fox production of “Carousel”. The casting was announced — one of many films offered to Judy Garland in the wake of her 1954 triumph in “A Star is Born” — but not a foot of film was shot with Judy, and Sinatra, after recording, with Alfred Newman’s orchestra, a version of “If I Loved You” which shows him at his absolute-best, eventually dropped out also.

What are some examples of famous actors taking a role only as a favor to someone (who helped them early in their career, for example)?

When Gene Kelly was first spotted by Judy Garland on-stage in New York and brought to MGM in Hollywood, Judy, at the top of her game and with plenty of “clout” at MGM, vigorously promoted his career, insisting that the cast list of her next project,“For Me and My Gal”, be changed to include him as her leading man. New to movies, he knew little about working for the camera, but she painstakingly helped him through the difficult early days, generously allowing the shot to favour him as much as her, and he made quite a splash in his first movie; a debt which he was always quick to acknowledge.

Around eight years later he was at the very top of his game, advancing the musical genre by starring, choreographing, and even directing in films like “On the Town” and “An American in Paris” (with “Singing in the Rain” in the pipeline), and Judy was going through HER hard time, having been unceremoniously fired from “Annie Get Your Gun” and sent, virtually in disgrace, to the Pasternak Unit (which specialised in quick little “B-musicals” which frequently found themselves on the bottom half of double-bills) to make a trifle called “Summer Stock”, a left-over script from her days with Mickey Rooney.

Kelly didn’t hesitate; getting leave of absence from the prestigious Arthur Freed unit, and putting his next project “on hold”, he followed her over to Pasternak’s lot and offered himself as the leading man for “Summer Stock”. Pasternak, who usually got the minor players for his leads, suddenly found himself with MGM’s two biggest musical stars, even though his story was a hokey barnyard “let’s-put-on-a-show” affair which was clearly a step down for both of them. But Kelly knew when to repay a favour, and he worked out some of his best-ever routines for “Summer Stock”; more importantly, he was there every minute to support Judy, whose self-confidence was at a low ebb, and to help her give what has turned out to be one of her most endearing performances (and which yielded the number “Get Happy”, always featured in compendiums of classic movie-musical moments). It was her swan-song at MGM, but, thanks largely to Kelly, she left her studio with another classic under her belt.

Are there any actors that have ruined a movie for you?

Yes, heaps, but in most cases I have blotted out the names of the movies (but not the players!) “None But the Brave”, Frank Sinatra’s interesting and quite-innovative war movie (his personal production and the only film he ever directed as well as starred in) had a lot going for it, especially the way it treated Japanese and American soldiers as equals; but, for me, every time Frank’s son-in-law, pop singer Tommy Sands, walked onto the screen — and he did that a lot, as he had a plum role — it was hard to concentrate on anything else except to wonder why Sinatra didn’t just step out of character for a moment and order him off the set. It’s probably the worst performance ever seen in an A-movie, and it’s the reason that, every now and then, when I see my VHS copy sitting on the shelf, I reluctantly (because I love Sinatra and his movies) turn away from it rather than subject myself to watching that degree of ineptitude again.

While he had, in his lifetime, a great reputation as a comic, I admit to never having been able to take Robin Williams for more than a few minutes at a time (“The Birdcage” being the single exception). After he ruined three or four movies in a row for me (I forget the names of them, but in one, I recall, he played a free spirit who danced naked in Central Park, and in another a man who decided he knew more about curing hospitalised children than the doctors and nurses did, and inveigled himself into the wards, against all instructions and warnings, to “entertain” them with his comic genius. Of course, they all got better fast… anything to escape Williams’ comedy routines!), I learned to check the cast list before I put my money down on the box-office counter. And he did a lot of work! Oh, well, there was a fair amount of money saved there for a while!

What actor's/actress' film debut was an indicator that they were going to be a major acting talent?

Jodie Foster. The first time I saw her was at a drive-in in a bottom-half-of-the-bill movie that I didn’t even want to see and had absolutely no interest in: “Napoleon and Samantha” (which may not have been her film debut, however, so my answer to your question may not be 100% accurate). She was then about nine years old, I guess, but so different from the other nine-year-old actresses of the time that, at the end of the movie I walked out into the cold and to the central candy-bar building just to check out her name. That was the first time I saw the name ‘Jodie Foster’.

I promptly forgot it, of course; but a couple of years later I saw a TV series based on the popular movie “Paper Moon”, which had earned an Academy Award nomination for its young star, Tatum O’Neal. Tatum had really made a big splash in that role, and, since moviegoers of the time were used to seeing TV spin-offs of classic movies with vastly inferior casts (e.g. “The Thin Man”), I tuned in already feeling sorry for the lass who had to follow in Tatum’s footsteps. But, amazingly, the TV girl was even better than Tatum had been! I hadn’t noticed her name at the beginning of the show, so I dived for the TV programme to look it up. The name rang a bell, and I suddenly remembered that it was the name I had told myself that I shouldn’t forget.

But, of course, I soon forgot it again. Another year or so passed, and I saw a film called “Alice doesn’t Live Here Anymore”; at the end of that movie I eagerly scanned the cast list for the name of the supporting player who, with only a couple of scenes, had just about stolen the whole movie…. and, for the third time, the name ‘Jodie Foster’ was imprinted into my forgetful brain!

But this time I didn’t have a chance to forget it; within a few months, “Taxi Driver” was released, and the name ‘Jodie Foster’ was suddenly on EVERYBODY’S lips, and in everybody’s mind…. where, of course, it belongs.

Which actresses have gotten better roles as they have gotten older?

Mention the name “Gloria Swanson” and everyone immediately thinks of Norma Desmond, the aging silent-screen actress in the lonely old house along Sunset Boulevard. In fact, this was her forty-ninth movie, and in most of the previous forty-eight she had been the star. She made her first film around 1918, but around 1931, by which time the talkies had well and truly taken over, the offers stopped coming in…. or maybe it was just that she didn’t like what was on offer. She made only six movies in the decade before “Sunset Boulevard”, so most people thought she had retired. But then, at fifty-one years of age, she was offered the role of Norma, and she knew right away it was the best part she had ever been offered…. or, for that matter, she would ever be offered. She gave a performance that Hollywood will never forget.

Similarly, the Broadway (and occasional movie) star Ethel Merman was, in her field, so pre-eminent (Merman shows ALWAYS made money) that just about every producer and composer of musicals wrote shows with her in mind. But the roles they wrote for her required her to just be herself (or, in any case, what THEY thought was “herself”) — brash, saucy, uncomplicated, always a barrel of laughs… and, of course, holding the unbridled affection of her audiences. She longed, before retirement, to be offered at least one role with a bit of “depth” to it, and it was the team of Laurents, Sondheim and Styne that gave it to her (also at age 51): as Mama Rose, in “Gypsy”, she got the part of her dreams, and she played it to the hilt, although fully aware of the risks she was taking with audience goodwill (her character was a monster!). She needn’t have worried; audiences left the theatre with a new respect for the talents of America’s pre-eminent Broadway diva.

How are child actors allowed to work in series like The Walking Dead when younger than the legal age-rating?

I am not an expert in this field, but you haven’t yet had an answer, so maybe I can just start the ball rolling and others can elaborate and correct my errors. The point is, the age you have to be to view the film is not the issue; it’s what you have to do when you go to work in it that is the factor which covers children. Their scenes are filmed under rigorous supervision from child-protection agencies. They are not subjected to any of the menaces that they may appear to be confronted with after the scene has been assembled. They may not even know how their scenes (of acting frightened or terrorized, for instance) are going to fit into the movie. Why should they know? It’s the director’s job to help them PERFORM as if they knew…..young ‘pros’ will happily do that without anything more terrifying to stimulate them than a director’s instruction and the word, “Action!”

Of course, the assembled film is strictly forbidden to them until they are of the legal age, because it’s the film as a whole — not merely the close-ups of the child — which is rated as “adults only”.

With all that said, there remain a trio (at least) of worrisome cases, the most obvious being Linda Blair (in “The Exorcist”), who had to “fake” masturbation with a crucifix; Jodie Foster (in “Taxi Driver”), who had to participate in one scene which, while faked, was quite unambiguous (in many prints they try to improve on the ambiguity factor by NOT adding the sound of a zipper being opened); and Brooke Shields (twelve years old in “Pretty Baby”), who had to allow herself to be displayed sexually in the absolute minimum of clothing in several scenes, and completely ‘au naturel’ in one. I still don’t know how they managed to get away with those three in a mainstream American movie, and I doubt if those scenes would be allowed today without the use of doubles (Brooke’s next big hit, “The Blue Lagoon” did, in fact, use a body double, as she proudly announced in interviews, so it seems like she had come to realise that she — or her carers — had been talked into going a step further then propriety would have indicated).

Who is the funniest actor or actress in the world? Would you see a movie just because that person is in it?

I would have to say Buster Keaton. He was making the world laugh during the days of silent movies, sometimes taking considerable personal risks to do this, and he never wavered from that aim. In his “golden” days his talent was, of course, purely physical; but when sound came in, he learned to say a funny line as well as anyone (something I don’t think Chaplin was able to do), and, in fact, in one of his last movies — “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, in 1966 — he was surrounded by some of the funniest people working in films, yet still managed to get the biggest laugh of the evening with his delivery of one line (“Those filthy pirates!”). He deserves, I think, to be placed right “up there” with Chaplin.

Do actors have to agree to kiss another actor before their story-line is written? What happens if they refuse?

I guess there can be three reasons why an actor might refuse a kissing scene: gender, religion, or personal dislike of the recipient. The first reason will normally be quite clear in the script as presented to the actor, so he may well decline the part altogether unless a change can be made. If it’s sprung on him mid-movie, then everyone has a problem, and I would imagine that negotiations are in order.

The second will probably be well-known to the producer, and the actor would not be offered the part in the first place if kissing were involved (Pat Boone, the musical star of the fifties, is a case in point; he made it clear, from the outset, that he would kiss no one but his wife, and producers were either willing to work around this demand — which most of Boone’s directors did, quite ingeniously — or simply look around for another actor).

The third reason is probably the hardest one to protect oneself against, which is why some powerful actors have co-star approval written into the contract. But if you’re not big enough to make such a demand, and your co-star is brought in after you’ve signed, then you might just have to grin and bear it, as did Tony Curtis when he signed to make a film in which he was Marilyn Monroe’s love interest. You’d never know it to look at the scene, but afterwards, he famously remarked, “It was like kissing Hitler.” It would seem, however, to be somewhat less unpalatable than fighting the court case for breach of contract if he had simply taken a walk!

What famous actors and actresses have never kissed in a movie?

When singer Pat Boone started making movies, he looked like a teenager (and was popular with teens), but was actually a happily married man, and very religious; he announced that under no circumstances would he kiss anyone but his wife, and that included his “romantic interests” in his movies. One of the bizarre treats in watching some of the early Boone movies, such as “Bernadine” and “April Love”, was watching the ingenious ways the director and cameraman could make it LOOK like their stars were having the traditional end-of-movie clinch even though the lips never actually touched (sometimes, as with Shirley Jones and Diane Baker, it was a question of millimetres).

Boone kept up his “no kissing” rule for quite a few movies, but fairly soon it started to have a limiting effect on the roles he was being offered (so, of course, did the fact that public taste was moving away from the “clean-cut college boy” image which he typified); ultimately, he “rationalised” his earlier stipulation, deciding that he wasn’t really serving God or his family by being left behind in the race for movie stardom. I can’t quite remember the name of the movie in which, for the first time, Boone actually locked lips with his leading lady (“State Fair”, perhaps? Hopefully, someone can enlighten me here), but by the time that happened his movie career was already past its peak, superseded in the public’s eye by Elvis Presley, who had no such reservations about giving his all for his art.

Which current Hollywood actor has the most in common with Humphrey Bogart?

That’s a hard one, because, frankly, there’s just no one “current”, and hasn’t been since Jason Robards Jr! They just don’t make them like that anymore!

But I have to admit that Sean Penn could probably step into Bogie’s shoes if films like “Casablanca”, “In A Lonely Place” and “The Desperate Hours” were to be remade today (actually, I’m starting to get excited at the very thought of those three with Penn). At his best, Penn is as good as any actor alive today, and he brings to all his roles the same essential quality that Bogie brought to his: the feeling that he’s seen it all, that he’s come through a lot of hard times, and that however you try to present yourself in front of him, he’s seen your type many times and can see right through you.

Which celebrities are surprisingly the same age?

Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine. Just a few weeks apart, but you’d never guess it from looking at their movie roles. In fact, in his autobiography, Ernest Borgnine tells an amusing story about “The Vikings”, the film in which they co-starred: “Kirk was — and is — a prince of a guy. He’s a month older than me; funny, because I was playing his father in the movie!”

What actors and actresses who usually play nice characters are the complete opposite in real life?

I would offer Jerry Lewis as the perfect example. Dean Martin, who was known as one of the most easy-going actors in Hollywood, finally had to walk out on him because his “I-am-a-genius-and-everyone-else-is-nothing” attitude finally got too much, even for him. Shirley MacLaine had idolized him back when she was a Broadway hoofer and had never met him, but then she worked with him in a movie; several pages of her book, “My Lucky Stars” are devoted to telling an appalling story about Lewis’s behaviour towards his director which left her, and the rest of the cast, shocked and saddened. I once spoke to the driver who had been assigned to take him around when he did a gig in Sydney, Australia; this man had driven just about everyone, from Sinatra to Charlton Heston, and had nothing but kind words to say about nearly all of them; but without a moment’s hesitation he volunteered Jerry Lewis as the most unpleasant person he had ever had to drive around: rude, arrogant, critical, openly contemptuous of everyone and everything. Yet the Lewis we saw on screen was exactly the opposite (which distinguishes him from Joan Crawford, who is the “easy” answer for this question; but she often played a bitch on screen, and had done so right from her very early days, in films like “The Women”). Lewis loved to be loved…. but never, it seems, knew how to love back.

There is another actress/singer who is, I have read, seen by her co-workers as being almost as unpleasant as Lewis, but she is still alive and occasionally working, so good manners would prevent me from mentioning her by name. She does, however, have one advantage (apart from still being with us) over Lewis: she has real talent (though not quite as much as she thinks she has), especially as a singer, and has left us a body of work that almost atones for her behaviour towards her equals and underlings.

The moment I think of Heath Ledger, his Joker in Dark Knight comes to mind. Is there an actor who, for you, instantly suggests one role?

Robert Walker in “Strangers on a Train”. He had been around for years, and, in fact, was just one picture away from an untimely death; but nothing in his portrayals of the past could have prepared cinemagoers for what he was able to bring out of himself to make that role so memorable. Was it Alfred Hitchcock’s direction that brought out a latent talent? Maybe, but Hitch had a reputation of ignoring his actors and giving them no help at all (Doris Day famously burst into tears after she had done one scene which she thought was the best thing she had ever done, and Hitch said, simply, “Cut! Next set-up.”) Or was it the fact that he knew his Hollywood career was coming to a close because of his off-set behaviour, and decided that he had nothing to lose by taking chances? Whatever it was, he ran off with the movie and created a character people still remember, sixty-five years later. You just have to say “Bruno Anthony”, and there’s a smile of recognition.

What are some examples of movie plots that had terrible flaws when they weren't edited correctly?

John Huston’s “The Red Badge of Courage” was not your typical MGM product, and Louis B Mayer, the head of the studio, in particular, disliked it. When it was due for release, it was decided (not by Huston!) that the best marketing ploy was to cut it down to second-feature length, so that it could be shown on the lower half of double-bills, and quickly forgotten. When finally released, it ran just 69 minutes! It must have been quite a task for the editors to assemble the remaining footage so that the story flowed more-or-less coherently!

Well, they ALMOST managed coherence… except (I am told) that a character who was killed in battle in the early part of the movie suddenly appears, alive and well, at some later point.

What actor spent the longest time between hit movies?

Gloria Stuart comes to mind as the perfect answer to your question: she had a string of hits between 1932 and 1939 (“The Old Dark House”, “The Invisible Man”, “Gold Diggers of 1935”, “Poor Little Rich Girl”, to name just a few), but a new contract with 20th-Century Fox saw her spending so much time supporting the child actors of the war years (Freddie Bartholomew, Shirley Temple, Jane Withers) that she virtually abandoned her movie career by 1945, working only sporadically (and for next-to-no recognition) for the next half a century. Then, out of the blue, in 1997, she was tempted out of retirement for a rather important role in James Cameron’s “Titanic”, and found herself “flavour of the month” at age 87! With that small role she became a star all over again, receiving a host of accolades including an Academy Award nomination. Talk about your late bloomers!

Who do you think is/was the most glamorous Hollywood celebrity of all time?

Julia Reece’s answer has covered the subject very nicely; she has, perhaps, overlooked actress Hedy Lamarr.

She reigned as “the” Hollywood glamour queen somewhat earlier than the others mentioned; Elizabeth Taylor was a child star at MGM during the time Miss Lamarr was at her peak (from the late thirties to mid-forties).

What is not so well-known about her is that, as well as being beautiful, she was smart, and in her spare time worked on hobbies and inventions. Wikipedia says she invented a traffic stop-light, a tablet which turned water into a carbonated drink, and — most importantly, as a contribution to World War II (with her friend, George Antheil) — a frequency-hopping system that prevented radio-controlled torpedoes from being “jammed” by the enemy. At the time this was patented by her and Antheil, she was seriously considering quitting MGM and joining the new Inventors’ Council in Washington. Both she and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, for inventions which have significantly advanced modern society. More than just a pretty face; but, boy, she sure had that, too!

What movies did the lead actor or actress change because of a real life event?

Frank Sinatra gave his best performance in years in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a political thriller about an attempt to assassinate, at a public meeting, a candidate for the US presidency. But just one year later, John F Kennedy, a friend of Sinatra’s (for whom the singer had campaigned vigorously during his candidature in 1960), was assassinated while in office. The film, which had been doing well, abruptly disappeared from screens world-wide, and it was revealed later that Sinatra himself had been behind the total “ban”. It didn’t surface again for many years.

Is the film Casablanca massively overrated?

Well, yes, really, it IS overrated. Mind you, that’s just my opinion, but, ever since I first saw it in around 1954, I have wondered just how it managed to acquire the reputation it enjoyed, even then. And its reputation has done nothing but grow during the last half-century; I think I read that, in the American Film Institute’s current lists, it is ranked second only to ‘Citizen Kane’… and their list goes right back to the silent era!

What ‘Casablanca’ is, I think, is TYPICAL. It’s a perfect example of what Warner Bros did best back in the forties. All their stock players turned up doing their usual “bit”, the usual technicians and artists were all there, at the top of their game, and from the moment it starts, you know nothing too disastrous is going to happen: these people know what they’re doing. So maybe it epitomises Warners, and epitomises the cinema of the war years. It’s fun, but the fun comes mainly from your confidence in the skill of its makers. No one does anything original, or startling, or innovative.

That’s why it’s strange to see ‘Casablanca’ “up there” next to ‘Citizen Kane’, which breathed originality and innovation in every frame, and successfully startled you for its entire running time. The two have very different aims (Welles was determined from the outset to make the greatest film ever made); my hunch is that ‘greatness’ was something that never even occurred to any of the people involved in the making of ‘Casablanca’ back in 1942. All they wanted was another efficiently-made Warners ‘hit’. That’s what they got.

Now I will really get blasted from the people who think it’s the greatest movie ever made!

What movies with interesting concepts were poorly executed?

 “Sweeney Todd”. It’s a brilliant concept; on the stage it remains, I think, Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, and, quite simply, the best musical ever. But then came Tim Burton’s movie; non-singers in the leading roles, virtually all the songs shortened (at least one omitted altogether), and the extraordinary finale jettisoned completely. As compensation, Burton gave us a lot of blood. Thankfully, a video recording of the stage production has been released for those who saw the film first, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Is there anyone who bacame a movie star by accident?

Two names spring to mind here: Lana Turner and Leslie Caron. Lana just happened to be in the right place at the right time. She was still in high school, 16 years old and sitting at the counter at the Top Hat Malt Shop, drinking a soda, when a ‘scout’ for Mervyn LeRoy noticed her, and took her along to LeRoy, who was looking for an ingenue to play a murder victim in his upcoming “They Won’t Forget”. The rest, as they say, is history.

Leslie Caron was a young ballet dancer working for Roland Petit’s company in Paris when Gene Kelly, on a visit, saw her on-stage and couldn’t quite get her out of his head. Some time later, when MGM was looking for a fresh new face for the female lead in “An American in Paris”, with Kelly as the star, he decided she was just what the studio was looking for, and returned to offer her the lead in a big-budget American movie. As she later pointed out in interviews, she was not at all keen on the idea (“when you are in Roland Petit’s ballet company, you have very different aims”) and only agreed to make the trip to America if her mother could accompany her. Signing her for this one movie turned out to be one of Gene Kelly’s very best decisions: she ended up making 45 of them, and danced not only with Gene Kelly, but also with Fred Astaire (unfortunately, she never again got a chance to pair up with Kelly, although his subsequent “French” film, “Les Girls”, was written for her, and is the poorer for her non-participation).

What actor /actress went on to a successful singing career?

The best example I can think of would probably be Yvonne de Carlo, who seldom did any singing on-screen when she was a Hollywood siren, from 1942 until about 1956 (her roles usually called for not much singing but a lot of kissing), but cut a well-regarded LP for Remington Records in 1957 (ten songs arranged and conducted by a young John Williams, who would, within a few years, make his mark as a composer of film music).

There is no indication that she ever saw herself as a cabaret singer rather than as an actress at this time, but, in 1963 (by which time the sex-symbol roles that had made her famous were no longer viable), fate took a hand: her husband worked as a stunt man on an elaborate western spectacle called “How the West Was Won”, and in a scene involving a runaway train and a load of timber, he was badly crushed, losing both a leg and his career, and thus leaving the family in dire financial straits. With no movie offers on the horizon (though her friend John Wayne would soon come to her rescue in that department), she went back to work, this time as a cabaret singer, and from there pursued stage roles in musical comedies (she was in productions of “Pal Joey”, “Little Me”, “Cactus Flower”, and “Hello Dolly”, among others).

But the role for which she will always be remembered was still ahead. Accepting a small part (one song) in the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”, she so impressed the composer that he decided the song he had written for her character (“Can That Boy Fox-Trot”) was unworthy of her; instead, he wrote a brand new song just for her, and it turned out to be the song that just about every female singer suddenly wanted to sing: “I’m Still Here”, which has practically attained the status of an anthem, and which has ensured that Yvonne de Carlo has a permanent place in the history of Broadway musicals.

Who's the most easy going celebrity?

I recall that back in the 1990s, bus tours of the homes of Hollywood movie stars were all the go (and possibly still are, even though I expect Hollywood is the home of fewer and fewer stars these days). I went on one of these these tours, and saw a lot of front doors and tall gates, but, of course, no stars. Stars valued their privacy, and, the driver told us, were careful to keep a low profile when the buses came past.

All, that is, except one. James Stewart was a keen gardener, and, quite often, as the buses paused at his gate he would be out in his front garden. It was not uncommon for him to stop what he was doing and come up to the bus, gardening tools in hand, to chat with the passengers… there was, the driver told me, not a trace of the “movie star” about Mr Stewart, who was very comfortable greeting strangers, even in his old clothes.

Which famous actors have refused to do certain scenes?

Just about all the responses so far are related to actors drawing the line at sex scenes, but there are other reasons for someone refusing to do a scene as written. On the face of it, MGM’s family musical, “Meet Me in St Louis”, doesn’t seem to be the kind of movie where one of the players would refuse to go ahead with a scene as originally scripted, but it happened. Judy Garland refused to sing the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to Margaret O’Brien with the lyrics as originally presented to her. “People will think I’m a monster!” she is reported to have exclaimed, and she sent composer Hugh Martin off to soften the lyrics to something an older sister might sing to a grieving younger one. Martin later agreed that Garland made the correct choice: the original lyric, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we will all be living in the past” was, he conceded, tantamount to cruelty to children, and just wouldn’t go down well in what was supposed to be a tender, loving scene.

What celebrities personally destroyed their career?

Tom Neal might be a good start as an answer to this question. He had a law degree from Harvard, was a member of the boxing team at Northwestern University, made his debut on the Broadway stage at age 21, was signed by MGM at age 24, and subsequently became the star of “Detour”, often regarded as the best ‘film noir’ ever made. A certain recipe for success, you might think.

However, there was one item in the curriculum vitae above that didn’t quite fit with the rest, and it betrayed a side to his character that would eventually cause his undoing in a big way. He couldn’t, it seems, keep his fists to himself, and when he let loose, he was capable of doing real damage to his combatants. In the early 1950s he had an affair with “actress” Barbara Payton, who happened to be engaged to Hollywood heart-throb Franchot Tone (Clark Gable’s co-star in “Mutiny on the Bounty” and previously the husband of Joan Crawford). Neal and Tone got into a physical fight over Payton, who watched as the former boxer gave Tone a smashed cheekbone, a broken nose, and brain concussion: injuries that required hospitalisation and effectively ended Tone’s career as a leading man, dooming him instead to “featured” roles where looks were not important.

Neal and Payton lived together for a while, but the incident caused Hollywood to turn its back on both of them, and the relationship foundered within a year. A few years afterwards, Neal married Gale Bennett and hit the headlines yet again: Bennett’s body was found on the couch at their home with a gunshot wound to the back of the head, and Neal subsequently confessed to her manslaughter (he claimed that the gun had accidentally discharged during an argument and that he had fled in panic). He was convicted and imprisoned for six years. Barbara Payton didn’t fare much better… she made a few low-budget movies, such as “Bride of the Gorilla” and “Bad Blonde”, had several skirmishes with the law (for drug possession, passing bad cheques and shoplifting), was reduced to sleeping in bus shelters, and was eventually arrested for prostitution on Sunset Boulevard. She died before she was 40.

Why do we put so much emphasis on awards shows?

For exactly the same reason that we celebrate the Olympic Games or the grand-final of a football game, or the result of a Presidential election. Everybody (as the song says) loves a winner, and we like to acknowledge the people who have made it to the very top of the tree. The Academy Awards show itself may not be as great as we would wish it to be (also the Emmy and the Grammy), but at least it gives millions of people around the world a chance to share in the feelings of jubilation (for the winners), to commiserate with the losers, and to test their own judgement against that of the so-called experts.

What actors and actresses have rejected movie roles that they surely regret?

Stars often make fun (in their later years, by which time their position is well-and-truly secured) of their early bad decisions, and the movies they turned down which turned out to be huge successes for someone else. It’s all good-natured self-deprecation, and, naturally, the exclusive preserve of major stars who made it big, anyway, in the next movie that came along. Less well-publicised are the stars who gave up the chance to revive a career that had passed its peak because of demands made by them that were out-of-step with their current standing in the Hollywood community.

Thus we have Joan Crawford, who was offered the lead in “From Here to Eternity”, which went on to win eight Academy Awards, including best picture of the year. She liked the part of the Army sergeant’s wife who has an affair with one of his subordinates…. but she didn’t like the wardrobe chosen for her. A star of her magnitude, she thought, should wear glamorous gowns, rather than off-the-rack frocks, and the director’s insistence that the kind of gowns she demanded were absurd for the character she was playing didn’t move her for a minute. She passed, and Deborah Kerr, who didn’t mind the dresses one bit, happily turned in a career-changing performance. Crawford went on, instead, to wear her kind of wardrobe in such “classics” as “Female on the Beach” and “Queen Bee”, neither of which won eight Academy Awards!

Then there was Alan Ladd, a major Paramount star in the forties who got the best role of his career in the early 1950s, in George Stevens’s “Shane”. The late fifties weren’t kind to Ladd, who was taking leads in movies of increasingly-dismal status helmed by undistinguished directors; but George Stevens maintained a genuine admiration for his star, and, when he was preparing “Giant”, offered Ladd the plum role of Jett Rink — a part that would surely have revived his sagging career. Ladd, however, refused to consider any part unless he was guaranteed top billing (in this case, over co-stars Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, who had the lead roles). When it became clear that this couldn’t happen, Ladd stepped aside, making room for James Dean to make quite a splash in his third and last movie. Ladd did keep his top billing, however, in his next three films, “Santiago”, “Hell on Frisco Bay”, and “The Big Land”, all of which came and quickly disappeared. Sadly, he never got a role in another prestige movie, and his career petered out within eight years.

Finally, there was Judy Garland, who was expected to win the Academy Award for her 1954 vehicle, “A Star is Born”, and when she didn’t (in perhaps the biggest upset in the history of the awards), she started to question whether she and Hollywood were really compatible. A host of offers came flooding in as the result of her outstanding performance, including “The Three Faces of Eve” (which WOULD have won her that Academy Award, and, in fact, did, for Joanne Woodward), and a part that would have been a dream-role for her: “Carousel”, opposite Frank Sinatra. But she vacillated in both cases, finding faults in all the offers. In the case of “Carousel”, her objection was that Sinatra’s character had more singing time (which was true), and, moreover, had the best song in the score: the seven-minute opus “Soliloquy”. Garland suggested that that number be split up to reflect her character’s thoughts also, and the producers simply were not prepared to make a change of that magnitude in an established work, even for Judy. So she turned down the role, and a great opportunity for the best “Carousel” the world would ever see was lost. Shirley Jones, veteran of only one movie, but a protege of Richard Rodgers, stepped in without demur; Sinatra subsequently found an excuse to step away from the movie as well, and Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra — the two best exponents of American music and personal friends to boot — never made a movie together (Judy, in fact, walked away from Hollywood for several years, turning instead to the concert stage and the period of her life for which she may be best-remembered; so, as it turned out, her career wasn’t past its peak, after all. Maybe, then, she never regretted turning it down; but lovers of movie musicals, and of “Carousel”, certainly did!)

Is the daily life of a film star different from common people?

When your face is instantly recognisable, I would imagine it would be hard not to see some differences in your life and those of the anonymous people around you! I recall reading that when the TV show “Evening Primrose” was being shot (on a very limited budget, so they shot on locale, not in the studio), they needed a long-distance shot — just a few seconds — of Anthony Perkins sitting on a bench opposite a department store in New York, and another of him walking through the revolving doors of the store. They wasted hours because someone ALWAYS recognised him just as the camera started to turn, and went up to introduce themselves. They wound up having to hire extras to crowd the area around the revolving door to ensure there were no “upsets” during that piece of filming.

Still, if a movie star is determined to have a “normal” life, I guess it can be done. In the 1940s, Marjorie Main was an important featured player at MGM, and, since they put her in just about every movie that needed a cook or a maid, had a face instantly recognisable; yet she insisted on travelling to work every morning by the public bus that went past the MGM gates… no chauffeur-driven cars for her! And when, late in her career, Katharine Hepburn lived in New York, she used to go down to the corner grocery store with her shopping bag just like everyone else in the neighbourhood, and could often be seen down on her hands and knees scrubbing the front steps of her brownstone. She was determined to live a “normal” life, and her neighbours were happy to grant her that wish.

What 10 movies would you induct into a Hall of Fame?

I don’t know whether I can get as far as ten, but it’s an interesting question to at least make a start on! I will try and stay away from personal favourites, which is the “easy” option, but instead choose movies that “raised the bar”… the movies that took their art to the next level and pointed the way to the seemingly-endless possibilities that the medium offers. So, going back to the beginning, one would have to start with

(i) A D.W. Griffith movie. Everyone seems to think either “Birth of a Nation” or “Intolerance” are the two best candidates here. I will let the experts judge… but, either way, Griffith’s influence on movies is incalculable, and his visions — and genius — still influence the movies we watch today.

(ii) “The Battleship Potemkin”. This 1925 Russian movie was directed by another movie genius, Sergei Eisenstein, and it was a game-changer, with its innovative editing techniques (if you haven’t seen his famous “Odessa Steps” sequence, you have, for sure, seen one of the more-modern films to pay it homage) … again, films today would not be what they are without “Potemkin” to lead the way.

(iii) F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise”. Right at the end of the silent area came the movie that is widely regarded as its masterpiece. It’s hard, nowadays, to watch most silent films, because of the crude technology and hokey acting, but this 1927 movie is still eminently watchable today, and the audacity of the director’s concept and execution can still make you gasp.

(iv) “The Jazz Singer”. The film that introduced sound movies to the masses (there had, in fact, been a few experiments with sound made before this, but it was with “The Jazz Singer” that sound movies “took off”) and changed movies forever. Without the popularity of sound, we wouldn’t have had the movie musical, and how much poorer the movies would have been without the singing and dancing that have thrilled us since 1927.

(v) “King Kong”… the original, of course, not any of the dozens of acknowledged or unacknowledged remakes. The fact that there ARE so many remakes and homages (the Japanese seemed to build a whole movie industry around its ideas) is testament to how ground-breaking it is.

(vi) “Citizen Kane”. In 1941, this film took leaps forward in so many areas that, as Pauline Kael commented, “it’s as if you’d never seen a movie before”. Virtually all the non-linear narrative films made today are trying to imitate “Citizen Kane”, but no movie has ever done it better…. while, at the same time, making huge strides in lighting, cinematography, and set design. Quite unsurpassed.

(vii) “Night of the Hunter”. The only movie directed by actor Charles Laughton, and he made it as if he knew he would never get another turn at the helm. In one film you can see all the great cinematic techniques of the past, and you can feel the masters of early cinema nodding their approval and appreciation.

(viii) “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It’s not a film I particularly like — to me, science fiction ought to be exciting and hit you where your fears reside, whereas all this one does is let you sit back comfortably and acknowledge that a poverty-stricken genre can, at least, be made to look respectable if enough money is thrown at it. Following this film, science-fiction fans would never again be satisfied with flying saucers suspended by wires or monsters with zippers up the back of their costumes. It was, in that respect, highly-influential, but, oh! All those boring scenes showing you around the space ship!

(ix) “Russian Ark”. Who makes a two-hour movie with a thousand players, most in costume, roaming around something like 22 rooms, in a single take? When I saw it, I just didn’t believe it, and went back again a couple of days later to “catch it out”…. or, at least, find places where they’d slipped up and had to improvise. Some recent movies — “Birdman” and “Dunkirk” are obvious examples — have tried to make it look like they were made on one continuous take, but Alexander Sokurov actually went out and did it! So, with every movement to a new locale, or every new character coming into the scene to read his/her lines, you are edging closer and closer to the edge of your seat, waiting for it all to come apart. It never does.

(x) “Boyhood”. By 2014, CGI effects had reached such a high degree of sophistication that there was virtually nothing that couldn’t be faked on-screen, so director Richard Linklater branched off in a different direction altogether: he went back, again and again, filming scenes with his cast for a full twelve years, writing in new situations depending on what had been happening to them in real life in the meantime. The result is — like just about every other film in this list — utterly unique, and will inspire filmmakers for generations to come. This, and “Russian Ark”, are the only 21st-century films in this list, and “Boyhood”, with its long shooting schedule, practically started in the twentieth! So this doesn’t say much for recent movies, does it?

Does it bother you when a different actor is brought in to play the role of a TV character (such as the two actors who played Darren on Bewitched)?

I guess so, because your suspension of disbelief is abruptly interrupted, and suddenly you’re thinking, not of the character, but of the “back story” behind the sudden change. “Bewitched” seemed to have more than its share of sudden replacements of major characters; I recall that Alice Pearce’s character abruptly disappeared from the series, and, just as abruptly, a new character appeared, explained away as her “sister” who was visiting. Of course, the two sisters were, as far as their function in the show was concerned, two peas in a pod, but this viewer, at least, kept wondering what had happened to wonderful Alice Pearce (she had died of cancer; her contribution to the show was eventually rewarded by a posthumous Emmy award); and that wondering can’t but help affect your reaction to the show.

Which celebrity do you think has a strange past?

Robert Mitchum often played anti-heroes who always found themselves at odds with the rest of society; his early life made him well-qualified for this persona. At age 14, having been expelled from school, he was arrested for vagrancy and actually put on a chain gang!

Do you think celebrities think they are better than others?

Yes, and not just in our modern world; it’s been the case for thousands of years! In the heyday of the Roman Empire, a conquering hero was traditionally given a triumphal parade through the city; as part of this, the hero was accompanied throughout the procession by a slave, whose sole duty was to continually whisper in the hero’s ear the phrase, “Remember, thou art mortal”.

Perhaps you HAVE to think you’re just a little more “worthy” than everyone else to BE a celebrity. It’s an arrogance that can sometimes lead to appalling treatment of others (check out Shirley MacLaine’s story about how comedian Jerry Lewis behaved on-set to his co-stars and directors, as she watched, aghast), but is, at other times, merely amusing. The story is told that MGM star Ann Miller, who was liked by everyone, was trying to whistle up a taxi, and spied one pulling up nearby for another woman (a “non-celebrity”). Without a moment’s hesitation, she jumped into the passengers’ seat ahead of the other lady, and called back, over her shoulder, consolingly, “It’s okay, Honey, I’m Ann Miller, the movie star!” You couldn’t really hate a woman like that, could you?

What actors and actresses have passed away in their prime?

John Garfield. Back in the forties, he started a whole new trend in leading men — the brooding, rebellious misfit (he starred in “Body and Soul” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, among others) — and his acting style was the inspiration for Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Warren Beatty. However, when he was thirty-eight and at the height of his fame he was accused by the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee of being a Communist sympathiser; he was summoned before the committee and ordered to ‘rat’ on other people in the movie industry who were also Communists. He denied the charge and refused to name names, and was, as punishment for his refusal to co-operate, blacklisted: no one would give him a job. Watching his career slip away from him, he went into a deep depression and his health started to fail. A year later he was dead from a heart attack.

What are some interesting details about the classic film Casablanca?

Just about all the important details have already been mentioned; here are one or two others:

The ending gave the scriptwriters a lot of trouble; they couldn’t decide whether Ingrid Bergman should wind up with Bogart or whether she should get on that plane. Both endings were written, but when all the early scenes were shot, the actors didn’t know how their romance would turn out. This particularly worried Bergman, who kept pleading (unsuccessfully) to know how it was going to end, so she could use that knowledge in playing her earlier scenes. She was, as a result, never quite happy with how she played the role.

Neither Bogart nor Bergman were first choices for their roles; Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan were announced at one stage, but the director decided that they didn’t look right together in the tests, so that was enough to get them both replaced (it sounds harsh, but you have to admit that Bogart and Bergman look just right and play marvellously together, although Bergman said afterwards that she never really got to know her co-star. This idea of “looking right together” was a luxury studios could afford back in the days when they had a stable of stars at the ready; if you see how ridiculous Marilyn Monroe looks romancing Donald O’Connor in “There’s no Business Like Show Business”, made at a later time when there was less time (and money) for pre-testing, you may feel that there is good reason to revive the idea).

Are there any celebrities that have such little talent, that you can't understand how they became so popular?

Answering that question is a good way to make enemies! I guess, if nothing else, all celebrities have one talent: the talent of conducting themselves in such a way that they are regarded by others as celebrities. Famous for being famous. There are many who seem to have no other discernible talent, but I don’t think I ought to identify my choices right here, because I don’t, at my age, fancy the hate mail from the fans of the person/people I name and shame!

Maybe I can just get out of it by repeating a funny story which I first heard told by the wonderful comedienne Bea Arthur (she swears it’s true; I am doubtful). There was an “actress” some years ago named Pia Zadora, whose movie triumphs included such classics as “Voyage of the Rock Aliens” (apparently her talent was such that she might well have been considered ideal for a film called “Voyage of the Rock Aliens”). Anyway, Miss Zadora hankered to play meatier parts than she was being offered, and found someone brave enough to mount, especially for her, a stage production of “The Diary of Anne Frank”, with herself in the title role (yes, it’s funny already). Miss Arthur says that, on opening night, at the end of the play, when the Nazi stormtroopers burst onto the stage, rifles at the ready, the audience rose as one and yelled, in unison, “She’s in the attic! She’s in the attic!” I don’t know whether the play ever had a second night.

Do you have a favorite child TV actor?

Not any more, because nowadays they are more likely to be seen on television, and I seldom watch television sitcoms or dramas. The last favourite I had from that source was Sarah Hyland from “Modern Family”, but, even in Series 1, she scarcely qualified as a child!

Children in movies so often seem to be either one-shot wonders, or else they grow up so quickly that they’re playing adult roles before you’ve had a chance to become familiar with their work. It was easier back in the days of the studio system, when, once a studio signed a child talent (such as Shirley Temple at Fox or Margaret O’Brien at MGM) they put them in two or three movies a year, so that you were actually able to follow their growing-up on the screen. Often, such as in those two examples, films were built around their talents. But in the sixties, that all started to change, and what you got was a child actor who would impress once and then would maybe not work again for years: Martin Stephens, who played Miles in “The Innocents”, for instance, or Patricia Gozzi, who gave a performance in 1962’s “Sundays and Cybele” that I still remember vividly today. But childhood ain’t what it used to be, and films like “The Exorcist”, “Taxi Driver” and “Pretty Baby” started making viewers more worried about what the child was being subjected to in the name of “art” than how good their performances may have been. You never had to worry about traumatic effects on Margaret O’Brien!

Have you noticed that John Williams used very similar orchestral music for Indiana Jones as with Star Wars?

I think I would be more surprised if the music didn’t sound “familiar”; movie-music composers, right from the beginning of sound, put a recognisable “stamp” on their work, especially if they worked repeatedly in the same genre, and I would imagine that a producer would choose them primarily because that was the “stamp” that he wanted for his movie. Williams, in his later years, worked mainly in the big-budget “comic strip” type movie (for the PG13 audience) which, producers considered, needed a BIG sound with a clearly-recognisable theme running through it, and his success in one of them would make him the logical choice for the next (to give him his due, when he was assigned to a different type of movie — e.g. “Schindler’s List” — he could produce something different but still appropriate).

However, he didn’t always write blockbuster music with the same “peas-in-a-pod” sound; he used to be billed as “Johnny Williams”, and if you listen to his contribution to “Bell, Book and Candle” and  his score for “None But the Brave”, I don’t think you’d be able to find many similarities between those and his later work.

However, for the Star Wars theme you may find similarities to the work of other movie composers: back when the movie was first released, the joke went around that John Williams got his theme for “Star Wars” by getting a copy of “Born Free” (by John Barry) and turning the sheet music upside down. Listen to them together, and you may be inclined to agree!

Are critic reviews and Oscar nominations a better indicator of quality movies over feedback from peers?

I guess it depends who your peers are; if they have exactly the same taste in movies you have, the answer is, you’d probably enjoy films more if you listened to them. But you won’t learn much more about the art of movie making that way; reading the wise words of a good critic (I always read Pauline Kael, and I would commend some of her books to you even today, in spite of the fact that they feature reviews of films from the sixties, seventies and eighties which you couldn’t see even if you wanted to), and then going to see a few of the films he/she recommends, even if your peers wouldn’t be seen within a mile of the theatre, is a good way to increase your knowledge and refine your tastes, so that you’re not just one of the crowd that never really progresses beyond the Marvel-comic-type movies.

That said, I would also tell you not to just listen to all the critics. Nowadays, I find, many critics aren’t very…. well, critical! I knew one critic once who used to review films even if he hadn’t seen them (if he went at all, he’d often sleep through them); he knew what he was going to write, because his publisher didn’t want him to make any waves with the major cinema chains, who were prepared to spend big advertising bucks on his paper as long as they got their “return” in the form of a recommendation… or, at least, not a downright ‘pan’, even when the movie deserved it. Kael, in my judgment, couldn’t be bought, and she merrily heaped dirt all over films such as “The Sound of Music” and “West Side Story” because, quite frankly, she detested them, and was literate enough to make you understand why. And she would also point you towards films so obscure that you’d have to actively go out and hunt them up, if she believed there was special worth in them. Is there anyone with that kind of ethical stance reviewing movies today? I am somewhat doubtful, because, if there is, why aren’t movies better? Why do they seem to get more expensive, but of lesser quality, every year?

You mentioned the Academy Awards. Errors of judgment on the part of Academy members is hardly new… back in the days of the major studios, it was expected that their employees would all “get behind” whichever of their products they decided were Oscar-worthy, and a “conscience vote” cast in favour of the product of a rival studio was grounds for having your option dropped. I don’t know whether it still works like that; when a film like “Twelve Years a Slave” can pick up a best-picture award, I suspect it does; but perhaps there just wasn’t anything better that year. Frankly, I wouldn’t really base my movie-going habits on what the Academy tells me to see…. but perhaps that just makes me cynical.

So my suggestion is, find a critic who seems to at least know more than you and your friends, and be guided by his/her reviews. Read the review carefully and go forearmed: maybe you will see some of what he/she saw in it, and your moviegoing experience will be the richer for it.

What has been the biggest celebrity affair scandal? 

I couldn’t judge the biggest, but I can tell you the saddest: Rita Hayworth, who, before she became a movie star, was Margarita Carmen Cansino, the daughter of the dancing duo Eduardo Cansino Sr, and his wife, Volga. Around the time Margarita was twelve, her father decided that she had become a more-attractive dancing partner than his wife, so she replaced her mother as the female half of the “Dancing Cansinos”, wearing sexy outfits and being introduced on-stage by Eduardo as his “wife”. Sadly, it was revealed many years later, she was being forced to perform that duty off-stage as well as on, and dutifully hushed-up the abuse throughout her early-teen years, and beyond. In fact, I don’t think the scandal ever became public knowledge until Orson Welles, who married her, revealed it to authoress Barbara Leaming, who wrote Hayworth’s biography, “If This Was Happiness” (a reference to Welles’s comment that, during all her problems as a major star in Hollywood (including their marriage and divorce), she commented to him that it was the happiest time of her life. “If this was happiness,” he said, “What must the rest of her life have been like?”)

Which is the happiest movie scene you admire a lot?

 “Spartacus” does not, on the face of it, sound like an obvious choice for inclusion in an answer to this question! But there is “a scene” which I can look at over and over again, because it LOOKS improvised, and the actress in it has a hard time holding in her giggles. Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons are the participants, and there was a rumour that the director (Stanley Kubrick) got Jean Simmons a little “tipsy” before the shoot in order to get the shot he wanted. Whether that’s true or not, she certainly appears to be having a great time, and, as a result, the audience joins in her gaiety. There are not many laughs, I should hasten to add, in the remainder of the film!

What are some remake movies in which the lead gave a better performance than the lead in the original film?

This is a question that one could spend weeks on, because some of the great plays (and screenplays) are filmed many times. But let’s start with the most-obvious example: the original lead in “A Star is Born” (1937) was a very fine actress named Janet Gaynor; but in 1954, Judy Garland put her stamp on the role, and it was a performance for the ages. The film was made again in the seventies, and again in 2018, but Garland has so far blitzed all the competition, and, thanks largely to the strength of her performance, her version is considered “the” classic of the four.

However, another one of my favourite performers, Frank Sinatra, walked through the original “Ocean’s Eleven” without even a trace of energy or interest. It turned out to be such a terrible movie that I was surprised that anyone would bother for even a moment to plan a re-make; however, George Clooney found something of value in it, and, even though the new version is hardly a memorable movie, it was better than the original…. and Clooney’s performance was better than Sinatra’s.

Laurence Olivier won an Academy Award in 1948 for playing the title role in “Hamlet”, but it has been made a couple of times since then, and Kenneth Branagh gave, I feel, a superior reading of the role. While we’re on Shakespeare, how many versions of “Romeo and Juliet” have there been? The first that I remember was the MGM one with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, both of whom were twenty years too old for their roles; subsequent versions have produced better performances in virtually all the leading roles, and, in particular, the 1978 Alvin Rakoff version would seem to stand head and shoulders above the rest, with Celia Johnson (the nurse), Michael Hordern (Juliet’s father), Alan Rickman (Tybalt), and an age-appropriate Rebecca Saire (Juliet).

Kim Darby was the original “True Grit” heroine, but, as good as she was, her replacement in the remake, Haylee Steinfeld, took the performance to a whole new level. Of course, the script of the Coen Brothers’ remake was so much better than the original that practically everyone else in their version was better, too.

Who is a celebrity you used to dislike but has gained your respect over time?

If you mean “respect as a professional” and not respect in any other way, I will nominate Sharon Stone. I saw a few of her early movies, and was pretty disgusted by some of the scenes she had agreed to play on-screen; to put it bluntly, I jumped to the conclusion that playing R-rated scenes would be the only way she could attain her status as a “star”, because she didn’t have any other kind of talent.

Then I saw a movie called “Bobby” (about the assassination of Robert Kennedy), and I noticed her name among the all-star cast list. However, I didn’t recognise her when she came on-screen. I just kept saying, “Who is that actress? She’s terrific!” And she was… among the many stars in that movie, hers was one of the two or three best performances. When I finally found out it was she, I realised that I would have to revise my opinion. I guess that, by playing R-rated scenes, she took a short-cut to “success” (if, by “success” you include “notoriety”), but it seems that, all along, she had the talent to make it, eventually, as an actress by more “regular” methods.

In the same vein, Lady Gaga, with her silly name and sillier costumes, was a performer whose work I dismissed as trivial as a matter of routine; in fact, when Tony Bennett made one of his “duets” albums, and chose to record with her, I wondered how on Earth he could have stepped down that far. Then I heard their duet, and, surprisingly, she was darned good. Soon afterwards, she appeared on the Academy Awards show and did a tribute to Julie Andrews and “The Sound of Music”… and, this time she was better than darned good, she was terrific! And now she has taken on Judy Garland on her home ground, with her remake of “A Star is Born”, and while she may not be a match for Garland (understandably: that 1954 performance may well be the greatest by an actress since the advent of sound), she has certainly proved herself a worthy challenger, and a better-than-competent dramatic actress (I preferred her reading to the Streisand remake). So I will eat my words about her, too; one day, maybe, she will do something GREAT.

What are some of the greatest movie casts of all time? 

I’m sure I have answered an almost-identical question before; anyway, here goes, again. Back in the days of the second World War, it was “standard operating procedure” for the major studios to produce often-patriotic movies in which virtually ALL their top stars appeared in cameo roles. These were, for the most part, musicals, such as Warners’ “Stage Door Canteen” and “Hollywood Canteen”, Paramount’s “Duffy’s Tavern”, and MGM’s “Thousands Cheer” and “Ziegfeld Follies” (which, eventually, wasn’t actually shown until 1946.)

Of course, the minor studios couldn’t hope to match the illustrious roll-call of stars in these movies, but, in 1943, right in the heaviest part of the war (for England, anyway), the many British stars who had come to Hollywood and now were unable to get back home came together at RKO to make the film which would probably top them all for an amazing cast list: “Forever and a Day”, which had no less than 78 stars (all either British or closely connected with the UK), eight directors (only seven — Rene Clair, Edmund Goulding, Cedric Hardwicke, Frank Lloyd, Victor Saville, Robert Stevenson and Herbert Wilcox — actually got screen recognition, as the eighth — British-born Alfred Hitchcock — had to withdraw part-way through and hand his segment to his colleagues to complete) and 21 screenwriters. This film is different from all the others mentioned above, because each of the players (and they included such luminaries as Charles Laughton, Ida Lupino, Ray Milland, Herbert Marshall, Merle Oberon, Claude Rains and Buster Keaton) had a real role (in most of the major studios’ films they played themselves and often just did walk-ons) in a real original story, written by (among others) C.S Forester, John van Druten, Christopher Isherwood and James Hilton. Nothing like this has ever been attempted in the 76 years since.

What actors ruined their careers practically overnight?

There have been several well-known names who have virtually destroyed their own careers through a hedonistic life-style of extravagances and indulgences; but that’s not exactly “overnight”. The HUAC investigations of the early 1950s might come closer to your definition of “practically overnight”: if you refused to co-operate or to “inform” on your colleagues for their possible Communist affiliations, or if you had joined clubs or attended meetings that were, in hindsight, considered sympathetic to Communist ideals, you found yourself “blacklisted”; no one would give you a job. Eventually, with the demise of HUAC, most of the blacklisted actors re-established themselves, although some of them had to leave America and work in Europe to do this (Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles and Paul Robeson were the most conspicuous examples of this). Others had years of unemployment before they gradually re-established their careers and “moved on” (Zero Mostel and poor Betty Garrett, whose only “crime” was that she was married to a man who had refused to co-operate with the committee). Still others — John Garfield, who died of a heart attack at 39, a year after being blacklisted (it was well-known that the stress of his treatment by HUAC sent his health into a downward spiral) and Larry Parks were never able to revive their careers.

Ingrid Bergman was loved by just about everyone in the 1940s, and no breath of scandal had ever undermined the pedestal on which the moviegoing public had placed her. But her saintly image (she actually played St Joan, and a nun) often robbed her of the chance to play “meatier” roles (she had to swap roles with Lana Turner in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” so that she at last got a chance to play a “bad” girl), and she looked around for new horizons. She found them, she thought, in the neo-realistic works of Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and (after sending him a letter praising the film “Open City”, which had made him famous, and expressing a wish to work with him) left the US to collaborate with him on the first of several movies they made together. Their professional partnership led to a romantic relationship, and the birth of their daughter Isabella in Italy so offended the American public that someone in Congress actually took the floor to accuse her of “moral turpitude”, and she was denied re-entry to her home country! This exclusion went on for years, and for a while there she could make films only in Europe (and, naturally, mainly for Rossellini, who seemed to have lost his touch; ironically, as soon as he had a major Hollywood star willing to work with him, his movies abandoned his early neo-realist philosophy and began to emulate the exact Hollywood product from which Bergman had been so anxious to escape!). Her academy award in 1956 for “Anastasia” was the first sign that America might, at last, be willing to forgive and forget; but it, like all her other movies, was made overseas, and, in fact, she never made another movie in the US until “Cactus Flower”, quite near the end of her career.

Has any actor or actress ever turned down a big movie role for a petty reason?

Joan Crawford reportedly turned down the female lead in “From Here to Eternity”, which ended up winning eight Academy Awards, including best picture of the year, because she didn’t think the dresses her character had to wear were sufficiently glamorous for a star of her magnitude. The director, Fred Zinnemann, stood his ground and said that her character, an army-major’s wife, wouldn’t be able to afford the kind of gowns that Crawford had in mind, so she could either like it or lump it. She stepped aside, and Deborah Kerr was given one of the best roles she ever had in her life.

Why do bad movies get Oscar nominations?

Unless you choose to narrow your question down to nominations for best production, you don’t have to like a film to consider it worthy of an Oscar nomination; you have to like the work of a PERSON in the film, whether it be the director, the writer, the cinematographer, the composer, the editor, or a member of the cast.

Even if you’re restricting your question to those movies which gain an award for best picture, the Academy may find that there was enough outstanding work by a sufficient number of craftsmen and artists to ensure that its members (the voters) stayed glued to the screen, even if one or two of the people mentioned above did let the team down so badly that the overall movie turned out to be a failure.

By and large, audiences go to a movie to have a good time, and, for them, a “bad” movie is one which doesn’t deliver that; film-makers, however, look at the individual craftsmen or artists and what they have managed to achieve within the limits imposed on them. So they might feel disposed towards heaping awards on a film which delivered the jolts of pleasure one gets from watching a master at work, even if the film, as a whole, isn’t all that “pleasurable”. Of course, if the artist involved happens to be a working colleague, or a member of the same studio, or someone who is thought to be overdue for a reward, that doesn’t hurt either… which is possibly why, when the votes were counted, “The Greatest Show on Earth” was favoured over “High Noon”, or Grace Kelly (“The Country Girl”) got the nod, while Judy Garland (for her masterwork, “A Star is Born”) did not.

Which celebrity makes an amazing movie no matter how dumb the plot may seem?

I’m a lifelong fan of musicals, especially the musicals that MGM’s Freed Unit produced in the 1930s through to the late 1950s. Even today, I am so besotted with musicals that I can’t let a revival of anything Stephen Sondheim has written pass without chasing it up and taking various children and grandchildren with me.

But there’s a huge difference between the Sondheim musicals (“Sweeney Todd”, “Assassins”, “Gypsy”, “Passion”, “Merrily we Roll Along”, “Follies” and so many more) and the movies the Freed unit was making even before Sondheim was born. Sondheim musicals are ABOUT something; their books are among their strengths. Apart from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, there are no “dumb plots” in Sondheim’s catalogue.

The Freed unit, however, wasn’t usually concerned too much with the plot, which was only put in there to provide a bridge — and as short a one as possible — between the sixteen or eighteen musical numbers which were going to be performed by MGM’s extraordinary roster of talent: Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Frank Sinatra, Cyd Charisse, Howard Keel…. and I could go on and on. All the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland black-and-white musicals seem to have had exactly the same story…. but who cared? What made those two youngsters the most successful team that MGM ever had was their mind-blowing musical and comedy talent; audiences didn’t fill the cinemas for a story: they paid to see Mickey and Judy “do their stuff”. Some MGM musicals (“Ziegfeld Follies”, and Gene Kelly’s “Invitation to the Dance”, for example) didn’t have a plot at all; nobody missed it.

So the answer to your question is, I think, the stars of the musicals and the comedies (let’s give Shirley Temple a mention in here as well, and, of course, the Marx Brothers) of Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the talent on display was, indeed, golden….. even if the plots were as thin as tin foil!

What actors /celebrities over 60 who have aged naturally and still look great?

This is a past actress, not a present one; but in 1991, after 53 years in movies (she was a star in the 1930s, and those with LONG memories may remember her as the female lead in the 1938 “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, opposite Charles Laughton), Maureen O’Hara returned to make a film called “Only the Lonely”, and still looked – and sounded -- wonderful.

When you think of a famous trios, who do you think of first and why?

The Marx Brothers, although they were only a trio quite late in their careers: first, they were a quintet (Groucho, Chico, Harpo. Zeppo, Gummo), and then two of the brothers (Gummo and Zeppo) dropped out of the group; Zeppo, however, was still in all their earliest movies, including their best-ever, Paramount’s pre-code “Duck Soup”, following which the brothers moved to MGM for their most popular movies, including “A Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races”, and he, too, left the group.

Which actors surprised you by being British?

Ida Lupino. She seemed, in her acting roles, the typical American girl of the ‘film noir’ era. Not a trace of accent from the country in which she was born (she was a Londoner).

What are the weirdest scenes an actor or actress has been asked to do?

Scarlett Johansson had nothing but “weird scenes” to do in “Under the Skin”, a 2013 science-fiction film whose plot is almost impossible to summarise (Wikipedia gives it a valiant try, and its synopsis is worth a read). Johansson was, it seems, heavily committed to this strange movie, which took something like four years from casting to completion; certainly, it was a change of pace for her! Some of her scenes were unscripted: she simply drove around in a van with a hidden camera in the back, and tried to pick up men who happened to be walking alone along the street; at the end of the “encounter” the men were told it was a movie, and they could either allow the footage to be used in the film, or request that it be discarded (there was an incentive for them to say “yes”, however: if the encounter proved interesting, the men were offered “real” roles (i.e. scripted) in subsequent scenes written into the movie just for them). If you enjoy movies that are unlike anything you have ever seen (or if you want to see full-frontals of a major Hollywood star), you may actually like this peculiar offering; not many people did, however, and, in spite of Johansson’s name above the title, it has yet to recover its production costs.

Who is currently the best working actor/actress, in your opinion?

John Malkovich might be a good choice here, even though I really don’t know if he is working in the movies nowadays (certainly, he was in a recent TV miniseries). I always like to see his name in the cast list because I know he’s going to take chances……. he acts like Mel Torme used to sing! “Unpredictable” would be a word for both of them

What, in your opinion, is positively the most horrible film ever made?

I’m presuming that, by “horrible”, you don’t mean “horrifying”, so I am thinking through ALL the appalling films I have had to sit through, and not just those in the horror genre. The answer came amazingly swiftly: “Caligula”. I confess that I only saw half of it, so it’s possible that it suddenly turned into a masterpiece in the second half (I doubt it, however). I had found a video copy in a garage sale, and because it was a rarity (the film was banned in Australia), had decided it was at least worth a couple of hours. I was wrong. An hour into it, I decided that no movie is worth THAT kind of feeling (that you’ve been degraded), so I not only removed it from the video player: I removed it from the world, with a pair of scissors followed by throwing the pieces into the garbage… which is an appropriate resting place for it.

How do child actors feel about being in rated R movies?

Probably annoyed that they can’t go to see themselves until they’re 18!

I think it’s important to remember that children don’t sign up for R-rated movies, because no movie is R-rated until it’s signed, sealed and delivered. The children sign up for a role in a movie, without knowing what the rating is going to be (although the parents of young Linda Blair must have had a pretty good idea of the rating “The Exorcist” was likely to receive, and would there have been any other rating even conceivable for “Taxi Driver”?) Furthermore, if their parents are prudent and responsible caregivers and not just stage-mothers out to push their children into stardom at any price, the scenes that the children shoot will not be R-rated scenes… or, if they are, there will be a lot of careful editing and use of body doubles so that what you see on the screen is not what the child had to actually put up with during the shooting.

In the USA, at any rate, film shootings involving children are carefully regulated and supervised; the occasional prosecutions of producers who put children into inappropriate situations almost-always occur in other countries. That said, I don’t know how anyone, especially the child’s mother, could have sanctioned some of the scenes Linda Blair was required to do in “The Exorcist”, and Jodie Foster had one scene in “Taxi Driver” that, reportedly, sent its studio into damage control, with much frantic discussion about whether it could release the film with or without the sound track (at one notorious point in the movie) of an opening zipper (in Australia, that sound was removed, so audiences just MIGHT have remained unaware of what was supposed to be taking place).

You’d have to ask Linda Blair and Jodie Foster (and Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby”, another movie that just couldn’t be made like that today) how they felt about those particular near-breaches of the code… if I recall, Jodie, at least, has admitted that she was extremely upset over some of the scenes she was required to do. But at least she didn’t have to go and watch herself on screen for five more years, and couldn’t have, anyway, even if she had wanted to!

Do actresses/actors sleep with directors?

Anne Bancroft once admitted to it.

Expressing interest in the part of the Mother Superior in “Agnes of God”, she was told that she clearly wouldn’t be convincing because she looked too young and too beautiful in her previous movie, “To Be or Not to Be”. Her retort was that the reason she looked so ravishing in that film was “because I spent three hours in Make-Up each morning and was sleeping with the director”. The director (unfortunately for the gossip-mongers) was Mel Brooks, her long-time husband (their son had a small but significant role in “To Be or Not to Be”, also).

She got the part of the Mother Superior.

What are some movies that aren’t popular but have great ratings?

Well, there are thousands of these, because what the critics find worthy of praise — a literate script; imaginative directorial choices; and innovative camerawork, lighting, and editing — are often not what the public goes to the movies to see, which is (as one moviegoer once pointed out to me when I was selecting movies for a rural community) “a good old shoot-em-up”. Regrettably (for it seems to me that movies should aspire to be better, not just to make more money), many reviewers nowadays seem to be bowing to the inevitable and just heaping praise on every movie that the public is likely to queue to see anyway: I have in front of me right now DVD copies of two movies I am trying to give away to someone I don’t particularly care for, since I thought both films were fairly contemptible; but both distributors were able to quote highly-positive comments to put on the package, and I am sure both made millions of dollars (Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” (which is not about Robin Hood at all) is described by one critic as “breathtaking” (maybe they were referring to its audacity in stealing the name); Wolfgang Peterson’s “Troy” was lauded, apparently, by the Chicago Tribune (no less!) as “stunning, raging excitement, visual grandeur, and dramatic intelligence”; I am still pondering over what “dramatic intelligence” might possibly mean in a film mainly composed of noisy swordfights and CGI gore).

Back in Pauline Kael’s day, critics looked for higher aspirations (and achievements) in movies, even the ones that didn’t cost a hundred million dollars, and hopefully critics like Kael inspired producers and directors to “lift their game”. However, I am digressing… you asked for “some great movies”, not a rant. OK, here are just two, one very old and one reasonably new: “Citizen Kane”, now widely acknowledged as the greatest movie ever made in America, did not actually start to show a profit until some twelve years after its release in 1941; “Locke”, from 2014 or 2015, came and disappeared virtually in the same week, since no one wanted to see it; but reviews gave it five stars out of five, and it deserved every one of them.

How come Woody Allen hasn’t been shunned more vehemently?

I guess you have to keep in mind the famous quote of the studio head (I think it might have been Harry Cohn at Columbia) who, having fired someone who had in some way offended him, gave the instruction, “Never let that bum back here on the lot… unless we need him!” The point is that, whether you like him or not as a person, Woody Allen makes movies that win both money and awards. He shoots economically and his productions usually run smoothly. He turns in a prestige product which makes his releasing studio look good. His track record as a writer/director/performer is, in the long run, all that counts with the money men.

Which child actor did not live up to his/her potential?

I expect you mean “potential in movies”, because quite a few outstanding child stars simply packed up and left Hollywood without really exploring the possibilities of an adult acting career, preferring instead to strike out in new areas. The classic example here would surely be Shirley Temple Black, who, after adolescence, found the movies she was being offered were less and less to her liking, and moved on… but not into oblivion, by any means! The remarkable Patricia Gozzi, who made such an impact in “Sundays and Cybele”, which she made at eleven, appeared (if memory serves) in only two further movies, but carved out a very successful business career for herself. Young Sharyn Muffett was top-billed at ten years old (and deserved to be, as she “carried” the movie) in “Child of Divorce”, but we’ll never know if she could have continued her career as an adult actress with the same degree of success, because she simply walked away to concentrate on more important (or rewarding) pastimes.

Relatively few — one of the sad exceptions was Bobby Driscoll, the Disney star who, reportedly, was dropped by his studio because of severe acne, and never was able to “find his feet” in the outside world — are considered unemployable in the movie industry as adults (if acting is no longer a viable option, they can always move into directing, as did Ronny Howard), and in most cases their early “retirement” is just a desire to try their wings in another field of employment; and their early success in the movies is probably a good indicator of success in whatever career they decide to enter (so, if you’re in England and you need to consult an osteopath, Dr Mark Lester might be a good choice, and you can talk to him about the time he played “Oliver”!)

What actors or actresses went off script to make their scene even better?

If the stories are to be believed, this happens more often than most people realise. Established actors are often highly critical of the lines that have been written for them, and if you have enough “clout”, you can often persuade a not-too-secure director into allowing you to write your own. Orson Welles, as an actor, was famous for writing his own speeches, even though, as a director, he would probably have refused his actors the same privilege (not quite true… he did allow an improvisation by Joseph Cotten in “Citizen Kane”, and even smiles on-camera at Cotten’s ingenuity). Mae West wrote better for Mae West than most of the hired writers of her scripts; most of the lines that got the most laughs in her movies were supplied by her.

But these were BIG names, in their time; even newcomers can sometimes convince a director that they “know” their character so well that they don’t need to say the words written on the page. Meryl Streep, for example, was right at the beginning of her career when she made “Kramer vs Kramer”; the courtroom speech she made at the movie’s climax was her own improvised idea of what the character she played would have said in that situation. The Academy, it seems, agreed with her; she won the Oscar for that performance. In “When Harry Met Sally”, the unpredictable Billy Crystal said, mid-scene, something so unexpected (and not part of the script) that Meg Ryan stopped and looked to the director, expecting him to yell “cut!”…. you can see her do it in the movie: director Rob Reiner was too canny to stop Crystal when he was all fired up!

Finally, the most astonishing seven-and-a-half minutes of “acting” you are ever likely to see was an unscripted scene, done on one take, in the 1963 film “I Could Go on Singing”: unable to find much of worth in the script that was handed to them, Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde met privately to work out what THEY wanted from the scene; the following morning, Dirk Bogarde took the director aside and said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but just don’t yell “cut”!” To his credit, Ronald Neame didn’t, and the result was possibly the most extraordinary piece of self-revelation by a major star ever caught on camera… and in wide-screen Technicolor! For this reason alone, the film remains a treasure for the ages.

What were the best conversations in film history?

Best conversations? “All About Eve”, written by Joseph L Mankiewicz, contained about two hours’ worth of them! That’s all the film is, really: two hours of talk. But it’s talk written by one of the best screenwriters ever to come out of Hollywood, and it’s talk delivered by Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter…. to name just some of the cast. I fear that, in the cinema world of 2019, it wouldn’t even get a release, because talk seems to be out of fashion, and action and CGI effects are the essential elements which keep cinemagoers awake and in their seats; it is, however, the most fun I have had watching any movie, and the dialogue doesn’t seem to get stale after two dozen viewings. I looked up Youtube to see if I could do what the other respondents to this question did, and paste in a scene for your consideration; but, looking at what was on offer, I decided that choosing one out of the bunch would do an injustice to all the others. You’d have to watch the whole movie…. and you should!

Which celebrity has had the longest career?

I note you ask for the longest career, and not the longest life; in this case, I would nominate Mickey Rooney. He made his first (of more than 300) movies (half a dozen of them, all as “Mickey McGuire”) in 1927, and his last (one of the “Night at the Museum” series) in 2014. I will now wait for someone to find a celebrity who can beat that record.

Who's the least talented actor you’ve ever seen in a film?

Tommy Sands. He was a pop singer of the late fifties; like many other pop singers of the time, had a minor movie (“Sing, Boy, Sing”) built around him, and the fact that he couldn’t act didn’t bother anyone (especially the teenage girls who were his fans). But he married Frank Sinatra’s daughter, and Sinatra decided to give his son-in-law’s career a boost by giving him a fat part in a major movie (“None but the Brave”) which Sinatra’s company was preparing. This was the film in which Sinatra not only starred but was also producer and director, so I guess there was no one to whisper in the old man’s ear that his son-in-law was making a Holy Show of himself…. or maybe (as some uncharitable people thought) this was Sinatra’s “grand plan” after all, to allow Sands to humiliate himself so much that the Sands’ marriage would collapse along with Tommy’s career. Whatever the motive, Sinatra’s otherwise-well-meaning movie (which was, for its time, quite innovative in its approach to its subject) turned out to be the main casualty, as Tommy’s ludicrous performance reduced audiences to laughter. The movie is now quite hard to find (although reviews of it, and of Sands’ performance, are still all over the internet)…. and, yes, the marriage foundered soon afterwards (but, I’m sure, for quite different reasons!)

Which movie do you like to re- watch and why?

Dozens! A truly great movie is the work of geniuses, and who could get tired of watching geniuses do their thing? “All About Eve” is quite simply the best-written movie I have ever seen, and every year I find an excuse to sit back and just listen to those great lines. “A Star is Born” (the 1954 version) had not only the best performance by an actress that I have ever experienced, but also featured the best vocal performances I have ever watched; “I Could Go On Singing”, with the same star, had some acting scenes and vocal performances that almost topped it, and although the story itself is a little “soapish”, I never get tired of “drinking in” its wonders and being thankful to the director who let it all happen. “Strangers on a Train” is so much fun that I just sit and chuckle all the way through… and Robert Walker’s performance surely is the stuff of genius. Watching “Sunset Boulevard” is like eating a sumptuous feast in every frame. “The Heiress”, “Meet Me in St Louis”, “Rear Window”, “The Innocents”, “Detective Story”, “The Band Wagon”, “Brief Encounter”, “Night of the Hunter”, “The Court Jester”…. not too many months pass by before I decide to revisit each of these. Hollywood’s golden years were, quite simply, golden!

Has an actor or actresses ever quit halfway through making a Hollywood Movie?

Quitting mid-film — quite different from getting fired or having to withdraw through illness — is not a minor issue, as it means breaking a contract and taking the risk of never being offered another one; so I would expect that this would be a very rare event, even though in the days when each studio “owned” its stable of stars and could, therefore, quietly move a player from one production to another, it may well have happened, and few outsiders would ever know. The great comedienne Judy Holliday had had a personal triumph with “Bells Are Ringing” on Broadway, and agreed to star in the 1960 movie version, directed by Vincente Minnelli. As the movie progressed, however, Miss Holliday became increasingly distressed, both with how it was turning out and with her own performance; she finally went to the producer, Arthur Freed, and begged to be released from her contract, even offering to pay from her own pocket the costs incurred up until that point. She had even lined up her preferred replacement, the young Shirley MacLaine. But a mid-movie “swap” was, simply, too big a deal for even MGM to consider, and she was persuaded (forced?) to stay with the production (sadly, she never made another movie; everyone’s loss).

What is the earliest movie worth watching for itself and not simply for the sake of history?

Richard Cownie’s answer is so wise, and so comprehensive, that I don’t think there’s much I can say to add to it; like Richard, I think Buster Keaton’s movies stand up brilliantly ninety years later (he was the best of all of the “silent” comedians, and that’s really saying something); they can be enjoyed without ever musing on their “place” in movie history. Similarly, Laurel and Hardy’s “Liberty”, made in 1929, is one I still mention when people talk about the funniest movie ever made; there may be others as good, but there’s never been one better. F W Murneau’s “Sunrise” was made in 1927, but it must have been the “Citizen Kane” of its day, and even today you watch it and gasp at the audacity of the director’s vision; it leaves just about all the movies being made today in the shade. Apart from these two additions (of which I hope Richard Cownie would approve), all I can say is… read the previous answers.

Do any actors/actresses find it more gratifying to play the heel or bad guy?

I expect it depends on the type of role they are usually offered. Every clown, they say, longs to play Hamlet, and the reverse is probably true, also. Thus we have the interesting case of MGM’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, in which Ingrid Bergman was contracted to play the “nice” girl (the character-type with which she had been identified since “Intermezzo”), and Lana Turner was cast, as usual, as the “bad” girl whose life is governed by her carnal desires. Both girls looked at each other’s roles and longed for the change of pace — especially Bergman, who had never really been given a chance to show her range as an actress. So they talked the studio into letting them swap roles, and the result was a refreshing change for the two actresses AND their legion of fans. Tyrone Power, also, put his own money into “Nightmare Alley”, because the leading role was a carnival con-man who destroys the lives of just about everyone he comes in contact with; no one at Fox had ever thought of him in those terms!

Which actor/ actress took a role, which he/ she should have turned down?

Maureen O’Hara was a fine actress (and she could sing, too), and made a perfectly respectable job of two pirate pictures, “The Spanish Main” (1945) and “Against All Flags” (1952). Since they were seven years apart, and she had made several “high-tone” movies in the years between (including “Miracle on 34th Street”, “Rio Grande” and “The Quiet Man”), she must have thought that there was little chance of her being “typecast”. Not so, it seems; when, in 1956, 20th Century-Fox was preparing its big-budget musical “The King and I” (from the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein Broadway hit), Maureen was deemed perfect for the part of Anna Leonowens (and, unlike the eventual star, Deborah Kerr, she wouldn’t have had to be dubbed). She was the front-runner, and it would have been the crowning glory of her film career; but when told of Fox’s choice, Richard Rodgers said, “The Pirate Queen as Mrs Anna??”, and vetoed her on the spot. She probably wished she hadn’t agreed to TWO pirate movies, or, if she had, that she hadn’t been QUITE so memorable in them! I don’t think she ever got a chance to do a musical, even though she did sing in “The Quiet Man”, and cut a well-received LP album in the late 1950s.

Which actor in Hollywood has the most integrity?

Congratulations, Tim; you may be the first person in history ever to use the words “Hollywood” and “integrity” in the same sentence! I don’t know the best answer to your question…. the name that first sprang to my mind was Liza Minnelli, who has consistently made other people’s lives easier for them, at her own expense if necessary, and always by keeping as quiet about it as possible; but, in spite of her Academy Award, she is not really what you’d call a Hollywood star, since the career she has carved out for herself is primarily on the Broadway and concert stage.

Gregory Peck, perhaps, might be a reasonable choice, for several well-publicised instances of good old-fashioned human decency and a modesty uncommon among movie stars. A good example might be his promotion of the career of newcomer Audrey Hepburn when she was co-starring with him in “Roman Holiday”; as the only “big name” in the movie, Peck’s contract provided for a sole above-the-title credit, with Audrey’s name beneath the title as a featured player. Watching her work, however, he tore up the contract and insisted she be equally-billed with him, above the title; for years afterward he insisted that this was just common sense, and not generosity (“I could see this girl was going to win the Academy Award, and then we’d all look like fools”), but it was typical, it seems, of the actor who credited his own Academy Award (as Atticus Finch) to Harper Lee’s writing rather than his own skill.

What actors found love in the movie they were filmed in?

You will get scores of answers here, as actors are exactly like everyone else: they choose their partner from the pool of people they mix with. Just as an example (but an important one, as this union produced a very special child!), Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli met while preparing the movie “Meet Me in St Louis”; “preparing”, because Judy, at first, refused to do the movie, and it was only after listening to Minnelli’s vision for it that she relented. Daughter Liza always says she was rather fortunate because she could “revisit”, whenever she chose, the exact moment that her father fell in love with her mother; and you can see it, too, when you watch the movie and see how lovingly he lights her, and frames her, as she sings “The Boy Next Door”.

What are some movies that aren’t popular but have great ratings?

Well, there are thousands of these, because what the critics find worthy of praise — a literate script; imaginative directorial choices; and innovative camerawork, lighting, and editing — are often not what the public goes to the movies to see, which is (as one moviegoer once pointed out to me when I was selecting movies for a rural community) “a good old shoot-em-up”. Regrettably (for it seems to me that movies should aspire to be better, not just to make more money), many reviewers nowadays seem to be bowing to the inevitable and just heaping praise on every movie that the public is likely to queue to see anyway: I have in front of me right now DVD copies of two movies I am trying to give away to someone I don’t particularly care for, since I thought both films were fairly contemptible; but both distributors were able to quote highly-positive comments to put on the package, and I am sure both made millions of dollars (Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” (which is not about Robin Hood at all) is described by one critic as “breathtaking” (maybe they were referring to its audacity in stealing the name); Wolfgang Peterson’s “Troy” was lauded, apparently, by the Chicago Tribune (no less!) as “stunning, raging excitement, visual grandeur, and dramatic intelligence”; I am still pondering over what “dramatic intelligence” might possibly mean in a film mainly composed of noisy swordfights and CGI gore).

Back in Pauline Kael’s day, critics looked for higher aspirations (and achievements) in movies, even the ones that didn’t cost a hundred million dollars, and hopefully critics like Kael inspired producers and directors to “lift their game”. However, I am digressing… you asked for “some great movies”, not a rant. OK, here are just two, one very old and one reasonably new: “Citizen Kane”, now widely acknowledged as the greatest movie ever made in America, did not actually start to show a profit until some twelve years after its release in 1941; “Locke”, from 2014 or 2015, came and disappeared virtually in the same week, since no one wanted to see it; but reviews gave it five stars out of five, and it deserved every one of them.

Who is considered the best movie star of all time? 

Clark Gable was referred to as “the king” by both fans and colleagues for a sizable part of his long career, so I guess he would be as good a choice as any. He would, however, have a lot of competition from the studios’ stables of stars during Hollywood’s “golden years” (for instance, Bogey, Garbo, “Duke” Wayne, Judy Garland, and Bette Davis might all qualify), so I don’t think you will get an authoritative answer to this question. And this is only talking about Hollywood movies; England, France, Germany and Italy also had their “top” stars. And we have had movies now for more than a century!

Which celebrities have aged well, in your opinion?

You’d have to give a mention to Tony Bennett, surely. He recently (2016) released his 90th-birthday concert CD, and he is still going out there, live and unprotected, and taking chances by doing the songs that were stretching his range and lung power fifty years ago! He looks wonderful — not “young” or “made-up”, just “wonderful”, like a man at peace with himself and the world. He has steadfastly rejected the urge to “get with it” and reach down, for his material, to the musical garbage that constitutes so much of the repertoire of performers in the 21st century; instead, he is keeping alive (almost single-handedly, now that Barbara Cook has left us) the great popular and show songs of the golden age of popular music: his repertoire is full of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Kern and Hammerstein, Harold Arlen and ‘Yip’ Harburg, and Johnny Mercer. Right up there with Sinatra, Garland, and Ella Fitzgerald, he has, by sheer staying power and good taste, become one of the towering giants of show business…. but a gentle and humble giant who seems more interested in what he can give than what he can receive. We are lucky to have had him.

What are the most memorable final roles by famous actors?

There have been quite a few! The great Edward G Robinson was near death, and knew it (as did everyone else in the cast) when he made “Soylent Green” in 1973, and the director gave his character a long and moving death scene which was Robinson’s fond farewell to the movie world. Sir Ralph Richardson was given a similar extended scene for his “death” in the 1984 film “Greystoke”; his actual death followed very soon afterwards, so his Academy Award nomination was announced posthumously.

Spencer Tracy was so ill at the time that “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was getting underway that the producer/director (Stanley Kramer) and female lead (Katharine Hepburn) had to put their own salaries up as guarantees before the insurance companies would give the film the go-ahead. Tracy came through, and was rewarded by his grateful co-workers with a scene that is a dream for any actor: a long stretch of dialogue which is his and his alone, and in which he settles, authoritatively and wisely, all the contentious issues raised in the movie (it looks like a single shot, but in fact, I read, it was grafted together from many “takes”, with reaction shots from his co-stars inserted whenever his energy flagged and he had to take a break).

But my vote for the most memorable final scene would have to be Robert Donat in “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness” (1958): during a long and arduous schedule his already-poor health deteriorated markedly, to the point where they had to have medical aid standing by at all times. His very final scene takes place around a table with (among others) his co-star, Ingrid Bergman, who adored him. At the end of the scene, he looks around at everyone and delivers (with obvious difficulty) the line, “We shall not meet again, I think. Farewell, old friends.” Bergman’s reaction is, quite clearly, a response to the “real” situation, and not the scene.

What actor/actress made the most unusual career change after "retiring" from acting?

Betty Hutton, star of “Annie Get your Gun” and “The Greatest Show on Earth”, and for years one of Paramount’s top-grossing stars, was known for her madcap, over-the-top performances which exhausted audiences faster than they exhausted her; when she retired from show business she took a job which couldn’t have been further-removed from the image she had created in her years as a star: to quote Wikipedia, “Hutton converted to Roman Catholicism and took a job as a cook at a rectory in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. She made national headlines when it was revealed she was working in a rectory.”

What bad movie is actually actually a masterpiece? How so?

I guess that if we take the word “masterpiece” to mean the best single work by a creator (whether we’re talking movies, art, architecture, fashion, or cake decorating), then a bad film can be a “masterpiece” if the director has never made anything better. Thus, “All That Heaven Allows” might be considered Douglas Sirk’s “masterpiece”, even though few moviegoers would argue that it’s a great, or even good, movie! So, I guess, the idea here is to pick a really bad director and see if you can find one movie he made that was just short of being a stinker. Voila! A bad film that is a “masterpiece”!

What are the chances of making it as a famous actress in Hollywood if you’ve got looks, talent and willpower?

I was tempted to be facetious, and say something like, “About as good as the chances of Meryl Streep coming on to this page and telling you how to do it.” But why should I be a killjoy? SOME people with the looks, the talent and the willpower DO make it, and if you have all of those, why shouldn’t you follow your dream? My daughter, in Australia, had wanted to be a dancer since she was six years old; while she was still in school, her idol, Chita Rivera brought her show out here, and I took my girl to see her. Afterwards she had a long talk with Miss Rivera (who is just the loveliest and most encouraging lady you could ever hope to meet!), and her advice was, “Don’t give up on your dream”. Well, that was all my daughter needed, and today she’s still earning her living as a dancer, even though she still isn’t famous (at 25), and nobody has invited her to Hollywood. But she IS living her dream (and loving it!), she’s keeping body and soul together, and she has never forgotten that meeting with Chita Rivera. So, my advice is, go out and give it a go! Just be aware that it’s about as likely as Meryl Streep coming on here as your next respondent! Oops! I said it after all!

What Academy Award is not given but you think is a critical aspect of film work should be an award category?

They already give two awards for screenwriting — original, and adapted from another source — and I have long thought that the awards for best actor and actress should also be divided into two, so that there was a special category for actors who bring their “hit” stage performances to the screen. Many of these performances have been excellent — and I am thinking right now of Judy Holliday, who was given the award for “Born Yesterday”, thus depriving Gloria Swanson for “Sunset Boulevard” AND Bette Davis for “All About Eve” — but bringing to the screen a stage performance you have had a chance to fine-tune for months — maybe even years — in front of live audiences, is not quite the same feat as having to build a totally original performance out of a script, as Misses Swanson and Davis did.

So, I wouldn’t have denied Rex Harrison his Oscar for “My Fair Lady”, in a part he’d been playing in New York and London for years; he gave us the benefit of that experience, and it was a joy to watch. But he edged out Peter Sellers in “Dr Strangelove”, and, to be honest, that ORIGINAL performance is probably even better-regarded today than Harrison’s. And, in 1956, Yul Brynner could still have won his Oscar without having to edge out James Dean and Kirk Douglas.

With this additional award, Marlon Brando might well have won his first Oscar a couple of years earlier, for “A Streetcar Named Desire”, without having to compete with the winner that year, Humphrey Bogart (for “The African Queen”). And Robert Preston might have been able to pick up an Oscar for “The Music Man” without having to be thrown into the ring with Gregory Peck (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) and Peter O’Toole (“Lawrence of Arabia”).

Every year sees performances shipped from the New York or London stage to the sound stages of Hollywood — 2016’s “Fences” is a good example, with both Denzel Washington and Viola Davis reprising their stage roles — so there should be no lack of nominees for this “new” pair of categories… and, in the case of Viola Davis, it may mean that she could have won an award as best actress (since she had a VERY major part in the movie!) instead of having to settle, somewhat arbitrarily (so as not to put her up against Meryl Streep and Emma Stone), for “supporting”!

What is the worst movie made by an Academy Award winning actor or actress?

Lots of great answers here, but everyone has seemed to overlook one of the most distinguished film and stage actors of the 20th century, Sir Laurence Olivier. He must have been trying to raise money for a London stage production when, in 1978, he agreed to star in “The Betsy”, which one critic described as “stupendously bad and often unintentionally funny.” Of Lord Olivier, all the critics had to say was that he “is as bad as everyone else”. The play he was perhaps trying to finance must have been a massively expensive one, because just three years later he turned up in “Inchon”, which has distinguished itself on Rotten Tomatoes with a 0% approval rating (not easy to achieve!), and garnered reviews such as “one of the worst films of all time”, “one of the sorriest in movie history” and “a hysterical historical epic”. In this one Lord Olivier played General Douglas Macarthur, and gave, according to the Washington Post “an excruciating yet morbidly fascinating impersonation”. There were no Academy Awards given to either of these two turkeys!

Who’s a famous actor with an interesting background?

How about Tom Neal, star of the ‘film noir’ “Detour” (now considered one of the classic ‘films noir’)? Before he became an actor he was a boxer, and, apparently a good one. Hollywood lured him, but, when he packed, he didn’t leave behind his taste for blood, it seems. When he and fellow-actor Franchot Tone (who had been co-star to Clark Gable and Charles Laughton in “Mutiny on the Bounty”, and was, at one time, husband of Joan Crawford) had an altercation over Tone’s second wife, Barbara Payton (described in one biography as “actress turned prostitute”), Tom Neal beat Tone so badly that he had to be hospitalised (broken nose and cheekbone, plus concussion). Franchot Tone never looked the same again, and had to take lesser “featured” roles from then on. I can’t remember what Tom Neal’s punishment for this act was, but, whatever it was, it was clearly not enough: not too long afterward, following his break-up with Payton, he was arrested and imprisoned for violently killing his third wife.

What Oscar nominated best picture surprised you the most when it did not win?

I followed the Oscars every year from 1952 until I finally kicked the habit in 2014, and just about every year I experienced that feeling of surprise that you talk about. Although, I have to say, that as I grew older and started to realise that you can predict the winners not by looking at the quality of the film but by looking at how much money is put into promoting it, my gasp of surprise turned gradually into something more like a cynical snicker. But I hadn’t learned that in 1952, when I was surprised three times as “The Greatest Show on Earth” was favoured over “High Noon”, “The Quiet Man” and the not-even-nominated “Singing in the Rain”. Ditto in 1959, when “Ben-Hur” got the nod over “The Diary of Anne Frank”, “The Nun’s Story”, and the not-even nominated “Some Like it Hot”. But perhaps the biggest surprise was in 1967, when “Bonnie and Clyde” didn’t win, but “In the Heat of the Night” did. After that, I started to see which way the wind was blowing, so it didn’t surprise me too much when “Terms of Endearment” was honoured over “The Right Stuff” (1983). But the 2014 awards, when “12 Years a Slave” was given the award over fellow-nominees “Nebraska” and “Dallas Buyers Club” (and, I guess, “Locke”, which was better than any of them and didn’t even get a nomination) that finally did it for me. In a single lifetime, one can take just so many surprises.

Tom Hanks has paid for everyone's lunch at the fast food chain in Fontana. Do you think that other famous actors/actresses need to follow same attitude of being swell people in real life?

What makes you think they don’t? The only difference between famous actors/actresses and yourself is that they are being continually hounded by the press; if they are caught doing a kind or selfless act, that is worth a paragraph on page 17, while a mean or selfish act is worth the front page for the next two days. Tom Hanks was somewhat lucky that this act of goodwill was reported so extensively (not that this devalues his gesture)!

What is the most peaceful movie scene?

 

That’s a hard one! If you asked “which is the most scary”, you would have had more than a hundred responses by now! My answer is just to start the ball rolling: how about the dance number in the church grounds in “Funny Face”, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn dancing (in soft-focussed VistaVision) to music by George and Ira Gershwin (“He Loves and She Loves”), and swans swimming lazily by in the background? Everything in the shot, and on the soundtrack, works to lull you into the cosy feeling of knowing what Heaven must be like.

 

Who sang the theme song in the James Bond Movie 'From Russia with Love'?

Not an authoritative answer, because the person who sings the title track in the movie isn’t always the one who has the hit record with it…. but certainly Matt Monro has been associated with the song since its earliest days, and I expect it was he who would have sung it behind the title. The most interesting thing about the song, I think, is its composer: Lionel Bart, most famous for writing that marvellous score for “Oliver” (but not averse to “writing down” for a pop hit, so he also composed “Little White Bull” for Tommy Steele, and “Living Doll” for Cliff Richard)

Is Mowgli a real life movie?

Well, it has some real actors in it, playing on-screen human beings; but I fear if one were to balance the “real” scenes and the CGI scenes, humanity would not be the winner! There have, however, been at least two real-life versions of Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”: the first, starring the popular Indian actor Sabu, in 1942, and another (from Disney, who had previously made a full-length animated feature which had turned it into a musical), starring Jason Scott Lee, in 1994. But then CGI entered the picture, and the line between what is real and what has been added by computer has become increasingly blurred (but is in direct proportion to the time it takes me to stand up and walk out of the movie… which means, of course, that I am answering your question about “Mowgli” without having seen more than the trailer.)

Has there ever been one single scene that ruined a movie for you?

Well, this isn’t really an answer to your question, because it isn’t a scene, it’s just one shot. And it didn’t ruin the movie, it just ruined the scene, pulling you out of the story and making you feel shocked that a movie that seems to have done everything right for a whole two hours can suddenly risk it all with an appalling directorial decision right at the climax. It’s “Dead Man Walking”, directed by the excellent Tim Robbins, and boasting great performances by the two leads, Sean Penn (as a convict awaiting execution for a senseless double homicide/rape) and Susan Sarandon (as a Catholic Nun who, while visiting him in the weeks prior to execution, talks to him of redemption and convinces him to accept responsibility for his crime). The execution, with Sarandon present, eventually takes place, as it must (it’s a true story): it’s by lethal injection, administered to Penn who is tied to a specially-constructed table. Robbins’ camera suddenly sweeps up for an overhead shot, looking down at Penn, and the audience gasps at an all-too-familiar pose: Penn’s rapist-murderer is positioned as Jesus on the cross. The “gasp” is one of disbelief: Robbins has already spent two hours making us understand that even a character as reprehensible as this is a human being deserving of the same compassion as any other. But now, suddenly, a rapist/murderer is being deified and his executioners are the crucifiers…. and the audacity of such a conceit does real damage to our reaction to the scene.

What movie can you watch more than 5 or more times, over and over again?

Rather than just give a couple of names of movies, I would find it easier to answer by genre: in a word, musicals. Even if you know the plot, in most cases this isn’t why you went to see the movie in the first place. It’s the performance(s) that send you back, again and again, into the theatre: the thrill of seeing dancers who seem to have spent their whole lives on just this one dance, making it an experience to wonder at, and to inspire us to go and do something that might match it; or listening to singers who can, with their voices and their phrasing, transport you to another, better, world. Think of Fred Astaire in the “Limehouse Blues” number in “Ziegfeld Follies”; or Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor dancing “Moses” in “Singing in the Rain”; or the Nicholas Brothers doing that staircase dance which seems to thumb its nose at both gravity and the physical limits of the human body. Think of Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” in “A Star is Born” and “It Never Was You” in “I Could Go on Singing” (or, indeed, just about anything else from any of her movies), Robert Preston performing “Ya Got Trouble” in The Music Man”, or Frank Sinatra singing “The Lady is a Tramp” in “Pal Joey” or “I Fall in Love Too Easily” in “Anchors Aweigh”. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy these a dozen, or even a hundred times? Did “Anchors Aweigh” even have a plot? Who cares? These people are giving us something to enrich our lives, to show us what WE might be capable of, if we were prepared to put in that degree of effort, too. Thank Heaven for the musical!

Have there been any actor, actress, or director fails that ended up making the movie even better?

A crucial scene near the end of Ronald Neame’s 1963 film “I Could Go On Singing” had Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde, the two leads, coming to terms with their relationship, and Judy (as the entertainer who had sacrificed personal happiness for stardom) coming to terms with her career, its rewards, and its obligations. The script, as written, didn’t suit either of the stars, so they went off (to Dirk Bogarde’s house, I read) and worked on something more meaningful. Next day they came on-set and Bogarde advised Neame to just film it, and see what happened. “What happened” was a seven-and-a-half minute “take” — only one — in which the character Judy was playing soon disappeared completely and, in her place, was Judy Garland herself, talking about her career, her music, and her life. Bogarde improvises lines that keep her talking, and the lighting and cameraman move in (somewhat clumsily and conspicuously) for a close-up of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s the highlight of the movie, and, quite possibly, the high-point of the remarkable acting career of “the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century”. Ronald Neame was well-respected for giving his actors their opportunity to bring something more to the role than was written; never, in his illustrious career, did he ever get a pay-off quite as good as this one!

How come Steven Spielberg has won only two Oscars while other, less famous, directors have more than two?

Spielberg is still two up on the one Hollywood director who is arguably even more famous than the three who, as David pointed out above, are ahead of him. Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for best director!

What’s an amazing movie that not many people know about?

1.“Russian Ark”. Just google up some of the reviews; probably the most audacious scheme ever devised for making a motion picture. Made in a single day (as they could only hire the Hermitage Museum for that one day). At least 800 actors (one review says two thousand) in full costume; a camera that roams around some 22 rooms full of priceless treasures, plus corridors, storage areas and outdoor areas; and….. a single “take”. If anyone forgot a line or bumped into the furniture, the deal was that they had to start again (which, in fact, they did, twice). But the third time they got it, all 100-odd minutes of it, and watching them pull it off would be a thrill even without the pleasure to be gained by “visiting” the Hermitage in the easiest and most pleasant way imaginable.

2. “Anne Frank Remembered”. This is a documentary which revisits the story of Anne Frank by bringing together the people (or the descendants of the people) who were part of it, and, as well as allowing them to remember their role in the saga, giving them some surprises right there on camera. For the audience, the biggest surprise comes right near the end, with the appearance, right there in 16mm film, of Anne Frank herself, watching a neighbour’s wedding from a second-storey balcony, back in the days when she was allowed out on a balcony! Everyone in the world, it seems, knows the story of Anne Frank and has been moved by the diary which she produced during her two-and-a-half years in hiding; it follows, then, that everyone in the world should see this film.

Which actor/actress acts great in movies but is a terrible person in real life?

Although I have met a few actors and actresses in my time, usually on a fan/celebrity basis, I would never presume to answer this question from my own experience, because that term “terrible person” is surely the ultimate in subjectivity. However, I once talked to a person who had had lots of experiences with entertainers, as their employee (specifically, their driver), and, in our long talk, your question naturally came up. His driving experience was for literally dozens of entertainers who were visiting Sydney, Australia (I met him when he was driving Charlton Heston, whom he acknowledged as one of the good ones) during the 1950s and early 60s, so the names he dropped are, for the most part, no longer with us. First, the two best: he said that singer Johnnie Ray was unfailingly polite and considerate, and actually called HIM “Sir”! Even more amazing, Frank Sinatra did something for him that no other of the visitors had ever done… when he dropped him at a gathering, Frank said, “Come on, you’re coming in with me,” and proceeded to introduce him, as an equal and not an employee, to everyone at the party! Well, those were the two best-of-the-best. But you asked about the worst-of-the-worst. He said, without doubt the most offensive person he had ever had to drive around was Jerry Lewis, who was arrogant, rude, and openly contemptuous of him and everyone else. Second was — surprisingly — Danny Kaye, who, he said, was always complaining and never satisfied. So the funny men have their not-so-funny side, it seems!

What are the 5 TV shows that you would recommend to everyone in your life to watch?

1. The Judy Garland Show
2. Foyle’s War
3. Columbo
4. Modern Family
5. The World at War.

What are all the movies that badly deserved an Oscar but sadly didn't get it?

There will always be miscarriages of justice when Oscars, or any other annual awards, are handed out, simply because you may get a rash of good movies in one year, and there are bound to be other years in which you can’t even find one that is truly award-worthy. 1939, for instance, is now generally recognised as “the” golden year for movies, with more than a dozen acknowledged “classics”, all worthy of a best-picture Oscar…. but, of course, there was only one award.

Conversely, in 1963, the crop was so poor that Danny Peary, author of the excellent “Alternate Oscars” (which might really be considered a 300-page answer to your question) chose to give no best-picture award at all (the Academy that year settled on “Tom Jones”).

Browsing through Peary’s book, you can see at a glance that Hollywood often shied away from giving Oscars to films that were too far ahead of their time, so there were a lot of maverick auteurs — Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) and Charles Laughton (“Night of the Hunter”) are two obvious choices — whose work was overlooked at the time, but who are now judged, to put it bluntly, to have been robbed.

Add, to those two, Stanley Kubrick for “Dr Strangelove”, Arthur Penn for “Bonnie and Clyde”, Alfred Hitchcock for “Strangers on a Train”, and Fred Zinnemann (for “High Noon”). The films that robbed them of their rightful awards all had one thing in common: they were “safe” films (such as “How Green Was My Valley”, “Greatest Show on Earth” and “An American in Paris”) which did their jobs with the expected craftsmanship of the top Hollywood product…. but avoided, at all costs, the risk of not being understood; they didn’t try to take you anyplace you hadn’t been before. The rule seems to be: the deserving films that “didn’t get through” were the ones that didn’t play by the rules. Those films have to wait a bit longer for their place among the great ones.

Can you give any examples of a child star escaping the industry with some level of success, rather than as just another young victim of Hollywood?

The answers you’ve been given so far have covered, very comprehensively, the child actors who made the transition to adult roles and distinguished careers WITHIN the industry; however, I interpreted your question quite differently. Weren’t you asking about child actors who dropped out of the industry and then went on to distinguish themselves in other fields, not at all related to the movies? Maybe I am reading your question wrongly, but, just in case that’s what you are looking for, I would start the ball rolling with Shirley Temple Black. At one time, when she hadn’t even attained double digits, she was the biggest star in Hollywood; abruptly, having realised that the particular qualities that made her so unique as a child star just couldn’t be taken with her into her young-adult roles, she retired from the industry and made a whole new career for herself in a totally-different field: international diplomacy. She served the US government with distinction as, in turn, Ambassador to Ghana, Czechoslovakia, and as Chief of Protocol of the United States. I am sure there are many others who made their marks in other fields as well…. the qualities that make one outstanding in one field are often readily transferable into another (Tony Bennett, for instance, is a well-known artist, but under a quite-different name; Stephen Sondheim wrote — anonymously, I believe — the cryptic crosswords for the New York Times for many years).

What was Clark Gable like away from the cameras?

Ava Gardner. who co-starred with Gable more than once, had a knack for describing people in a single sentence which captured the essence of their character. When asked about Clark Gable she retorted, “Clark? He’s one of those guys, you say, “Hiya, Clark!“, he’s stuck for an answer!”

Who are your top three film directors of all time? 

The “top two” choice is fairly straightforward: number one would be William Wyler, for the simple reason that every time I list my ten, or twenty, or fifty favourite films, Wyler has more titles in the list than anyone else (“The Heiress”, “Detective Story”, “The Letter”, “The Children’s Hour”, “The Best Years of Our Lives”, “Mrs Miniver”). And number two, for much the same reason, would have to be Alfred Hitchcock: his very late output may have been pretty dismal, but in his “golden years” he directed a string of highly-entertaining movies which seem to be on everybody’s ‘favourites’ list, including mine (“Rear Window”, “Strangers on a Train”, “North by Northwest”, “Vertigo”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”).

It’s choosing the third one that is giving me a hard time. Elia Kazan directed some standouts, but only during a relatively-brief period; he will be remembered, I expect, more for his work on the New York stage than in movies. Stanley Kramer’s films, whether as producer or director, were always interesting and sometimes surprisingly ahead of their time…. he seemed to put profit second, after giving you something to go away and THINK about. Robert Wise isn’t a name on the tip of everybody’s tongue, but his track-record is pretty remarkable: everything from semi-horror, like “The Curse of the Cat People”, to Rodgers and Hammerstein (“The Sound of Music”). And Orson Welles is certainly one of the greatest directors, even though he frequently lost control of his films after shooting (sometimes during!), and they were assembled and edited by people who were not in sympathy with his aims. And there’s Joseph L Mankiewicz, who directed my all-time favourite movie (“All About Eve”) and a cluster of other classics…. but, like Kazan, all over a very brief time-span. Then there’s Vincente Minnelli, whose musicals will live forever, even if some of his non-musical efforts arrived already dead-in-the-water.

That third director is a tough call! But I guess if I had to choose just one, I’d give the nod to Billy Wilder. Like Hitchcock and Minnelli, some of his later output is cringe-worthy, but he had a long turn at bat, and was responsible for a lot of movies that keep cropping up in everyone’s list of favourites: “Ace in the Hole”, “Double Indemnity”, “Sunset Boulevard”, “Some Like it Hot”, “The Apartment”).

Which actors put on good performances despite being the wrong age for their characters?

Julie Harris was in her late twenties when she played the leading role of twelve-year-old ‘Frankie’ Adams in “The Member of the Wedding”. Of course, she had had a bit of practice in the role prior to filming, as she had been the highly-acclaimed star of the Broadway production!

Another interesting “age-anomaly” that comes to mind — though I will leave it to you to decide which actor was the right age and which one the wrong — was the pairing of Jessie Royce Landis and Cary Grant as mother and son in Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest”. They might have been more appropriately cast as brother and sister, since there was a difference of just seven years in their ages (maybe even less, since studios often played ‘fast and loose’ with stars’ dates of birth to keep them ‘bankable’ as romantic leads for a little longer)!

What is the best -old movies vs new movies?

As critic Pauline Kael once pointed out, everyone’s “golden age” of movies is the period just a few years before they were allowed to actually start going to the cinema. You saw all those titles and posters, but you never actually saw any of those movies.

The chances are, then, that the answer to your question will depend largely on the age of the responder. My own “golden age” was the period from the end of WW2 until about 1955, and, therefore, my answer will, not unexpectedly, be “old movies”. The movies I see nowadays all seemed to have either been “dumbed down” so that there’s nothing to talk about, or even think about, as you walk out of the lobby, or else so deliberately “complexed-UP” (Christopher Nolan’s films come immediately to mind here, but there are a lot of other directors who think that their films are suddenly deep and meaningful if they throw all the pages up in the air and then put the film together in the order in which they fall) that you’d rather NOT talk or think about them as you walked out of that lobby, because all you’d be doing is showing your total ignorance of just what had been going on up there on the screen for two hours.

In choosing “old” movies as superior to new ones, however, I should in fairness concede one point. Most of the movies from what is now usually referred to as “Hollywood’s golden age” (from the late thirties to the early sixties) were, in fact, pretty bad. Just look at any of the books of movies year by year and you will soon see that. 80% of the movies from that era weren’t worth your time back then, and you will probably never get a chance to see them today, because, frankly, no one would want to. And, today, about 80% of the new movies I see are totally forgettable, and only the remaining 20% give me something to ponder, and come back to. So there’s really not much difference in the proportion of quality movies between then and now. Movies have never been as great as they ought to be!

But I feel that the old movies have the edge, because they were made in the days when the major studios controlled the industry, and the moguls from those studios, for all their obtuseness and lack of class, LOVED movies. So they would take a chance and allow an unpopular movie to be made, because they could always recover their losses with the big-budget crowd-pleaser being made on the adjacent lot. So Harry Cohn, at Columbia, could let his producers, directors and writers blow Columbia’s money on “The Member of the Wedding” and “The Goddess” and “The Marrying Kind” (none of which he, himself, would want to see!), because he knew those same people had a “From Here to Eternity” or a “Caine Mutiny” or a “Born Yesterday” waiting in the wings to make back all that money, and more. And, thanks to this attitude, cinemagoers were infinitely richer for having seen some of the great but less-heralded actors of that generation — Julie Harris, Kim Stanley, Ethel Waters — commit to film a permanent record of their best stage work. Louis B Mayer could approve “The Red Badge of Courage” or “The Boy with Green Hair” or “The Next Voice you Hear” because SOMEBODY at MGM believed they were worth making, even though they were doomed to wind up on the bottom half of a double bill. Mayer might have loathed movies like that (and did!), but he knew that there was always a “Singing in the Rain” or “National Velvet” or “Ivanhoe” to secure his studio’s reputation as a maker of big-budget family movies that were guaranteed to fill the MGM coffers. So if John Huston wanted to waste a couple of hundred thousand dollars on something no one was going to see, what did it matter?

Some of the classics of the golden age sprang from these “small-time” movies that few people at the studio believed in, but which kept its budding writers and directors happy. Their costs were generally minimal, and they used actors that were on the payroll and sitting around idle, so there wasn’t much to lose.

But the producers of movies today just don’t have that luxury of taking a chance and wearing the consequences. Nowadays you may only get one chance. Everything costs two hundred million dollars, and there’s only one rule: at all odds, get that money back. So they try to ensure success rather than encourage originality; look at recent films that HAVE turned a profit, and then just do anything and everything necessary to divine the formula that worked once, so it will probably work a second time. Stealing the names of successful movies is a good start: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” actually had nothing to do with the other films in that series, as it was very much about a planet of the humans (it was pretty much a straight remake of “Project X”); but using the name of a successful franchise is insurance against red ink in the books. The Ridley Scott “Robin Hood” had virtually nothing to do with the legend of Robin Hood (and ‘fessed up to that in the last frame), and might just as easily have used different names for its heroes and villains (and probably did, in an earlier incarnation; the plot, somehow, seemed VERY familiar!); but everyone has heard of Robin Hood, so using his name (and the memory of some of the wonderful Robin Hood movies of the past) might just put a few more bums on seats. And what does it matter if those bums feel cheated when they rise off those seats, as long as the money has come in?

Oliver Stone’s strategy to make “Alexander” turn a profit was to just keep withdrawing it and recutting it, and assembling scenes in a different order, and then releasing the “new, improved version” until SOMEBODY agreed to like it; and, hopefully, with every new edition, the movie got a little closer to having black ink in the accounting books.

Stone at least kept the title intact (or almost so); there have been other films which, having failed dismally to attract customers the first time, were hastily withdrawn and released again with a brand new title, for another “crack” at it (don’t ask me to name them… I’m still back in the era where nobody really considered re-naming their current releases, such as “Gone with the Wind” or “The Wizard of Oz”). Nowadays, alas, it’s all about money, and, as a result, all movies seem to look alike, sound alike, and use the same “tricks” to win you over.

Things may not, in actuality, have been as great as they are now cracked up to be in “the golden age”; but at least you stood a pretty good chance of seeing a movie that you felt like actually TALKING about, every now and then, even if it was only black and white and had the actors standing in front of painted sets… twice as good a chance as nowadays, anyway, because back then you got two servings at every session!

What actors or actresses are notoriously hard to direct?

I’ve just finished reading a biography of Trevor Howard (who, I hasten to add, was NOT hard to direct!), and in it he says that he can get along with just about anyone — fellow cast-members and directors — but that he couldn’t tolerate Marlon Brando. On “Mutiny on the Bounty”, Brando refused to say the lines in the script, preferring to say whatever he felt like at the time, so that Howard never knew when it was his turn to respond; Brando had the film’s director (Sir Carol Reed) removed from the picture, and ran roughshod over Reed’s replacement (Lewis Milestone, who quickly gave up even trying, and retired at the end of shooting), so that, in effect, Brando was in control of the whole movie; the rest of the cast could only watch, aghast, as millions of dollars of MGM’s money went down the drain.

Brando apparently took delight in alienating fellow cast members, as long as it wasn’t his own money he was wasting: in “Guys and Dolls” he and Frank Sinatra didn’t get along at all, and so, in a scene between them where Sinatra (who liked to get his scenes done in one or two “takes”) had to eat cheesecake while it played out, Brando kept deliberately fluffing his lines right at the end, so that they would have to start over again and Sinatra would have to eat another piece of cheesecake. By the time Brando had done this nine times in succession, even the thought of cheesecake was making Sinatra nauseous, and he felt he had lost all vestiges of the spontaneity which made his acting style so effective. From that time on, he only spoke to Brando through an intermediary.

Which child actor best lived up to their potential?

All the above answers are full of wisdom, but few reached back into the golden age of Hollywood; there were quite a few from those days who managed to make the shift from child roles to adult parts, and be successful in both. Shirley Temple didn’t quite make it; after about a half-dozen teenage roles, she realised her time had passed and moved into a more profitable line of business. Natalie Wood, however, was a star until her premature death, and Russ Tamblyn (who used to be “Rusty” Tamblyn) also stayed with MGM until it practically closed around him! Dean Stockwell was playing child roles as far back as “Anchors Aweigh” in 1944, but he was still acting as recently as 2015. Mickey Rooney used to be called Mickey McGuire, and made his first film in 1926; by the time he made such an indelible impression as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1935, he was already a veteran of 26 full-length films and sixty-seven short subjects! His last film was one of the “Night at the Museum” films (can’t remember which one), made in 2014. That really has to be the most amazing movie career EVER.

And finally, of course, there was Judy Garland. She made a series of short subjects from the time she was seven years old, in 1929, and was already a star (as “Baby Gumm”) in live theatre before she even signed with MGM (under her “new” name) at age 13. After a film career spanning over a quarter of a century, she returned to the stage, and conquered it all over again, earning the accolade, “the greatest entertainer who has ever lived”. That’s REALLY living up to your potential!

What actors do their own stunts?

Going back to the Golden Era, when stars were not generally allowed to do any work that might be considered even remotely dangerous, Gene Kelly used to wait until the heads of the studios weren’t around, and then do his own stunts during his dance numbers; check his work in (for example) “The Pirate” and “Living in a Big Way”. Frank Sinatra actually broke his hand during a fight scene in which no double was used, in “The Manchurian Candidate”; if you watch, you can see him miss his target and slam his hand into a heavy table (he carried on until the director yelled “Cut!”, and then yelled himself). It didn’t seem to cool his ardour for doing his own stunts: that’s really him being dragged along under a horse-drawn wagon in “Sergeants Three”. Finally, there was Burt Lancaster. He had been a trapeze artist before Hollywood beckoned, and whenever possible he tried to work some circus stunts into his movies (e.g “The Flame and the Fury” and “The Crimson Pirate”.) Finally, when he was at the height of his power, his own company produced “Trapeze” with, of course, himself in the lead. I have a feeling that there was still a stunt man involved in one of the major trapeze stunts in that movie (a good rule of thumb when watching actors in “difficult” scenes is, unless you can be absolutely sure that it’s the actor’s face you’re looking at, it almost certainly isn’t); however, there are ample trapeze stunts throughout the movie where it’s clearly Burt up there.

Which movie have you watched the most times? How many times did you watch it?

This is an easy one to answer: the 1954 “A Star is Born” with Judy Garland and James Mason. The reason that I have watched it at least twenty times (over a period of 63 years, so I am not quite as obsessive as you may think!) is partly because Judy Garland is my favourite actress (and this was her best role) and James Mason is my favourite actor (and this was HIS best role!), and this only pairing of these two consummate performers was in one of the best films of its decade (now widely regarded as “the first masterpiece in CinemaScope”).

But those are not the only reasons for my repeated viewing. “A Star is Born” was released, for just a few weeks, at a length of 186 minutes, and almost-immediately became the victim of ruthless studio editing in an attempt to recoup its not-inconsiderable cost by fitting in more screenings per day. By the time I got to see it, it had been whittled down to 153 minutes, and it was rumoured that those missing 33 minutes had been wilfully destroyed by Warner Bros, in an attempt to recover the expensive silver nitrate from the negative (or some such daft reason).

Almost immediately, a campaign began to find and replace this lost footage, and over the next sixty years diligent searches through the vaults turned up a host of treasures, both musical numbers and dramatic scenes. The result of all of this was that you often didn’t know, if you went to see “A Star is Born” (or bought it on DVD or blu-ray), just what “new” scenes you might see! The rumours of just-discovered extra footage persist to the present day, and so the legions of Garland admirers faithfully buy every new issue or go along to every new revival. Much has, indeed, been restored…. but there is still missing footage reputedly floating around, so I have a feeling that my twenty-something viewings of “A Star is Born” are by no means over yet…. especially in view of the fact that it’s such a damned good movie, however long the version is that you happen to be watching, that I have been diligent in seeking out revivals and ensuring I introduced the movie to my own children and grandchildren! Frankly, they just don’t make performers like Judy Garland any more, and the present generation deserves to see what “star quality” really means!

What/Who were the most undeserving Oscar winners for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress?

Grace Kelly’s 1954 Oscar for “The Country Girl” (best actress) created such a storm in Hollywood that several Academy members actually resigned at the injustice meted out to Judy Garland for “A Star is Born”. Groucho Marx famously commented, “This is the biggest robbery since Brink’s”.

Which actors did not fit the role they were cast for? 

The great director Billy Wilder usually had a knack for the “right” casting, and his shrewdness in this area helped advance the careers of fine actors like Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine (in “The Apartment”) and William Holden (in “Sunset Boulevard”… in which film Wilder also helped kick-start a whole new career for silent-screen legend Gloria Swanson). However, when Cary Grant turned down the leading role in “Love in the Afternoon” (on the grounds that he was just too old to convincingly romance Audrey Hepburn as she looked in 1957), Wilder made an uncharacteristic blunder: he replaced Grant with an actor who was not only three years older (and twenty-eight years older than Audrey!), but who lacked Grant’s comparatively-youthful appearance and unmatched flair for light sex-comedy. Gary Cooper was a wonderful actor and a two-time Academy Award winner, but he looked so uncomfortable throughout the film (at one stage being required to lie on the floor with Audrey in an attempted seduction scene) that it was hard for audiences to take their minds off him long enough to concentrate on the story! The film, consequently, could only be described with a word one doesn’t often need to use when talking about a movie directed by the man who gave us “Some Like it Hot”: deadly.

What is the most unbelievable plot ever used in one of the best movies ever made?

“One of the best movies ever made”? There are a lot of crazy plots out there, and the 41 preceding answers have nailed a great many of them, but as I looked down their list of “best movies ever”, I couldn’t help feeling the responders had just gone for craziness and had ignored that part of the question.

The American Film Institute keeps revising their list of “greatest movies” every few years, and the last time I looked, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” was right near the top. But the plot — a complicated murder which succeeds because it involves heights, and the one man who might stop it suffers from fear of heights — doesn’t bear too close an examination, or you might notice how foolish it is.

A murderer and his intended victim seemingly just wait up on top of a tower many miles out of town, until eventually the acrophobic turns up (good thing he happened to be passing that way!). The murder — a quite-noisy affair involving screams and an apparent suicide — gets everyone’s attention, but nobody happens to notice the killer’s car, which must have been parked nearby (there’s no other transport), and, despite the fact that the tower is almost-instantly surrounded, no one present notices both the killer and his decoy — who, by the way, is a “dead ringer” for the woman whose body they are in the middle of investigating — somehow slip out of the one exit door from the tower (and somehow getting past the acrophobic, who is helpless on the stairs), get to their car (wherever it was hidden), and drive blithely off…. or did the two just sit in the tower until midnight, hoping no one would bother to investigate the place where the “suicide” had just happened?

The movie is intriguing, the music (by Bernard Hermann) is superb, and Hitchcock, as always, knows how to keep things moving…. but in this “great movie”, he can only keep things moving by throwing any kind of logic off a high tower, along with his victim. Not really good enough for “one of the best movies ever made”!

What movies get better every time you see them?

My particular passion is musicals, and I can usually watch any one of the great ones — usually MGM, and most often from the Freed unit — a dozen times and never tire of it. But the two that, to me, always seem to give MORE pleasure every time I return to them are “The Pirate” and “Kiss Me Kate”. Also, I feel that “All About Eve” is just such a great piece of writing, and so superlatively acted by Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders and Celeste Holm, that every new viewing seems to give new tingles of pleasure…. the most fun, I would have to say, that I have ever had watching a movie.

Selecting the greatest science fiction films of the 20th and early 21st century, which three will you single out?

Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and the David O Selznick “King Kong” (1933) would have to be two of the three, because they virtually “invented” the genre, and are still inspiring film-makers in the 21st century. For the third one, I’d have to leave the choice to our younger responders, and I would expect that “2001”, although not a personal favourite, will probably emerge near the top.

What's your favorite movie ending?

You want just one? I wish you’d allow me a couple of dozen! If you really want to pin me down, I would have to choose the last six or seven minutes of “All About Eve”, especially that very last shot. The film appears to be over immediately before this scene, but Joseph L Mankiewicz has his little “zinger” waiting in the wings, just as you begin to start reaching for your coat. It gives the plot a whole new perspective, and, in my opinion, “seals the deal” for “All About Eve” being the most enjoyable movie I have seen in nearly three-quarters of a century of picturegoing…. a bold claim for me to make, as Judy wasn’t even in it!

What are the best movies centered on some people talking to each other?

Some excellent recommendations already in this list; most of the ones that I was ready to add (for example, “Twelve Angry Men”, “Sleuth” and “Brief Encounter”) turned up already as I scanned the 65 answers. One that I didn’t see was “Locke”, a 2014 Stephen Knight movie starring Tom Hardy. Hardy’s character is the only person you see in the whole movie… although there are several other characters with whom he converses on his car phone. The whole plot unfolds through the dialogue, so it’s a refreshing change from so many of today’s movies, which rely so much for their impact on the visuals that dialogue tends to take a “back seat”. It’s my pick for the best film in the last decade.

What makes a bad movie director?

A bad movie director thinks that his audience has neither intelligence nor taste. A bad movie director is sloppy… if something goes wrong with a shot, he will say, “Well, that doesn’t matter; let’s just move on.” Have you seen the scene in “Exodus” where Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint come together for a passionate (but forbidden) embrace, and the camera zooms in for the close-up; but the shadow of the camera zooms in over their faces, so noticeably that the audience instantly assumes that they have been discovered by an intruder, and waits for the next development.

That same director (a very famous one, so maybe I’d better not mention his name) made “Carmen Jones”, which you’d better see on television rather than on the giant screen (as I did in 1955); it’s a great movie, one of the best of its day, but it’s a bit disconcerting, on the CinemaScope screen, when Dorothy Dandridge walks past a row of shops, and the reflections of the travelling camera and operators are clearly visible in the windows as she passes. This director also made “Bunny Lake is Missing”, a supposedly-serious “mystery” with a final twenty-minute denouement so patently absurd (and embarrassing to watch a good actor sink to this level) that audiences laughed out loud (but they might also have felt more than a pang of sympathy for actor Keir Dullea, who must have prayed, three years later —at which time he was up for the lead in “2001” — that Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t drag out a copy of “Bunny Lake” to assess the extent of his talent!).

Hitchcock was supposed to have once said, “Actors are cattle” (he denied it, admitting only that he said “Actors should be treated like cattle”); well, a bad director thinks that audiences and critics are cattle!

What are the dumbest scenes in otherwise good movies?

It’s a hard question to answer, simply because if a movie has a really dumb scene in it, I normally wouldn’t consider it a good movie, and I would try to forget it as swiftly as possible. Anyway, a movie with a dumb scene in it will normally have ten or twenty dumb scenes in it, don’t you think?

However, I will suggest one. The Stanley Kramer movie “Inherit the Wind” is a well-written and splendidly-acted (Spencer Tracy, after all!) movie about the famous “monkey trial”; not unexpectedly, Tracy’s character’s arguments “for” Science and “against” religion trump Fredric March’s “the-Bible-is-literally-true” tirades in virtually every reel, and, by the climax, March is shown to be ridiculous, and traditional religion comes out of the conflict with its halo well and truly tarnished. But Kramer doesn’t want to offend the believers among his audience, so he decides, in the very last shot, to play it safe: Tracy, having decimated the opposition, picks up his copy of Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, and turns it over thoughtfully. Then he picks up a nearby copy of the Holy Bible (which he has spent the whole movie rubbishing) and looks at it thoughtfully, too. He “weighs” them in each hand, piles them together (with the Bible on top, if I recall!), and leaves the courtroom with them under his arm. The one clumsy and obvious moment in a film that was, in all the previous scenes, not afraid to take a stand (which was the very quality that made Kramer’s films so innovative back then…. e.g. “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “On the Beach”).

What modern films will become classics?

The administrators of QUORA ought to put the answers to this question into a time capsule and store it safely until 2050, by which time we might be able to test how good today’s moviegoers are at “crystalballing”. I suspect they’re no better than the crystalballers of 50 years ago, when people suggested that films like “Samson and Delilah” were destined for “classic” status. I’m going to play it safe and choose only two from the last twenty years; I’m being so cautious, in fact, that I’m not even going to choose the one that I would personally LIKE to see attain the status of a classic (“Locke”, because it tried for something almost impossible, and damned if it didn’t bring it off), if for no other reason than I seldom run into anyone who’s even heard of it, much less seen it, and that, I guess, is not a good start!

But the two that surely will be screened and discussed and admired in another half century are, firstly, Rob Marshall’s “Chicago”, which, single-handedly, revived an almost dead genre — one that never should have been allowed to die, as the Musical is one of the three totally “American” types of movies (westerns and “films noir” being the other two), and, as such, deserves nurturing — and did it in such fine style that, suddenly, everyone was talking about musicals again; and, secondly, “Boyhood”, which seemed like such a daft idea that only a madman would have even attempted it….but Richard Linklater has the kind of madness that the movies haven’t seen, probably, since the days of Erich von Stroheim, and what he has given us is practically a new genre, all by itself. I don’t think it will be imitated very often (there aren’t that many madmen working in the movies, unfortunately), but I am prepared to bet that it will be discussed for years, or even decades… and, surely, that’s the hallmark of a “classic”.

In your opinion, what movie has the greatest ending? 

I may as well mention “The Searchers”, with John Wayne standing at the door of the homestead knowing that the homesteaders’ life can never be his, and “Some Like it Hot”, with Joe E Brown’s response to the discovery that his fiancee is a man, before too many answers are submitted to this question, because it’s certain that they will come up several times as the list grows longer! I also have a fondness for “Camelot”, where the boy bearing the message of the “one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot” down through the ages, all the way to the 20th century (“Run, boy!”). But the film that straightaway sprang to mind when I saw the question was a little-known 1989 film from director Costa-Gavras called “The Music Box”. It’s about a young woman attorney’s discovery that her father, in World War II, just might have been responsible for unspeakable war atrocities, and her efforts to defend him. It is an engrossing and involving thriller which is so absorbing that the two hours fly by, and the story seems to be winding down to its conclusion…… when someone discovers an old pawn ticket, finds the shop that issued it, and the shopkeeper drags a long-forgotten package out of the back room. At home, it’s unwrapped…. and it’s a music box. And you realise that the film isn’t over yet, because that’s the first reference to a music box in the entire film; you’ve totally forgotten, until that point, that it’s the title of the film you’ve been watching!

Which actor or actress replaced another in a role but was better than the original?

MGM’s finance department decided that their 1939 project, “The Wizard of Oz”, needed a star name to carry it, and decided on Shirley Temple (much to the anguish of Metro’s music department, who knew who the role was REALLY ideal for… but money wins over art every time!) Fortunately for the movie, and for the movie-going public for the last eighty years, money wasn’t quite enough to secure Temple, so the powers-that-be somewhat-reluctantly gave the go-ahead for the studio’s own Judy Garland to step in. Without her participation, of course, we would never have had “Over the Rainbow”….or, probably, a film that has now been seen by more people than any movie ever made.

What is the best movie at all time? 

Well, to misquote ONE of the FIFTY or so ‘best movies of all time’: “Frankly, my dear, there is no such animal.” Even the ‘experts’ can’t agree. It’s all a matter of taste. Now, if you’d asked about a FAVOURITE movie, well, that would be a ‘do-able’ question to deal with; but it still wouldn’t help you much; my favourite almost certainly wouldn’t turn out to be your favourite, nor the favourite of the 99 people who are now going to attempt to answer your question for you.

Is it OK watching 3D movies for a 10-year-old child in theaters?

I don’t know whether I should even try to answer this question, as I am not sure I understand it; 3D is a process, just like Technicolor or CinemaScope, and although it can certainly add to the fun of the moviegoing experience (as, indeed, can the other two; that’s what they were designed to do), it doesn’t change it so significantly that a film that might have been suitable for a ten-year-old in 2D is suddenly inappropriate because he/she is unable to distinguish between the film in its 3D process and the real world. 3D is hardly ‘new’; when I was nine years old, back in 1952, there was a sudden rash of 3D movies, and I eagerly went to “assess” this new ‘miracle’ (my nine-year-old’s assessment: “Wow!!”, with two exclamation marks). But when I told my grandmother about this new wonder of the world, she laughingly told me that she had seen 3D movies as far back as 1915; it was a passing phase then, and, I soon realised, it would be a passing phase when I discovered it. By the time I was eleven, it didn’t seem so thrilling to audiences anymore (even the ten-year-olds who liked a bit of “Wow!”), in spite of innovations like Technicolor 3D; fairly soon, movies made in 3D were being shown ‘flat’. But neither myself in 1952 nor my grandmother thirty years earlier ever heard of anyone whose movie-going experience was made somehow unsuitable because of the new ‘trick’. Even the very youngest member of the household knew that a trick was all that it was, and they knew exactly how the moviemakers did it.

What all this is leading to is my belief that the term 3D in your question is rather irrelevant. A ten-year old won’t hide under the chair because he thinks that the movie has suddenly turned real; he will probably already know more about the technical side of how the effect is produced than you or I do. So it’s not 3D that makes a movie ‘OK’ for a ten-year-old; it’s the content of the movie. If it’s not ‘OK’ in 2D, it won’t be okay in 3D or even 4D; if it’s an appropriate movie for a ten-year-old in 2D, all that 3D is going to do is make the experience a little bit more fun (as does surround-sound, etc.). So concentrate on what’s in the movie when you choose for a ten-year-old (or, for that matter, children of any age); the movie-making process should be of minor significance in making your choice.

What requirements does a movie need to fulfill for you to give it a perfect 10/10 rating?

Everyone is writing quite long and considered answers, and I think there is a lot of truth in everything that has been said. I’ll just add one thing: a movie that I would give a 10/10 rating would certainly be a movie which I would come out of and then TALK about for a couple of hours… talk with a companion, if I was with someone, or eagerly ring a friend if I was alone. I remember coming out of the theatre where I saw “Judgment at Nuremberg” for the first time, and going to a coffee shop nearby, and sitting at the table with my companions, “chewing over” the movie for about as long as we had spent watching it! It happened with “All About Eve” and the 1954 “A Star is Born” (ALL the way home, and it was a two-hour drive), and “Citizen Kane”. Of the more-recent releases, a British film called “Locke” did it to me, also… and so did “Predestination”. If we’ve said all there is to say about a movie before we arrive at our home, then it’s unlikely to get more than an ‘8’.

What is the best negative review of a movie you've ever read/seen?

I recall one movie magazine had a three-word review of the Meryl Streep movie “The River Wild”. The review: “The Movie Awful”. Not only concise, but apt.

What are some instances where directors went outside the script to elicit original reactions from the actors?

I’m sure there will be a lot of answers to this question, because examples of this practice, whether by luck or by design, abound; but I hope this one will be one that not many people know about… because not many people saw the movie! It was “A Child is Waiting”, in which John Cassavetes directed Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster in a film with genuine “special” children (peppered with a few child actors who were just pretending). The very last shot in the movie — and there could not have been a better way to end it — was when Judy Garland, playing with one of the “genuines”, changed a crucial word… and the boy, not being savvy with actors doing that, “called” her on it! Judy instantly picked up on what he had said, and carried on with the shot in a delightful piece of improvisation. Thank heaven Cassavetes didn’t yell “Cut!” In a movie that challenges your preconceptions rather than merely giving you a warm glow, this tiny bit was a lesson in just how uplifting relationships with special children can be, and the film ends on a “high”.

What movies have shockingly low or high budgets?

The “shockingly high budget” part of the question is a little difficult to address, because, I guess, film-making is a little like grocery shopping: it’s not just what you spend, it’s what you get for your money. Films like “Cleopatra” have budgets that are “shocking”, not because of the figures at the foot of the page, but because so little of what was spent seems justified by what you finally see on-screen in the finished product. It’s not what you spent, it’s what you NEEDED to spend.

So, my choice for the most “shocking” budget of recent times would have to be “Valkyrie”, with Tom Cruise. It’s an efficient, if somewhat bland, little thriller requiring little expenditure in the way of sets, costumes, and special effects (I guess Tom costs a few bucks!); yet the company admits to spending 70 million dollars making it, and a further 65 million marketing it (so that they might recoup at least part of the original seventy million!) 135 million dollars! When you see it, you will wonder what could have happened to the other 134 million.

For “shockingly low budget”, well, surely you couldn’t go past “Broadway: The Golden Age”, which had a “cast” that most of the big-budget films could only dream about: Alec Baldwin, Angela Lansbury, Shirley MacLaine, Carol Burnett, Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon, Carol Channing, Barbara Cook, Nanette Fabray, Karl Malden, Robert Goulet, Celeste Holm, June Havoc, Fay Wray, Ann Miller, Jane Powell, John Raitt, Eva Marie Saint, Julie Harris, Maureen Stapleton, Elaine Stritch, Leslie Uggams, Ben Gazzara, Stephen Sondheim…. the list just goes on and on. The budget was, according to the official data sheet, “N/A”. The producer started with nothing but a camera and a dream, and he spent five years knocking on doors or inviting people to his apartment. And what he ended up with, well, it’s a bloody miracle!

Have you ever seen a movie that was so bad you left the theatre? 

I try not to make a habit of it, because I’m a bit of a tightwad, and I figure that if I’ve put down all that money on the table, I might as well spend the time as well, and try to find SOMETHING to like! But it has happened a few times. The last one I remember walking out on, and it was quite early in the movie, was Baz Lurhmann’s “Romeo and Juliet”. I sat there for the first half-hour more puzzled at his treatment than disgruntled, so I was prepared to persevere with it. But when he staged the balcony scene in a swimming pool (?) with the actors treading water (?), I decided that an early night suddenly seemed a VERY attractive proposition, so I quietly left them to their swimming strokes. I knew the ending, anyway… unless, of course, Baz changed that, too!

What are the best science fiction Hollywood movies?

Among the recent crop, “Predestination”; its wildly complex plot will keep you discussing it for hours; hokum, but so cleverly done that you hardly notice the basic flaw in its premise.

 Going a bit further back, Carl Sagan’s “Contact” benefited greatly from a well-written script with a firm basis in science fact, and, of course, from Jodie Foster. Still further back (skipping right past “2001”), I thought “The Day the Earth Stood Still” approached its subject with commendable restraint, and didn’t push its allegorical element too hard. I grew up in the fifties, at a time when there was a rash of poverty-row science-fiction stuff hitting our screens, but, sadly, in just about all cases the idea of the movie was far better than its execution (if there is anything good to be said about ‘2001’, it is that it did show that the science fiction genre could look respectable if the studios were prepared to actually treat it seriously and throw money at it). So my generation looked back to the thirties, even though some of the rather-primitive sci-fi product from that era is not really watchable today, in an era when mind-blowing special effects are part of every movie. The original “King Kong”, however, must always rate a mention in any list of the best… there’s a reason why it’s so often revived after its pallid remakes have come and gone.

What is the most heart-wrenching scene you ever saw in a family-friendly film?

If we can go all the way back to 1946, there’s a wonderful MGM film called “The Yearling”, about a farm boy who rescues a fawn, and raises it until it becomes a yearling and starts to destroy the family’s crops. He tries to abandon it, but it finds its way home. He tries to fence in the crops, but the deer always manages to destroy the fence. Finally, he has to take it out to the woods and shoot it. Done with all the class that one expects from an MGM movie of the golden years.

Who are great actors/actresses that are also great people?

I’ve heard a lot of stories about just what a great person Liza Minnelli is. Of course, everyone knows how unselfishly she acted when Gwen Verdon had to take sick leave from “Chicago”, and it was feared the show would close, because, after all, who can replace Gwen Verdon? Liza not only stepped in, with something like a week and a half of rehearsals, but, so as not to take the role from Gwen, making it hard for her to return, insisted that no publicity be given to her appearance: nothing in the press, nothing outside the theatre, only an announcement from the stage at the beginning of each performance. You can guess, though, that the word spread around the New York theatre crowd like lightning, and, for the first time, the show actually started turning a profit while Liza was “on board”. She is now credited with saving “Chicago” from becoming one of those forgotten musicals…. no wonder Ebb and Kander adored her!

Less well-known is how she took Martha Graham, one of the great choreographers of the first half of the 20th century, under her wing when she was ailing and all-but forgotten. Martha Graham actually dedicated her autobiography to Liza, who gave her her last moment “in the sun” by introducing her (and talking her up) to Liza’s own fans.

And then there was the great Kay Thompson (Liza’s godmother), also ailing and becoming increasingly difficult. Liza moved her into her own apartment, and looked after her in spite of the fact that Kay was extremely irascible by this stage; when the pressure became too much, Liza rented a second apartment nearby and lived there herself, still returning every day to her “old” apartment to stock it and tend to Kay’s needs.

In the entertainment world, we’ve come to expect the big stars to be self-centred and demanding, asserting their “exalted” position at the expense of everyone else. It seems Liza, God bless her, is something of a rarity in that kind of world!

What is your favorite movie of all-time?

I’d be happier if you had asked for the top ten or twenty in any order, as choosing the best from a host of genres and a time frame spanning nearly a hundred years is a daunting task; but, if you push me to name just one, I’d have to say the 1950 movie “All About Eve”, written and directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz. All my other favourites come from the 1940–1970 era also; in fact, the only “new” film which would even get into the top forty would be “Locke”.

What lesser-known sci-fi movies would you recommend?

Someone has already included “Outland”, and I’d like to ‘second’ that one, and add a little information which may make you intrigued enough to follow it up. It’s in a sci-fi setting, but the story is a remake of the classic western, “High Noon”, with Sean Connery in the Gary Cooper part. This time the clock they keep looking at is a digital count-down clock in hours, minutes and seconds, and when it reaches zero (high noon) there’s a shoot-out just like in the old one. Interesting idea, and they don’t trash the memory of the Stanley Kramer classic.

One that I didn’t see listed here is “Contact”, with Jodie Foster, written by Carl Sagan, who, of course, was an expert in the “science” of science-fiction. The film seems to be logical and intelligent (of course, Jodie Foster’s presence is a great help here; Jena Malone plays her as a little girl, and that’s a performance worth watching, too), and it’s a movie that can take three or four viewings. It delves pretty deeply into the science vs religion debate, with Matthew McConnaughay as her priest and love interest (!)

What is your favorite low reviewed movie?

This was Judy Garland’s last movie, and contains some of the best acting she ever did….not so surprising when you consider that, in its best scene (an eight-minute take), she is delivering lines which she and co-star Dirk Bogarde wrote themselves the night before, and which the director (Ronald Neame) had never heard. (Bogarde’s instruction to Neame, as they were getting ready to shoot: “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but just keep the camera rolling. Whatever you do, don’t call “cut”.”) Just about ALL her lines in this movie sound like she wrote them herself, and this is her great talent as an actress: she makes you believe the words of her scripts, just as she makes you believe the lyrics of her songs (of which this film contains four shining examples, one recorded “live” when the pre-recording couldn’t be used). Yet this remarkable picture was dismissed almost universally by critics, and is seldom seen today. The first review I read, the morning after I saw it for the first time, was so chilling that I remember its first sentence verbatim, even fifty-five years later: “The talents of the great Judy Garland are wasted in this movie, possibly the year’s worst.” It’s worth tracking down and seeing for yourself.

What are some of the greatest acting performances to not win an Oscar? Why?

So many top answers already given, it’s hard to do anything but upvote them! For those who chose recent performances (say, in the last fifteen years), I must bow to your superior knowledge; of the ones who reached back into the Golden Years of Hollywood, I would earnestly support the respondent who chose Richard Burton for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” — my pick as the best performance EVER by an actor), and the one who chose Judy Garland for “A Star is Born” (the best performance EVER by an actress, and a particularly notorious case of injustice on the part of the Academy, because they gave the award that year (1954) to an actress who gave a routine and merely-competent performance not even deserving of a nomination).

I also cheered when I saw Yves Montand given the nod for the Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources duo; I had never had a great respect for him as an actor before those films (really one film shown in two parts), but that performance was truly phenomenal, and has stayed with me for thirty years. Anyone to add? Well, I didn’t see anyone vote for Bette Davis for “All About Eve”, or Gloria Swanson for “Sunset Boulevard”; they were both nominated in the same year (1950), and the rumour is that their inspired, over-the-top performances cancelled each other out, so the befuddled voters just looked elsewhere. And, finally, a performance that everyone remembers — they can even quote lines which the character said, and the very mention of the name of the character — Bruno Anthony — brings an instant smile of recognition: I refer to Robert Walker’s amazing performance in “Strangers on a Train”. People will still be watching Bruno fifty years from now!

What movie is for you, basically, the most perfect film ever made?

I have read all the answers so far — and there are quite a few! — and two submissions, in particular, seem to be the ones that come closest to the mark of “perfection” (not, as everyone has wisely pointed out, the same as “favourite”): Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” and Joseph L Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve”. I don’t know if  I could find a third one to match these two, but, just to say I had a go, here’s a 1946 MGM movie which doesn’t seem to miss its mark on ANY aspect (“MGM at the height of its powers”, someone once said of it). And it’s not a musical! My vote is Clarence Brown’s “The Yearling”, full of scenes that will stay with you your whole life.

What's the best movie you ever saw? And why?

I’m glad — and relieved — that the phrase used was “the best movie you ever saw”, and not the usual “the greatest movie ever made”. On that last question, I admit that I give up; I just don’t know what to use as my criteria, and since the American Film Academy has gone through such diverse offerings as “The Gold Rush”, “Citizen Kane”, “The Searchers” and “Vertigo”, I rather suspect that it’s not too confident of its criteria, either.

But the “best I ever saw” is easier… I can interpret that as, which movie can I happily watch again and again, and never, ever get tired of? There is a list of contenders when it’s expressed that way; I can always watch “Sunset Boulevard”, and “The Band Wagon”, and “Meet Me in St Louis”, and “The Heiress”, and “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, and “Gaslight”, and “Kiss Me Kate”. I never get tired of “Brief Encounter” or “A Star is Born” (the 1954 version) or “Strangers on a Train” or “Rear Window” or “North by Northwest” or “Detective Story” or “3:10 to Yuma” (the original) or “Carmen Jones” or “The Innocents” or “The Court Jester”. But, above all these treasures, there is one that demands to be shown more often than any: my pick as the best movie I ever saw would have to be “All About Eve” (20th Century-Fox, 1950, written and directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz).

What is a single line that ruined an otherwise great movie?

 “The Bridge on the River Kwai” won a slew of Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor for Alec Guinness. Mr Guinness is, indeed, excellent; but his reading of his very last line — “What have I done?” (hardly a brilliant exit line in any case) — drew attention, not to his character, but to his choice as an actor…just at the time when we needed to be carried along by the story, not thinking about the nuts and bolts behind it (the bridge blew up about thirty seconds later).

What’s the best screenplay ever written?

I’d hark back to 1950 for the answer to that one: “All About Eve”, written by Joseph L Mankiewicz. It’s the one screenplay that I could listen to, even if the picture on the TV screen failed. Like listening to a great concerto!

Who is the actor/actress who spoiled an excellent movie?

Most of these comments tend to be about actors or actresses who ALWAYS give terrible performances and tend to spoil ALL their movies. But my first thought, when I read the question, was an actress whom I usually greatly admire, and who has given me a lot of pleasure in just about every movie I have ever seen her in. However, I watched Helena Bonham-Carter in “Sweeney Todd” with ever-growing dismay… I can understand an actress wanting to put her own “spin” on a part that everybody in the audience has already seen played by someone else, but in this case the result was a serious misfire; she took a character other actresses have turned into a triumph and made it flat and uninteresting (well, I suppose that’s KIND of putting your own stamp on the part!). With such great music to sing, it seems strange that she’d come to the part with not only very limited singing skills, but not even any discernible sense of the drama or humour in the musical numbers.

 I won’t say, however, that she spoiled an “otherwise-excellent” movie, because there were a couple of other prominent names associated with this production who seemed equally-intent on achieving that same purpose; it may have been an excellent PLAY, but the movie had probably been scuttled by other poor decisions before she even came on-board. Miss Bonham-Carter was, however, the extreme example: there doesn’t seem to be ANYTHING positive to say about her contribution.

Have you ever stopped watching a movie because it made you too uncomfortable? Why?

Yes. I once obtained a video of “Caligula”, never released in my home country. I don’t think I got half-way. I not only turned it off, but I destroyed the video and threw it in the bin. Also, when “The Deer Hunter” was first released (with an intermission), I remember that at half-time I walked around the block outside the theatre, trying to decide whether I really wanted to subject myself to the second half. I eventually did go back in, but it was a close decision.

What is the most impressive scene in movie history? 

Can I choose three? Number 1 would have to be the seven-minute ‘take’ between Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde in the hospital waiting room towards the end of “I Could Go On Singing” (people on the set that day described it as “a miracle”). Number 2 would have to be the one-take dressing-room scene between Judy Garland and Charles Bickford in the 1954 “A Star is Born” (EVERYONE described that as a miracle!). And Number 3, from that same movie, would be “The Man That Got Away” (also filmed on a single ‘take’), which I saw for the first time in 1955, a few days after my thirteenth birthday, and which, in four minutes, established my musical preferences for the rest of my life. My school friend remembers me coming along to school and saying, “I never knew people sang like that!” Sixty-three years later, I still can’t think of anything more apt to say about THAT scene and THAT song and THAT singer!

What movies did you think were really good but got bad reviews? 

In 1963, when “I Could Go on Singing” was released, the first review I read started with the sentence, “The talents of the great Judy Garland are wasted in this movie, possibly the year’s worst.” Most other reviews were similarly negative, and the film quickly disappeared….and Judy never made another movie. Yet today it stands as the most-accurate record we have of the extraordinary talents of “the greatest entertainer who has ever lived” (a quote from Tony Bennett). The world would be a poorer place if we didn’t have “I Could Go on Singing”; and watching Judy in scene after scene, whether comedy, dramatic, or musical, is, even fifty years later, edge-of-the-seat stuff. There are few movies I turn to as often as this one…..it aimed to show Judy as she really was — “warts and all” — at that time in her career, and, in my view, it succeeds totally. It ought to be preserved in a time capsule and shown to present and future generations… especially to up-and-coming performers who would gain so much from seeing just how great popular singing can be.

Which are best movies which no one knows about? 

There’s a documentary which I saw in the mid-1990s called “Anne Frank Remembered”. I expect that, by now, everyone has seen the actual black-and-white movie footage of Anne Frank on her balcony, but I think this movie showed it publicly for the first time, and it was quite a revelation. So were some of the interviews and encounters that were organised by the movie’s producers. I recall saying at the time, “This film should be seen by everyone on earth”. Yet, around that time, I couldn’t find anyone else who had seen it! Now, thankfully, it’s on Youtube. So give it a couple of hours… I STILL think it should be seen by everyone on Earth!

What movie assembled the most A-list movie stars?

It seems everyone has forgotten “Forever and a Day”, the 1943 movie which RKO made with no less than 78 stars (and all playing real roles), written by 21 leading authors and brought to the screen by seven directors (it was supposed to be eight, but Alfred Hitchcock, after preparing his segment, found he had “overbooked” and let someone else do the actual directing). Everyone connected with the movie was either British or had close ties with the UK. Were they all “A-list stars”? I guess many of them would not even be remembered today, but here are a handful who might just strike a chord in someone’s memory: Anna Neagle, Ray Milland, Ray Bolger, Claude Rains, Jessie Matthews, Charles Laughton, Buster Keaton, Ida Lupino, Merle Oberon, Gladys Cooper, Robert Cummings, Donald Crisp, Herbert Marshall, Victor McLaglan, June Lockhart, Cedric Hardwicke, Cecil Kellaway and Edmund Gwenn. The writers included C.S. Forester, John van Druten, Christopher Isherwood, James Hilton and Donald Ogden Stewart. In those days, they really knew how to assemble the stars!

What actors could have been easily typecast but have been able to avoid it?

Burt Lancaster, when you look at him, is the typical Hollywood “hunk”: big, beefy, not too bright, teeth like piano keys. You have only to glance at any photo to know exactly what kind of character Burt ought to play.

Yet he spent his whole career seeking out roles that used none of the characteristics which were most obvious in his appearance and manner. It seems that he deliberately preferred parts he wasn’t suited for, and enjoyed the challenge of making them his own. And, usually, he succeeded.

So there he was as the weak, henpecked alcoholic doctor in “Come Back, Little Sheba”; as the quiet bird-raiser and author in “Birdman of Alcatraz”; as the principal of a school for mentally-disabled children in “A Child is Waiting”; as the ruthless newspaper columnist who uses the written word as his weapons in “Sweet Smell of Success”; as the Irish recluse amongst the guests of an English guest house in “Separate Tables”; as the disillusioned MInister for Justice of Hitler’s Third Reich in “Judgment at Nuremberg” (a part, incidentally, originally intended for Laurence Olivier, who was, on the face of it, just about the most un-Burt-Lancaster type you could imagine). And the list goes on; it would seem that, if a part didn’t look like it could possibly be played by Burt Lancaster, then that was the part he coveted.

In the early days he practically had to plead for these parts, as he did to producer Hal Wallis, who envisaged Fredric March as the doctor in “Sheba”; as his career progressed, and he became a third of the production company of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, choosing the part to spite his physique became somewhat easier!

Sometimes, you had to spend the first fifteen minutes of one of his films adjusting to the fact that, yes, that was Burt Lancaster up there, arguing educational philosophies applicable to special-needs children with their parents, or the principles of war-time law with peace-time judges; but, generally, he pulled off these roles quite well, and I always had a great deal of respect for him because of his eagerness to spend virtually his whole movie career out of his comfort zone… a little like Johnny Depp sometimes does today.

If there would be any "worst actor award", whom would you give this award, and why?

Questions similar to this have come up before, and the same performance always springs to my mind. The film was “None But the Brave”, which was, in most respects, an uncommonly controversial film, presenting a very-different “take” on World War II from any other film made up until that time. But it only took one performance by one of the supporting actors to bring undone the whole enterprise, and, today, the film is rarely seen and seldom even discussed.

The performance was by pop-singer Tommy Sands, who had, if memory serves, only ever appeared in one movie previous to this, and that was one of those 1950s teenage ‘quickies” in which all he had to bring to the movie was his standing as a top-forty heart-throb.

But in “None But the Brave” he had a real part in an adult movie, and, in order to bring it off, he needed firm direction and careful guidance from a top director. Instead, all he got was indulgence from his brand-new father-in-law; he had just married Nancy Sinatra, and the producer/director of “None But the Brave” was Nancy’s Dad, Frank Sinatra, who seemed content to strand back and give the lad a chance, just for daughter’s sake. What Sands delivered, and what Sinatra was content with, was perhaps the most ridiculously-overdone performance since the development of the sound movie. In fact, it was so embarrassingly bad that a rumour went around that Sinatra allowed it — even encouraged it — to happen in order to sabotage a marriage of which he disapproved (in fact, the two young ones separated not long afterwards).

Whatever Sinatra’s motives, it surely backfired. A movie which presented challenging concepts and deserved serious recognition as a genuine advance in war movies became discredited, and was soon relegated to the back of the shelf, where it remains to this day. It’s worth digging up a copy, because it is, actually, a bit of a pioneer in some respects, as befits the most-innovative male singer of popular music of the twentieth century (no, not Mr Sands).

What classic film was hated upon release?

 “Classic” films are usually films that do things differently, or tackle subjects not usually talked about, and I guess you could go through a whole list of classics which, when they were released, were held in contempt by at least some sections of the community… even to the extent that banning the movie was suggested.

“Bonnie and Clyde” is a good example of this. Today it is considered by many people to be the best film of its year (1967), and was, years afterwards, one of the first 100 films to be selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry. But it won only two Academy Awards (Supporting actress and Cinematography) in the year of its release, and it had more detractors than supporters: it was condemned for presenting as heroes perpetrators of crimes of violence, for its sexual explicitness, and, mostly, for its graphic depiction of bloody violence (the final scene is talked about even today, and has been copied by several other movies, including “The Godfather”). Director Arthur Penn lost to Mike Nichols, and producer Warren Beatty lost to Norman Jewison; in both cases (especially Jewison’s) the winning movies have maintained a far-lesser reputation today, with the benefit of hindsight.

“Bonnie and Clyde” is, therefore, a good example of the kind of film you asked about, but there are many more; “The Man with the Golden Arm” was actually denied a Production Code seal of approval because of its controversial subject matter, and thus found itself shunned by many major exhibitors; consequently, Frank Sinatra’s best-ever performance was seen by only a few cinemagoers and went unacknowledged at the 1955 Academy Awards. “Night of the Hunter” was banned outright in some countries and suffered restricted exhibition in others. “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist” were condemned by the powerful Catholic Legion of Decency, which meant they were forbidden to Roman Catholics because of their unsalvageable immorality (“Spartacus” originally suffered the same fate, but, it was, it seems, salvageable: the objections centred around a single scene which was scrubbed to make it acceptable (it has since been reinstated in “restored” editions).

What are some great movies about English village mysteries?

Agatha Christie was the classic writer of stories about dark deeds in quiet English villages, so just about any of the movies which feature her amateur sleuth, dear old Miss Marple (of the village of St Mary Mead) would probably qualify as an answer to your question.

I have to say, however, that my own preference is not a movie at all, but a TV series. “Foyle’s War” — at least, the first six series — was set in a provincial town in England during World War II, and every episode contained at least two mysteries involving the local populace. The series was beautifully-written, so that the clues for each of the two mysteries were intertwined with one another and with sub-plots that had nothing to do with either of them, and that made it hard to guess (in fact, I think that, in the whole sixty-plus episodes, I only ever guessed one, and that wasn’t because of my superior sleuthing skills; I just used the time-honoured method which has worked, for me, without fail, ever since the movie “Black Widow” in 1954: if you have a major star appearing, and his/her part seems fairly inconsequential, then the only reason that star would have been likely to take the part in the first place is if he/she can be revealed as the villain in the last reel).

What are some controversial roles featuring child actors on film?

While I share Frank’s and Patrick’s disquiet about what Brooke Shields was required to do in “Pretty Baby” (which, being made by Louis Malle, was approached more like a European film than an American one, and the rules about nudity were/are far more lax in Europe than in America), I would have to say that the role of Lolita remains the most controversial role ever written for a child. The book has been filmed twice under that name, and controversy raged before and during the shooting of each…. so much so that, in the more-recent one, a lot of the pre-release publicity centred around assurances that the film-makers were taking all sorts of precautions to ensure that their under-age star was not actually required to do anything that might be considered inappropriate; even the cushion on Jeremy Irons’ lap when Lolita was required to plant herself there got prominent mention!

Before “Lolita”, there was “Tiger Bay”, written originally for a boy in the juvenile lead, and changed only to a girl at the last minute when it was found that the boy simply wasn’t up to the job. But the change in sex changed the whole tone of the movie, to the point where the young star (Hayley Mills) was actually considered for the role of Lolita in Kubrick’s forthcoming production — an idea quickly and firmly quashed by John Mills, who announced bluntly, “I wouldn’t even let her read the book, much less play the part”.

And before “Tiger Bay” there was “The Bad Seed” and a whole slew of imitators, all centred around the idea that children — particularly little girls — weren’t the adorable little innocents that they might appear; Patty McCormack was the first in the string of films — “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane” being another that springs to mind — in which the sweet little things were murderesses… sometimes even serial killers. Back in 1956, when “The Bad Seed” was released, that was a very controversial concept, and questions were asked about the appropriateness of allowing young children to even know about such things.

What book or movie has the best hook?

I always like the premise of the movie “D.O.A.” In the opening scene, a man walks into a police station in Los Angeles and says, “I want to report a murder that happened last night”.

The officer says, “Where did this murder take place?”

“San Francisco.”

“And who was murdered?”

“I was.”

What movie will you not or never watch again? · 

“Caligula” was never released in cinemas in Australia, but I once found an imported VHS copy in a garage sale. I never got anywhere near the finish… if I recall, I threw it in the garbage round about the time when Sir John Gielgud committed suicide in the bathtub. Some people will do anything to get out of their contract! Malcolm McDowell now, reputedly, disowns the film, and says that all the porn stuff was put in afterwards, without his knowledge or consent… but that IS him urinating on-screen, isn’t it?

What is a historical movie you feel focuses on an underrated or forgotten historical period or event?

Just for openers, Tim Robbins’ 1999 movie, “The Cradle Will Rock”. I am interested in most things cinematic and theatrical, and this film dealt with a 1937 incident that I had always found interesting (Orson Welles was involved), but which had, I think, never been comprehensively-analysed up until that time (although it certainly has since, and, in fact, the play “The Cradle Will Rock” — the subject of Robbins’ movie — was on in New York earlier this year).

“The Cradle Will Rock” is, as well as the name of the film, the name of a play put on by the Mercury Theatre (Orson Welles’s company, which also produced the notorious “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast and, subsequently, made movie history with “Citizen Kane”) with the help of a US government grant designed to encourage young entrepreneurs such as Welles to write and produce new material following the constraints of the Great Depression. A condition for qualifying for the grant was, not unexpectedly, that you had to produce something that at least didn’t openly denounce government policies of the time.

Welles, of course, never hesitated to rush in where angels feared to tread, and the play written for his company smacked of communism, which, of course, outraged the government officers charged with supervising the money (Welles didn’t mind biting the hand that fed him!). The company was denied a theatre to perform in, and every effort was made to suppress the play; eventually, it had its opening — one performance — but under somewhat bizarre conditions (the actors had to present their lines from seats in the audience, as they were prohibited by law from taking to the stage), and it is this one-off performance, and the events leading up to it, that is the subject of Robbins’ film.

It is a film about a unique event in a very special period of United States history, and deserves to be seen. As an interesting footnote, aficionados of “Modern Family” who seek it out will be rewarded by one of the first performances of the then-child actress Sarah Hyland (“Haley Dunphy”), currently one of the most delightful performers around. Also on display are both John and Joan Cusack, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro and Paul Giamatti; you know it’s worth a look when actors of such distinction choose to get involved.

Which actor or actress that's now past their prime would you still be honoured to run into today, and why?

There are few movies more celebrated than “Gone With the Wind”, and one of its stars is still with us: Olivia de Havilland. She turned 103 some four months ago. She is truly cinema royalty, and there could be no one alive today that an old movie buff like myself would prefer to be in the same room as, even if only for a few minutes, just long enough to pay her the homage that her longevity and reputation deserve.

What is the worst film to star a Hollywood A lister?

Possibly “A King in New York”. Not only did it star a “Hollywood A-lister” — in fact, one of the filmmakers who made Hollywood what it became in the Golden Years (one of the four founders of United Artists) -- but it was written, produced and directed by this same pioneer: a genius, but, by the time he got around to this one, a bitter old man bent on revenge (admittedly, somewhat justified) for wrongs done to him by his adopted land.

The problem with “A King in New York” was that, in spite of being created by Charles Chaplin, one of the comic geniuses of the twentieth century, bitterness is not an ideal basis for comedy, and he seemed not to have even tried to hide his motives. Not the worst movie ever made; but surely the worst film ever made by one of the pantheon creators of Hollywood and the movies.

What are some good movies that are bad if you have read the book?

Both the “Lolita”s, for starters. If you have read the book, you will know that it is, despite its serious subject matter, actually very funny, because its leading man is not unwillingly possessed by some “demon”: he’s thoroughly enjoying his perversion until quite close to the end (around the time Lolita leaves him). The book makes you chuckle, in spite of yourself, right there along with him…. and, of course, Nabokov’s dizzying vocabulary and turns of phrase are something else to keep you laughing even as you’re appalled by what his leading character is doing.

How to get that feeling across in the movie? Kubrick tried for a different type of humour in the first one, having Humbert wrestle with a folding bed which keeps springing back into position, lying on it and collapsing to the floor, etc.; and there is always Peter Sellers on hand doing his clever voices, as in “Dr Strangelove”, and turning every scene he’s in into knockabout comedy. But that’s not the kind of humour that was in the book; and we’re not even allowed to be appalled by Humbert’s perversion in Kubrick’s version: Lolita’s age and physical maturity have been upped from grade school to Senior High, so that his obsession with her loses all its shock value (actress Sue Lyon was such a sexy mid-teen that just about every man in the audience could sympathise with Humbert’s passion: a perversion has been “watered down” to an obsession).

The second version was more-faithful to the book, because we were, at least, spared the slapstick comedy; and Lolita did look a little closer to the age of the character we had met in the book (although it was obvious that an older actress was being made look younger by pigtails and braces on her teeth, and an attempt to “juvenalise” her movements as she skipped and twirled through the sets). But it was all such a serious affair! Humbert didn’t seem to be having the least bit of fun (Jeremy Irons played the part as if Humbert had long had all the passion squeezed out of him and was walking, helpless, towards the inevitable), and all the carefully-choreographed childish movements didn’t, in the long run, make Dominique Swain look like Nabokov’s Lolita; in fact, they made her look just a bit like a tomboy!

Which 2 movies would be greatly improved if the main actors/actresses were swapped around?

I don’t know of any that “WOULD have”…. but I can tell you two cases where it actually happened. The MGM movie of “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” was originally cast with Ingrid Bergman (fresh-faced and saintly, as she usually was) as the girl who waits faithfully to marry the troubled Jekyll, and Lana Turner as the street girl whom Hyde tortures and eventually kills. In other words, the usual MGM idea of “safe” casting, with no surprises. Bergman, however, was thoroughly sick of playing saints which gave her little chance to show her range, and Turner was equally tired of always being cast in roles where her only defining characteristic was sex-appeal…. so, at Bergman’s suggestion, they approached director Victor Fleming about swapping roles. Amazingly, the big brass agreed, and, both actresses approached their new parts with relish. Bergman, not unexpectedly, stole the movie.

The second case was in the 1960 British film, “Tunes of Glory”, in which Alec Guinness and John Mills both played “against type” and turned in one of their best-ever performances (it’s my favourite Alec Guinness performance, even though he won his Oscar for a different movie). The film was originally conceived with the casting reversed, and the film was actually in rehearsal when the two stars decided, just as an experiment, to see how they would approach each other’s roles. What they brought to their “new” parts was extraordinary, and director Ronald Neame was canny enough to see that the contracts were adjusted; the result was one of the most engrossing British movies of the decade.

Which movie climax killed you?

Climaxes must be easy to write, as I could run off a couple of dozen that either had me breathless with excitement or weeping openly and trying not to make a fool of myself. In fact, one of the first films I ever saw — I must have been no more than six or seven years old — taught me what a great climax was: it was a B-film called “The Window”, starring the Disney child-actor Bobby Driscoll (but this was no Disney film!), and it had such an effect on me that, thirty years later, I couldn’t see Paul Stewart (who played the villain, out to kill little Bobby, who has “seen too much”) in any movie, even when he played sympathetic roles such as the parent of the disabled girl in “A Child is Waiting”, without the whole last five minutes of “The Window” flooding back into my mind.

Films then proceeded to do that to me for the rest of my childhood, and throughout adulthood. I’m not a weeper (usually), but the climax of “The Yearling”, to use your phrase, “killed me” when I first saw it, and it never fails to get the same response, sixty-five years later, when I see it in revival. The desperate first kiss as the siren in the street below suddenly stops right outside the secret annex in “The Diary of Anne Frank” has me completely helpless, every time… although I blame Alfred Newman for that, because the music he wrote for that few moments was just beyond brilliant (I hardly dare play the soundtrack album, because that’s all it takes to destroy me!).

And for thrills, like “The Window”: well, I guess Sidney Lumet’s “Fail Safe” would be the one that most shocked me, when Henry Fonda (playing the President of the United States) picks up the red ‘phone and proposes, to the Soviet Union’s premier, his eleventh-hour solution to the USA’s computer failure. The story of this little-seen film is basically the same as “Dr Strangelove”; “Fail Safe”, however, is deadly serious, and that scene, followed swiftly by the resolution (told in a rapid series of freeze frames) is one that will stay with you forever.

What's the best performance by a kid actor in an otherwise bad movie?

You could always write to Patty McCormack, who is still working, and ask for her opinion on her post-”Bad Seed” movies. She made quite a splash, in 1956, as evil Rhoda (for which role she was nominated for an Academy Award), and there was obviously a lot of talent there waiting to be used.

The trouble is, there weren’t too many parts for child serial-killers, and she probably wouldn’t have wanted to be type-cast in that kind of role even if there had been, so, after playing Helen Keller (before Patty Duke) in a TV adaptation of ”The Miracle Worker” in 1957, she looked around for other films, but only came up with “All Mine to Give” and the syrupy “Kathy O” (about a child actress who is just looking for love). I remember the second of these, in particular, as being… well, I guess the kindest way to put it is “beneath her talents” (and also the talents of the film-noir actor Dan Duryea, who would have been a great co-star for her had they found a strong vehicle for the pair; perhaps a remake of “The Window” with a girl in the Bobby Driscoll part.

Anyway, Patty McCormack couldn’t have given a bad performance if she’d tried, and she accredited herself quite well in “Kathy O”, but it was no “Bad Seed”; it was more like “bad movie”. The next few films she was offered gave her no better scope for her capabilities, and around 1961 she gave up movies — temporarily, at least — until she could try again, near the end of the decade, in adult roles. A great loss to movies, as she really opened the door for future child stars — such as Patty Duke and Pamela Franklin and Hayley Mills — to move away from the Shirley-Temple-type roles which has been their province for two decades. It’s a pity they hadn’t made “Kathy O” back when Temple was still around… it was her kind of part and her kind of movie.

What movies would you like to see made?

Hollywood loves to make filmed biographies of its own luminaries — currently we have Renee Zellweger’s portrayal of Judy Garland in the last year of her life tipped for an Academy Award — but no one, to my knowledge, has yet made a film about the last years of Dick Powell: one of the most ironic and tragic stories in the history of Hollywood.

Most famous as a musical comedy star in the 1930s and then as a hard-boiled private eye in the 1940s, Dick Powell — like so many other actors when offers for roles began to dwindle — turned to directing, and the first film he directed was a film-noir thriller called “Split Second”, a very timely movie in the early post-WWII years, as it dealt with nuclear testing in the deserts of Nevada and the dangers faced by people who fail to get sufficiently-far from the test site in time. While Powell actually went on location in a real desert for several scenes, he, naturally enough, stayed as close to Hollywood as was practical, and all his location scenes took place in California. It was a tight little movie in which there was quite a deal of discussion about the dangers of radiation poisoning, and in the climax, the heroes, unable to escape from the area, have to find shelter deep in a convenient cave and wait till the coast was clear.

Two years later he was assigned to direct his second project, “The Conqueror”, set in Mongolia, which followed the life and battles (and, of course, romantic dalliances) of Genghis Khan. A big budget movie, the production company wanted to get some things, at least, right; they couldn’t get the cast right (John Wayne was hardly a convincing Mongol warrior, and Susan Hayward as a Tartar princess was such an unlikely piece of casting that she later joked about it: “Me, a red-headed Irish Tartar princess!”. And what can you say about Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendariz? They hardly had an oriental in the cast) and they couldn’t get the dialogue right (who knew how ancient Mongols talked?), but they spent much time scouring western areas of the USA for a perfect location to stand-in for Mongolia. They found it — the right vistas, the correct colored sand — at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, and with the location so picture-perfect, what could go wrong?

As it turned out, plenty. As director of “Split Second”, it might have occurred to Dick Powell that the radiation which his previous script had discussed at some length might just have turned out to be a factor worth considering when he moved his cast and crew to the chosen site just 137 miles from where eleven nuclear explosions had been conducted less than three years earlier. But he did what he was told, and unwittingly exposed himself and another 219 people to the deadly sand which covered the area. The story took an even more appalling twist when, the location shooting finally over, the company found they needed to match up the sand colour of the studio shots with those at the location; accordingly, sixty tons of the sand was shipped back to RKO studios, and production continued with even more technicians exposed.

The tragic finale to the story? John Wayne and his son (who wasn’t even in the movie, but visited the set) both developed cancer, and the ‘Duke’ died from it. Susan Hayward and her son (also a visitor to the set) developed cancer, and Susan died from hers. Agnes Moorehead and Pedro Armendariz both developed fatal cancer (Armendariz shot himself after diagnosis); some ninety other people working on the movie, and an unknown number of American Indians who had ridden horses as extras in the desert, developed cancer, with a mortality rate of something in the nature of 60%. And Dick Powell, the director who had made the first American movie about the dangers of nuclear testing in the deserts of western USA, also developed cancer and died. An ironic and unnecessary end to a distinguished career.

Do books ever come out after movies? Are they typically better than the movie?

While more movies are based on books than the other way around, it is not too unusual for a movie which isn’t based on an already-existing work to be the basis for a follow-up book which cashes in on the movie’s name and reputation.

Typically, these are aimed at people who have already seen the film and just wish to relive it, so literary competence, rather than literary merit, is all that is required. However, if a good author, such as John D MacDonald (author of “Cape Fear”), who wrote the book “I Could Go On Singing” after the release of the movie (which was originally titled “The Lonely Stage” and based on an original screenplay by Mayo Simon and Robert Dozier) becomes involved, there may, indeed, be some literary merit in the work (even though, in that particular case, I cannot imagine what Mr MacDonald could have put in the book that would be fair compensation for the loss of the Garland musical numbers which made the movie so memorable; it wasn’t exactly a great story!).

What actor/actress has been snubbed by the Oscars that should have won?

There have been many miscarriages of justice in the Academy Awards over the decades, but surely no one has been overlooked quite as consistently — without winning the statue even once! — as Richard Burton.

He was nominated as Best Actor for his first Hollywood movie (“My Cousin Rachel, in 1952), following which he received six further nominations, but was beaten each time (in one case by John Wayne, whose cantankerous but lovable cowboy in “True Grit” was given the nod over Burton’s Henry VIII in “Anne of a Thousand Days”). Little wonder that, eventually, he gave up altogether, took parts in films like “Exorcist II: The Heretic”, and appeared to be spitting out his lines instead of acting them.

What is a movie that you would strongly recommend watching but not want to watch again?

A similar question has come up in the past, and I mentioned a film called “The Woodsman”, which had a scene quite near the end which made viewers so uncomfortable that a controversy erupted on-line as to whether the film should ever have been made. The scene, involving a conversation in a park between a pedophile and a young girl, is quite-brilliantly played, and the motives of the film can’t be doubted; however, I found myself not knowing whether to feel sorrier for the character in the movie (“Robyn”) or the young actress having to read her lines in that scene (Hannah Pilkes). It’s a film I admire, and it sits on my DVD shelf; but I can’t quite bring myself to put it into the player again.

How do movie directors choose their soundtrack?

Charles Chaplin and Clint Eastwood usually wrote their own; Francis Ford Coppola’s films often kept the soundtrack music in the family (Carmine Coppola). Still other directors have a close arrangement with a particular composer and commission them as a matter of course: Steven Spielberg with John Williams, and Alfred Hitchcock with Bernard Herrmann, for example.

These are all A-list directors, of course, who have enough “clout” with their backers to ensure that they can get their own way. It is, perhaps, useful to remember, however, that the director is ultimately responsible to the producer, who pays the bills; the choice of composer may well be decided without the director even being consulted. Certainly, this was the case in the days when the half-dozen major studios dominated the scene; the director and composer were assigned to the movie depending on who was available at the time, and most of the directors went into their assignment neither knowing nor (I would imagine) particularly caring which of the staff composers was going to score their movie. Of course, if you worked at 20th-Century Fox, you could probably breathe easily in this matter, because your composer was likely to be either Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann or David Raksin (or, as in “The Egyptian”, a combination), and you knew that they were going to make your movie sound better than it really was!

And if, by chance, the composer didn’t perform “up to scratch” — as was the case with the film “Torn Curtain”, originally scored by Bernard Herrmann but, according to the producers (NOT the director, even though Hitch subsequently got the blame), lacking in a sure-fire “hit” which would ensure a box-office “smash” — then the entire score could be lifted out of the film and another composer brought in to write a replacement.

What are the most ridiculous lines of dialogue you've ever heard in a movie?

I wouldn’t care to be pinned down to specific lines, but I think I would be safe in saying that most of the most ridiculous lines of dialogue I have ever listened to were in a 1956 movie called “The Conqueror”, in which Hollywood scriptwriters had to come up with dialogue that sounded like it might have been spoken by twelfth-century Mongols, and failed spectacularly. Of course, in making this selection I have to step back from “King Richard and the Crusaders”, because I never actually saw it; so I have only a critic’s word for it that Virginia Mayo really did utter the line, “War! War! War! That’s all you ever think about, Dickie Plantagenet!”

What is a 10/10 movie that is NOT well-known?

I don’t know whether I could come up with even one 10/10… the word seems to get around for the “total” masterpieces. But I can think of a few 9/10 movies (maybe even 9.5) that seemed to come and go without the recognition they deserved. In recent years, “Locke” (2013) has been the most outrageously-overlooked film I can think of; even Tom Hardy’s name didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference to the box-office receipts. Further back, “Fail Safe” (1964) failed to get much recognition because it just happened to be made around the same time as another film with basically the same plot (“Dr Strangelove”, which found the humour in a nuclear holocaust; “Fail Safe” was dead serious). And “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1962) was handicapped by being a cinema expansion of a made-for-TV movie (that fact, however, didn’t hurt “Marty”!) which had, it seems, been enough to satisfy everyone’s demands for this “boxer-in-his-declining-years” story; but with superlative performances by Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney and Julie Harris, it surely deserves to be more-widely known.

What is that one movie that terrorised you as a child, and why?

Probably “The Window” (1949), which I saw on its first release (so I would have been six or seven, just a year or two younger than the boy — Bobby Driscoll — who was being pursued by killer Paul Stewart); so it was easy for me to identify with the main character. In fact, the movie made such an indelible impression that, for the next thirty years, whenever Paul Stewart came on the screen in ANYTHING, his evil intentions in “The Window” instantly jumped back into my mind and overshadowed his performance. And he often played sweet lovable characters (such as the proud father of a mentally-disabled daughter in “A Child is Waiting”, in 1962); but I kept waiting for the ugly side of his persona to break loose!

If the name “Paul Stewart” doesn’t ring any bells, perhaps I should mention that he was the last-interviewed person in “Citizen Kane”: Kane’s faithful manservant who said, “Rosebud? Yeah, I can tell you about Rosebud.”

Why do films from the past look crisper compared to movies released today?

I hesitated to even try to answer this question, because I was sure an expert in film stock would chime in straight away and explain it far better than I ever could; but, so far, your very-interesting query has gone without an answer, so maybe this first one will encourage other more-knowledgeable people to respond, if only to point up the flaws in my answer!

For a start, there’s film stock. “Films of the past” were filmed in either 35mm or one of the 55/65/70 mm processes, and this film, while fragile and cumbersome, gave a crystal-clear picture. So much so that the makers of movies for the cinema scoffed at the TV product (usually not made to be preserved), which was filmed on much cheaper and easier-to-handle videotape. For a while it was believed that no one would pay money to see a film shot on such cheap “stock”. Eventually, however, some maverick filmmaker who couldn’t afford the expensive film stock decided to go ahead with his idea on videotape, and, if the film caught the public’s fancy, suddenly the cheap stock didn’t seem such a big deal. Audiences were, in the TV era, prepared to put up with a less-than-perfect picture, it seems. I remember the first time I saw light enter the camera, it was in an Italian “swords-and-sandals” cheapie, and I thought it could NEVER happen in a “real” film, i.e. from Hollywood; now it happens all the time, even in multi-million-dollar epics, and it’s very distracting when you’re trying to believe in the film as something that is actually happening before your eyes (as, for example, “The Revenant”); but it seems I am the only one still distracted by such trifles.

Anyway, the realisation that audiences didn’t actually care all that much about “crispness” meant that filmmakers soon had the luxury of choosing… and they often chose just as you and I do at the supermarket. I think it was Dame Nellie Melba who first coined the phrase “Give them muck!” That must have been the mantra for the “new order”. But, they could argue, at least we got spontaneity… and with a few hand-held cameras and natural lighting, you can shoot a film in not much more time than it takes to watch it.

Then there was lighting. While hand-held cameras operated by a single cameraman who wanders among the actors on a set during a scene, capturing whatever looks “right” for the scene, is now standard practice making movies (and is sometimes convincingly argued for, as, for instance, by director Ron Howard, defending his choice for “Frost/Nixon”, which would have been easy to set-up and light in the “traditional” way), the “films from the past” used stationary cameras (or ones that moved predictably on a ‘track’), and what the cameraman actually shot was predetermined down to the tiniest detail. Spontaneity was not considered a virtue… it was the actors’ job to make it LOOK spontaneous, but not to BE spontaneous!

Therefore, a great deal of time was spent lighting each set-up — sometimes a half-day, while everyone else sat around and waited — to ensure every frame of film showed the best-possible picture. There were much fewer location shots in these older movies; many of the supposedly-outdoor scenes were shot on elaborate indoor sets which were lit to maximise their effect (Looking at the on-location-in-Manhattan shots of Grand Central Station which were taken by director Fred Zinnemann before he was fired from “The Clock”, his replacement director, Vincente Minnelli, chose not to continue with location shooting, but to have the interior of Grand Central Station constructed right there at MGM in Culver City). In this way, every inch of the set could be lit for crispness and clarity.

Finally, perhaps, there is black-and-white vs colour. The lighting described above always seemed to suit black-and-white films more than it did those in Technicolor (although, using Vincente Minnelli as an example yet again, this wasn’t always true, as Minnelli proved in “Meet Me in St Louis”, lit with all the care of a man in love with his leading lady). So I rather suspect that the “crisp” look to which you referred is something you associate mainly with the black-and-white films of the Golden Years.

You meet someone who has never watched a film in their life. What do you show them?

Michelle’s answer is fun, but, amazingly enough, I was once in a position where I took a whole bunch of kids who had never seen a movie (and didn’t have television, in most cases) to their first-ever!

It was back in the mid-sixties, and I was appointed as teacher in a tiny school in a valley where TV reception was possible only if you installed an antenna on top of the mountain and ran a cable for around a kilometre, among all the rocks and trees. A farming community — and far from a rich one — movies were not something that was considered an essential ingredient in a child’s upbringing, even though the valley was only about two hours’ drive from a major city.

Anyway, I managed to get hold of a mini-bus and someone licensed to drive it, and organised a day-trip to the “big smoke” and a movie. One or two of the kids had seen a movie or two before, and a few more even had TV, but for the majority, this was their first experience with the cinema. The movie I chose was “Oliver!”

And if I were doing it today, and for adults? Maybe a Hitchcock film; “North By Northwest” would probably fill the bill. Colour, humour, suspense, outdoor locales, trains, Mt Rushmore, and Cary Grant and James Mason, as good an introduction to Hollywood royalty as you could get in any film. And a bit of hokum is always welcome.

How have famous actors and actresses, later neglected or forgotten, continued their lives and aged?

If they got good financial advice back when they were in demand, they sit at home and count their money.

If they were given wise counsel back when they were “hot”, they will know that it was all just a passing phase, and that they would one day have to go back to what they were originally, a mere mortal who now walks, unrecognised, down the street, and takes the bus to the Seniors Centre.

There are, I suppose, always the Norma Desmonds: the ones who think that past stardom means that they are forever closer to the gods than are the rest of us, and who can never forgive the world for moving on and leaving them behind, and nature for treating their faces and bodies the way we mere mortals are treated. (There’s a delightful story about Marlene Dietrich, who had the same portrait photographer for a quarter of a century; towards the end of her career, she had a sitting with him and was displeased with the result. She carpeted him and complained: how could he have made her look so unattractive, so ordinary? “You never made me look like this twenty years ago!” she exclaimed. “Ah, yes, Miss Dietrich,” he answered calmly, “But you must understand, I was much younger then.”)

It’s a common myth, this claim to eternal stardom, but, in actuality, probably a lot less-common than Hollywood likes to make you think. Most actors and actresses have been in the game long enough to see what has happened to THEIR idols, and accept their own destiny with neither resentment nor rancour, but, possibly, a little bit of relief.

What is the least an actor has done to prepare for a movie?

Actors sometimes play themselves in movies, and that relieves them of such duties as doing research on the character, or trying to “flesh out” the character from what is written on a page….. and from mastering an accent! Just as an example, it is unlikely that John Malkovich had to do a great deal of preparation when he played the part of John Malkovich in the movie “Being John Malkovich”!

Was Gene Tierney a good actress?

Better than that…. she was, for a while, the brightest of 20th Century-Fox’s stable of dramatic stars. There was always the ‘Foxy blonde” for musicals and comedies — Alice Faye, then Betty Grable, then Marilyn Monroe — and Fox seemed to chart the courses of these three so well that you could easily spot the “hand-over” film: the one where they put both the reigning queen and the challenger in a movie together, and made it clear that it was time for the “old” one to step aside; but Fox were less-sure of how to handle their stable of drama queens: Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain, Anne Baxter…. and Gene Tierney. Occasionally one would be announced for a role, but, when the film hit the theatres, one of the others was playing the part (for instance, Jeanne Crain was the original choice for “All About Eve”, which eventually won an Oscar nomination for Anne Baxter).

However, when it came to the absolute-top roles, Gene Tierney was usually a shoo-in for the part: “Laura”, “Leave Her to Heaven”, “The Ghost and Mrs Muir”. She had an elegance and grace which the others couldn’t match, was cooler and more controlled, and seemed to have an inner strength which was hard to define, but which made her roles “special”. She alone, of the group, could “age” on screen, as she had to do in “The Ghost and Mrs Muir”; she didn’t get less-attractive as she approached middle-age. Her persona didn’t seem to date as fashions changed, and — personal tragedies notwithstanding (her sad story was actually used by Agatha Christie as the basis for one of her murder mysteries) —she seemed set for a long and distinguished career at Fox, since there was no one else on the lot quite like her.

It was, eventually, the studio that changed around her: Fox pioneered CinemaScope and stereophonic sound, and its policy, in the 1950s, was to specialise in wide-screen costume dramas which exploited the new technology rather than the unique talents of its stable of stars. “The Egyptian” — the film that Marlon Brando walked out on — was clearly beneath her, and it was the first film in which she made little impression (in fact, the only person in that film who did make much of an impression was the up-and-coming English beauty Jean Simmons, who was the logical successor to Gene Tierney’s crown at Fox, as she, too had a large dose of what Tierney personified: class).

Can you name an actor who played a role in a film that is strikingly different from his real-life personality?

I could start by saying that Jerry Lewis often played humble, lovable simpletons… but maybe I shouldn’t go there, because I took Lewis to task in another answer, some months ago, and fair’s fair!

So I will opt for Sir Alec Guinness. In real life, I have read, he was much like most of the characters he played on-screen: lacking in self-assertiveness, over-reserved, somewhat fussy, but unfailingly polite to both men and women and of such even temperament that he was seldom heard to even raise his voice. And that was the character-type he usually chose to play…. even when he was a crook, he was a meek, mild gentleman (“The Lavender Hill Mob”).

He was cast in the role of the fair-minded but essentially weak commander who was brought undone by John Mills’ blustering hard-drinking Scotsman in “Tunes of Glory”; but during rehearsals they tried swapping roles, and the experiment was so rewarding for both actors that when shooting started, the blustering, rule-breaking Scot who resorted to violence when drunk was being played by meek, mild Sir Alec. Like most shy people, he was able to become a totally different person when acting, and he revelled in the part. He had already taken an Academy Award as the stiff-upper-lip colonel in “Bridge on the River Kwai”, but “Tunes of Glory”, in my opinion, is his best-ever performance.

What are some good examples of film directors cribbing the style of other directors?

Brian de Palma wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock, and in several films tried to imitate scenes with which Hitch had previously had particular success. He came closest to pulling it off in “Obsession”, which was similar in style and content to “Vertigo”, and for which he even borrowed Hitch’s composer, Bernard Herrmann.

Francis Ford Coppola disposed of James Caan in “The Godfather” by unleashing a stream of bullets at him while he sat in his car, which quickly became ridden with bullet-holes as Caan did his squirming “death dance”: an easy-to-pick steal from Arthur Penn, who disposed of both Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty (“Bonnie and Clyde”) in exactly the same way.

Which movie has the best opening theme?

You’ve set the bar high, Joel, with a collaboration between Hitch and Bernard Herrmann! I honestly don’t know if it gets much better than that! But, for another great opener with much of the same excitement, try Alfred Newman’s theme for the opening credits of “Airport”. It was his last score, and it’s a killer.

Then there’s Jerome Moross’s score behind the credits of “The Big Country”. Apparently the director, William Wyler, didn’t like the music at all and was about to bring in another composer to finish the job; but star Gregory Peck, who was co-producer, talked him into backing down. Peck, I think you’ll agree, got it right.

Are there any movies/series about real life sisters like "To Walk Invisible" or "The Crown?"

 “The Dolly Sisters” is purportedly the biography of identical twins Jennie and Rosie Dolly, two Hungarian entertainers who were well-known in the Broadway of the 1920s. Since the movie was a 20th-Century Fox musical starring Betty Grable and June Haver, and musical biographies from the major studios were never really renowned for their devotion to historical accuracy, I wouldn’t hope for a great deal of fact, however!

And, of course, “Gypsy” — another musical, and this time with an original score by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim — was about Gypsy Rose Lee and her sister, actress June Havoc. There’s some great music and a witty script, but, once again, I wouldn’t hope for too much historical accuracy, since it made a comedy figure out of the girls’ pushy stage mother, Rose Hovick, who sings and dances and keeps everyone laughing. In real life, she was “pushy” indeed, but in a quite-different way: she pushed a hotel manager out of a window to his death! She also shot dead a boarder in a lesbian boarding house where she was living (there were varying accounts as to whether the boarder was Rose’s own lover or had made advances towards one of the daughters), and twice tried to shoot the dancer who had eloped with ‘Baby’ June….. once actually in a police station! None of that was in the stage play or the movie (‘though Sondheim could have written some great songs if that material had been used!), since the producers were trying to attract Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, and Rosalind Russell to the role.

What small thing ruined a movie/series for you because it was insufferable it to the point you can't ignore it?

There was a similar question asked some months ago, and it straightaway brought to my mind a very fine movie called “Dead Man Walking” with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, and directed by Tim Robbins. With those three, you would expect a film of the highest order, and it is…. just about every minute of the way.

Until near the end, when Robbins makes a choice, for one brief shot of an execution taking place. It shocks; but not for its brutality. What is shocking is its equating a rapist/murderer with Jesus Christ in the eyes of a nun.

If you’ve seen the film, you will probably know to which shot I am referring. Sister Helen sees the humanity behind the commission of an evil deed (a rape/murder), and visits the condemned man prior to his execution, offering counsel, just as she does to the victims’ families. She eventually attends the execution, and, in the final moments, she sees him posed like the traditional image of Christ on the cross, standing with arms outstretched, addressing his last words to the assembled onlookers. I feel that shot makes a comment about her feelings for the killer, and the comment is both unnecessary (is the film trying to teach US how to feel?) and objectionable…. not to mention unjustifiable, because there is no prior suggestion in the movie that the nun ever saw the killer as a Christ-figure, but merely as a flawed human being still worthy of her time and compassion.

I wish I’d left early… Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon are both great, and Robbins is one of the best living directors (“Cradle Will Rock” is unmissable). But the memory of that one shot became the whole movie for me, and for years I was reluctant to revisit it.

What movies from the 70s are so outrageous and shocking that they couldn’t be made today?

I don’t suppose there’s any movie that can’t be remade, so long as the makers of the new one are careful to make some adjustments to allow for changing sensibilities of audiences. The 1978 movie “Pretty Baby” would certainly not be allowed to be remade exactly as the original was, because laws regarding children on-screen are more rigorously enforced nowadays, and mothers bent on exploiting their children whatever the cost to the child are less-tolerated than they were (apparently) back then.

What movies do most people like for an absolutely wrong reason?

I like Judy Garland. I like to watch her act, I like to hear her sing, and I enjoy all of her movies (it’s true! I can’t think of a single bad one; but I admit she had a lucky escape in 1967 when she got fired from “Valley of the Dolls”, or that might have blemished her perfect record), because they all give me an opportunity to see her at work. I think, therefore, I like those movies for the RIGHT reason.

But there are people (I hear) who don’t like Garland, either her acting or her singing (and they may actually like “Valley of the Dolls”!). They may still enjoy “The Wizard of Oz” for its witty song lyrics, or “A Star is Born” for James Mason’s performance, or “Meet Me in St Louis” for its set decoration. They would say, then, that I was liking those movies for “an absolutely wrong reason”, and point me in THEIR direction for the “right reason”.

But what they mean is the wrong reason for THEM. “Wrong reason” or “right reason” are subjective terms.

I would say, therefore, that no one likes movies for the wrong reason, absolute or otherwise. They like them for the right reason, according to their own tastes. Whether that’s YOUR “right reason” is the question.

What movie is loved by everyone but has a major plot hole that totally ruined it for you?

A major plot hole is an annoyance in any movie, but I don’t think that its discovery is, on its own, enough to “totally ruin” the movie. A recent example of a film with a MAJOR flaw in the “solution” still being one of the best films of its year was the science-fiction movie, “Predestination”. It took great pains, at the end, to explain its convoluted plot, but there remained the one incident which they had to conveniently ignore rather than explain…. because, very simply, there IS no explanation for it. OK, so that’s a “fail” on the part of the scriptwriters…. or maybe by the author of the work on which the film was based. But it remained an engrossing and exciting movie with a fascinating premise and something to SAY. Its plot hole certainly didn’t mean it was mindless; merely slightly imperfect.

What is a film that is very controversial, but its controversy makes it excellent?

It’s easy to make a controversial film: just break a few rules about what is considered morally acceptable or hold up to ridicule something that is considered sacred. Being controversial, by itself, doesn’t make a film “excellent”, although the publicity generated by the banning, seizing, arresting, picketing and court battles might turn an ordinary film into a blockbuster (which happened in “Baby Doll”, which was a relatively minor black-and-white movie with no star names to attract audiences, but offended the Catholic Legion of Decency so much that Catholics were forbidden to see it, a ban which, naturally, caused everybody else to line up around the block wherever it was showing).

However, despite my initial doubts about any connection between “controversy” and “excellence”, I decided I would have a look at a few lists of controversial movies to see, first, if there were any on the list that I liked, and second, if the reason I liked them was because they “pushed the envelope” and disturbed my sensibilities.

On http://timeout.com/newyork/film I found a list of “The 50 Most Controversial Movies Ever”, apparently ranked in order from the one that stirred up the most trouble. Most were condemned either for explicit horror or explicit sex. I strolled without even pausing (well, maybe just for a moment, at “Freaks”) until I got to “Bonnie and Clyde” at number 9, and decided that its excellence did, indeed, stem from the fact that it shocked us with violence even as it made us feel sympathetic towards the perpetrators of the violent acts. So it might go in as an answer to your query.

There were a few good films in the next thirty or so, but most of them — such as “Silence of the Lambs” and “Last Tango in Paris” — were good in spite of the controversies in which they revelled, not because of them. I had to go all the way down to number 39 to find “The Man with the Golden Arm”, which certainly qualifies for a place in your list: one of the few good Otto Preminger films, it looked unflinchingly and horrifyingly at drug addiction (enough to scare you off for life), and gave Frank Sinatra the best role he ever had.

Nothing else beyond that was worth even pausing for, even though I must confess that, as I scrolled, it did occur to me that the compilers seemed to be stuck in a rut in their definition of “controversial”, and that some really fine films of the past were omitted because they didn’t fit that somewhat-narrow definition: two early Marlon Brando films, for instance (“The Men” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”) certainly stirred up controversy at the time, as did “Night of the Hunter”, “Home of the Brave”, “Dr Strangelove” and even the original “King Kong”. All were better films because they dared to tread where no film had gone before.

What's an uplifting movie to watch when you're depressed?

For about sixty years of film-making, the immediate answer to your question would have been “a musical”. Through the Depression, through World War II and through the Cold War, there was always a warm musical to chase away the blues; in fact, “Chasin’ the Blues Away” was actually one of the songs in “Easter Parade”, a good example of the kind of movie I was talking about.

However, with the eighties and nineties, the musical suddenly ceased to be a genre, unless you count the Disney animations which alone kept it alive, but usually with rather banal scores and lacking the experience of watching a musical genius (and “old” Hollywood certainly had those “on tap”) actually up there, working. And the message sent to children — that songs were something that only cartoon characters sang, and were not, therefore, part of the real world — was, to say the least, unfortunate. And, in the animations, dancing, of course, virtually disappeared, as there was no challenge at all in making a cartoon character perform amazing physical feats with a stroke of the brush.

So what do you do nowadays when you’re depressed and want to snap out of it? Watch a TV sitcom, maybe… at least they laugh for you, to cue you in on when your depression is supposed to have ended! Or one of the romantic comedies; but the lack of originality and real wit in those nowadays is enough to give me depression, not cure it!

For myself, I say a prayer of thanks that I have a DVD player, and I take a musical off the shelf. One where the singing is done by real people, and you see them at work; one where the dancing really does defy the laws of gravity. I recommend “The Band Wagon”, or “Meet Me in St Louis”, or “The Pirate”, or “Singing in the Rain”, or “On the Town”, or “Funny Face”. There are so many great musicals that your depression won’t stand a chance!

Which are the best comedy movies in Hollywood from 2000 to 2019?

I’m choosing from a very narrow base here, because the comedy stars of the last twenty years peddle a different kind of humour to the kind I used to like back in the “golden years” of Hollywood, so I usually make a point of avoiding films with their names on them. “The Truman Show” (if, in fact, you accept it as a comedy) is easily the best, in my opinion, since the great days of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen…. but it just manages to fall outside the time period you’ve defined (I can’t resist mentioning it, however!)

Since the day I came out delirious with joy over that movie (and prepared to forgive Jim Carrey for all the movies in which he made me cringe rather than laugh), it has been, as they say, lean pickings. I do recall, however, in 2006, thoroughly enjoying “Little Miss Sunshine”; and, as recently as 2016, there was “Florence Foster Jenkins” (however, as with “The Truman Show”, you may dispute its inclusion as a comedy).

What is a classical film?

The term really has no precise meaning, Raimon, even though cinemagoers — including myself — like to bandy it about a lot. Usually, it refers to films that have stood the test of time and are still respected years after they have been made. Just how far back you have to go before a film is considered “classic” is anybody’s guess; the period of 1930s through to 1950s is usually referred to as “the Golden Years of Hollywood”, when the all-powerful major studios collected stars, writers, and directors the way you or I might collect stamps or coins; the films produced in those years —readily identifiable because the same people were involved in virtually every film that came from a particular studio, and so they were made in a uniform style — are usually referred to as “classic” movies. The fact that most of them weren’t all that good doesn’t seem to affect the bestowing of that title; I suppose the more-recent films to be spoken of in the same way are ones that reflect that particular style of story-telling (once again, that is no guarantee of any real worth in the product!)

Which 1950s or 1960s classic Sci-Fi movie would you like to see remade?

I wouldn’t particularly like to see any of the “classics” remade, because they have tried with most of them — “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, “The Thing”, “The Time Machine”, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” — and the results have always been decidedly inferior to the originals. “Them!” hasn’t been touched yet, or “The Incredible Shrinking Man”… these, like the already-mentioned “Forbidden Planet”, were both good ones, and really don’t need the ballsing-up that the previous four suffered in their remakes.

So, I would look for some of the “thudders” and suggest that, since there’s nothing much to lose, they try to do something with them. How about “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and its sequel, “Revenge of the Creature” (they might even ask Clint Eastwood to do a walk-on, since his first screen appearance was in the second of these). Or “Tarantula” (another early Clint Eastwood appearance), or maybe “The Black Scorpion”? The low-budget sci-fis really only had one thing going for them, and that was Ray Harryhausen’s special effects, but, if my recollection is correct, these films didn’t even have the benefit of Harryhausen’s imagination; today’s CGI could hardly be worse than what they offered.

Who is your favorite movie narrator?

Not really a movie, but there was, some years ago, a TV series called “Hollywood”, which was narrated by James Mason. Even if the series hadn’t been masterfully-written (which it was), beautifully-made (which it was) and constantly enlightening (which it was), it still would have held my attention (which it did) with that voice making music out of every word.

What is a not-so-popular movie that you thoroughly enjoy?

Every time I watch “A Child is Waiting”, I chuckle to myself that it must have been Stanley Kramer’s attempt to lower his tax debt for 1962. A sure-fire hit, like his “Caine Mutiny”, it certainly isn’t; it doesn’t set out to make audiences feel comfortable, and it has some pretty brutal things to say about the parents and caregivers of disabled children. Since most of the children in the movie are, in real life, disabled, it doesn’t even let you off the hook by allowing you to think, “But it isn’t real; they’re only pretending”.

The film is virtually all talk, and the main thrust of the plot — can the misfit child and the misfit teacher help each other to find acceptance in a world that doesn’t want to know about misfits of any kind — isn’t exactly edge-of-the-seat stuff. Consequently, it got very little publicity and not many people, back in 1962, turned out to see it. If remade today, it probably wouldn’t even get a theatrical release; more like a television docudrama.

Yet I both admire it for its honorable motives and like it because it presents both sides of its case with fairness and understanding of the issues. To call it “not-so-popular” would probably be an understatement; yet it deserves to be seen by everyone. The last shot, alone — improvised, when the leading lady adds a word that wasn’t in the script, and the child reacts to the alteration, causing the whole scene to play out spontaneously -- is worth the price of admission.

What movie did you sit down to watch but didn't expect it to make you cry?

 “Schindler’s List”. And I didn’t cry, either… not until the very end, when all the people started to file, two by two, past the camera and place their stones on Oscar’s grave, and I suddenly realised exactly what was going on. I thought that was just such an inspired idea that I actually teared up with admiration for Spielberg and his stroke of genius. I saw this movie on the first half of a double bill (the second was “True Lies”), but Spielberg’s ending affected me so much that I never went back for the second movie!

Which movie can you watch over and over without ever getting tired of?

In fact, there are quite a few.

I guess if the main reason you went to see a movie was for the story being told, then you could only take so many viewings before your interest wore very thin. However, my favourite movie genre is the musical, and, as anyone who has ever seen a musical from the “golden years” of Hollywood knows, their plots were, at best, thin (and, in most cases, uncannily similar to the one the musical you watched the previous week), and, at worst, non-existent.

Perhaps it is this freedom from telling you a story laced with complications and surprise twists that makes musicals amenable to a dozen viewings, even more. You go to see them in order to, as one of the studio heads once said, “worship at the feet of the talent” that is being displayed for your approval. You can see the greatest singers and dancers in America performing to music written by the greatest composers and lyricists of the twentieth century, and accompanied by the best musicians and arrangers of their generation. So, who couldn’t watch “The Band Wagon” a dozen times? Or “Meet Me in St Louis”? Or several dozen others, such as “The Pirate”, “On the Town”, “Singing in the Rain”, “I Could Go On Singing”, “Funny Face”, “For Me and My Gal”, “Kiss Me Kate” and “Easter Parade”? Supreme talent never loses its lustre with repeated viewings… quite the contrary: you find something new to respond to — a special movement by Astaire or Kelly, a surprising piece of phrasing by Garland or Sinatra — with every visit.

Are actors just a tool in cinema? Why or why not?

Certainly Alfred Hitchcock thought so. He was once quoted as saying, “Actors are cattle”. When some of the actors who had worked for him objected rather loudly, he hastily revised the quote, and said that what he MEANT to say was “Actors should be treated like cattle.”

Amazingly, that seemed to placate everybody!

What is the best foreign horror movie you have ever seen? Why?

I will take “foreign” to mean “foreign language”, so I won’t trawl through my memories of English movies (if I did, then “The Wicker Man” would be the hands-down winner), and settle instead for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Les Diaboliques”, a modestly-made French movie from the late 50s (made in 1955, released somewhat later on the international market) which had a great effect on Alfred Hitchcock (who had “Vertigo” in release around the same time, and was less than impressed by the comparatively-negative views his movie was getting), and directly influenced the look (and budget) of his upcoming project, “Psycho”.

What is the most overrated film in your opinion? Why?

It’s surprising how people’s views change with the passage of time, and a film such as “Vertigo”, which wasn’t much liked when it came out (even, it seems, by its director, Alfred Hitchcock) can gradually acquire a reputation as one of the classics of cinema. It’s nice when an initially-overlooked masterpiece finally gets the recognition it always deserved, but I have to say that some of the films now regarded as classics seem to me to have sneaked into the top-100 lists without anybody standing up and saying, “But that one simply isn’t all that good!” I have said it occasionally, and usually had to leave the ring with my head bowed, so staunchly do people defend these films against which no one will hear a discouraging word.

So, with some fear of being thrown out of the Quora fellowship, here are a few overrated movies:

1. “Casablanca”. It’s fun, but that’s all it is. Everybody in it did their work very competently, but, of course, the Warners team always did; they released films every bit as good as “Casablanca” every three months. “Casablanca” must have just come along at the right time. But if you see it, you may wonder, as I do, where its reputation as the second or third-best film of all time comes from.

2. “The Searchers”. It’s a superior John Ford western, and all the great shots people talk about are true, and there to be admired; but it occasionally makes you want to cover your face when Ford gives in to his misogynistic tendencies. And the scenes done in the studio are such a poor match for the scenes done on location that you wonder why they didn’t spend an extra fifty dollars on the set decoration to get it right. And the John Ford stock company in the minor roles just come in and do what they do in all of his movies (show off)… and, in short, there are far better westerns from this era that never got anything like the reputation enjoyed by “The Searchers”; the original “3:10 to Yuma”, for example.

3. “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Yes, the special effects were out of this world, and yes, it was nice to see a science-fiction film which actually had money spent on it, but “2001” actually went places that no film of this genre had ever gone before (nor ever wanted to): it was boring! Especially those interminable early scenes where the director is escorting you around the spaceship. I admit there was nothing boring about the end… it’s hard to be bored and confused at the same time! You have to admire the technology that went into making it (apparently, they had to go out and invent the techniques that would satisfy the director’s demands). But I would have gladly sacrificed a few of those techniques to have the good time that I had in, say, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”.

4. “Vertigo”. There are some almost-hypnotic soft-focus scenes in the early part of this movie, and the Bernard Herrmann score is perhaps his best-ever. But it has one of the least-believable plots of any mystery movie you ever saw, and even Hitchcock couldn’t make you suspend disbelief for the full length of the movie. The all-important murder is, frankly, quite absurd, and is predicated on the assumption that the murderer and his accomplice can happily stay at the scene of the crime, confident that no one will bother examining the spot where the “suicide” took place. Most unbelievable of all is the Kim Novak character, low-class and desperately in need of a cosmetician, elocution and deportment tutors, and a good dressmaker; after being meticulously trained to use make-up skilfully, walk elegantly, speak beautifully, and dress with style, she — as soon as the job is over — goes right back to the bad make-up, sloppy dress, raggy hair, and “shopgirl” diction, having, it seems, learned nothing worth holding on to! There are a dozen better Hitchcock films for the “classics” file.

5. “Psycho”. Everybody who saw it in first release had a good time, screaming co-operatively on cue, but even as we screamed we knew that Alfred Hitchcock was taking a BIG step down with this one, going for the cheap thrill every time… something he had always left to the ‘B-movie’ people. The film looked like a “B” movie, and played like a “B” movie, and neither John Gavin nor Vera Miles was up to the standard of the past Hitchcock leads (although Anthony Perkins was, I admit, wonderful). But it made a lot of money, and encouraged Hitch to lower his standards for just about the remainder of his working life (“North by Northwest” excepted). Its inclusion, nowadays, as a classic is something of a mystery; its main contribution to the movies, really, was to encourage lesser directors to copy its crudity… which they did, ad infinitum.

What is your favourite movie made in this decade?

 “Locke” in 2013. A truly imaginative piece of work, trying for something original. One actor (Tom Hardy), one setting (the driver’s seat in a car going along an expressway). The kind of movie that you come out of and talk about all the way home.

Is there any film/TV adaptation that is actually better than the book?

Not many! However, “Night of the Hunter” would definitely qualify. Davis Grubb’s book is merely a good read; Charles Laughton’s movie is one of the most startlingly original films of all time.

Which film's climax you would have changed if you were the director of that film?

I would have gone back to the original ending for “The Bad Seed” (1956), which, on stage, ended with a shocking scenario: the mother, terrified of the evil that lies inside her child, poisons the girl and shoots herself; but the little girl is saved, and continues to work out her evil plans, unsuspected by anyone now that her mother is gone.

The movie was made at a time when evil on-screen could never go unpunished, so the film, first of all, saves both mother (who must have been a singularly bad shot, since she was supposed to have put the gun to her temple) and daughter, and then has the daughter venture out in a thunderstorm where she is conveniently disposed of by a lightning strike (the wrath of God?), following which event Mum — head bandaged but with all her faculties intact — and Dad live more-or-less happily ever after.

It was a clumsily-crafted ending if ever there was one; what had been a perfectly good movie, up until its climax, became an object of ridicule. It was later (1985) remade for television; hopefully the producers of the remake were able to restore the original ending.

Which comes first in song and dance movies, the soundtrack or the video?

The traditional way is to record the vocals first, and then mime to the playback when the number is being filmed. A good example of this can be seen at videopress.com/v/5x5hZTkf?fbclid=IwAR1JDhAmeS4598e-MrKFC_Rr8snJanfXosT4QxFQkOQOzigCyzo2OhnzEqo, which presents two simultaneous takes of Judy Garland filming the number “The Man That Got Away” for “A Star is Born”. Note that the soundtrack is identical.

Who are some child movie stars who grew up to be absolutely stunning?

Natalie Wood is the one that comes instantly to mind. Also Elizabeth Taylor. But I’m sure there are dozens of others! Margaret O’Brien was certainly sweet as a teenager, but she was smart enough to get out of movies as a young adult, so I don’t know what she was like at, say, 21. But she’s still around, and she still looks pretty good at around 80!

Before VHS, were people completely unaware of previous decades' movies?

No, certainly not; quite the contrary. There were cinemas in every city — six or eight just in a small city, as Sydney was in the 1950s — which specialised in “revivals”: booking movies which were not current, but which were still stored in the vaults of the distributing companies. Still other cinemas, in the suburbs, used to specialise in showing only movies from one company — the ‘Metro’ cinemas were a good example — and the usual practice here was to show the latest blockbuster from that studio on the second half of a double bill, and support it with a revival (the Marx Brothers movies were often a good choice, as they were normally only around 80 minutes long) from an earlier era.

There were fewer movies back then, so it wasn’t unreasonable for the local MGM office (for example) to stockpile most of their old product, and to supply it on request from cinemas whose main function was to show the old movies; these cinemas, in turn, would take requests from their patrons. My very first job was in a revival theatre in suburban Sydney, and I used to see four films a week that had been made before I was even born. That little cinema gave me a very firm grounding in the history of the sound movie… I recall that we even played Rudolph Valentino in “Son of the Sheik” for three nights, because one of our patrons had requested it, and our manager managed to unearth a copy (we seldom went back quite that far, however!)

What was special about Vistavision, which was apparently first used for the film “White Christmas?”

VistaVision, Paramount’s answer to the wide-screen processes which had preceded it into theatres, gave an in-focus picture at any depth of field, something Cinerama, CinemaScope and their clones weren’t able to offer. It used a standard 35mm film, projected onto a flat screen, but oriented horizontally in the camera gate; the usable film area was increased, and the exposed film of a finer gain than any other process then available.

Cinemas — especially the independent ones who didn’t have thousands of dollars to throw around for modifications — preferred it to CinemaScope (Cinerama was never an option for the smaller cinemas anyway because it needed three projectors all throwing light at the screen at once), because they didn’t have to knock out their proscenium arch to install a new-shaped curved screen covered by new-shaped curtains, and then worry about whether the altered “throw” from the projector room at the back would put EVERYTHING slightly out of focus or perspective (as it did in one cinema in Sydney, Australia, but the management just proceeded as if the film was supposed to look like that!).

Cameramen liked it because the absolutely-correct focus, especially in two-shots, was no longer such a critical issue. Directors liked it because they found the letter-box shape of the wide-screen processes restricted camera movement (a sudden quick “pan” could make audiences dizzy, as Nicholas Ray did in “Rebel Without a Cause”) and needed careful positioning of the actors (who often had to stand in straight lines across the screen, as in “There’s No Business Like Show Business”).

And the public liked it for its overall clearer picture with no “fuzzy bits”; and the colour looked wonderful!

But, of course, it didn’t have the ‘wow’ factor that the wide-screen processes with their stereophonic sound had, and few other studios bothered to hire it from Paramount (MGM and Warner Bros did, however, make some limited use of it, in “North by Northwest” and “The Searchers”.)

I thought VistaVision was the best of all the “new” processes in the early fifties, but it was doomed from the start; the push was on to develop a lens which would give the same clarity but still project onto a wide, curved screen. The first one to do this successfully was Todd-AO, used for “Oklahoma!” and “Around the World in 80 Days”. It was so expensive, apparently, that it was never used again, even though films kept coming out advertised as being in Todd-AO (in reality, it was a cheaper and inferior substitute from, I think, Panavision); but few people bothered to complain, and soon various types of Panavision lenses became so popular that Paramount decided to “get with the strength” and discontinued VistaVision, only about seven years after “White Christmas”.

Is it possible to get into film school with no acting experience?

Just going on from what Patrick said, above, film schools are specifically concerned with making films, but few budding actors would, at the outset, limit their ambition to acting ONLY in films; there is the stage, TV, commercials….. actors need to be prepared to work in whatever field the opportunity arises in.

So what you want is a Performance School or Acting School; and, certainly, you don’t need experience to get an offer of a place in most of those. They are looking for people who will succeed in their course, so what they want to see is not prior experience, but talent and potential. So you will be required to audition. My daughter attended a one-year full-time Performing Arts course some five years ago, and, as a result, actually did get a couple of small spots “in the background” in made-for-TV movies; much more of her work, subsequent to the course, was done on the stage; but the majority, would you believe, has been in the world of television commercials (often for fast-food products where she REALLY has to be a good actress, because she would never actually eat the stuff in real life!). So don’t carve out a niche for yourself quite yet! Get into an acting school, and then find an agent… it’s his job to get you that experience! Good luck!

Do you have a favorite war movie, and why?

There are a lot of great ones… going right back to the early days of sound, and “All Quiet on the Western Front”. But I think my favourite would have to be one of Stanley Kubrick’s early films, “Paths of Glory”. It copied “Western Front” with its sweeping shots of soldiers crawling across mud-filled fields and in and out of trenches, and you really felt you were there. Yet it also had a strong story, built around a moral dilemma; there was lots of talk, and not just one battle after another. And finally it had that ending, with the German girl (Mrs Stanley Kubrick, if I recall) singing in the French saloon.

One film I can think of that almost took the top spot from “Paths of Glory” was “From Here to Eternity”, with that great performance by Montgomery Clift. But, although it had war as its background (and the attack on Pearl Harbour was re-staged for one scene), it wasn’t really a war movie, so I decided it probably didn’t quite qualify. Another contender would be “Battleground”, one of the least-likely films ever to have come out of MGM in its golden years, when realism was usually consigned to the back-burner.

Why are children not banned from theaters showing R-rated movies?

They are, actually; but sometimes there is no one on duty bothering to enforce the ban.

It has always been that way. In 1955, when I was around thirteen years old, there was a movie going round called “Blackboard Jungle” which was classified (in Australia, anyway; we were always a conservative bunch) as “CHILDREN UNDER 16 NOT ADMITTED”. Of course, there wasn’t another movie in town that I wanted to see more, and I was canny enough to know which suburban cinemas would turn me away and which ones would probably just yawn and let me buy my ticket. So I waited until the movie “did the rounds”, and when it turned up at one of the cinemas I suspected would be a “pushover”, I turned up at the Saturday matinee.

Bulls-eye on the first try!

I recall when the ‘R’ certificate first came out in Australia, I went to see “Dirty Harry” at a drive-in. The car next door to us pulled up, and, instead of the two adults that had been sitting staidly alone in the front seat, there were suddenly three additional children in the back seat…. young children, tossing aside the blankets under which they’d been hiding. Well, what are the proprietors of the drive-in to do? Do a search of every car as it passes through the gate?

What movie/TV series has had the biggest impact on yourself?

In 1963/4 Judy Garland did a weekly series that ran for twenty-six one-hour episodes. During the series she gave (by presenting them as guests) a kick-start to the careers of both her daughter, Liza Minnelli, and Barbra Streisand, and helped revive the career of her “old” partner, Mickey Rooney. She sang duets with Vic Damone, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Mel Torme, Ethel Merman, Steve Allen, Chita Rivera, Steve Lawrence, June Allyson, ‘Count’ Basie, Peggy Lee, Jane Powell, Ray Bolger, Martha Raye, and quite a few more. The standard of this TV series was several steps above what we were used to seeing on TV back then, and even President John Kennedy let it be known that there would be no official business done on Sunday nights at the White House, as that was family night, for dinner and for watching “The Judy Garland Show”.

For existing Garland fans, it was a chance to watch and hear their idol expand her repertoire by four, five, or even more songs in every episode. For new fans her show was a revelation, as they were privileged to discover the greatest entertainer of the entire twentieth century, and get to know her, close-up, without even leaving their living rooms.

The DVD box of her shows was selected by “Downbeat”, many years later, as the DVD set of the Millennium.

For me, the show was a revelation, although I had seen most of the MGM musicals she had made in the two decades previously, as well as her pet project and masterwork, “A Star is Born”. More than half a century later, a week doesn’t go by without my putting one of those twenty-six episodes into the DVD player. It is Judy’s gift to the world, the sure proof — if such were needed — that she stood (at four foot eleven) head and shoulders above any musical entertainer that had graced the air-waves before her (and, I believe, in the 56 years since). They don’t make them like that any more!

What are the best books and/or movies where someone stood up for others or a cause?

 “A country isn’t a rock; it’s not an extension of oneself. A country is what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice; truth; and the value of a single human being”.

This was part of Spencer Tracy’s courtroom speech at the climax of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, the film dramatising the post-WWII war crimes trials. It dealt with important issues; it dealt fairly and intelligently. It examined both sides of a complex issue -- perhaps one of the most complex of the twentieth century; still, when it came to stating its own point of view, the film strode in boldly.

The excerpt from which the above quote is sourced, youtube.com/watch?v=N3BwK51YFgQ&t=324s, takes six minutes and forty-two seconds to watch. It is worth every second. Even better, buy the blu-ray; it’s great!

Why is 1999 considered the best year for Hollywood movies?

Actually, it was sixty years earlier than that; most authorities consider 1939 to be the best year Hollywood ever had. There is, in fact, a coffee-table book just covering movies issued in 1939, and a glance through it will soon reveal the reason for this being the popular choice.

Are sci-fi movies good for kids?

I guess it was easy for me when I had young kids, back before films became too confronting and violence was usually limited to somebody grabbing his chest when the gun went off, and falling to the floor (and he probably yelled “Darn!” or “Curses!” as he fell!). So my rule of thumb was, first, avoid movies made specifically for children, and, second, if it was a good movie for me, it was a good movie for my kids. That pair of rules seldom let me down, whether it was sci-fi movies or any other genre.

Now, of course, you have to do your homework rather more thoroughly, and I no longer take my grandkids to many movies. A pity, I think, but films have changed much faster than my opinion of what children ought to be encouraged to watch and hear!

Are there any Hollywood movies based on a book or series that have included everything in them story-wise, including all the dialogue and events happening?

There was one, once; it was a silent movie called “Greed”, directed by Eric von Stroheim, and it was based on a novel called “McTeague”.

Von Stroheim’s approach to this movie was to open the book at Page 1 and dramatise everything that was written there. Then he turned to Page 2. It was a long book.

The completed movie was more than 9 hours long. Since reels of film back in 1924 ran for 9 minutes, that would have meant that sixty-plus reels of film had to be hauled up to the projection rooms where it was to be shown. One imagines that they wouldn’t have even fitted in to those tiny rooms and would have been stacked down the stairs and along the corridors!

Fortunately for the exhibitors (and maybe for audiences, whose patience was unlikely to have extended for nine continuous hours of movie-watching), the 60-reel scenario was never allowed to happen. The completed film was only ever shown once, and that was at the studio (MGM) which had assigned von Stroheim to the movie. The screening started at ten in the morning and ran all day without a break; it is said that von Stroheim sat ram-rod straight throughout the screening as an example to the others (who included the studio head, Louis B Mayer). At the end of the screening, Mayer and his associate, Irving Thalberg, ordered the film cut; in fact, it was cut and then re-cut several times before being deemed “fit” (by everyone but von Stroheim, who disowned the final result) for release under the MGM banner.

The movie that reached the theatres had seven hours cut out of it, and ran for 140 minutes. This final version inspired a fist-fight between von Stroheim and Mayer (who won) which is as well-known as the film itself.

Today, Eric von Stroheim is probably best remembered for one film he made, as an actor, near the end of his career: as Max, Norma Desmond’s butler/chauffeur/ex-husband, in “Sunset Boulevard”.

What are some of the funniest movies you’ve ever seen?

 

 I would have to say that the funniest film I have ever seen would be a silent movie, so you’re unlikely to see it at your local cinema! It was called “Liberty” and it starred Laurel and Hardy.

After that, in the 1930s, it would be a toss-up between several movies starring the Marx Brothers. I always had a special fondness for “A Night at the Opera”, but I suppose the more-primitive (and less-inhibited) “Duck Soup” is actually a little funnier.

By the 1950s, both Laurel and Hardy and the Marxes were no longer making movies, and, frankly, the American comedies didn’t have much going for them. Fortunately, England stepped into the breach, especially a tiny studio called Ealing, and a whole slew of genuinely-funny comedies, several with Alec Guinness as one of the main characters, emerged from that quarter; “The Ladykillers” was probably the best.

Several of the Ealing stock company (and assorted other British players) ended up in the USA in 1955, and their participation in a Danny Kaye comedy — “The Court Jester” — resulted in what is easily the funniest American comedy of the era. There are probably other good ones, but the heavy-handed approach to comedy, as typified by “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World”, squeezed most of the fun out of the material and left us with some brilliant comedians with nothing much to do. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” had Buster Keaton, MIchael Hordern, Phil Silvers and Zero Mostel in it, and you can’t do better than that; but the camera moved around them at such frenetic pace that no one was able to get a good routine going, and we were left thinking about what might have been.

Woody Allen and Mel Brooks both made genuinely funny movies in the 70s and 80s; I always loved “Play it Again, Sam” and “Annie Hall” from Woody Allen’s pen, and Mel Brooks scored heavily with “The Producers”, “Young Frankenstein”, “High Anxiety” and “To Be or Not to Be”, even though you had to be careful with a Mel Brooks movie, because he was always on the brink of going over the top (which he did, unfortunately, in “Blazing Saddles” and, to a lesser extent, “Silent Movie”).

Since then, there has been Billy Crystal to look out for. But he didn’t get much work in the “new” era, when wit had been replaced by shock-humour, and the aim became to see, not how funny you could go, but how far.

What are some historical inaccuracies portrayed in popular movies?

In “The Last Days of Pompeii”, the hero befriends the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, after which they go their separate ways and have their separate adventures. They meet up again, having aged hardly at all, at the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, which, of course, happened nearly half a century after the death of Christ, and in a quite-different part of the world.

Is there a film that solved a problem in your life after watching it?

I am not sure whether you’d call it a problem, but there was a film, once, that totally-changed the direction of my life, and, although I never saw it a second time or heard much about it again, I always remember the night when I discovered it (on late-night TV!) as a “turning point”.

I was a country teacher in a tiny school (just myself and twenty-or-so children, aged 5 - 17) in NSW, Australia, living, with my wife, in a “residence” (a cottage right in the school playground). When we found ourselves the new parents of twin sons, I realised that, after five years of pleasant “isolation”, it was, regrettably, time for me to move on; but I had no real plans to do anything with my career except to progress to another school in a nearby town, a move which I viewed with little enthusiasm.

Then, one night, on late-night TV, I watched a little-known British black-and-white drama called “Mandy”, starring Jack Hawkins as a teacher who has to deal with a young deaf student (played by Mandy Miller). This little film had an enormous effect on me, and I thought about it for days afterward. Then I made my decision; instead of applying for a transfer, I applied for a training course in teaching deaf children, an area of education in which I had had absolutely-zero experience.

It was, on the face of it, a crazy decision, made for all the wrong reasons; amazingly, however, it all turned out for the best. I stayed with deaf education for the next thirty years, and found immense personal and professional rewards by “becoming” Jack Hawkins. But I never again saw “Mandy”, which, after that late-night screening, appeared to completely disappear, as so many films of that era have.

Has an actor or actress ever not been able to play the part they were assigned due to their lack of acting abilities? How was it handled?

Hayley Mills got her start in movies because of the situation you asked about.

The film “Tiger Bay” was to star her father, John Mills, as a police officer dealing with a child who has witnessed a murder but has developed a hero-worship for the murderer, and refuses to co-operate.

As written, the part was supposed to be for an eleven or twelve-year old boy, but the ones tested for the part (including one boy who had been the star of his previous movie) repeatedly failed to “come up with the goods”, and were let go; John finally suggested that his daughter just might be able to handle it if the part were rewritten for a girl.

Hayley did more than just ‘handle’ it; she stole the picture from everyone, including her father (who, of course, was delighted to allow her to run with it), and the switch from boy to girl gave the movie an added dimension which was so disquieting that young Hayley was approached afterwards to play the title role in the upcoming film of “Lolita” (her father declined on her behalf, and she joined the Disney roster of child stars instead).

What are some good book & movie recommendations for someone interested in mystery, crime, or suspense?

James and Shashwat have covered, respectively, the literary world and the cinema world with such thoroughness that I don’t think there’s much to be added to either; so I will tackle the TV side of things. I only have one recommendation, really, but it’s surely a good one: “Foyle’s War”. It’s a British series based around a policemen in a small British town during World War II who would have liked to join the war effort but is required to stay behind and cover the — on the face of it — “minor” crimes at home. Needless to say, he repeatedly uncovers a hornet’s nest of mystery and intrigue which invariably plunges him into the war effort from a unique and highly-interesting perspective. It ran for nine series, and each episode featured multiple mysteries cunningly intertwined, and an assortment of superb British character actors in guest-star roles; in more than fifty shows, I only ever guessed a solution once!

What are some of the strangest films ever made?

Virginia has already come up with “Under the Skin”, which was the first one that came to mind when I saw your question. This is the film in which some of the actors didn’t even know they were in it until after their scene had been shot (with all the dialogue improvised and a hidden camera), and THEN they were shown the footage of themselves and offered the chance to have a built-up role based on what had transpired. Just “strange” doesn’t begin to describe it!

It may also be not quite a strong enough term to describe the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. I saw a retrospective a few months ago of three of his movies, back to back, and it was hard to make up your mind which was the weirdest. He’s acclaimed as one of Russia’s (and the world’s) greatest film directors, so I am happy to recommend any of his works to you. Are they really as great as the critics say? Well, I can tell you, I certainly found them…….strange.

Can a young teenager get in trouble for sneaking into an R-rated movie by themselves if caught?

If a teenager (or anyone else) “sneaks” into an R-rated movie (or any other kind) without first buying a ticket, then he is breaking the law; the answer, therefore, is “yes”; he can be prosecuted, or banned from the cinema.

The fact that it is an R-movie, however, is quite irrelevant. The onus to abide by the code, with movie classification, is on the exhibitor, not the customer. A ticket may not be issued to a person who is prohibited by the code from receiving one. If a teenager masquerades as an adult at point of sale and gains admission fraudulently, the police, with more important things to do, will, more likely than not, merely tell the cinema owner that he has to be more diligent at the ticket office….. and that will be the end of the matter. If four hundred teenagers are admitted at every session, then it is the cinema owner, not the four hundred, who is liable for prosecution.

After all, under-age movie fans watch R-rated movies all the time in their own homes, courtesy of DVD, blu-ray and streaming; they can normally count on doing so without the constabulary knocking at the door! The restriction applies only to public exhibition, and is binding on the exhibitor.

Which movies should I watch if I have watched almost all famous movies?

Try the little ones that only those in the business know and appreciate. In 1995, Martin Scorsese made a 225-minute doco (available on DVD) called “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Cinema”. It introduced me to some of the movies he had discovered and learned from, and, as he says, few of them were the big blockbusters that everyone had seen; instead there were the little movies, such as “The Phoenix City Story”, “Murder by Contract”, “Silver Lode” and “The Next Voice You Hear”. After watching his three-part odyssey, you will have several dozen movies which you’d never even heard of to seek out. And you will find some treasures among them. Happy hunting!

What are the characteristics of movies that do well with audiences, but poorly with critics?

The films that do well with audiences are films which give them more of what they like; the films that do well with critics are films which give them something they haven’t seen before. The two are seldom the same.

If a film is to make a lot of money, which means if it is to be seen by a lot of people who then spread the word, then it has to be SAFE. Audiences seldom like to be disquieted or challenged or confused by what they are watching. They just want to be bowled over with more of what bowled them over last time. And, of course, as all these sequels coming out every year show, that isn’t hard to do.

Critics see a lot of films, and it’s less-easy to bowl them over… and if they ARE bowled over, it won’t be by something they saw last year just ramped up to 150%. A critic is bowled over by an original concept, a new approach, something that makes them sit up and take notice; something that will perhaps even advance the cause of movies as an entertainment medium.

So the critics were bowled over by “Intolerance”, which told several stories, covering thousands of years of world history, simultaneously. The public was less-warm towards the idea. The critics were bowled over by “Citizen Kane”, which told its story out-of-sequence and from different viewpoints, so that we were likely to “visit” the same event more than once during the film’s running time; it took years before recovering its costs.

It didn’t, however, take any time at all for “Avatar” to recover its production costs, and it stands today as the second or third-biggest money spinner of all time. However, the critics were far less-impressed with it than the adoring public: quotes like “pretty standard fare”, “you’ll find your mind drifting as what you assume was going to happen happens exactly as you thought it would” and (my favourite, as it sums up what I was trying to say in Paragraph 1), “the plot, sadly, is so predictable I found myself saying lines of dialogue before they happened” are easy to find on-line. That predictability may actually be a “plus” for some moviegoers, who like to “play safe”; a critic would prefer NOT to be able to recite a scene a split-second before it flashes on-screen!

Where does the role of a writer/director end and the role of an actor begin roughly?

That’s easier to answer if you’re talking about the stage: it ends when the curtain goes up. When he’s on-stage in front of an audience, the actor can do whatever he chooses, and the director can only watch helplessly and plan disciplinary action after the curtain has come down again. That’s why so many actors who start on stage and move into cinema eventually go back to their roots, I have heard: they like that feeling of control over what they do in public.

Movie actors, however, rarely get that much power. The director can yell “cut” at any time, or the actor can be shot from an angle where he can’t control the scene. If the worst comes to the worst, the editor can cut up his scene later so that anything of originality he brings to the role can be seamlessly excised. It takes a powerful cinema actor, indeed, to ensure that the part he is playing can be played HIS way.

Marlon Brando, at one stage in his career, did have that kind of authority, and, according to Val Kilmer, who co-starred with him in “The Island of Dr Moreau”, liked to use his power to torpedo a movie he didn’t like. “Moreau” was a prime target for his particular brand of sabotage. As they were setting up a scene between Brando and himself, Kilmer says, Brando turned to him and said, “I am going to put this flower-pot on my head and wear it throughout the scene.” When Kilmer asked why, the great man retorted, “Because no one will even mention it and tell me I can’t do it. Wait and see”. And, Kilmer says, he was dead right. No one, not even the movie’s director, dares question the choices of Marlon Brando!

How do Hollywood movies have a good influence on the world?

Do they, in fact? I confess I wasn’t aware of it, at least as applying to the present day.

I mean, they DID have a good influence on the world back when they made all those musicals which had the world humming and dancing down the street after leaving the cinema. But then, as Life Magazine once put it, Hollywood movies changed: instead of being part of the solution to the world’s worries, they became part of the problem.

If they’re back now having a good influence on the world, with all these mindless films, based on comic-strip heroes, costing countless millions of dollars and spawning dozens of copycat sequels, it might just be because the rest of the world is coming to view America not as a world superpower to be feared and revered, but as a nation of permanent adolescents still at comic-book level in their thinking, with somewhat-naive views about good and evil, and thus to be tolerated rather than elevated. It’s a bit of a shock nowadays to see countries such as Iran making more-adult movies than Hollywood, with all those billions, cares to.

Why does the audience not watch quality films in theaters?

Maybe my response is not addressing the question you have in mind, but I would say that one of the reasons the audience doesn’t pay to see quality movies is that those films often don’t stay around long enough for cinemagoers to catch them. The multiplexes may actually book them, half-heartedly, but they are more interested in booking the latest blockbuster which is being supported by a multi-million dollar publicity campaign, and which is screened in every cinema in town simultaneously to catch the hordes who have been caught up in all that publicity. Meanwhile, the “quality” product, consigned to the “lounge” cinema for a few poorly-attended screenings at unpopular hours, is likely to be forgotten.

I remember being bowled over by “Locke” in its opening week, and came out of it determined to spread the word to everyone that the best movie in a decade or so had just arrived. But I was too late. Within a couple of days you couldn’t find it screening anywhere in my home town, although the blockbuster in the same multiplex, so loud that you could actually hear the sound of all the explosions and crashes in the tiny “lounge” cinema to which “Locke” was relegated, was still going strong (and loud).

One could tell the same story about “Fences” or “Into the Woods” or “The Post”. You know they’ll be available on free-to-air in a few months, so why chase them up in some far-from-home multiplex where you’ll have to battle through the hordes fighting to get in to see “Spiderman: Far from Home”? (Was he far from home, perchance, because he was chasing up one of the quality films you mentioned?)

Which movie cliche annoys the hell out of you as it is constantly overplayed?

I feel that the romantic comedy device called “meeting cute” has definitely had its day. It’s an early sign that the writers of the movie will stoop to any level to get you to like the characters five minutes into the movie.

What one scene in a movie is significantly better than the rest of the movie?

I enjoyed reading the answers that have already been given to your question, and would like to submit one that has been overlooked.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the rest of the movie “Anastasia”, for which Ingrid Bergman won her 1956 Academy Award (one of three); it was well-written, well-played throughout, and had a great background score by Alfred Newman. But there was one scene…..

It was the scene where, at long last (in the movie’s plot), the woman claiming to be Anastasia Nikolaevna finally encounters the one woman who might, unless she can convince her otherwise, be able to positively refute her claims: the exiled Dowager Empress, played by the great lady of the New York stage, Helen Hayes.

Neither Bergman nor Hayes had ever played a scene better, and, although this wasn’t a thriller, it was edge-of-the-seat stuff for around seven or eight minutes, with an edginess to the playing of both actresses that made it stand out from the rest of the movie. Afterwards, Bergman (who had been through quite a lot previous to this movie — including being exiled from her own country and being forced to make her movies abroad) explained that she was just so nervous at actually playing a scene opposite the great Helen Hayes (who hadn’t deigned to appear on screen for many years), that this “coloured” her approach to the whole scene. That, perhaps, wasn’t so surprising; but then Helen Hayes admitted that it was a difficult-enough challenge returning to the screen after such a long absence, so that she was nervous about her part, anyway; but then, seeing that she had to play a scene opposite Ingrid Bergman, whom she so much admired, she was convinced that she simply wouldn’t be able to “hold up” her end!

Both actresses, in fact, raised the film to new heights with that scene, and no one watching it could doubt for a minute that they were witnessing two of the great ladies of the stage and screen striking sparks off each other.

What silent film stars never made the transition to talkies?

The actor that came immediately to mind when I read your question was John Gilbert, known in the silent era as “the Great Lover”. The rumour was that his voice, when it was finally heard on screen, didn’t match his popular image and audiences giggled; in fact, it was cultured, precise, and not unlike that of Ronald Colman, who came to prominence at around the same time Gilbert went into decline. However, it wasn’t, perhaps, the voice of a passionate he-man.

The rather sinister truth regarding his decline and fall was that Louis B Mayer hated him; Gilbert had married Mayer’s biggest star, Greta Garbo, and, at the wedding, Mayer was heard to make a crude remark about the match. Gilbert, who had clashed with Mayer before over creative differences (and, of course, salary) took umbrage, and a fist-fight ensued. From that moment onwards, Gilbert could do nothing right in the eyes of the head of the studio, and his days were numbered.

What are  good science fiction shows that have accurate science behind the concepts of the show?

I would suggest the movie “Contact”, since it was written by Carl Sagan who, in addition to being a writer, was an astronomer and astrophysicist. His story was fiction, but he never allowed himself to deviate, in its telling, from scientific fact.

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology,” Sagan once said. His life and his work were devoted to opening the eyes of the world to the universe just beyond our reach and to help us understand our own place in it. There are no monsters or flying saucers in “Contact”, but there certainly is intelligence beyond the Earth’s boundaries. Another of his quotes: “Absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence”.

Which sci-fi movies have the most original plot or idea?

Although I normally look at the “Golden Years” of Hollywood when seeking answers to questions asked on this forum (for the simple reason that I know so little about the movies of today), my vote for an answer to your question would be for a movie no more than about five years old: “Predestination”, based on a sci-fi short story of the 1950s called “All You Zombies”, starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook (who has the hardest role to play and pulls it off quite brilliantly).

“Predestination” deals with time travel. While it is neither the first nor the fiftieth movie to take this concept as its starting point, it takes the concept in brand new and head-spinning directions, and does it so convincingly that you are quite satisfied that its premise is perfectly plausible until hours after you leave the cinema, when you finally realise that, in one scene, it just got too smart for its own good and a fatal flaw in its own seemingly-impeccable logic was exposed for all to see.

However, that detracts neither from your enjoyment of the movie while you’re watching it, nor from your admiration for a truly original idea, which makes other time-travel movies look like they’re locked in the past.

Is there any actor or actress who admitted to hating the film they were in after seeing the final cut?

Many! Frank Sinatra used to have a whole segment of his concerts in which he talked about the terrible movies he made when he didn’t have too much control over what he was assigned to. “The Kissing Bandit”, “Miracle of the Bells” and “Johnny Concho” came in for special drubbing; so did the big-budget “Pride and the Passion”, which he described as “an underwhelming achievement”.

Paul Newman was so embarrassed by his first film, “The Silver Chalice”, that when it resurfaced on television (after having been carefully hidden away for some years), he took large advertisements in the trade papers apologising for it!

Finally, Elizabeth Taylor was so vocal about her contempt for the last film made under her MGM contract, “Butterfield 8”, that the studio machinery went to work to ensure that she won the Oscar for it so that she would quieten down about how bad it was!

What was one movie or TV show you tried really hard to like, but just couldn't?

My passion is the musical, so every time I go to see a musical I am on fairly safe ground for being guaranteed a good time. But, over the years, there have been around a half-dozen musicals — major ones — that I just couldn’t warm to, no matter how hard I tried.

Admittedly, while I tried hard, I didn’t try for long with the remake of “Lost Horizon”; it was fairly obvious, after around twenty-five minutes, that its songs were banal, its dancers clumsy (Bobby Van excepted), and its singers (Bobby Van excepted) hardly able to carry a tune. Twenty minutes further in, you’re watching it with your mouth open, wondering just how bad it can possibly get. It is the granddaddy of terrible musicals, scoring a zero in just about every department (yes, B.V. excepted).

“Annie Get Your Gun” was one of MGM’s biggest musicals of the early fifties (around the time they were giving us “Singing in the Rain” and “The Band Wagon”). But, unlike those two, “Annie” was hard to like; instead of the great team efforts that we were used to seeing in an MGM musical (Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan; Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor), we were treated to two hours of Betty Hutton practically elbowing her co-stars out of the way as she endeavoured to dominate every scene in much the same way that King Kong dominated Skull Island (the result was scarcely more musical).

MGM was also responsible for “High Society”, and you’d reckon I was bound to like that, as it had two of my favourite stars — Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm — in important roles. But not, it seems, important enough; Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, reciting the Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn lines in “The Philadelphia Story” with absolutely none of the panache that made the original so memorable, killed it stone dead to the point where not even Sinatra and Holm and Cole Porter’s (admittedly indifferent) score could revive it. My advice to prospective viewers is to watch “High Society” BEFORE you watch “Philadelphia Story”; if you’ve already seen the original, you won’t put up with the remake for ten minutes.

“Hello Dolly” was another one you just had to hate, even though it was directed by the great Gene Kelly and had perfect casting in Walter Matthau; moreover, it was the very next film made by Barbra Streisand after she had been so impressive in “Funny Girl”. But she was no Dolly, and the lightness and risk-taking that characterised the films which Kelly made in front of the camera were nowhere in evidence; all you saw were millions of dollars being wilfully thrown away in the belief, possibly, that if they kept throwing money at the screen, you wouldn’t notice that this light little musical was unaccountably as heavy as lead. And Barbra was, frankly, pretty terrible, but maybe that wasn’t all her fault; she was the hottest of all Hollywood’s hot properties at that moment, and those millions of dollars had to be recouped somehow.

“Paint Your Wagon” is so terrible that I have never even been game to go back for a second look, to check whether it really could be as bad as I remember. After all, it was directed by Joshua Logan, who made one of my very favourite films, “Picnic”. Maybe if I could summon up the courage to watch it again (it sits on my DVD shelf, untouched, even though I have tried unsuccessfully to give it away a dozen times over), I wouldn’t dislike it so much. A lot of money was spent on it, too, if I remember; not, apparently, on singing lessons for the cast.

And finally there is “Sweeney Todd”. On stage, it’s my all-time favourite musical. I realised, before I went to see it, that I was unlikely to see the “Sweeney” of my dreams, because I was bound to resent every note, every word, every bit of business left out so that a film of “acceptable” length could be made from the material. However, I didn’t realise that they would leave out quite so much, or that Helena Bonham-Carter would play a Mrs Lovett with so little musical and comedic sense, or that one important song plus the entire prologue AND conclusion would be completely excised, or that …… well, Sondheim gave it his okay, so who am I to say that they would have been wiser to just set up a couple of cameras in a theatre where Angela Lansbury and George Hearn were doing the REAL “Sweeney Todd”; but, wait a minute, they DID do that, didn’t they, and it’s on DVD, too! So why would anyone bother with Tim Burton’s pale ghost of the greatest musical ever written?

I didn’t include the movies of “Cats” or “Les Miserables” (the one with Russell Crowe) in this list, because it wouldn’t have been fair; I didn’t see either in a cinema, and when I put the DVDs on the player, I didn’t even last forty-five minutes. Maybe all the good bits came on after I went to bed.

When was the last golden age of cinema in Hollywood?

It probably depends on whom you ask, and when they first started going to the movies.

Critic Pauline Kael always held the belief that everyone’s golden age of movies (I don’t know whether she specifically said “Hollywood” movies) was the age just before they started going to the cinema regularly; the age where they were old enough to know the names of the movies that were being released, but not old enough to go out and see them for themselves. I rather agree with that statement, because it is certainly my own experience; I started going to the movies regularly in the early fifties, around the time of “The Quiet Man” and “The African Queen” and “Strangers on a Train”. I was just too late to catch “All About Eve” or “Sunset Boulevard” or “On the Town”, but I knew they existed, and chasing them in revival centres became an early obsession. That provided a gateway to the movies of the forties, and that decade became my own “golden age”: the age of Gable and Tracy and Garland and Bogart and Bette Davis and Fred Astaire and the Marxes, the era of the great Hollywood musical and the films noir.

I took only an academic interest in the films of the twenties and early thirties, but there were people, older than I who assured me that I was already too late for their Golden Age, which was the era of Dick Powell and Alice Faye and John Barrymore and Luise Rainer. I eventually saw all their films, and liked them well enough, but they were just a little too “primitive” for MY “golden age”. Give me “Meet Me in St Louis” or “The Yearling” or “The Postman Always Rings Twice” anytime!

I expect that the young people of today view my “golden age” much as I viewed the era of Rudolph Valentino and Tom Mix, and their own “golden age” is the era of “Titanic” and “Avatar”!

Which is your favorite war movie?

Stanley Kubrick is, nowadays, famous for some of his “big” movies, such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Shining”, but in his very early days he made a little black-and-white movie called “Paths of Glory”, and I think that this remains my favourite war movie, even after sixty years. Not only did it have some staggeringly-authentic-looking footage of the World War One trenches, but it had an engrossing story, including a trial and an execution, which would have been gripping in its own right as an examination of justice and corruption at the top levels.

Kubrick’s authentic-looking footage was copied from the original “All Quiet on the Western Front”, which would have to run “Paths of Glory” a close second. Made in the early days of sound, it, and another one I have never managed to catch, “The Big Parade”, set the standard for war movies for decades to come.

It’s hard not to include “From Here to Eternity” and “Judgment at Nuremberg” in any discussion of great war movies, even though there was only one battle scene in “Eternity”, and none at all — except for newsreel footage of the liberation of the concentration camps — in “Nuremberg”, which was actually set three years after the war had ended. But “the war” (and its effect on those caught up in it) was lurking in the background of each, and they were both superb examples of their genre.

And then there was, “Battleground”, an early-fifties film from, of all studios, MGM…. but you’d never guess it to look at it, except maybe for the presence of Van Johnson in one of the leading roles; all the other actors are what you might call “minor” MGM players, but they went at it as if it was the most important movie in their careers … and, in the case of James Whitmore, maybe it was.

Finally, two which are perennial favourites of mine, although I don’t know whether they’d get in many others’ “best war films” list: “The Caine Mutiny” (the only one in the whole list in colour) and the original “Manchurian Candidate” (the only one in the list about the Korean War).

You didn’t ask for a choice of TV shows, or I could have spent several paragraphs singing the praises of “Foyle’s War”; but at least I managed to slip in this small mention of the best TV series of the last forty years!

What was Joan Collins' best movie?

I enjoyed her in “The Bravados”, a CinemaScope western starring Gregory Peck, although it was a somewhat-atypical role for her (she was so often cast as the “bad” girl). Stephen Boyd, mentioned by Joan Wall (above) as Joan Collins’ partner in “Island in the Sun”, was in this one, too.

“The Bravados”, by the way, is one of those well-above-average but overlooked westerns that is worth reviving more-frequently, if only for the strength of Peck’s performance.

Why do filmmakers keep producing more and more zombie movies?

Two possible reasons: maybe that movie in 2017, simply called “Zombies”, actually turned a profit, so that the box-office analysts, sensing the beginnings of a “craze”, encouraged everyone to jump in for a share of the profits before the craze petered out (audiences don’t stay faithful for long, so this would account for a “scramble”); or, maybe all the zombie movie producers had the same piano teacher as I did, and remembered her daily exhortation: “keep doing it till you get it right!” I haven’t seen any of these new films, so I will be interested to know: do the zombie movies of the 21st century have anything to recommend them?

Should mainstream Hollywood have done more to prevent Gods of Egypt from being made and released?

There is no law against making a terrible movie (which, I presume, this is, since Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rating of 16%.) There is no law against producers spending $140 million on a movie and winding up in the red by around $90 million. Who knows? It might have been a smashing success and made everyone connected with it as rich as Tutankhamun (it might still have been a terrible movie, at least as far as the critics were concerned). “Mainstream Hollywood” encourages the entrepreneur to go out and give it a go, and it’s that attitude — and that freedom —that has made the movies what they are today (whether that’s good or bad), around 100 years after the first movie was shot in ‘Hollywoodland’. You could really take “Hollywood” out of that last sentence and substitute “United States of America”…. or even “the free world”. You’re free to sink money into a “bomb”, if that’s how your thinking works.

There have, in fact, been one or two cases where “mainstream Hollywood” has attempted to prevent a film from being made and/or released — “Citizen Kane” being the prime example — but the likely quality of the movie, or the size of its profit or loss, has never been a factor in such a campaign. “Citizen Kane” trod heavily on the toes of the rich and powerful (or, at least, one of them), and was, therefore, bound to make enemies; but who would become a likely enemy of Hollywood over “The Gods of Egypt” (apart from the studio that lost ninety million dollars on it)?

What is the saddest ending to a cinematic friendship?

Martin and Lewis, perhaps. In their early (pre-movie) days, they were, apparently, a riot together: the overgrown child with a rubber face, and the good-looking baritone who set up the situations, all of which revolved around anarchy and mayhem (except when Dean sang – which he did, often -- and restored three minutes of sanity to the world).

At first it was a fifty-fifty partnership, but when they came to movies, the people who count the laughs noticed that it was the clown who was getting the lion’s share, while everyone thought the singer was merely “pleasant”. So each new film had more footage given to Jerry Lewis, and Dean Martin found himself doing less and less; he was an easy-going type of guy who pretended he didn’t care as long as the money was coming in, but everyone who knew him agreed he was actually funnier than his clown partner, and, moreover, had the potential to tackle a wide range of roles.

Still, Martin ambled along, occasionally reminding directors and scriptwriters, “Don’t forget, I’m in the picture, too!”. Meanwhile, the duo’s success seemed to have gone to Jerry’s head, and he began to see himself as the logical writer, director, and comic genius of the team. This alienated not only Dean but some of their writers and directors also, especially when Jerry began ad-libbing his own lines and giving orders to the director on how his scenes should be shot.

It was a movie called “The Delicate Delinquent” that finally did it. The script was the usual 80/20 split of Jerry and Dean, and, what’s more, Jerry started insisting on exactly how Dean should play his part in what he referred to, to Dean’s disgust, as “my picture”. “In MY picture,” he instructed Dean, “a cop wears a uniform!”

“Your picture?” replied Dean. “Well, then, why don’t you play the part yourself?” The team split at that moment; it was such an acrimonious break that they didn’t speak for twenty years, and only then because Frank Sinatra, a close friend and supporter of Dean (who had, without Jerry, gone on to unimagined heights as a singer, TV host and dramatic actor), engineered a surprise appearance for his buddy on Lewis’s live telethon.

What is the best Hollywood movie from the 60s according to you? Why?

That’s such a tall order, Sunil! I started jotting, and very swiftly came up with twenty-two names (not all of them made in Hollywood, however; and one — “Sundays and Cybele” — wasn’t even an English-language film), and choosing just one from that list would be an almost-impossible task. It might just be the original “The Manchurian Candidate”; and, then again, there is “The Miracle Worker”, ”The Children’s Hour”, “Rosemary’s Baby” and the widely-overlooked (because it had the same plot as “Dr Strangelove” — another of the top twenty-two — but treated the subject seriously) “Fail Safe”.

What’s interesting about those seven was that not one took home the Academy Award for Best Picture of its year. Only “The Apartment” and “Oliver!” in my list of twenty-two were so honoured. Most of my choices, in fact, didn’t even get a nomination, and you may not even remember many of them: “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, “The Visit”, “Raisin in the Sun”, “Splendor in the Grass”, “Hud”.

You will, I am sure, remember “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, and “The Producers”; they, at least, became the darlings of all the compilers of “best” movies.

But I still haven’t come up with that special “one”! If I had to narrow it down to four and then say WHY (as you asked), then I would elect “The Music Man”, “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “The Innocents”, and all four for the same reason: when I came out of the cinema, I talked about each, for hours!

What are examples of movies where they changed the ending from what it was originally supposed to be?

Warner Bros’ musical, “Young at Heart”, was a remake of an earlier Warners film (a non-musical) called “Four Daughters”; in order to accommodate its musical content, the remake had to make a few significant changes to the story-line, the first of which was that one of those daughters simply had to go.

But the second change was one demanded by the star, Frank Sinatra: as written, his character (played in the original by John Garfield) commits suicide; however, believing that this was contrary to the tone of a musical (which already had its share of “downbeat” moments anyway), Sinatra insisted on his character surviving the attempt, and redeeming himself at the fade-out. Audiences, it seemed, approved of the revision, and “Young at Heart” — the only teaming of Frank Sinatra and Doris Day — was a big hit.

What’s an example of a terrible movie that most people think is good?

Your question makes a couple of presuppositions, don’t you think? A movie may be a collective work of art, and, therefore, less “pure” than a sculpture or a painting, but it is a work of art, nevertheless, and as such is virtually impossible to judge it as if you were testing a washing machine or a microwave. The best film I ever saw is undoubtedly the worst film somebody, somewhere, ever saw, and who’s to say he is right and I am wrong, or vice-versa?

Further, more than the sculpture or the painting, movies are a popular art, made, usually, for the sole purpose of pleasing enough people so that the costs will be recovered in as little time as possible. If “most people think (it’s) good”, then it succeeded in being popular, so it would seem to me that an assessment of “terrible” is simply the opinion of the minority who were looking for something else and didn’t get it.

I could list a thousand films that I thought were terrible even though there were queues around the block to get in, but my opinion tells you nothing about the film, and everything about me. The last film I raved about — really raved, using the words “masterpiece” and “unforgettable” — I saw in a cinema that had no more than half a dozen people sitting in it, myself and my daughter included. Within a week, it had disappeared completely from that cinema and the handful of others that deigned to book it for a split week. You’d be lucky, five years later, even to find it on blu-ray or DVD. So, you tell me: is it terrible, or is it terrific?

I expect I am not making this point at all well, and twenty-four hours from now I may well come back on site and, shame-faced, delete every word I’ve written above; I realise that there are critics (such as Roger Ebert) around to tell us what we SHOULD be looking for in cinema and who decry both us, when we don’t patronise a movie that would have given this to us, and the movies, when they settle for sure-fire tricks to get back that mighty dollar and offer their audiences nothing new in return. They would say films like that were terrible; but, if nearly everyone else loves them (as a single example, “Avatar”, around the second-biggest money-spinner of all time, which someone told me was the greatest film he’d ever seen, and which I turned off after twenty-five minutes), then who is right and who is wrong? It’s all about what you, personally, want from your movie.

What is your favorite Whodunit movie?

I always had a special fondness for “Witness for the Prosecution”, as it was the one with a half-dozen surprises AFTER you found out whodunit; and it had so many great lines and great performances! “Death on the Nile” was another good one, too… and “Murder on the Orient Express”(the first one, not the recent remake where they played around with the Agatha Christie plot).

There have been dozens of others… it’s a genre which keeps coming back like a song! One which I think has been unfairly overlooked is “Black Widow” (1954), a Nunnally Johnson movie which gave a leading role to the underused Van Heflin, and introduced the former child actress Peggy Ann Garner in her first adult role. It wasn’t too hard to guess whodunit, but it provided a lot of fun weaving its way to the predictable solution.

Finally, one that was so convoluted that it was virtually impossible to work out not only whodunit, but also howdunit and whydunit, was the crazy (but fascinating!) “Last of Sheila”, written — surely as a labour of love, because it’s hard  to imagine that they thought they might have a potential hit on their hands — by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. It is, in fact, so complicated that the only way to help you understand what it has all been about by the fadeout is to have one of the survivors of the series of murders explain it in a ten-minute monologue which probably would have cleared the cinema had it not been spoken by James Mason, he of that most-marvellous of voices. He didn’t exactly have a great part up until the climax, but it was easy to see why he was asked to participate… no one else could have done that scene quite as well as he!

Can someone be credited under two different names in the same movie? I’m producing my own film. I have a small acting role in it but want my acting name to be different from my producer name.

Go right ahead. You’re the producer, so you do what you like, at least as far as your own billing is concerned!

Lots of multi-talented people operate under different names for different facets of their talent. Vladimir Dukelsky wrote classical music under his own name, but popular songs under the name “Vernon Duke”. Singer Tony Bennett sells his much-respected art work under his birth name of “Antonio Benedetto”. Agatha Christie wrote detective novels under her own name, but romance novels under the name “Mary Westmacott”. And Walter Matthau, who had a particularly long and difficult real surname, made up a brand new (quite fictitious) name for his billing in the movie “Earthquake”: his credit read, “Walter Matuschanskayasky”.

So you’re in good company. Best of luck with your movie!

What are your favourite most rewatchable movies of all time?

Let’s start with the obvious ones: “All About Eve” is my all-time favourite movie, and I never tire of watching it…. even just listening to it would be enough.

“A Star is Born” and “I Could Go on Singing” are the two films that best-displayed the singing and acting talents of the “greatest performer who has ever lived”, Judy Garland. I never tire of watching those, because there is always someone new coming along who doesn’t know Judy’s work, and introducing them to her at her peak is one of life’s pleasures…. and, in my opinion, a great privilege.

I can’t quite tell you why “The Court Jester” — on the face of it, just another Danny Kaye comedy — turned out to be maybe the funniest film since sound; possibly it was all those marvellous English actors who provided the perfect contrast to him by underplaying all their scenes, and still emerging funnier than he was. Or maybe it was the script, with all the mix-ups with the pellet with the poison. Whatever it was, I’d better not get tired of rewatching “The Court Jester”, because not too many months pass by at my home without one or another of my children or grandchildren knocking at the door and begging me to play it again!

What scene gave you the most goosebumps?

My “all-time goosebump” scene is in a film that not many people know about, as the film is (unfortunately) rarely seen: the 1963 British film, “I Could Go on Singing”, the last movie made by my favourite singer and actress, Judy Garland; and an important “swan song”, as, for this single time on-screen, she was virtually playing herself (with a name change for the story), singing her own concert songs in her favourite theatre (the London Palladium) in front of her own fans, and with her own conductor (Mort Lindsey) leading the orchestra.

The scene takes place in the wings of the theatre after “Jenny” has given the go-ahead for her overture to begin. She walks to her stage-entry point, preparing herself for her entrance, her face registering, in turn, doubt, nervousness, growing confidence, and, ultimately, excitement in anticipation of what is about to happen. As the overture reaches its final eight bars of “pow!”, her excitement explodes: hugging her stage manager in delight, she shouts “Go!” above the sound of the orchestra, and claps in exultation to the beat of the final few bars. As it ends, she straightens her costume one last time and, taking a deep breath, struts confidently forward onto the stage, to her usual standing ovation. Watching it, you really felt you were seeing what really went on in the moments before her sell-out concerts at Carnegie Hall, the New York Palace, and, of course, over most of the western world.

Why is the acting in low budget films so awful; why do actors pursue acting if they're going to be so horrible?

Perhaps because they know that some of the biggest stars in Hollywood history started off being “so horrible”. Paul Newman was so amateurish in his first movie, “The Silver Chalice”, that when it finally went to television (after languishing for two decades, mercifully forgotten, in the Warner Bros vault) he took ads in the trade papers apologising for it. Tony Curtis was thrown into movies by his (in those days) minor studio without even so much as basic training (but he had that beautiful face, as, indeed, did Newman), and, in his first couple of films, had audiences giggling at his Bronx accent (“Yonda lies da cassel of my fodder”, he was reputed to have declaimed, to Piper Laurie, another star who had to work her way up from some embarrassing early movies).

Less than a decade after these two inauspicious debuts, both Newman and Curtis were being nominated for Oscars, and their beautiful faces, past their prime, were suddenly almost inconsequential to their success.

If Paul and Tony can do it (and there are probably a hundred others), then why can’t today’s “low-budget” actors hope for the same ultimate outcome? Strength to their arms… they love their business enough to get up there and make fools of themselves, still unspoiled enough to see good days ahead.

Who are the top 10 most beautiful and elegant actresses of world cinema, that you've ever watched?

I would certainly second Hilary’s choices of Gene Tierney, Audrey Hepburn, and Grace Kelly. Hedy Lamarr and Ingrid Bergman would have to go in a list of the top ten, also. And the British actress Kay Kendall. Then there were Jessica Walter, Capucine, and Suzanne Pleshette. That’s only nine, but I will ponder for a while and maybe come up with number 10.

Did movies in cinemas used to have intermission periods?

From the thirties onwards, all cinemas had intermission periods, but these were generally between movies, because a movie was normally around 90 to 100 minutes long, so you expected to see two, especially in the suburban areas where they had only one or two sessions per day; in the city, where four sessions a day was normal, you may only have the one movie, but it was preceded, in the first half, by an array of cartoons, featurettes, and trailers which ensured the session was around three hours long, in total.

However, most MOVIES didn’t have intermissions; that was something that happened only rarely in the thirties and forties (with movies such as “Gone With the Wind”), although there was a rush of “roadshow” features in the late fifties and sixties which gave you an intermission: films like “The Ten Commandments”, “Bridge on the River Kwai”, “A Star is Born”, “Around the World in 80 Days” and “Lawrence of Arabia”. Expensive musicals, such as “My Fair Lady”, “Oklahoma” and “South Pacific” were all the rage back then, and since their stage equivalents always featured an intermission, the movie tended to do the same thing, at least in its initial release (a “cut” version, without intermission and with a supporting feature, was often released at “popular prices” after the initial hard-ticket release).

It wasn’t until the era of the multiplexes and the half-hour of advertisements that preceded every feature that the idea of the intermission was finally laid to rest … as was the opening and closing of curtains and so many other traditions that made going to the movies an “event”. One of those was specifically associated with the intermission: a boy with a tray of drinks and sweets would walk up and down each aisle, so you didn’t have to leave your seats and go out to the candy bar. Someone else would have movie magazines for sale… in fact, my first job (quite underage) was selling movie magazines at a “revival house”; hardly any pay, but I got to see four movies a week, quite free. And that’s why I am writing for Quora today, sixty-three years later!

What movie scene from your childhood can you not get out of your head?

There are a couple, both now about seventy years old.

Probably the one that had the greatest effect on me was the scene in “The Window”, a black-and-white ‘B’ movie, when the boy star, Bobby Driscoll (who would have only been three or four years older than I was) is being pursued by the killer (played by Paul Stewart) because he has “seen too much”. He’s in a disused building, hiding in the rafters, and Stewart is edging along the rafter towards him, with a deathly drop below. Even today, when I see Paul Stewart in a movie — even when he plays a “kind-old-guy” role, as he did in “A Child is Waiting” — my thoughts go back to that scene, and I feel that pang of fear once more.

The other film was also a black-and-white ‘B’, called “Johnny One-Eye”, which I saw at around the same time as “The Window” (I was about seven). The title character is a dog, but at the beginning of the movie he has both eyes (my memory of him is that he looked a lot like Dorothy’s ‘Toto”). Even though he’s friendly and good-natured to everyone, including those on the other side of the law, an angry hoodlum kicks him in the face and robs him of his eye. I thought that was about the cruellest thing I had ever heard of! I haven’t the slightest memory of anything else that happened in the movie, and I haven’t seen it surface since; but that scene is as fresh as if it happened yesterday.

What's the longest movie made so far? I thought “Lawrence of Arabia” was longest, but found out it wasn’t, 

It certainly isn’t “Lawrence of Arabia”; that part of your question is easy to answer. The tough part is deciding what IS the longest, and “Lawrence” is actually a good example of why this can be quite a challenge. I have seen two different editions of “Lawrence of Arabia”: the one that was supplied to cinemas in the year of its first release; and the “restored” edition, which has a couple of scenes originally cut, but then re-instated, because, by that time, the film had been acknowledged as a “classic”, and, therefore, suddenly every bit of film which David Lean had shot for it became worthy of “consideration”.

I have seen the 1954 “A Star is Born” in three quite-different lengths, and there are (or, perhaps, WERE) at least two longer ones which came and went well before the movie ever came to Australia. It seems that only the people involved with its making ever saw the full edition: James Mason, the male lead, assures us that when he first saw it, it was four hours long and was by far the most satisfying of all the editions. No later edition has ever approached, in length, the one Mason saw, but each successive one has been longer than the one I saw in 1955, and there are, for sure, more to come: quite recently, another song has been discovered, and, of course, now that Judy Garland has attained legendary status, no musical number of hers must be allowed to be omitted.

In some cases, such as “South Pacific”, you could actually choose your length: the “roadshow” edition or the “popular prices” edition (the second of which had about sixteen minutes cut out of it, just enough to allow the cinema owners to have an extra screening per day, which, of course, meant they could charge you less for your ticket.) You can buy the DVD with both editions, back-to-back, so you can decide for yourself which one is superior. Sometimes, in making the revisions, alternate takes would be used, so you couldn’t really say you’d seen all the movie unless you went along to both!

None of this, of course, is an answer to your question: “what is the longest movie ever made so far”; I am merely alerting you to the unfortunate truth that a definitive answer to this question may not be quite so easy to discover. Eric von Stroheim presented his finished film, “Greed”, to his studio (MGM) in something like sixty-three reels, running over nine hours, and he screened it for the top brass without even a rest-room break. The studio head, Louis B Mayer, attended that screening, and immediately took control from von Stroheim and cut the film to 118 minutes for its general release. The decision provoked a violent reaction from von Stroheim, and the fist-fight between himself and Mayer (Mayer won) is, today, more well-known than the movie!

But, even at nine hours, “Greed” is not the longest film ever made; not by a long chalk. In 2006 a German film called “Matrjoschka” ran for 95 hours. Its plot, according to IMDb, was this: “A German girl eats yogurt, looks through a phone book, and tries to sleep on a couch to no avail.” Do you want films like this counted? Clearly you could go and make one of those yourself, and even longer (just have your protagonist eat two pots of yogurt or sleep for an hour extra). Wikipedia has a page, at wiki/List_of_longest_films_by_running_time, which will give you this film plus dozens of others you will never see which have been produced JUST to be the longest film ever made; I have no doubt that some of these will turn up in subsequent answers to your question (the question has been asked before on Quora).

If you’re talking commercial films which you are quite likely to see, there is a 1966 Russian film, “War and Peace”, directed by the well-respected director Serge Bondarchuk, which ran for 8 hours (six and a half in Australia; we left out a lot of the peace), which required you to attend for two successive nights. It’s probably not anywhere near the longest in Wikipedia’s list, but it’s a “real” film, and will certainly win out over “Lawrence of Arabia”, which, even in its extended edition, wasn’t even half that long!

What is the name of the movie? It is about a father looking for his missing son.

I’m sure there are dozens, but just to start the ball rolling, there’s a movie called “Little Boy Lost”, starring Bing Crosby as a father who, after the war, goes back to France to search for the son he never knew. Despite Crosby’s name on it, it wasn’t a musical, although it did have one song in it, so as not to disappoint his fans; and it was a particularly good one, too (“The Magic Window”).

How does the movie "Into the Woods" compare with the original musical?

Tristan’s answer is so thorough that it hardly needs any addition from me. There’s hardly a Broadway musical that has been transferred to the screen without aficionados crying “Foul!” at some change that has been made. The most common changes are casting (the original New York stars, who have made the characters their own, are rarely brought across to re-do their parts for the screen) and editing (a Broadway musical usually has a longer running time than a standard movie, so the producers look around for suitable songs to cut or characters to eliminate; whichever ones they choose, they are bound to be someone’s favourite number, or favourite character, so a certain percentage of the audience is going to be mortally offended).

Often, the job is botched quite horribly, and Tristan has provided a nice list of “Broadway-to-Hollywood” films of which this could be said. On other occasions the movie just gets by, even when cast with non-singers, thanks to well-chosen dubbing of the voices (everyone always mentions Marni Nixon, the vocal-dubber who did such a great job for Deborah Kerr in “The King and I”, one of the better transitions from stage to screen… unless, of course, “I Have Dreamed” happened to be your favourite song from the show!) Every now and then, the transition works so well that one doesn’t really miss what has been taken out, and we can be grateful to Hollywood for having given millions of people the chance to see a show that, otherwise, they would never have had the chance to enjoy (“The Music Man” is, I feel, probably the best example of that, although, as good as Shirley Jones was, it would have been nice to see Barbara Cook reprise her role alongside Robert Preston).

Stephen Sondheim, generally, has not been well-served in transitions. The movie of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” had a dream cast (Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, Michael Hordern, and the amazing Buster Keaton), but the director seemed to have deliberately set out to sabotage their routines by substituting dizzying editing for what these old masters knew best: timing. “A Little Night Music” unaccountably put Elizabeth Taylor into a role where she had to sing (dubbed, but, then again, so was Rosalind Russell in “Gypsy”) and dance (“dubbed” there, also” a body double was used in the opening sequence!), and reduced one of the show’s major assets — Hermione Gingold — to what almost amounted to a “bit” part. “Sweeney Todd” omitted the entire prologue and finale, and proceeded under the assumption that what the audience really wanted was blood, not music; virtually every song was either semi-spoken or edited to half-length… or both. With that kind of record, I approached the movie version of “Into the Woods” more with dread than with eager anticipation.

But there was one major difference between this and “Forum”, “Night Music” and “Sweeney”: “Into the Woods” transferred into the film medium as if it had been born there, and, while one could lament the editing choices (Tristan has enumerated the omissions very succinctly), it was exceptionally well-sung and faithful to the spirit of the original. And it was fun! I think it is, thus far, the best of the Sondheim “Broadway-to-Hollywood” musicals.

What are some extremely predictable movies that are still good?

The first one that jumped into my mind when I read this question was Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River”. It plays like a modern Greek tragedy: the leading characters are “locked into” their destinies from the first half-hour, and you sit there, with ever-increasing dread, while they make every misjudgement in the book to lead them inexorably towards the final, tragic outcome. It’s quite brilliantly played by all three leads, and it is far better than merely “good”; it’s one of Eastwood’s best movies, and that awful predictability is a major factor in making it as memorable as it is.

Have you ever seen a movie or TV show that was a blatant ripoff of another show but the ripoff was better?

Like David, I wouldn’t say that the whole project was ‘better’, but I do recall that when the film “Paper Moon” was released, everyone went wild over the child star, Tatum O’Neal, who was everybody’s great-white-hope, for a short while. So then they made a TV series out of “Paper Moon”, and, of course, everyone was used to these spin-offs being a pale imitation of the original, and everybody just “knew” that the TV girl couldn’t possibly measure up to the wonderful original.

I only ever saw one episode of the TV series, so I have no way of knowing how it compared with the movie. I do remember, however, being gob-smacked at the child star, who, I thought, was head-and-shoulders above the original. I was so impressed, in fact, that I checked her name at the end… and then realised that I had already checked that name at the end of “Napoleon and Samantha” not too long earlier (and, in fact, would soon check it yet again in the closing credits of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”).

Her name was Jodie Foster. Nowadays, I never need to check her name at the end!

I have just watched a film including Margaret Rutherford which was a joy to watch. Is there an actor or actress you like who always manages to add something special to a film?

There are dozens, but I will confine myself to just two, since my answers seem to get longer every week!

Number One would be Thelma Ritter. Whether it’s “All About Eve” or “Rear Window” or “Titanic” (the 1953 version; she played Molly Brown, but with a name-change) or “The Misfits”, or her “straight” roles in “Pickup on South Street” and “Birdman of Alcatraz”, she enriched every film she appeared in, and her entrance invariably elicited a theatre-wide murmur of recognition and approval. In a host of cases, she was the best thing in the movie, and on one or two occasions the only part of the movie you cared to remember an hour after the curtain had come down.

Number Two would have to be Ann Miller. I remember, back in the sixties, always remarking, with wonderment and pleasure, that I had never spoken to anyone who didn’t like Ann Miller (I think that’s still true), and in the years I worked in a cinema, I used to stand where I could watch the faces of the audiences when she came on: smiles from every corner of a crowded cinema. MGM musicals were usually pretty wonderful even if she wasn’t in them; but when she was cast (usually in the second or third-female lead), you knew right away that the movie was going to be immeasurably better than it would have been without her. She looked like she thoroughly enjoyed every movie she was in, and she made sure you felt the same way!

Does anyone pause TV shows and movies to read the paperwork or newspapers the characters are reading?

I don’t usually make a point of doing this, but there was one occasion where I couldn’t help it, as the director, Joseph L Mankiewicz, was a little careless in selecting this particular “take” for printing, and a rather amusing mistake was evident. The movie was “Guys and Dolls”, and Marlon Brando’s character is in a Salvation Army mission writing his “marker” on the back of a display card with a biblical quote on one side. It is quite clear, as he is writing (and reading as he writes) that all he is doing is scrawling lines on the card; however, a moment later, when he holds up the card to show Jean Simmons, the wavy lines have changed into neatly-written and easily legible words.

What’s that show/documentary that shows highlights of old movies?

There have been quite a few of these, so I am not quite sure which one you’re looking for.

For a start, there were the three “That’s Entertainment” movies, which concentrated almost solely on MGM musicals (although the second one did delve into other genres), and the companion movie “That’s Dancing”. Still on MGM, there was a marvellous series called “When the Lion Roared”, hosted by Patrick Stewart, which traced the history of the studio through its movies. Yet another series, “Hollywood”, narrated by James Mason, traced the history of the movies using clips from just about all the studios’ products.

All the above were multi-part series; if you are talking about single shows, Warner Bros had a similar “history of…” doco, “Here’s Looking at You, Warner Bros”. Life Magazine had yet another: “Life Goes to the Movies”.

And one of the most interesting of all was the three-part documentary narrated by Martin Scorsese: “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies”. It didn’t just deal with the classics, but drew our attention to a number of frequently-overlooked movies (“Murder by Contract”, “The Phoenix City Story”, “Silver Lode”, “Duel in the Sun”) from which he, as a young film-maker, learnt his craft.

The granddaddy of all the documentaries about old movies must surely be the American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Movies”, available in two editions: 145 mins, or the whole ten-part series, which runs 460 mins.

Do all movies end with a climax?

Any proposition containing the worlds “all” or “never” are a trap for respondents to fall into…. all you have to do is find the single exception, and the whole proposition is false. So, the answer to your question, which refers to ALL movies, would have to be “no”.

Narratives, traditionally, build up to a climax; and the vast majority of films are narratives. We expect, therefore, that most movies will have a climax of some sort, even if it isn’t a romance or a whodunit or an escape from peril or a fight to the death, where the climax provides the main reason for watching the movie. So, even a film like the amazing “Russian Ark”, which doesn’t conform to the narrative structure (so you are not waiting breathlessly to see what happens to the protagonist) ends with a “big scene”, where a cast of dozens suddenly becomes a cast of hundreds, and everybody starts walking towards the main exit. But it didn’t have to end like that, and if you had taken the “climax” and placed it somewhere in the middle of the film, it would still have been a satisfying movie.

There are, doubtless, movies where the writers, whether for real and honest reasons or just to be “original”, will have very deliberately avoided a climax. Off-hand, I can’t think of one (the next respondent may). That’s because NEARLY all movies, like any other types of narrative, have a climax.

What movies would you suggest I watch if your list was the top five movies of all time?

I wouldn’t presume to just give you just my own personal five favourites, because our tastes may well differ, and, anyway, I chose my favourites on how much pleasure I got from watching them, not from how “significant” they are in movie history (which may be a better criterion for selection).

So here are five films that might be considered essential viewing if you are talking about the “top five” in the whole hundred-plus years they’ve been making movies:

 “Sunrise”. The masterpiece of the silent era. A superb demonstration of what directors were doing before sound came along and changed all the rules.

 

“King Kong”: the original 1933 version, which is the granddaddy not only of all the Kongs that have come along afterwards, but all the monsters who ever destroyed Tokyo or New York or whatever.

 

“Citizen Kane”. Widely regarded as the greatest American film of all time. There are books (and another film: “RKO 281”) about the making of this film and the furore it caused. It introduced to the screen several lighting, photographic and editing techniques that were new to movies in 1941, but which are commonplace today.

 

“The Night of the Hunter”. Like “Citizen Kane”, it gives some insight into what you can do with a film camera and innovative lighting when you have a genius (in this case, Charles Laughton) at the helm.

“The Wizard of Oz”. I thought I needed at least one film in colour in my top 5, and, what’s more, I would like to see a musical go in there, since it would seem to me that the musical and the “silver screen” were made for each other. And, also, it would be hard NOT to put in a Judy Garland film, since she is now acknowledged as the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century. So this one ticks all those boxes… and, in any case, it is famous as the movie that has been seen by more people than any other!

Why do some film previews have content not in the movie?

Greg and Alexander have both covered the topic quite thoroughly, and I think it is important, especially, to remember Greg’s comment that if there is footage in a trailer that you’re not going to see in the movie, it isn’t someone’s attempt to “cheat”, in some way, but is simply a consequence of the way trailers are made. I don’t know exactly how trailers “work”, nowadays, but, certainly in the days of the big studios — MGM, Warners, Paramount, etc — the simple fact was that the people assembling the trailer were not the same as the people shooting and editing the movie. The trailer was often assembled from alternate takes which had been stored away while the “real” film was being put together in another part of the studio. There is no reason for the director taking the same interest in the trailer as he would in the editing of the movie… he might be an expert in making a movie, but not in selling one!

Most times, the alternate takes were so similar that you couldn’t tell the difference from the shot in the trailer and the one that actually “played”; but, occasionally, there were quite marked differences… or, perhaps, a shot was considered worthy of inclusion in the trailer when the director and editor were in another part of the studio editing the whole scene out of the movie!

One of the most important (and first) restorations of a badly-edited movie was the one undertaken by Ronald Haver (there is actually a book about this) on the 1954 Warner Bros “A Star is Born”, which had a half-hour cut from it after distributors, smelling easy money, demanded a trimmed version allowing an extra screening per day to satisfy the queues forming outside the cinemas. The cut sequences, thrown away, seemed lost forever: a particular tragedy, since they included, for the most-part, the more-easily removed musical numbers, all of which featured the star, Judy Garland.

However, by 1983, most of that footage had been recovered, and, as Haver points out in his book, one of the sources he finally discovered was the Warners department where trailers were assembled. With no idea that they were saving history for us, the workers in that department had collected a series of alternate takes and discards from which to assemble the original trailer, and no one had bothered to destroy that footage, even after thirty years. At least one of the musical numbers re-inserted for the restored version is assembled from several of these alternate takes; there were, it seems, a great many of these, since the star was very exacting about what she would accept for the final, released version.

If you don’t want to read the book on the restoration saga of this movie (even though you should; one review of the book said “The search for the missing half hour from George Cukor's classic had all the ingredients of a detective story”), you may, instead, be interested to read a five-page discussion on-line, on the Home Theater Forum site, page: community/threads/regarding-the-restoration-of-a-star-is-born-1954.247733/. So, yes, it makes a lot of sense to have the trailers assembled while the film is still being edited, and in some cases you will see something that didn’t make it into the distributed edition.

What movies have been ruined by a single actor alone?

Aldrich’s “The Big Knife” would actually have been any good even without the “coup de grace” delivered to it by Rod Steiger; in typical Aldrich fashion, it was full of tricky camera shots which drew attention to themselves and, consequently, took you out of the story (shooting the characters up through a glass table, if I recall), and there were several other top names in it that were far from at their best, possibly because of a script that sounded like it had to be recited rather than read; but Steiger, in his most outlandish and over-the-top performance (and he had a few of those!) was definitely the factor that sent it right over the edge. With only Ida Lupino and Wendell Corey emerging unscathed from the wreckage, “The Big Knife” is, I think, one of the worst movies of the entire 1950s.

Marlon Brando — at his peak one of the greatest actors the movies have given us — was the expert, however, at ruining movies didn’t appear to like. In “The Island of Dr Moreau” he was, frankly, grotesque, wearing a flower pot (or was it a waste paper basket?) on his head in one sequence, simply because — as he told his co-star, Val Kilmer — no one on the set, including the director, would be brave enough to even mention it to him, and in another sequence smearing white cream all over his face for no discernible reason except to make his character more ridiculous than it already was.

Perhaps the most puzzling of Brando’s sabotage attempts was the big-budget remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty”, shot on location in Tahiti and with the entire fortunes of MGM riding on its back. Seemingly working in opposition to sterling performances by Trevor Howard and Richard Harris, and one of Britain’s greatest-ever directors, Sir Carol Reed (Brando soon forced him into withdrawing, and so ran roughshod over his replacement — the equally-distinguished Lewis Milestone, who had made the original “All Quiet on the Western Front” — that Milestone simply let him have his way and retired at the end of the movie), Brando, while not, at least, reaching for the flower pot this time, made up his own lines as he went along (so that Howard never knew when it was his turn to reply), and wrote himself into at least one scene where he wasn’t supposed to appear (and, moreover, put himself into such an outlandish costume for that appearance that his characterisation of Fletcher Christian threatened to descend into low comedy). His shenanigans so demoralised the rest of the crew, who, in turn, soon wore out their welcome with the local populace, that MGM found it needed to hire a press agent just to put a positive spin on such “paybacks” as a large sign erected on the island which said, “MGM go home” (the press agent claimed that the sign actually ended with the words “…and take us with you”!)

What is a funny movie I can watch with a family?

If you don’t mind drawing a candidate for your family show from the great movies of the past (in the days when you didn’t have to worry about what the children might be about to see, or hear, in the very next frame of the movie), then I suggest “The Court Jester”.

Despite its age (it’s over sixty years old), it’s in Technicolor and VistaVision, and, therefore, still looks wonderful (unlike some of the earlier comedies which, funny as they are, are less-easy to watch nowadays because they preceded such technical advances as colour, hi-fi, and sometimes even sound).

It had a great cast of “straight” actors (mainly British), who play it as if they didn’t know they were in a comedy (always an added bonus). “The Court Jester” isn’t, strictly, a musical, but it does have a couple of very good songs in it, written to suit the persona of the lead actor, American comedian Danny Kaye.And it even has several of the original “Munchkins” from “The Wizard of Oz”, suddenly transported to the days of King Richard the Lion-Hearted; for the “Oz” midgets, this movie was like a family reunion. It’s really a very funny, very winning movie, and one that can stand repeated viewings without the humour getting blunted.

Why are movies so much better than books?

Honestly, I sat and thought a lot about your question, and I have to say that in just on seventy years of going to the movies, I can only come up with one movie — just one! — that was better than the book on which it was based. That was “Night of the Hunter”. I am sure there must have been one or two others over nearly three-quarters of a century; but I will have to leave those to people with better memories than I have… or to people who just don’t like books much!

Is it childish for adults to watch children's movies?

Watching them with your children can give you a real kick if they’re having a good time (you spend more time watching their reactions than you do watching the screen), so certainly that isn’t childish. Watching them alone, however….well, I guess that could be construed as childish, but, in my opinion, that would only be something to be concerned about if the adult ONLY liked children’s movies, and never tried to take the step forward to appreciate a good movie made for adults. In that case, I think, the person should make an effort to broaden his/her taste. But doing something “childish” doesn’t necessarily define you as a person!

The most important point that to be made here is that some children’s movies are really very good, regardless of your age group! I know a lot of adults who thoroughly enjoy “Dumbo”, for instance. I always had a soft spot for “Lady and the Tramp”, with those great songs by Peggy Lee, and if it turned up on TV tomorrow night I wouldn’t even hesitate. “The Wizard of Oz” is wonderful whether you’re nine years old (and it scares the hell out of you) or ninety years old (and you cry at “Over the Rainbow”). The important thing about watching ANY movie is not whether its target audience fits your age range, but whether or not it’s a good movie!

Which current film critic(s) do you enjoy reading and find highly insightful?

I guess there will never be another film critic to equal Pauline Kael, and because she’s no longer working, I don’t read many reviews nowadays. I often see snippets of reviews on the jackets of DVDs, and, most of the time, when I play the actual movie, I wonder what on earth they have been drinking.

However, I still have high regard for Roger Ebert. He really analyses his movies, and, more than once, has pointed me towards qualities in a film that I would, otherwise, have surely missed.

What is an easy hobby to get into for somebody whose only passion is watching movies?

Haven’t you answered your own question? A hobby is something you do in your spare time because you have a passion for it. That you already have, so, really, all you need to do is what everyone does with his/her hobby: learn more about it. Read books on the history of the movies and the people who made them, make a point of chasing up obscure or out-of-print movies which most people have never seen; build up your own private collection of movies, and don’t just clog it up with the hits of the last two or three years (the movies are more than a century old, and there have been masterpieces from the very earliest days); read reviews but don’t treat them as holy writ (you will learn by experience who the knowledgeable movie reviewers are, the ones you listen to and try to see things from their point of view); and, finally, start writing your own reviews. There’s enough material just in what I have said above to last a couple of lifetimes. Have fun!

Why were movies popular in the 1920s?

I guess it’s because you could see them for a nickel (early cinemas were actually called “nickelodeons”), and the opera and ballet would have cost quite a deal more than that. They may not, in their primitive 1920s form, have been very popular with society’s elite, who were more accustomed to velvet chairs, smoking rooms, and orchestra members dressed in black ties… but with the hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who only had a nickel to spare, the movies were a gift from the gods; and the great silent clowns — Chaplin and Keaton and Laurel and Hardy — were the popular heroes of the era, having mastered the difficult (but essential!) skill of making their audiences forget how hard life was for them as soon as they stepped outside the nickelodeon.

Has there ever been a science fiction movie that was lauded by critics?

Yes! “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, for instance, and “Robot Monster”!

No, I’m joking. It was actually films like those that probably made you feel that you needed to ask the question. The word of how bad those two were certainly got around. And they were helped along immeasurably by all those Japanese films which had assorted monsters rising from the sea and laying waste to Tokyo (and, eventually, to each other) over and over.

But you shouldn’t judge a whole genre by its “duds”. Right from the earliest days, producers were making science-fiction movies that were proclaiming the worth of this often-ridiculed genre.

Even back in the twenties, people regarded “Metropolis” as a masterpiece, and in the thirties there was “King Kong” and “Things to Come”. Even seen today, these films are quite remarkable, and it’s easy to see their influence in many of the science fiction films made today.

In the fifties, Robert Wise’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” received praise right from its first release, and with good reason. Howard Hawks’s “The Thing from Another World” was well-received, critics commenting especially on the way the tension built up so that you didn’t get a good look at the thing until just minutes before the end. George Pal’s “War of the Worlds” was praised for its visuals, and his other ‘science fiction-ers’, “Destination Moon” and “When Worlds Collide” were, at least, acknowledged as a respectable attempt. And Don Seigel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was considered a classic almost as soon as it hit the screens. “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and “Them!” were both recognised as serious works, and certainly stood out from the crowd in the days when films similar to them were almost a weekly event: “Tarantula”, “The Black Scorpion”, “The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman”, “The Thing with Two Heads” (one of the heads was Ray Milland!) and assorted other “look-what-those-scientists-have-unleashed-on-us-now” stinkers. “Forbidden Planet” was made by the craftsmen at MGM, and it certainly looked as if it had had money spent on it; and there were such MGM stalwarts as Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis to look at, too. And, finally, from that era, there was the highly-unusual but undeniably interesting “Invaders From Mars”, the production design of which was done by William Cameron Menzies, whose other credits included “Gone with the Wind”!

Moving along, “Alien” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” were both acknowledged as adding respectability to what was often regarded as a poverty-stricken genre, and “Contact” elicited much praise for the fact that, for once, it had the science well in-hand, so that it couldn’t be dismissed as mere fantasy.

After these, well, now I’m on shaky ground, because I stopped reading reviews of movies after being disappointed once or twice too often… it got to seem that anyone could be a reviewer, you didn’t even have to see the movie! So I will leave all the new ones to the young moviegoers who may be able to sing the praises of some of the newer crop; I just hope they don’t decide to sing too loudly of the virtues of “Elysium”! I went to see that one, Jodie, just for you. You owe me!

Why are movies based on actual events so compelling?

Movie plots are full of coincidences and surprise twists, and, while we can admire the craft of the people who make up such stories, we know in our hearts that this is all it is — made up. But if it’s a true story, then we can relate to the events the way we relate to events in our own lives….or the possibility of future similar events occurring to us.

I, for one, always get a real feeling of being part of an event in a movie when it happened in my lifetime. While I was half a world away, I was alive at the same time the holocaust was occurring. I breathed the same air as Adolph Hitler, and Anne Frank, and Mahatma Gandhi, and Albert Einstein. Stories about their lives (just as examples) resonate especially with me because THEY were “real” when I was “real”. I can watch a movie of, say, Anne Frank writing in her diary, and muse on what I might have been doing at the very moment she was writing that paragraph. It gives an added dimension to what is going on up there on the screen.

Which movie stars, who are currently active, are likely to become legends?

Certainly Meryl Streep is one. She could well be on her way to becoming the most-honoured screen actress in the history of motion pictures. Even in films where she is part of an all-star cast, she is almost-always the best thing in the movie. And she chooses well. Definitely a legend in the making!

If authors got to have control over their books' movie adaptations, would the films likely perform better, especially since many movies don't do as well as their book sources?

There is no indication at all that they would “perform” better (I presume you are talking box-office returns), and they would more-than-likely perform less-well, because the movie-makers at least have some idea, learned through years of experience, of what the target audience will put money on the counter for.

The films might, however “be” better, because writers are, for the most part, people who understand characters and motivations and, most of all, the beauty of language, all of which are frequently sorely lacking in their work when it finally translates to the screen under the direction of others….. but, of course, quality is rarely a good indicator of a likely profit, at least where movies are concerned. The movies of today are, generally, far, far, FAR worse than the movies of a half-century ago, yet the producers (who have probably SEEN some of those great old movies) are quite happy with that, because they are giving the audience what it wants. It saddens me that many of today’s young filmgoers have never seen a great movie…. and, what’s worse, wouldn’t want to, even if they could. You want something to THINK about and be CHALLENGED by, and to TALK about for days afterward? Watch a TV programme. That’s where the writing is done, and is still the most important element. The movies are just for a minute’s adrenalin rush, often forgotten about before the final credits have even rolled up the screen. Who wrote it? Who cares? Who directed it? Who cares? It’s over now, so let’s move on to the next ride.

Watching a film in a foreign language, is the audio translation more accurate than the caption translation?

It varies from film to film, of course, but neither method is renowned for achieving a high degree of accuracy!

I would say the captions probably have a higher chance of reflecting the actual words spoken. All the captioners have to do is edit; since people speak faster than they can read, and since a dialogue-heavy film will involve a torrent of words for every camera set-up, there is no chance that ALL those words can be represented in the captions. So, the captioners work out what they can afford to jettison: they leave out words, or whole phrases, which don’t impact on the meaning of the scene, they substitute synonyms which are shorter and take up less caption space (and time). But they are generally careful to capture the essentials of the dialogue exchange: the message is the important thing, all they have to do is compress, with as little alteration to the original meaning as possible.

Audio translation can come in several guises, and I have seen movies where a single narrator has just explained what everyone in a scene was talking about… no attempt made to “dub” the voices. The best-case scenario here is “dubbing”, where a suitable actor is hired to do the voice in a brand new language (which may, in fact, necessitate a certain amount of editing, as in the captioning method, but probably not as much).

But the dubber has another obligation: to match, as far as is possible, the tone of the conversation and the mouth movements of the actor up there on the screen. This is a far-more difficult process, it seems, since I have rarely seen a movie where the discrepancy was anything less than painfully obvious. So words are changed, not to synonyms, but to words that might go close to fitting the mouth movement and might at least give an approximation of the original message. Whole sentences may have to be restructured so that the dubbing “fits”. It seems to me that this makes the audio translation far-less reliable than mere captioning, where the only things that have to fit are the time and space on the screen.

Are full-length films of out-takes and bloopers a good idea?

Frankly, I think the joke would wear rather thin after just a few minutes.

I will, however, admit to seeing a few films which made me think that they had collected a pile of acceptable takes and a pile of “bloopers”, but the editor had, in assembling the movie, picked up the wrong pile!

What is something almost everyone does wrong yet has no idea?

Use the phrase “cannot be underestimated” so that it means the opposite of what they intend.

You see this even in newspapers and magazines, in eulogies and written tributes: “His contribution to medicine cannot be underestimated”, etc. Of course, the readers know what the journalist MEANS, so that no one (presumably) takes offence, but what is actually being SAID here is that the person’s life’s work was so trivial and insignificant that, no matter how trivial you imagine it might have been, it was even more trivial and insignificant than that: you can’t even imagine any life’s work less-worthy than this man’s. His “contribution” was minuscule beyond measure!

What journalists OUGHT to be saying, of course, is “can’t be OVERestimated”: no matter how great you think the person or the work is, actually the reality is that he/she is even greater than that. Nowadays, that is how everybody “reads” the phrase, anyway; but the way it is expressed is still wrong, and journalists, in particular, ought to know better.

Why won't Hollywood go back to making good quality TV shows like the ones from the 60s?

Some of the answers already given to your question have brought up those infernal comedy half-hour shows of the sixties, with their cliche characters and canned laughter, and suggested that most of today’s TV is well ahead of those; and they may well be right.

However, what is missing from today’s TV screen are the music specials of the 60s, when you had shows with people like Judy, Frank and Dean on the same stage at the same time… or Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong jamming together. We had the Judy Garland Show — 26 weeks of it in 1963/4, and she sang with people like Barbra Streisand and Ethel Merman (that was just one of the shows, and it is now legendary). We had the Frank Sinatra shows, one of which had Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim as the main guests, and, boy, that was something to hear! Then there was the Dinah Shore Show, the Rosemary Clooney Show, and… well, you get the idea.

Are there ANY TV shows like that anymore… ones where you raced home early on a Sunday night because you didn’t want to miss Judy’s opening number, and her guest that week was Lena Horne (or Peggy Lee, or Count Basie or Mel Torme or Tony Bennett)? I recall how the President of the United States (JFK) announced that, on one night every week, there would be no business conducted at the White House, for that was Family Night: he, Jackie and the kids sat around and ate a quiet dinner, and then watched the Judy Garland Show together.

Some TV shows may, indeed, be better today than their counterparts in the sixties (“Modern Family” is every bit as good as, say, the Dick Van Dyke Show used to be), but the sad fact is the days of the great musical specials seem to have gone forever; there isn’t the money to produce them, there isn’t the talent to fill them and, sadly, there isn’t the audience to appreciate them.

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Have you ever met your favorite actor/actress just to be disappointed by their behavior?

I am drawing from a very shallow well here, as I haven’t “met” many movie stars except for autograph-hounding experiences. But I have been lucky; every one of these, including the ones where the star stopped to chat for a while, has been a rewarding experience, and I have gone away liking them more than ever.

June Christy was, without a doubt, the nicest of all, treating a bunch of young fans like old friends, and inviting them for a second visit to see her backstage. This was when she was in Sydney, where she was never really given the accolades her talent deserved (Sydney is not one of the great jazz centres of the western world), and, on her return home, she gave an interview saying that she regretted not seeing more of Sydney, but wound up spending most of her time looking at the walls of her hotel room; we all regretted that we had never asked her out and taken her around, but who does that to a major star?

Johnnie Ray and Charlton Heston were both so nice to me — and neither had any reason for their kindness — that I can honestly say that I will never forget the impression they made; a friend of mine and I spent more than a half-hour in Mr Heston’s company, at his invitation, and I had well over an hour with Johnnie Ray. They may be major talents, but they are decent human beings, too. I’d have to say the same for Chita Rivera, who actually gave my school-aged daughter some career advice that still drives her forward a decade later. And Sir Richard Attenborough gave me a record album when I confessed I was too short of funds to buy one!

Some nice words, also for Jane Fonda and Anne Baxter, both of whom were gracious, warm and full of good humour. And Carmen McRae, who sat and talked about the record companies she had recorded for (she was very proud of the album “Bittersweet”; that’s one to go out and search for).

What sometimes does disturb me, as an autograph hound, is the behaviour of some of the fans who cluster around these nice people and act like they are bosom buddies. They assume the right to address the star by a first name, and kind of take control of the meeting as if the celebrity ought to be thankful for meeting THEM.

I guess celebrities learn to accept this over-familiarity with good grace (the price of fame), but I admit that I did once see Mickey Rooney lose his cool with their attitude. Everyone repeatedly called him “Mickey”, not “Mr Rooney” (do they do that to, say, their bank manager when asking for a loan?), they kept touching him as if he was their personal property and handing him all sorts of scraps of paper and cloth to autograph for members of their family (spelling the person’s first name and even instructing him on what he should write!), and he was being gracious and well-mannered; but eventually he explained that he really did have to go, because he had a plane to catch and was already running late. That didn’t ‘phase’ them one bit, and they just ignored the plea and thrust more bits of paper, handkerchiefs, and anything else to hand under his nose for signing. Finally, he just said, “What you’re telling me is that you don’t care if I miss my plane!” and stepped abruptly into his waiting vehicle. And as he drove off, all these people turned to each other, tut-tutting and shaking their heads and telling each other how rude and ungrateful HE had been! People really think they own their idols!

Which was the best acting performance in a TV show by any actor in the decade (2010-2019), and why?

“Foyle’s War” started in 2002, well before the period specified in your question, but they kept making it up to 2015, so I hope that permits me to chime in with Michael Kitchen, who played the lead, Christopher Foyle. Kitchen’s performance was a masterpiece of understatement: he said little (but when he did speak, he was worth listening to), and any gestures or expressions were performed on such a small scale that you really had to pay attention to even see what he was expressing.

“Foyle’s War” gave a chance for some of England’s best character actors and actresses to shine in fat, important roles that showed off their considerable talents to perfection. And what a great number of acting masters there were in that decade! But MIchael Kitchen never let the programme slip from his hands; however outstanding the guests, he underplayed them deftly, and, consequently, became the one you couldn’t take your eyes off. There were several reasons why “Foyle’s War” became the most compelling TV series of the first two decades of the 21st Century, not the least of which was some brilliant writing by Anthony Horowitz. But, when push came to shove, it was Michael Kitchen who gave the series its pre-eminence. I wonder when another one as great will come along?

Has any actor or actress deserved a nomination or award for two different roles on the same year?

Just leaving out the word “deserved”, it has happened almost a dozen times (starting in 1938, when Fay Bainter was nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, and won the second) that actors have been nominated for two awards for two performances in the same year. Seven of them actually won one of the two nominations; to date, no actor has ever won both (although the two nominations this year for Scarlett Johansson may make a rewriting of the record books necessary).

Re-inserting the word “deserved”, I would have to say that, in the Golden Years, there were dozens of actors whose performances were so consistent that, in the years they had two or three different movies in release, choosing which of the performances was going to be the one receiving the nomination must have been a “toss-up”. For example, in 1936, Spencer Tracy made “Fury” and “San Francisco”, but was nominated only for the second. Bette Davis was nominated for Best Actress of 1939 for “Dark Victory”, but in that same year she made “Juarez”, “The Old Maid” and “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex”; in all four she was, quite simply, at the top of her game.

What actor or actress has made the best comeback ever?

I may as well get in first with the name “Judy Garland” as the definitive answer to this question (since she has quite a few comebacks to choose from, and her comebacks, like just about everything in her life, were of a grand scale!)

Many people would choose her amazing 1954 comeback, when, after being fired from MGM, she (with her husband) set up their own production company (Transcona Enterprises) and made what remains the definitive “A Star is Born”, now regarded as the first masterpiece in CinemaScope (the first film chosen for restoration and preservation by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

Still others would choose her 1951 comeback at the Palace Theatre in New York, which re-opened to present her in vaudeville format for what was supposed to be a three-and-a-half week engagement; in fact, popular demand kept getting it extended until, finally, she called the Palace home for nineteen straight weeks.

My own choice for the comeback to beat all would have to be her return to the concert stage in 1960 after she had almost lost her life from untreated hepatitis which had cause her to retain so much body fluid that she had ballooned to a size that made her practically unemployable (her record covers had to be painted or photoshopped, and her film career had imploded to the point that Mike Todd was considering using her for the part of Bloody Mary in his forthcoming “South Pacific”… and she was, at the time, only thirty-six!)

Thanks to timely intervention by a doctor who contrived to diagnose her without her knowledge, her life was saved, but she was told, very firmly, that she would be an invalid for the rest of her life and must, of course, never work again (her one-word reaction to this news, from her hospital bed, was a weak “Hooray!”)

A year later she embarked on one of the most rigorous concert tours ever undertaken by any performer: looking better than she had in fifteen years, singing better than she had ever sung in her life, and feeling sufficiently newly-energised to plan a series of concerts in which she, and she alone, held the stage for a full two-and-a-half hours every evening, she toured England, Holland, France, and, finally, the USA, climaxing the year-long comeback on April 23, 1961, with a night at Carnegie Hall which has become legendary as “the greatest evening in show business history”.

Film offers poured in again; her concerts sold out — even the standing room — wherever she went; and her records became top-sellers once more. The double album of her “Carnegie Hall” concert not only won Album of the Year — the first time a recording by a woman had been so honoured — but Judy herself won Female Vocal Performer of the year; the record, in spite of being a more-expensive double album, became a gold record (the first two-disc set ever to achieve this honour) and was Capitol’s biggest-selling record up to that time, continuing as a top seller in CD format even to the present day, nearly sixty years after its release (it is one of fifty records chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, and has never been out of print).

Judy went on to conquer the movies once again, garnering an Academy Award nomination for her very next movie, and, shortly afterwards, embarked on a rigorous series of weekly television shows which, today, are regarded as a high-water mark in television musical programmes (the boxed set of all twenty-six shows was selected by Billboard as “the CD set of the Millennium”).

Today she is simply acknowledged, by practically everyone in the business, as the best there ever was; as Tony Bennett put it, “the greatest entertainer who has ever lived”.

Which are the best Hollywood directors of sci-fi movies?  

I’d give a vote to Robert Wise, even though you may say that only one of his movies — “The Day The Earth Stood Still” — was true sci-fi. But it was one of the best, and he directed quite a few movies that dealt with the supernatural or reincarnation or “other-worldly” subjects; just to name three that are now regarded very highly: “Curse of the Cat People”, “The Haunting”, and “Audrey Rose”.

What are the top 20 must watch movies of all time?

I have long since given up rating my favourite movies in order (even though I maintain that “All About Eve” is unchallenged as my number 1 favourite of all time), and what I will be doing in this answer is calling up memories of great movies and jotting down the titles in no particular order. Will I miss any that should have gone in there, and would have if I had answered this question a week ago, or a day ago? Probably. Will I even get as far as twenty; if so, will I be able to stop before fifty?

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are a few. Obviously, we start off with Joseph L Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve”. William Wyler, my favourite director, ought to be represented at least three times, so how about “Detective Story”, “The Heiress” and “The Children’s Hour”? Alfred Hitchcock, everyone else’s favourite director, would be entitled to his own three entries: “Rear Window”, “Strangers on a Train”, and “North by Northwest”.

If you’re interested in great acting, you’d have to start with the Judy Garland “A Star is Born”, and Vivien Leigh’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”. That last one was directed by Elia Kazan, whose “On the Waterfront” might be a good inclusion for a similar feast of great performances.

Billy Wilder directed so many great movies that it would be hard to limit the choice to three or even four. Let’s start with “Sunset Boulevard”, and “Ace in the Hole”, and “Double Indemnity” and “Witness for the Prosecution”… but you couldn’t leave out “The Apartment”, could you?

“Missing”, directed by Costa-Gavras is certainly exciting enough to go in a list of the top movies. So is “The Manchurian Candidate”, “The Set Up” and “Fail Safe”.

Then there were the musicals: “The Band Wagon” and “Meet Me in St Louis”, both directed by Vincente Minnelli, simply could not be left out. “I Could Go on Singing”, the last film made by Judy Garland and the only one to show her on the concert stage, playing herself and singing her own songs with her own conductor, is certainly one to watch over and over again.

There were some of the great MGM movies, with production values to die for: “The Yearling”, “Gaslight”, “Captains Courageous” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” were four that simply couldn’t have been better.

War movies? “Paths of Glory”, one of Stanley Kubrick’s very-early efforts, is probably still the best that ever was, with Fred Zinnemann’s “From Here to Eternity” just behind it; and, with war as the background, Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” is a standout for its superior screenplay, which required a great cast to deliver it (and, fortunately, got Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich and Maximilian Schell, all at the top of their game!)

Westerns? I join nearly everyone else in admiring “High Noon” and “Red River”, but my own special favourite is the less-known “3:10 to Yuma”, directed by Delmer Daves.

Horror or supernatural? “The Innocents”, based on Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” is a standout, as is Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”; I don’t think I can come up with a third one to complete the trilogy pattern, however!

However, if you will include British movies, “Brief Encounter”, “Tunes of Glory” and “The Third Man” are an easy trio… and that doesn’t include some of those great Ealing comedies, like “The Ladykillers” and “The Lavender Hill Mob”. On the subject of comedies, “The Court Jester” wasn’t a British entry, but it was the host of British supporting players that turned it into one of the funniest American comedies since sound.

And then, of course, there is Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane”, which (unlike “Casablanca”) is every bit as good as it’s cracked up to be. It’s probably as good a place as any to draw a line under this list, which, unfortunately, is now closer to fifty than to twenty. Should I get to work and edit it by fifty percent? Probably, but there isn’t a film up there that I don’t love, so I think I will just beg your indulgence and submit the whole lot, even if I am playing fast and loose with your limit!

Who gave the shortest speech after winning an Oscar?

I bet the answer to this is a tie, since there are probably a hundred people, especially in the technical awards section, who have made the usual two-word speech because of time constraints or because they really had nothing else to say. Of the major awards, just as a single example, Patty Duke winning her Oscar for “The Miracle Worker”; this is on You-tube, and is interesting, not because of the brevity of her speech, but because of the shot of her as her name is read out in the nominations list. Most seasoned performers learn to sit like stone at that point, but young Patty seems to be in considerable discomfort, and can’t keep her hands still.

Which classic Hepburn/Tracy movie would be worth a remake?

For a start, NOT “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, which seemed dated even on first release; you sat there thinking, “Just what is their problem?”

However, “Adam’s Rib” is a genuinely funny film with a crackingly-sharp script, and could well stand a remake; although, so much of the fun of the original depended on the on-screen chemistry between the two leads that it is quite possible that it wouldn’t seem nearly as funny once you substituted two of today’s stars. Maybe re-unite Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan?

What's the best instance of a serious actor doing a comedic role?

Patrick Young actually wrote a very good answer to this question, but, for some reason, Quora relegated it to the “need improvement” pile. Citing “Airplane!” (and its sequels) he proposed Leslie Nielsen. I would second that and take it a step further: while “Airplane!” missed as many marks as it hit, its particular contribution to the comedy genre was its insistence that supporting roles be played by “serious” actors, and that they played their roles “straight”. Nielsen was probably the big winner from this idea, taking it into a whole series of “Naked Gun” comedies; however, there were quite a few “straight” actors in the “Airplane!” series who delivered their outrageous lines without so much as cracking a smile or winking at the audience; their brief appearances were highlights of the films.

In particular I remember Whit Bissell as a doctor asked to give his impression of the defendant in a court case (“I’m sorry, I don’t do impressions; my speciality is psychiatry”), Peter Graves as a pilot welcoming a young plane enthusiast to his cockpit, and William Shatner giving instructions through a video screen. Their “no-one-told-me-I-was-in-a-comedy” delivery was so much more effective, I thought, than the broadly-comic deliveries of serious actors like Jack Nicholson (in “Mars Attacks!”) who made it perfectly clear that they were taking a holiday from their weightier roles, and were out to have a whale of a time with every line.

What are your favourite revenge movies, and why?

I’ve always had a soft spot for Henry King’s “The Bravados”. It has several features which make it a cut above many of the movies with similar themes (peaceful rancher comes home to find his wife raped and murdered, and becomes not-so-peaceful): one was that the until-now law-abiding citizen is played by ever-reliable Gregory Peck, and his voice, as he confronts each of the murderers, makes you remember that the first ten years of his acting career were spent on the pre-microphone stage. The second is some wonderful music credited to Lionel Newman, but generally believed to have been written (the best bits, anyway) by his brother, Alfred. And the third is the twist at the end, where Greg discovers that he has spent the whole movie tracking down and executing a trio of innocent men! Definitely worth a look!

Who is your favourite actor/actress and why?

Having grown up in the “golden years” of Hollywood — the era of Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Montgomery Clift, James Mason, Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra and so many more — I have a great many candidates from which to choose. Yet, when push comes to shove, there is “the one”; that single performer who thrills me with her acting (what she does is, frankly, beyond acting; and, whatever it is, it she can keep it going without a cut until the camera runs out), bowls me over with her singing (as so many have said before me, she doesn’t just sing a song, or even live a song; she becomes the song, and the song becomes part of her), makes me dissolve with laughter with her comic timing (as she proved on television talk shows, she doesn’t even need a script to become, as Lucille Ball graciously conceded, “the funniest woman in America”) and just leaves me awestruck with the obvious intelligence that jumps out of the movie or TV screen (or the concert stage) in virtually every project she undertakes.

Amazingly, in a career spanning more than thirty years as a top performer, she never made a bad film! I can’t think of another actor or actress who can say that. And, in nearly every case, she was the best thing in the film.

My favourite performer — as if you haven’t yet already guessed — is Judy Garland. She’s also my favourite singer and my favourite concert performer, and the star of my favourite TV series. She has been dead now for more than 50 years, but her fame is perhaps greater now than at any time while she was alive. When you hear someone say, “They just don’t make them like that any more”, it’s a likely bet that he has just watched one of the great Garland TV performances which are currently all over Youtube. She makes Youtube better! She made movies better! As far as entertainment is concerned, she made the twentieth century better. If you are one of the lucky ones who haven’t yet been introduced to her work, then, brother, you have some thrills in store!

What movie do you wish hadn't flopped?

 “Night of the Hunter”. It was the only film directed by actor Charles Laughton, and it showed him to possess a directorial talent right up there with that of D.W. Griffith or F.W. Murnau. It is like no other film, and should have launched a career that might well have advanced the art of cinema, as, for instance, Orson Welles did with “Citizen Kane”.

But — unlike “Kane”— “Hunter” flopped, and in some countries it wasn’t even shown. Laughton returned to acting, and died (just seven years later) with his masterwork neglected by everyone except the handful of people who had managed to catch it.

Today it’s a classic, and Laughton is recognised for what he was: a creative genius with much to offer the Hollywood of the 50s and 60s. If his sole directorial effort hadn’t flopped on first release, films might have been different from that time onwards.

Why is Tom Hanks the supporting actor instead of the lead actor in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"?  

This is just the crazy way the Academy works nowadays. In the early days of the Awards, “supporting” wasn’t tied to less screen time; it meant that there was a star (or a couple of stars) whose names were “carrying” the film, and that a supporting player, regardless of how many scenes he may have been in, didn’t have a name that would carry the movie. So Van Heflin got the supporting actor Oscar for “Johnny Eager” because, although he had a “fat” part, few people had ever heard of him, and his name would not have drawn the moviegoing hordes to the cinema; for that purpose, the film boasted Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. Lana may not, in fact, have had as many words to say as did Heflin — she didn’t read lines very well back then — but she was a “star”, and if she was going to be nominated for an award, it would not be “supporting”. Heflin, of course, made such a splash in “Johnny Eager”, that from then on he would be able to carry a movie on the strength of his name; he would, therefore, no longer be eligible for a “supporting” Oscar).

Fashions changed, and producers started ensuring the success of their movies by putting aside a major part of their budget into luring big names to do “guest spots” or even walk-ons (a good example here was Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in the 1978 “Superman: the Movie”). Since these experienced stars often gave outstanding performances in their few minutes of screen time (not, however, in Brando’s case), the Oscar for “supporting” player started to veer towards them, even though the success of the film often depended on their name being associated with it; the complete opposite of the original intention of the supporting Oscar.

When Rosalind Russell, a star since the early days of sound movies, was told that she was about to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Picnic” (1955), she turned it down flat, on the grounds that she was not a supporting player; her name drew in the customers. She would take a nomination for Best Actress or nothing. People accused her of an inflated ego, but she knew her movie history, and she was dead right. Someone like newcomer Susan Strasberg, whose part was about as long as Miss Russell’s, might have been a suitable recipient of the Supporting Oscar for “Picnic”; but the length of the role, Miss Russell averred, was not the deciding factor. Moreover, Susan, at that time, could have used the break, whereas Miss Russell, with several leading roles (“Auntie Mame”, “Gypsy”) lined up to follow this foray into drama, clearly did not.

However, Rosalind Russell’s push for a “fair go” for the young unknowns — a perfectly good system which guaranteed a steady stream of fresh new stars emerging every season — eventually came to nothing, as the producers who had set aside the money to pay the big names for small efforts led the push to have these people recognised by the Academy for their excellence in their half-day role. It was, after all, money in the bank for their movie (a big star name AND an Academy Award), and moviegoers gradually became accustomed to seeing leading players with thirty years’ experience, such as Tom Hanks, appearing as “supporting” players and being awarded because they condescended to take fewer lines, or not insist on the whole outcome of the plot depending on their character. This daft practice surely reached the extremity of foolishness when Meryl Streep — MERYL STREEP, members of the jury! — was nominated as “Best Supporting Actress” for “Into the Woods”; not only is she the most honoured actress of our era, whose name is enough to sell any movie she deigns to appear in, but, in “Into the Woods”, she practically had the longest role! How did they work out that she was “supporting”? Did somebody sit down and count the number of words she had to speak, or the number of seconds she was on-screen? It must have been very close to a tie! Well, she didn’t win, so the situation is not as bad as it might have been…. but somewhere, out there, is an unknown actress who JUST missed out getting an Oscar nomination that year because Meryl’s name was dropped into the slot that might have been hers; and, sadly, in this cut-throat business, she will likely remain “unknown” for the rest of her life.

What is Cary Grant’s best role?

I don’t think I could possibly narrow it down to one! From his early days, I particularly liked his comedy roles in “Bringing Up Baby”, “Arsenic and Old Lace”, and “The Philadelphia Story”. Then he showed his talent for drama in “Penny Serenade”, which came as a real surprise. Alfred Hitchcock was, I think, responsible for the best films of his middle-to-late career: “Notorious”, which drew on some of the dramatic skill he had shown in “Penny Serenade”, “To Catch a Thief”, and the wonderful “North By Northwest”.

What novel to movie adaptation do you consider as a missed opportunity?

Without a doubt, “Lolita”. And, not only did they miss it, but they missed it twice!

The Stanley Kubrick “Lolita” was made at a time when the book was still being banned in some countries and was widely believed to be unfilmable. Kubrick had to make it away from home (in England), and the advance publicity for the film was built around the tag-line, “How did they ever make a movie of “Lolita”?”

Well, the answer, quite simply, is that they didn’t. With three or four years added to the age of the heroine (so that the theme of perversion became a theme of obsession), and cutting to some visual gags (a folding bed that folds up on the occupant) whenever it looked like it might be straying into dangerous territory, the film was entertaining enough, and featured a first-class performance by James Mason (whose character, however, doesn’t appear to be having much fun with his obsession for a girl in her mid-teens), but it just wasn’t “Lolita”.

They tried again twenty years later, but while there was more of the book in Adrian Lyne’s version than there had been in Kubrick’s, they still had to tread with painful delicacy over the controversial bits, with much use of body doubles and one-shots. And, again, they didn’t get the girl right; in this new era of strict child protection laws, the movie had to, once again, use an older girl and resort to such devices as putting teeth-braces on her to make her look “cuter”. And, once again, Humbert Humbert (this time played by Jeremy Irons) just didn’t seem to be having any fun… and if Nabokov’s book “Lolita” was nothing else, it was a riot of a comedy!

Besides Snakes on a Plane and Independence Day what are other bad movies that are watchable/entertaining?

Does anyone remember one of Marilyn Monroe’s early movies, called “Niagara”? It’s hard to know whether it’s a bad good movie or a good bad movie, but, whatever it is, it always passes 90 minutes most entertainingly, and not just because Marilyn sleeps with only a sheet almost covering her, and showers (or is it bathes?) behind a shower curtain that must have been specially-designed to JUST get past the censors!

What movie scenes that don't take place in comedies are the funniest you've ever seen?

In the movie “Sudden Fear”, the heroine (Joan Crawford) thinks her husband (Jack Palance) may be plotting her murder, so she goes rifling through the closet looking for clues. She finds a bottle hidden in some dark recess, and, as she extracts it, the shot changes to a close-up of the bottle in her hand. The label says, simply, in bold letters, “POISON”. No brand name, no ingredients, just…. “poison”. Joan’s look of terror lasts only a second; my subsequent outbursts of uncontrollable laughter, however, lasted for the rest of the movie.

What does a soundtrack do for a movie, and how much better does it make a movie?

Both the answers above are excellent, and there is only one more thing I have to add. Just as we may remember images from a movie we have seen, so that the next time we see an actor, even one whose name we don’t know, we immediately associate him with a particular role, and that role comes flooding back to us, so our ear remembers a piece of music, and, even years later a re-hearing of that music can re-activate the whole movie experience in our minds.

This happened to me just two nights ago. I was watching a DVD of the French movie “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, and in one scene the background music used was the title theme from Stanley Kubrick’s film of “Lolita”, which I hadn’t seen for two decades, and hadn’t even thought about for years. But that snatch of Nelson Riddle’s theme did it: I recognised it for what it was after just a few seconds, and for the rest of the scene I was lost in appreciation of Kubrick’s movie and what a great love theme Riddle had created for it. In fact, that theme stayed with me for the rest of the evening.

Renee Zellweger won the best Actress Oscar for her bravado performance in the film Judy. But the movie itself got mixed reviews. Will filmgoers who passed seeing it the first time now want to see it?

Just following on from Mac Cheryl’s answer, I also “passed”, but for quite a different reason: I don’t know much about Zellweger’s work (however, she was great in “Chicago”!), but I DO like Judy Garland, and I didn’t care to see a “hatchet job” done on her in a major movie, which comes right out and admits that it focusses on the last six months of her life when she was having more downs than ups.

But Zellweger’s Oscar acceptance speech implied that she, at least, had done her homework and had learned to appreciate and respect Judy Garland’s singular talents and the contribution she has made to American show business. So, while wild horses couldn’t have dragged me into a cinema where it was showing three months ago (and my daughter did try!), I admit that right now I am wavering.

Were animals commonly harmed in films in the 19th/20th century?

Probably not in the 19th, since the movies never really took off until around 1902 and the Lumiere Brothers; however, it only took until the following year for Thomas Edison to produce a short film, “Electrocuting an Elephant”, presenting this horrendous event as entertainment for the masses.

Horses, in particular, have been particularly hard-done-by in movies…. at least, up until 1940, in which year the Hays Office, horrified at a shot in 1939’s “Jesse James” in which a horse was jumped straight off a cliff and into a river below (it is not known whether his death was caused by a broken neck or drowning), banned all apparent cruelty to animals. Accurate records of horse fatalities were not considered worth keeping before then, so the claim that 150 horses had been killed in the making of the original “Ben-Hur” (1925) may be (hopefully) a wild exaggeration. It is, however, verifiable that five horses were killed in one single shot: the pile-up which climaxed the chariot race. The notorious trip-wire, sending horses and their riders into spectacular spills that made audiences cheer (truth to tell, the early movie-makers didn’t care too much if a couple of the extras on horseback met the same fate as their steeds) accounted for dozens more in such films as “Charge of the Light Brigade” (1936) and “They Died with their Boots On” (1941). But by that time audiences were cheering less and being outraged more.

While horses and other mammals were relatively safe from abuse in the second-half of the 20th century, no one, it seems, stood up for the rights of our feathered friends, and no less a director than Alfred Hitchcock was perfectly happy to preside over the deaths of dozens of birds in order to get the shots he wanted in “The Birds” (1963). And while Hollywood may have begun standing up for the rights of dogs and cats long before 1986, there was a Japanese film in that year — made for children! — called “Milo and Otis”, to which I took my children, and was aghast at my misjudgement; while the two leads (a pug puppy and a tabby kitten) were not, thankfully, killed for the sake of the movie (although there were strong rumours that the filmmakers “went through” several kittens before they got all the shots they needed), they were clearly placed in highly-dangerous situations, and the traumas they suffered are right there on the screen for your “enjoyment”.

Which Hitchcock film has the best musical score?

 “Vertigo” has already been mentioned, and rightly so; I would also urge you to listen to the original score (by Bernard Herrmann) for the movie “Torn Curtain”; not the John Addison score that finally made it to the screen, but the one which Hitch commissioned from his “regular” composer, and which was subsequently vetoed by the studio, causing his long-term working relationship with Herrmann to founder. But while that relationship lasted, it produced, in addition, “North by North West” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (among others); this was perhaps the richest period for Hitchcock, and one of the richest for Bernard Herrmann (whom, it must be said, recovered from the split more easily than did his director/collaborator).

Who is the most well-known/recognized composer in American (or worldwide) cinema?

I love movie music, so I began writing this with relish, ready to extol the praises of Alfred Newman or Bernard Herrmann or Alex North, or any one of a dozen others whose music has thrilled me for most of my life. But I kept pausing mid-sentence, because I realised I wasn’t really answering your question; I was merely giving you a list of my personal-favourite composers for cinema.

But you asked for the most well-known and recognised of cinema’s composers, and for an answer to that question, I expect one would have to stand back and say: Who inspired Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann? To whom did Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin and Elmer Bernstein look for their inspiration when writing their own unforgettable scores?

So my answer, as the most-recognised and most-influential composer in American cinema would have to be Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He composed scores for movies from 1934 through to around 1948, but his influence affected movies for a further forty years, and is even seen today in the large orchestral scores of John Williams. Korngold is the father of American movie music.

May I conclude that Hollywood directors generally assiduously avoid doing historical research for the majority of modern movies?

No, not at all. You might, however, conclude that, for a director, that is far from the prime concern. Normally directors are presented with a finished script, and I would imagine that they would assume that the writer is responsible for the historical research, and that the proof of this would be right there, on the page. The director would have quite a few other priorities, and would be working with the actors, costume designers, set decorators, and lighting and sound technicians (not to mention the producers, who will always be asking him why the picture isn’t finished yet and what the heck he has done with their money!). He may never even meet with the screenwriter!

I’m sure that a good director will at least talk to his collaborators about historical accuracy (a good example was Frank Lloyd, who convinced an unwilling Clark Gable to get rid of his trademark moustache when he played Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty”, for exactly the grounds you mentioned); however, getting a good shot for the least cash outlay is probably more on most directors’ minds!

Why do two different movies have the same name?

Titles can’t be copyrighted, so you are free to call a new movie by the same title as your favourite movie of twenty years ago, even if the two have nothing to do with each other. You may do this deliberately to take advantage of the fact that the name is “pre-sold”, but, of course, you also risk confusing moviegoers and/or having your movie compared unfavourably with the original user of the name. Still, you have broken no laws.

However, you may not be able to use the same design for your title as the original movie used, since these designs are usually trademarked. This, of course, applies also outside the world of movies; if your name is McDonald, you may well be able to open a store and call it McDonald’s, but I wouldn’t try to use the golden arches to promote it!

What are some famous movies that were so bad that they accidentally became entertaining?

Edward D Wood Jr’s catalogue of movies could all be considered so bad that you couldn’t take your eyes off them, but none achieved quite the fame — or perhaps notoriety — of “Plan Nine from Outer Space”. The reviews alone will give you a good chuckle, but nothing, I assure you, could prepare you for the actual movie.

However, I often feel that critics who choose “Plan Nine from Outer Space” as the worst movie ever made are, in a sense, cheating; its budget was minimal, its techniques amateurish in the extreme, and the script laughable, but it never claimed to be more than it was. It’s surely more fun to find a big, expensive ‘A’ movie with famous names attached to it and watch in bemused horror as it sinks to the level of Ed Wood’s product. And I can think of a beauty.

Ross Hunter’s musical remake of “Lost Horizon” is, quite frankly, a movie you watch with your mouth open, wondering how on earth everybody could have got it THAT wrong. I don’t know whether you could really call it “entertaining”; “stupefying” might be a more-appropriate adjective. But you won’t forget it……nor, I would suspect, could Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, George Kennedy, Sally Kellerman, Michael York, Olivia Hussey, Sir John Gielgud, James Shigeta, choreographer Hermes Pan, and songwriters Bacharach and David (ESPECIALLY songwriters Bacharach and David!), although they probably spent the rest of their careers trying!

What is the best movie of Al Pacino? I have such a huge crush on him after watching Godfather 1 & 2,

Pacino is, in fact, an extraordinary actor, and one of the ways actors prove this is by taking on a role that would, normally, be thought to be WAY out of their range, and making it ”their own”. In Pacino’s case, this surely must have been Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”.

Films of Shakespeare’s plays are seldom blockbusters (unless the connection to Shakespeare is downplayed, such as in “West Side Story”), so I would imagine few people have seen Pacino’s Shylock; but, I assure you, it is something to see. While he doesn’t, this time, look “absolutely gorgeous”, he reads the absolutely-gorgeous lines as if they had just occurred to him, and the character, instead of being “played”, is suddenly real and compelling. Until you’ve seen him in “Merchant of Venice”, I don’t think you can truly say you’ve seen Pacino!

In addition, I would have to urge you to get hold of a copy of one of his very-early movies, “Dog Day Afternoon” (directed by Sidney Lumet, who trusted his actors and was always willing to give them “room”). Pacino improvises in this one, and there are a couple of scenes that are, quite simply, beyond “acting”. When he takes the rifle out of the gift box, you learn more about “Sonny” in one single shot than most actors could give you in ten minutes of earnest dialogue. If I recall, he didn’t win the Oscar. The performance that did was, admittedly, almost as good; still, in my book, Pacino was the Best Actor of 1976.

Shirley Temple was one of the biggest child stars ever, even saving 20th Century Fox from going under. What other child stars in the last 50 years have come close?

No one, really. Temple was a phenomenon… and you’re right, of course, she DID keep 20th from “going under”, and I don’t think there is another child star who can claim to have saved an entire major studio!

But there have been at least two others who seemed to come along just when the movies had need of them.

The casting — after several false starts — of Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” certainly saved that movie from having sunk to where it would hardly be remembered even eight years later, much less eighty; and Judy saved the score by Arlen and Harburg — including “Over the Rainbow”, the Song of the Millennium — from being thrown in the waste-paper basket while the composers reluctantly started again, with some cute little numbers for Shirley Temple, who ALMOST got the part.

And there was Hayley Mills, who came along just when the Disney studios needed her. Having gone about as far as it could go with full-length feature cartoons, that company was dabbling in live-action family films, but they needed a star who would appeal to both children and adults: to do, for the live-action features, what Mickey Mouse had done for the Disney cartoons. And then along came Hayley Mills, who became as precious to Walt Disney as Shirley has been to Daryl F Zanuck and Judy had been to Louis B Mayer. Hayley was put in Disney movie after Disney movie, and she was, in fact, Walt Disney’s last great discovery.

What are some of the most accurate castings for a role in movies in your opinion?

Just about any top actors or actresses can make a role their own if they really put their heart into it, so “accurate casting” can’t really be judged after the film is completed. It always surprises me when I see an actor in a part that he seemed born to play, and then find out that he wasn’t the first, or even the second, choice for the part: witness Frank Sinatra in “From Here to Eternity”, Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”, both William Holden and Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”, Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in “All About Eve”, and (on stage) Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl”.

Frank Story mentioned Gregory Peck, in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, as the perfect example; Greg has always been an actor I have liked to watch, but I read Harper Lee’s book before the movie was made, and, as I always do, cast it in my mind as I read. Spencer Tracy was one of “my” choices; so was Henry Fonda. Richard Basehart, I thought, would have been probably the perfect choice, but I knew that he wasn’t likely to get the role, because an important film like that required an important name. Greg was certainly that, but I wouldn’t have put him in the top five, or maybe even in the top ten. Now, however, it’s impossible to think of anyone else in the part!

But surely the most accurate casting of all time was the decision to cast actor Audie Murphy in the leading role in “To Hell and Back”, since the movie was about the wartime career of Audie Murphy!

What differences can you see between the acting styles of Rod Steiger and Alec Guinness?

It’s all a question of attitude.

Sir Alec Guinness acts as if he doesn’t want you to notice him; he just wants you to notice the character he is playing. He disappears into his character.

Steiger, on the other hand, likes you to remember that it’s Rod Steiger up there, delivering a helluva performance for your approval. His character disappears into what becomes the Rod Steiger Show.

How come everyone in TV shows, movies, or recordings from older decades all sound exactly the same?

 “Older decades” doesn’t tell us what films or TV shows you are thinking about, but if we can go back to the days before hi-fi, I think you might be able to lay the blame on the microphones and recording equipment; many of the rich overtones that made voices distinctive and unique were simply not captured by the early equipment, so everyone sounded “flat”.

That would account for your impression of the voices in movies from the thirties, but by the 1940s the major studios had sound technicians who could ensure that the voice, both speaking or singing, was reproduced with reasonable fidelity. Perhaps you’re referring to the voice training actors were given in those days… in the “pre-Method” era, they were taught to enunciate meticulously (unless you played a gangster!), and a British accent was held in higher regard than a home-grown one (the Hollywood Brits in the Golden Years had usually come by way of the London stage, and, therefore, had the skill and the discipline to need little direction).

However, none of this really seems relevant to the TV shows which you held up as an example; possibly, in this case, there was a particular delivery that was favoured by those who held the reins, tied up with their assumption about whether or not you would care to “invite” the particular performer into your home every night. In that case, “unique” may not necessarily be an asset; “bland” may well have been what everyone was striving for (which may account for the fact that the CBS top brass never really warmed to their “Judy Garland Show” series in 1963–4; whatever Judy was, she was certainly never bland!)

Who is the greatest actor of our generation in your opinion?

That’s a tough call, because, frankly, I think acting nowadays is better than it ever was. Today’s stars may not achieve the status of the great names of the Golden Years of Hollywood, but many of them could act the old guys off the screen!

Whomever I choose right now, I know I’m going to go to bed and kick myself for NOT choosing someone else; but I don’t think acting comes any better than some of the performances I have seen Sean Penn give.

So, since John Malkovich, my own favourite of the currently-working actors, doesn’t quite fit into your ‘brief’ of “our generation”, I will go with Penn and kick myself later.

What are your 3 favorite comedic movies of all time?

You’ve had a score movies mentioned in your previous responses, but, not surprisingly, no one has come up with the movie I rate as the funniest I have ever seen — and that’s in more than seventy years of moviegoing!

The omission is not surprising because my choice – “Liberty” -- is actually a silent movie, made as long ago as 1929, directed by Leo McCarey, photographed by George Stevens, and starring that great silent-comedy team, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It’s only nineteen minutes long (so many people won’t even count it as a “real” movie), but these artists could pack more laughs into a couple of reels than today’s moviemakers can manage in two hours (available at youtube.com/watch?v=44I3VN1plBM).

While “LIberty” is a clear winner, choosing just two from the half-dozen runners-up is no easy task. The Marx Bros “A Night at the Opera” and “Duck Soup” would be serious contenders; so would Woody Allen’s “Play it Again, Sam” and Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. And I have a special fondness for “The Court Jester”, which was not only the finest moment for Danny Kaye, but possibly for Cecil Parker and Mildred Natwick and a host of British ensemble players also (the Brits were usually funnier than their American counterparts).

What movie with Spencer Tracy inspired you?

“Judgment at Nuremberg”, certainly; his final courtroom speech was a beautiful piece of writing, and he delivered it simply and with dignity. It is on Youtube at watch?v=N3BwK51YFgQ&t=9s.

Also, as a potential candidate for the US presidency in “State of the Union” he had a dinner table speech which predicted ObamaCare by more than sixty years. It’s also on Youtube at watch?v=ZSqUuaXOR-o

Are there any popular movies where none of the cast was paid?

This isn’t an exact answer to your question, but certainly there is a case of several stars, including no less a name than Charlton Heston, bringing lawsuits against a producer because the company released a film that the stars hadn’t actually agreed to appear in!

The film was Richard Lester’s “The Four Musketeers” (1974). The previous year Lester had cut and issued a film version of “The Three Musketeers”, starring Heston, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Christopher Lee, and Michael York …. all of whom, of course, got paid for their services. What they didn’t know, however, was that Lester had (deliberately?) prepared a script far longer than was needed for his movie, so when the original was issued, there was enough footage left over for him to put together a “sequel”; hence, “The Four Musketeers”, which followed hot on the heels of the first one and made a fortune for the producers all over again.

Nobody, however, had bothered to tell the stars that they had actually made two movies for the price of one, and, on becoming aware of this fact, several of them sued the producers for a fair share of the profits of the second movie. The courts found in their favour, but the settlement was considerably less than the salary to which they felt they were entitled!

Why is there a lack of good movies lately?

There was always a lack of good movies…. in the sense that, even in the “Golden Years” of Hollywood, there were more mediocre movies being made than memorable ones. Just open up the book of Warner Bros movies, or MGM movies, or 20th-Century Fox movies, at any page and gaze down the titles: for every movie you have heard of, and that people remember fondly, there are eleven or twelve films that nobody remembers, and that are never revived; and for good reason. Movies were always hit-and-miss, with more misses than hits.

And the reason that there was a lack of good movies in just about every year in the last hundred is exactly the same as the reason there is a lack of good movies “lately”: because people are willing to pay to see bad ones.

What are some classic Hollywood movies to lift our spirits during the social isolation with the coronavirus?

 

William has provided you with a tasty list, and I am tempted to continue with it, but I realise it would go on forever, and the titles may not actually mean anything to you, up to seventy or eighty years after their release. So I will take the easy way out, and just provide the names of a couple of producers or directors:

First, Arthur Freed, producer. From his first film as co-producer, in 1939 (“The Wizard of Oz”) until his final musical in 1956 (“Bells are Ringing”, following which he continued to produce quite-different kinds of movies, all non-musicals, with results ranging from rather-sad to fair-to-middling), Freed was responsible for some of Hollywood’s greatest lift-your-spirits product, most of them associated with his favourite director (Vincente Minnelli) and his favourite leading lady (Judy Garland). Checking through his filmography will provide you with months of spirit-lifting.

Second, Frank Capra, writer/director. He managed to keep his name above the title of his movies for thirty years, because audiences knew that he was committed to the idea of lifting your spirits and highlighting the essential good in the “ordinary” citizen who might be faced with extraordinary problems. Watching his movies, you will come, in spite of current social isolation and the coronavirus, to believe the title of his most popular movie: “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

Which MGM child actress was the biggest rival to Shirley Temple?

 

MGM had a host of child stars — including, eventually, Shirley herself when Fox found they weren’t making the profits expected from her name — but the most important one (Judy Garland), five or so years older than Shirley, was already an adolescent when Shirley was at her little-girl peak (MGM’s New York office originally wanted Shirley Temple for “The Wizard of Oz” because she was an established star whose name could definitely “carry” a movie…. but with their teenage Garland, who knew? Fortunately, Arthur Freed did, and he eventually got his way!). Shirley and Judy could not, therefore, be considered rivals, except for that one role.

Virginia Weidler was closer in age to Shirley than was Judy (or Deanna), but MGM treated her more as a supporting player than a potential star. Still, she occasionally essayed musical numbers (for instance, in “Babes on Broadway”, in a part originally intended for Shirley), and had a far greater acting range than Temple, as she proved in movies like “The Women” and “The Philadelphia Story”.

What are some must-watch movies of Leonardo DiCaprio? 

For a start, “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” That was the first time I ever saw him in a film, and I was impressed enough to look up his name in the cast afterwards… and remember it. He is just about the most memorable element of what is actually quite a memorable film.

Who were some child movie stars who did not remain stars but lived normal and happy lives?

Very many, thankfully. Here are just four that come to mind:

Mark Lester is a good example. The star of “Oliver!” made several subsequent movies, culminating in “The Prince and the Pauper”, and then simply decided that an acting career wasn’t for him. He is currently working as an osteopath specialising in sports industries.

Virginia Weidler didn’t really live a “normal” life, since she died (from a long-existing heart ailment) at age 41; however, after a forty-something movie career (working alongside Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, and Katharine Hepburn) as a child star, she decided that there was a better life waiting for her in the “real” world, and left her career at sixteen, declining further interviews or personal appearances.

Claude Jarman, Jr made a big splash in such movies as “The Yearling” (he was the boy who found the fawn), but he was equally well-regarded as the founder of Jarman Travel Inc., and as Director of Cultural Affairs for the City of San Francisco. He is still active as an author and visitor to the website “Child Stars of Classic Film”.

Patricia Gozzi made an indelible impression in such 1960s movies as “Sunday and Cybele”, but in the early 1970s she turned down future offers and currently lives and works, anonymously, in Paris as the manager of an English firm.

Generally speaking, are successful actors/actresses more intelligent or have higher IQs than the general public? I'm referring to the script they must learn.

I don’t think you can answer this “generally speaking”, as you’d need to look at actors on a case-by-case basis.

Especially in the “golden years” of Hollywood, and also in the early rock ’n’ roll era, actors were often hired for their looks, or because they’d just had a hit single on the charts. Learning the script was seldom a problem in any movie they might be put into, as the lines could be fed to them a few words at a time (which, I expect, is still true). Whether they had a high IQ, or, indeed, ANY IQ, was beside the point. To make a fair guess at this, you’d just have to wait and see which ones dropped out after a movie or two, and which ones learned their craft and rose to the top of the heap, even when the asset that had brought them into movies in the first place was just a dim memory.

You can assume, I think — or, at least, COULD assume, until a recent election in one major world power appeared to give the lie to the theory — that anyone who rises to the very top in just about any field has a good chance of being multi-skilled, innovative, creative, and adaptive: all signs of superior intelligence.

What should people know about the actor Paul Newman?

 

While I expect Paul Newman himself would have said that everything you need to know about him was right there in his movie performances, I admit I learned to respect him a lot more from a reading of the book by Stewart Stern, “No Tricks in My Pocket” (published in 1989 by Grove Press), which chronicles the making of the TV version of “The Glass Menagerie”, which Newman directed, but did not appear in.

He comes across in the book as a dedicated professional and a devoted husband, but with none of the over-inflated ego that characterises so many celebrities who have achieved his level of stardom. As a director, he listened to his actors, accepting suggestions from them (especially John Malkovich, who had many to make!)

His motive for taking on the assignment was not to further his own career, and not even to make a fortune (in fact, he believed so strongly in the project that he offered to put his own money into it): he had watched his wife, the wonderful Joanne Woodward, essay the role of Amanda Wingfield on stage, and felt that it was a performance that deserved to be preserved for posterity. And he was right…..moreover, his passion for the play and his cast is right there on the screen, in a production that also deserves to be preserved for posterity.

What are your favorite lesser-known musicals to listen to?

 “Street Scene”, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes, has been around since 1946, the year that “Annie Get Your Gun” first hit Broadway; but while everyone from Judy Garland to Frank Sinatra to Doris Day was scrambling to record the many hits from “Annie”, the deep, disturbing score from Weill’s show never really took off. There was one quite-outstanding performance by June Christy of “Lonely House” on her hit album, “Something Cool” (she knew a perfect song for her voice when she heard it!), but there were few other recordings to keep the memory of “Street Scene” alive. It’s a remarkable work, innovative and surprising — the “West Side Story” of its day. It really deserves to be performed as often as the Bernstein/Sondheim score.

Speaking of Sondheim, one of his lesser-known musicals is “Evening Primrose”, written for a television show which starred Anthony Perkins (from “Psycho”). And it’s just about as terrifying as is the movie Perkins is famous for, set in a department store in the hours between closing and re-opening, when everyone expects that all is still. However, there’s a whole community in there, unseen by the world outside! As you’d expect from a Sondheim score, it is original and exciting (“If You can Find Me, I’m Here” could stand alongside the best that Sondheim has ever written); definitely another of the best “lesser-known” scores!

What is your favorite movie that is a musical?

There are several musicals which I love so much that, while I am watching them, I say to myself, “THIS has to be the best musical I have ever seen”. Nearly every one of them came from the period now referred to as “the Golden Years of Hollywood”, and, what’s more, most came from MGM and the particular contingent of that studio known as ‘the Freed Unit’: Arthur Freed as producer, stars like Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly as players, and, more often than not, Vincente Minnelli as director.

Of that illustrious group, there were four that stand out as being just that little bit better than all the others. In ascending order, there was “On the Town”, “The Pirate”, “Meet Me in St Louis”, and, the absolute pinnacle of the Freed musicals, “The Band Wagon”

There was yet another MGM musical from the Golden Years that belongs in with that illustrious list, but came, not from producer Arthur Freed, but from Jack Cummings: “Kiss Me Kate”.

One more musical, this one from Warner Bros and just a little past the “golden years”, surely deserves to go into the top half-dozen: “The Music Man”, as close to a perfectly-realised adaptation of a Broadway musical as has ever been made. I didn’t, in this list, include Warner Bros’ 1954 version of “A Star is Born”, which is one of my favourite films ever, because it always seemed to me that it wasn’t really a musical; some of its best songs weren’t written for the movie but were sourced elsewhere, and its musical numbers didn’t arise spontaneously from the story, but were, in the main, “on-stage” numbers superimposed onto the plot of what was, essentially, a drama with songs. But if you call that a musical, then yes, it has to go in the list also.

What are some movies about movies?

 

I guess “Sunset Boulevard” is the one that comes to mind first, since much of it is set in the Paramount studios, and it even has a scene in which Paramount’s top director, Cecil B de Mille, sets up and shoots a scene from “Samson and Delilah”.

There’s also “The Bad and the Beautiful”, based rather loosely on the career of RKO horror-movie producer Val Lewton, This one was made at MGM with no less than Vincente Minnelli at the helm; around fifteen years later, Minnelli made a follow-up (not really a sequel), “Two Weeks in Another Town”, with the same star (Kirk Douglas) now playing an actor attempting a comeback in a Hollywood film to be made at Cinecitta in Italy.

The above three movies were all made towards the end of the Golden Years of Hollywood; a much-more-recent movie about making a movie is the 1999 “RKO 281”, which chronicles the making of the masterpiece of the golden years, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941).

Which actors have successfully overcome seemingly insurmountable typecasting in their careers?

 

Burt Lancaster is the first actor I thought of when I read your question. When he first came to movies, with his big teeth, huge shoulders, athletic frame (he was a former trapeze artist) and small head, he was a natural for the tough guy roles where brute strength counted for more than mental prowess (one of his early movies was appropriately titled “Brute Force”).

Almost from the first, however, he used that strength to fight for roles which seemed the exact opposite of the persona he projected: in “Come Back Little Sheba” he was the weak, middle-aged doctor who, dominated by his wife, sought solace in the bottle; in “From Here to Eternity” he played an army sergeant whose sense of fair play inspired him to stand up to a corrupt superior officer. He donned a business suit and glasses for his role as a ruthless newspaper columnist in “Sweet Smell of Success”, and an Irish accent for his inebriated poet in the English guest house of “Separate Tables”.

From this point onward he seemed to deliberately choose roles to which he was, at least on the surface, quite unsuited: a Nazi judge and author torn by the knowledge that he had been complicit in war crimes in “Judgment at Nuremberg” (Laurence Olivier had originally been tipped for the role); a quiet, withdrawn prisoner whose companions are birds (“Birdman of Alcatraz”); the school principal with unorthodox ideas for helping severely-disabled children (“A Child is Waiting”); a general masterminding a military takeover of the US government (“Seven Days in May”); an Italian aristocrat (“The Leopard”).. While his physical appearance often constituted an extra challenge in playing these complex parts, he resisted the temptation to take the easy way out and “play to type”; his courage and unfailing commitment to the role meant that a Lancaster movie was always fascinating to watch, and he was sought after by some of cinema’s top directors, including John Huston, Luchino Visconti, John Frankenheimer, Bernardo Bertolucci, Louis Malle and Stanley Kramer.

What actor or actress is an unexpectedly good singer?

Meryl Streep. However, “unexpectedly” is not really the right word…. if you told me she was going to swallow a sword or walk a tightrope in her next movie, it wouldn’t really be “unexpected”, would it? She seems to do everything she tackles with such distinction that, when I heard her sing in “Into the Woods”, instead of reacting with “OMG!”, all I could think was, “Well, of course!” Can she bake a cherry pie, do you reckon?

What is the greatest opening shot in a Hollywood movie?

 There are several shots which spring instantly to mind here, and perhaps the most interesting was one that, on its first release, wasn’t even properly seen by audiences, as the studio decided to play the opening credits on top of it! This was the famous one-take shot, covering several blocks in a Mexican border town, in “A Touch of Evil”, the film Orson Welles made for Universal-International, but which so worried the “top brass” that they took the project out of his hands and re-cut it for release. Logistically, the scene is, quite simply, breathtaking, with close-ups, track shots, aerial shots, and just about every other kind of shot all done on one continuous take, following the progress of a car which has just been booby-trapped through the streets until it eventually explodes. The scene was eventually restored, without the credits rolling through it, for the DVD release, so, finally, it can receive the acclamation it deserves.

Robert Altman practically rivalled Orson Welles in his opening shot for “The Player”, which, in one single take, followed various members of the cast around the offices of a movie studio, eavesdropping on conversations and then moving on, and casually introducing us, as it progressed, to most of the galaxy of stars that were in the movie. It’s a murder mystery, rather than a thriller; but during that shot you are on the edge of your seat waiting for one of the luminaries to blow a line or miss a cue! However, with Altman at the helm, no one does.

Finally, one that nobody else in the entire world would even remember, or care about; but I remember it because it was probably the FIRST opening shot I ever recognised (at about eleven years old) as being of special interest. In the Robert Wise movie, “Executive Suite”, the character whose untimely demise begins the drama is never actually seen on the screen. He is, in fact, the camera; actors greeting him, or acknowledging him, or ushering him into an elevator, speak directly at the camera, so we see everything through his eyes, right up to the time where the camera spins dizzily and he collapses, dead, on the sidewalk, with horrified bystanders milling round. Not a world-beater, I concede, but to a naive moviegoer, it was exciting stuff, and helped me to an understanding of what an imaginative director can do with a routine scene. So, Robert Wise, to my mind, you rate right up there with Welles and Altman!

Which movie were you sure you had figured out the ending to early in the film only to find out as the movie came to its conclusion that you were completely wrong?

 

The German silent film, “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920) probably invented the ending which turns the whole plot on its head; the plot device it used is often imitated in modern movies (for instance in Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”), so if you’ve seen “Caligari”, you are in with a chance to astound your fellow-cinemagoers with your brilliance.

I admit to being quite wrong in guessing the solution to Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution”; then again, I was never very good at predicting the ending of anything written by Agatha Christie!

What is the most moving movie score in your opinion, and why?

 

Some good answers already given here; but Michael’s mention of John Williams’s “Schindler’s List” instantly calls to mind the music from George Stevens’ “The Diary of Anne Frank”, written by the great Alfred Newman (father of David Newman, Thomas Newman and Maria Newman, and uncle of Randy Newman, so it is virtually impossible to discuss movie music without bringing his name into the conversation). In his early days as a composer of movie music, Williams worked with Alfred Newman, and, listening to the two scores, one swiftly becomes aware of how Newman’s use of strings and choice of harmonics inspired Williams, thirty-five years later. Newman composed many beautiful themes for the movies of the Golden Years of Hollywood, and religious themes were his specialty (“The Song of Bernadette”, “The Robe”, “The Greatest Story Ever Told”); never, however, did he surpass his music for “The Diary of Anne Frank”.

What movie quote do you use all the time that no-one recognizes?

 

 “You’re too short for that gesture…. besides, it went out with Mrs Fiske” (a good quote for when someone around you is becoming a little too dramatic or earnest).

 

What's an example of a good movie that would've been bad if not for a single actor's performance?

 

I hardly know where to start with this question! Surely there are hundreds of movies where the producer and director went home every night and thanked whatever gods look over the movie business that they had the foresight to offer one certain actor the job of pulling it all together simply by virtue of his talent and appeal.

But I guess I will have to confine myself to one, or else this will be the longest reply ever on Quora. Here goes.

Despite his name and reputation, I think Otto Preminger is probably the sloppiest director who ever worked in Hollywood (well, maybe Ed Wood was sloppier), and he spent most of his career making appalling movies which people forgave simply because, well, if it was a Preminger movie, it couldn’t really be THAT bad, could it? He is the classic example (Michael Cimino might be another) of a director who made a “splash” with a couple of his early works, and spent the rest of his career “coasting”, usually downhill.

“The Man with the Golden Arm” looked like it was going to be another Preminger debacle. A set every bit as realistic as the deliberately-surreal Times Square set for “Guys and Dolls”. A whole heap of supporting performances which were classic cliches, the kind of character you knew everything about from the moment they walked onto the screen…. and all of them spectacularly overplayed. And even the always-reliable Eleanor Parker serving up such a peculiar performance that you never quite made up your mind whether she was signalling to the audience the tawdriness of the whole film, or whether she was just badly-advised by the director. Last, but not least, the music, again so overdone that it didn’t help the on-screen drama, but distracted you from it (it’s good to listen to on its own… it’s just not ‘suited to purpose’). This should have been a truly awful movie.

But Preminger had, fortuitously, interested Frank Sinatra in the leading role, and Frank attacked the part with a fervour he almost-always put into his singing, but rarely into his acting. His performance in “The Man with the Golden Arm” is better than the one he won his Oscar for, and, in my opinion at least, the very best performance he ever gave. Watching him work, you know you are watching one of the most talented performers you will ever see, and you are watching total commitment. You can’t take your eyes off him, and, whenever he is on the screen (which is most of the time), the crummy sets, the overblown background score, the cliche supporting cast, and all the other trappings that normally make a Preminger film one to loathe, just magically disappear. Definitely worth chasing up, and maybe we have to give Preminger his due: he may not have known much about making movies, but he knew how to cast; he gave Dorothy Dandridge the lead in “Carmen Jones” at around the same time, and she turned out to be the only serious rival to Judy Garland at the 1954 Academy Awards (both, of course, were robbed, and so was Sinatra, whose performance went largely unseen because his film broke so many taboos it was denied a seal of approval).

Are British actors better than American one? I see a lot of British actors in American productions but not many American actors in British productions.

 

Assuming that your premise is correct (I haven’t done a “head count” of nationalities since the middle of the last century), wouldn’t the likely answer be that the American market is larger than the English market, and that actors are likely to go where the work is? Certainly it has nothing to do with acting prowess.

The variety of British accents is also possibly a factor in the casting of the Brits in American films. For just about as long as I can recall, U.S. movies which had a non-American villain — all those war movies or espionage movies — were happy to cast an English actor in that role, even if the villain was actually a German or Russian or some other nationality. Whether the actor attempted the appropriate accent or just kept his own didn’t seem to matter; as long as he wasn’t American, that was acceptable (check the cast of “Night of the Generals”, for instance: Peter O’Toole, Donald Pleasence, Tom Courtney, Joanna Pettet, Coral Browne, John Gregson, Nigel Stock, Gordon Jackson and Harry Andrews all playing Germans, and a grab-bag of accents of all kinds).

There weren’t all that many American actors working in England back in the mid-twentieth century, and if an American actor was cast in a British film (such as Paul Douglas in “The Maggie” or Aldo Ray in “The Siege of Pinchgut”), he was usually brought in specifically to give the film a chance to crack the larger US market, and, therefore, the script was adjusted to make him an American. His own accent, then, was a definite advantage.

What is your favorite restaurant scene in a crime movie?

Charlie has gone for an example in a serious drama, so I will go in the opposite direction and give a couple of examples that made audiences chuckle. In “North By Northwest”, when Eva Marie Saint shoots Cary Grant in the crowded Mount Rushmore diner, the boy extra at a nearby table puts his hands over his ears before it is even clear that it is a gun she is taking out of her handbag. I guess it must have been the fourth or fifth take!

And then there was “Second Chance”, and Robert Mitchum having a dinner-table conversation with Linda Darnell over full plates of food. Every time the shot favours Mitchum, he is scooping up food with his fork and lifting it towards his mouth, but it never quite gets there, and the shot cuts to Linda Darnell. After half a dozen of these quick exchanges, the shot lands again on Mitchum and he puts his fork down — with the look of a man who has just enjoyed his hearty meal — on a suddenly-empty plate!

Are there any biographical films where the original person outlived the actor playing them?

 

I can think of one: Spencer Tracy played Lt Colonel James H Doolittle in “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” in 1944. Spence died in 1967, but the real James H Doolittle lived until 1993, dying at age 96.

Can a film have two directors?

“Gone With the Wind” reportedly had six. “The Wizard of Oz” had four. Many “episode” movies (such as “How the West Was Won”) hire a separate director for each episode. Some directors always share credit with a long-term working partner, such as Norman Panama and Melvin Frank (who co-directed one of my favourite comedies, “The Court Jester”), and the Coen Brothers. And there are innumerable stories of directors leaving a project unfinished because of illness or “creative differences” with the producer or a temperamental star, and having a substitute come in to complete (Vincente Minnelli was brought in to finish “The Clock” because Judy Garland found it difficult to communicate with the original director, Fred Zinnemann; Liza Minnelli is, surely, grateful for that communication breakdown!).

In this latter case, you would only know about the original director if you read the gossip columns, because the general rule is, unless he just comes in to “tidy up” as a favour to an ailing friend (as John Wayne did for his mentor, John Ford, in the already-mentioned “How the West was Won”), the director who finishes the movie is the one credited in the titles. Thus, Victor Fleming was the only one of the directors credited with “Gone With The Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz”, even though he directed only part of each. There are, however, exceptions to this rule: the credits for “Mister Roberts” acknowledge both John Ford (who left the project mid-way because of major differences with the star, Henry Fonda) and Mervyn LeRoy (who was brought in to re-shoot some of Ford’s scenes and finish the movie) as directors.

Finally, there is always the case of a film where one of the cast or crew decide they can do a better job than the director, and use their status to overrule him. The story is told of Barbra Streisand, making her first film, “Funny Girl”, riding roughshod over director William Wyler’s instructions and telling him how she wanted the scene to be shot. Since Wyler was one of the most experienced, and highly-regarded, directors in the history of movies, he, naturally, took umbrage at her arrogance. One of his colleagues quietly took him aside and said to him, “Be gentle with her, Willie; after all, it’s the first film she’s ever directed” (she didn’t, by the way, get directorial credit).

Which actors have children more successful than them?

 

 “More successful” is a matter of opinion, I guess, so it is probably best to leave out, for example, Henry Fonda and his daughter Jane. But Gwyneth Paltrow is surely more well-known (if that’s your definition of “more successful”) than her actress Mum, Blythe Danner, and maybe it is even true to say that playing J R Ewing in “Dallas” made Larry Hagman more successful than his mother, Mary Martin, who played the first Nellie Forbush (“South Pacific”) and the first Maria von Trapp (“The Sound of Music”). I still feel, however, that history might eventually find in favour of both those Mums — as, indeed, it has with Judy Garland and her illustrious daughter, Liza Minnelli.

 

 Was Judy Garland the first choice for Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz?

 

All the answers you have been given so far are very good. But, as far as the (very important) first word in each is concerned, they are all wrong.

The creative team at MGM charged with bringing “Wizard of Oz” to the screen knew, right from the start, whom they wanted for the role of Dorothy. Arthur Freed, the co-producer, was her champion right from the first mention of the project. “Over the Rainbow” was written for her, long before the name “Shirley Temple” was ever brought up as a possible star (in fact, when Temple was finally announced as the preferred choice, the aghast team of Arlen and Harburg were resigned to the fact that they’d have to throw “Over the Rainbow” into the bin and start all over again, because, as talented as Temple was, she couldn’t possibly have handled a song as “mature” as that one).

It was the money men in New York who decided that the studio was crazy to entrust the movie to young Judy Garland, who, up until that time, had been mainly a featured player in other people’s pictures. “The Wizard of Oz” was shaping up as one of the most expensive pictures MGM had ever been involved in (don’t forget, the other “big” MGM film that year, “Gone With the Wind”, wasn’t made by MGM at all; it was a Selznick Studios production which was only acquired for distribution by MGM as a condition of the studio lending Clark Gable to Selznick for the male lead), and, in those days, the more expensive the project, the more important it was to have a star name that could carry the movie. They looked at several child stars, both at MGM and at other studios (Benjamin is quite right in mentioning that Deanna Durbin was among them), but only one had the star power to ensure that the film would recover its cost, and that was 20th Century-Fox’s Shirley Temple. So Louis B Mayer was told that negotiations were being made to lend both Gable and Harlow to Fox in order to secure Shirley Temple for “Oz”.

Everything else in the other answers is exactly right. The creative team had to just grin and bear it, because money wins over art every time, and they had to admit that, although Garland had received rave reviews for her featured parts up until that time, her name didn’t mean much when compared to Shirley Temple’s. So they waited, distraught, while those negotiations proceeded, and Judy’s hopes for a film in which she was the star seemed, again (several other projects had been announced for her before this, but they, too, had eventually come to nothing), shattered.

Fortunately, just as in all the fairy tales, everything came out right at the end, and Arthur Freed, who had promoted her career right from the start, became MGM’s new “darling”. He was even given his own unit — The Freed Unit — just to make quality musicals. In the following decade, he made no less than twenty-six of them, fourteen of which featured his favourite star.

What are some careless mistakes in movies?

 

After seventy years of moviegoing, I have seen a lot of those! The most-frequent ones are historical anachronisms and technical slip-ups.

An example of the former is easy to spot in “Sins of Jezebel”, where you can plainly see the zippers down the back of Paulette Goddard’s costumes. In “The Bounty”, Mel Gibson (Fletcher Christian) and Anthony Hopkins (William Bligh) are seated indoors planning their imminent 1787 voyage to Tahiti, and a car with its headlights on drives past the windows in the background. That car also plagues Cornel Wilde in “The Naked Prey”… alone, starving and hunted (but not naked!) in the primitive African wilderness, he staggers through the bush in the foreground while it drives, quite visibly, across the screen, a few metres behind him. It may have turned up in the 1959 “Ben-Hur”, also, in the chariot race sequence; according to rumour, one of the crew was a little careless in where he parked his car at the edge of the arena. I have never been able to spot it, however. I didn’t see “Gladiator”, so I can only take people’s word for it that while Russell Crowe is delivering a speech to his colleagues, an aeroplane can be clearly seen flying overhead. I did see “The Last Days of Pompeii”, but I confess I didn’t notice the Roman soldier wearing the wrist watch, but that is also part of movie lore.

Technical slip-ups include visible microphone booms, cameras or crew reflected in car or shop windows, or the camera capturing lights or other equipment that isn’t supposed to be noticed. The films of Otto Preminger could serve as a handbook of clumsy mistakes of this sort; “In Harm’s Way” has several shadows of microphone booms (this movie had a litany of recorded errors, including a car that changed make and model while it was being driven), “Exodus” has the worst example of the shadow of the camera falling across the close-up faces of the actors that I have ever seen (they are engaged in a forbidden love tryst, and when the shadow falls across them you jump, thinking that they have been discovered… but the shot merely dissolves into the next scene), and, in “Carmen Jones”, when Dorothy Dandridge walks out of the doorway of the boxing centre and strolls past a group of shops, you can (if you can bear to take your eyes off Dorothy Dandridge walking!) spot the entire camera set-up and crew following her, reflected in the shop windows (I think there’s a brief shot of the camera in “Gaslight”, also, but since that was made by MGM at the top of its game, and directed by no less a craftsman than George Cukor, no one believes me, and I confess that I MIGHT have been mistaken). As far as visible lighting towers are concerned, everyone has seen Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, but few notice the lighting set-up visible, for one night shot, outside the motel room; everyone just assumes that a cheap motel like Bates would have a super-duper lighting system three times as high as the building installed right outside; in any case, that is apparently what Hitchcock was trusting we’d assume!

There are, of course, dozens of other less-crucial errors which the director lets through because he’s on a tight schedule. Even Stephen Spielberg, in his young days, was prepared to put up with these. He directed the very first episode of the TV series “Columbo”, and there are several examples of lights coming from illogical sources, actors mistiming their deliveries (Peter Falk, at one stage, answers a question a second or two before the actress in the scene asks it), and props refusing to behave. A particularly amusing one in this latter category was Jack Cassidy opening a bottle of champagne; he simply touches the cork and it pops out, spilling champagne everywhere, and quite befuddling him for a split second before he carries on, deftly, with a smile and an off-hand remark.

One of my favourites of this kind of error was in “The Road to Morocco”, where, for authentic atmosphere, the director places a camel behind Bing Crosby and Bob Hope as they play their scene; mid-line, the camel leans forward and spits straight into Bob Hope’s eye, causing Bing to react with such delight that the director decided that it was one of the best gags in the movie, and used that take. And, of course, there is the well-known scene filmed on location under the statue of Prometheus in “On the Town”: Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin and Frank Sinatra are singing “New York, New York”, while several hundred Sinatra fans, eager to catch a glimpse of their idol, can be seen crowding the viewing area at the top.

Name three movies whose scripts took a great deal of poetic license in portraying a real person from history.

Back in the days of the “studio system”, when each of the major studios had a stable of musical stars and a unit specifically devoted to making musicals to showcase their talents, the big challenge was to find stories around which the musical numbers could be “built”; biographies of composers or musicians of the past were, naturally enough, the obvious choices for such projects, as you had a ready-made body of work for your current performers to utilise. The biographies, however, frequently didn’t do much more than use the name and music of the person whose life was being portrayed. Certainly, anything unsavoury in the life of the subject of the biography (but not the tragedies: in “Night and Day”, Cole Porter was allowed to be crippled in a riding accident, so long as his homosexuality wasn’t even hinted at) was conveniently omitted from the script.

I wouldn’t, therefore, expect too much fact to be found in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (Jerome Kern), “Words and Music” (Rodgers and Hart), or “Three Little Words” (Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby), to name just three of many.

Which film movie should have elevated an actor's career but didn't?

 

 “South Pacific” and Mitzi Gaynor. It was the biggest musical of its year: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Todd-AO, hard-ticket prices, the lot. Everyone wanted to play Nellie Forbush — Shirley MacLaine, Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, and even Elizabeth Taylor among them — as it would have been a “plum” for anyone. Day was, in fact, the front runner, but was unexpectedly vetoed at the last minute by Richard Rodgers; everyone was surprised when the prize finally went to young Mitzi Gaynor, who was a reliable co-star in Fox musicals but certainly not the big name one would have expected to take on this role.

Mitzi, however, rose to the occasion, and most people were quite delighted to see Fox’s little girl give such a good account of herself in such an important movie. A career-builder, for sure. From that movie on, it was thought, she would be one of the A-list.

But it never happened. Gaynor herself says that she was, following that movie, simply the wrong age for the leads in the other big musicals of the time (“West Side Story”, “The Sound of Music”, “My Fair Lady”, “Hello Dolly”); either too young or too old. She did “Les Girls” for MGM and a couple of non-musical roles for Paramount, and was actually on standby for “Some Like it Hot” in case Billy Wilder decided he couldn’t take another day working with Marilyn Monroe; eventually, however, she decided that her future lay in Las Vegas (and similar), and left the movies for cabaret.

What is your favorite Oscar win?

 

All answers so far have assumed you wanted the name of a movie; can I, instead, submit the name of some performers? I recall when I saw “The Untouchables”, I remarked that the Academy could save a lot of money at the next-year awards simply by leaving out the voting for Best Supporting Actor and mailing the award to Sean Connery there and then; so I was more than a little pleased that he was the eventual winner. I felt much the same about Martin Landau’s win for “Ed Wood”.

And, as far as the ladies are concerned, Susan Hayward’s long-overdue win for “I Want to Live”, after giving a string of award-worthy performances virtually every year for the previous four or five years, was definitely a case of justice being served.

What's Shirley MacLaine’s signature movie for you?

As John pointed out, the first answer that comes to mind for this question is “Sweet Charity”, because it was the movie where she was able to show her dramatic ability and her song-and-dance talent to their fullest extent, simultaneously; and the results were stunning. Hers really is one of the best portrayals in a musical I have ever seen; and then she gets up and dances with Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly, and they don’t make the choreography any easier for her (which they might easily have done) because she’s the star. I have a lot of respect for her as a performer, thanks to that movie; only Liza Minnelli might have been able to pull that off with equal brilliance.

However, when I think a little deeper about Shirley’s remarkable body of work, I come back to a dramatic performance in one of her lesser-known films: “The Children’s Hour”. Quite simply, in a film full of strong performances, she played against type (an unlikely choice, on the face of it, for the repressed, closet-lesbian teacher) and walked away with the picture. She might easily have won the 1961 Academy Award, except that she was up against some fairly stiff competition, including… Shirley MacLaine for “The Apartment” (amazingly, neither of the two Shirleys won)!

Who is the best slapstick comedy actor?

You mean right now, or in the history of movies? If the latter, I would say you’d have to go right back to the silent era, the days of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, when slapstick was really an art. Everyone who has watched a silent movie has his own favourites from the comedians of that era, but, for my money, the best of them all was, no, not Chaplin, but Buster Keaton. Not only was he the best back then, but he kept on being the best through much of the twentieth century; in his last film, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966), with his slapstick days long behind him, he showed that he could still teach the young ones a thing or two about timing: it was a film full of comedians, but he was the funniest person in it.

What are some movies you loved as a child that still resonate with you today?

 

Barb has provided you with an exhaustive list, so I will limit myself to just two. Back in early 1954, all of eleven years old, I thought “The Caine Mutiny” was the best movie I had ever seen. It didn’t hold onto that position very long, of course, because the late forties and mid-fifties was a great time for movies, and my tastes were only just developing. But every so often I keep coming back to “The Caine Mutiny” for another look. And you know what? I still love it. I think that, among many of its other virtues, it features the best performance Humphrey Bogart ever gave us.

The second one? Just a year later, in 1955, a fortnight after I turned thirteen, I saw the Judy Garland “A Star is Born” for the first time (of maybe twenty or thirty times to date). “Resonate”? That’s putting it mildly. In one day I saw the best acting I had ever seen and heard the best singing I had ever heard… or would ever hear. How lucky I was that “A Star is Born” came along when I was at just the right age to be impacted by it! Thanks to DVD, I watch it frequently, and the thrill is still there.

Why is Brad Pitt a supporting actor in his latest film when he and Leonardo both share similar screen time?

Good question. Maybe it wasn’t a question of screen time. If you went to see the movie because Brad Pitt was in it (and I expect that millions did just that), then I would argue that he wasn’t a supporting actor, no matter how many lines or scenes he had. The traditional definition of a supporting actor was someone whose name couldn’t, at that time, “carry” a movie, so they were hired to SUPPORT the stars whose names COULD carry the movie. Those stars always had the most-important roles, of course, but they sometimes didn’t have significantly more on-screen time, or words to say, than their supports. Brad Pitt, however, could carry a dozen movies on the strength of his name, as could di Caprio. Under the old definition, Pitt hasn’t been a supporting actor in the last thirty years!

Nowadays, it seems, the original concept has been discarded, and “supporting” means something quite different. But I am not sure what. Certainly, one wonders what reasoning must have been behind the decision to nominate Meryl Streep for “best supporting actress” for “Into the Woods”, since she was easily the biggest “name” star connected with the movie, and, what’s more, she had practically the largest role in the film (they must have got down to counting syllables!)

What was Judy Garland like to work with?

 Judy Garland worked for forty-four and a half years of her forty-seven years of life; she had traversed the USA, garnering great notices, in Vaudeville, as “Baby” Gumm of the Gumm Sisters, before she was eight. She made her first movie at seven, and kept making them for thirty-four years. She played in concert houses in the USA, in England, in Australia, in the Netherlands, in France, and in Scandinavia. So a question such as “What was she like to work with” is going to have practically as many answers as she had years on Earth.

In her earliest days, as a thirteen-year-old at MGM, the verdict of her colleagues -- Roger Edens, Charles Walters, Arthur Freed, Mickey Rooney -- was unanimous: she was tireless, did what she was told, never made any trouble….one of the most co-operative and talented (and, without question, THE most intelligent) star in MGM’s stable. Even back then it was said of her that she could be greater than Garbo…. but, unlike Garbo, she did everything without a murmur of complaint. She even willingly swallowed the daily cocktail of pills she was fed, and, less-willingly, put up with a diet of chicken soup (not even allowed to eat the cake at her own birthday party), because the people who “knew” what was best for her told her to. She was, for a few years, the epitome of all that was good about American youth: full of life, full of optimism, full of eagerness to take on the next challenge.

But, as just about anyone who has ever picked up a newspaper knows, it didn’t last. She was only in her early twenties when she started to feel unwell at work; she’d come in late, go home early, and sometimes not come in at all. This was not the Judy of old everyone knew, and she was accused of being temperamental, although those close to her constantly pleaded that she was sick. You could see it on her face as early as 1943, in “Thousands Cheer”; by the time she got to “The Pirate” in 1946, her health problems must have been obvious to everyone at the studio. But, as her second husband, Vincente Minnelli pointed out, even when she came late, she could do her musical numbers perfectly on the first take, just by watching a single run-through with her stand-in. She could handle pages of dialogue and be letter-perfect every time. You could tell her twenty things just once, and they would all be there, in place, for the next take. So everyone just kept her working, and her illness and depression continued to be written off, by the studio brass, as “temperament”.

Judy could, of course, have taken the easy road, and just worked hard enough and long enough to get by, to finish the movie and please her public, without continuing to drive herself the way she had when she was thirteen; but she seemed unable to compromise. Her colleagues were her staunchest supporters and tried to tell her she was good enough without all the self-driving; but she was her own sternest critic, and continued to take days off if she wasn’t absolutely sure she could deliver 100%. She knew the damage the pills were doing to her metabolism: her appearance, her moods, her work output, and – most relevant to your question – the demands she was making on her co-workers. But every attempt to give them up failed; her employability began to suffer (she was fired from at least three movies). Desperately unhappy, she became more and more demanding of those around her, insisting that everything be exactly right… or, in the case of her final movie, done exactly her way. To stay in her favour, you had to make her feel that you were always on her side (her arranger/conductor through her great concert and television years, Mort Lindsey, really was, and maintained to the end that he at no time had the least bit of trouble with her; but others on that final production -- made in England, where she had always, previously, been adored by everyone -- had less-happy memories).

Lindsey was not alone in finding her a model of professionalism. Many other co-workers  – Roger Edens, Saul Chaplin, Kay Thompson, Hugh Martin, and, of course, Mickey Rooney – never wavered for a moment in their support, and they were well-rewarded for their fidelity with triumphs beyond anybody’s expectations, such as the 1960/1 tour which climaxed with the now-legendary Carnegie Hall concert. However, not everyone got such great treatment from Judy; if she suddenly felt she was being exploited — that those “supporters” were, in fact, using her for their own gain (and there were, of course, many of those), she could give them a pack of trouble. She always had, at her disposal, the ultimate weapon if she sensed someone wasn’t acting in her best interests: she could just walk away. And, sometimes in the last decade of her life, she did just that, distressing directors, TV executives, and — sadly — audiences of her lifelong fans (“believers”, they were called). She could always produce a doctor’s certificate to show that her no-shows were legitimate, and she always bounced back a day or two later stronger and livelier than ever…. but many of the people she had alienated didn’t bounce back with her. “Just wait!” she once said to Dirk Bogarde, to whom she was very close. “One day you’ll be like the others; you’ll walk away, backwards, smiling” (and, admits Bogarde with a pang of regret, eventually he did).

Among the people who never walked away, backwards or otherwise, were, of course, the Press. But they were always smiling, because Judy was always “hot copy”: at her best, when they could give her titles like “Miss Show Business”, or, better still, at her worst, when they assured the world that she was all washed up. Breaking box-office records or breaking contracts, Judy was never far from the front pages.

 She has now been dead for fifty years, and, amazingly, she is still “hot copy”. Thankfully, the great achievements (her matchless MGM movies with Mickey and Gene and Fred; her one-woman concerts in Europe and the USA, in which she sometimes sang more than thirty songs in a single show; her 1963/4 television series which showed her at the top of her game, singing duets with people who had been inspired by her and clearly idolized her; her TV talk-show interviews when she so delighted hosts -- such as Jack Paar -- and viewers that even Lucille Ball conceded that Judy, and not she, was “the funniest woman in America”; and all those record albums of great song after great song, delivered like no-one else ever could) are all on Youtube or on tape for people today to marvel at, and wonder why we haven’t been able to produce another talent like that in a half-century. However hard it may have been for her to produce work of such standard, and for others to have to work with her and support her while she did it, the fact remains that virtually everyone did their finest work while in her company or in her employ, benefiting immeasurably from the experience of knowing her. And nearly everyone who is still around and answering questions about working with her — for example, Tony Bennett, who worked with her on her TV series, or Gregory Phillips, who worked with her on her last movie — now says she was worth every bit of effort she made them expend on her behalf, because she gave it all back, and much more, to them and to us. The problems are forgotten; the work endures.

Why is the multi-talented Danny Kaye forgotten?

 

Is he? I’d be rather sad to think so, because, although I was never a keen fan, I think that one of his comedies — “The Court Jester” — is just about the funniest movie since “silents” went out, and I always enjoyed his weekly TV show (he did the best version I ever heard of the Rodgers and Hammerstein gem, “A Fella Needs a Girl”). And he certainly had nothing to be ashamed of with “Knock on Wood” and “Hans Christian Andersen”.

But I guess that comedy is a young man’s game; the smart ones — such as Mickey Rooney — learn that, to stay on top, you have to spread your wings and prove your worth in a serious role. What one generation finds side-splitting, the next can’t even raise a smile about. Kaye certainly tried to diversify, but those efforts weren’t well-received, and maybe people started to write him off as just another second-rate comedian. Comedy is a tough genre… wasn’t it Edmund Gwenn, who said, on his death-bed, “Dying is easy… comedy is hard!”

What is Jason Robards's best movie? Why is it better than others?

 

I can’t give a definitive answer to this question, because there are several Jason Robards films I haven’t seen, and some of his others — for instance, “A Thousand Clowns”, which he brought, to great acclamation, to cinema in 1962 from the Broadway stage — I saw only once, on first release, and don’t remember well enough for my opinion to be worth anything.

 

So I will simply offer two, for starters, and then leave it to the Robards experts: he was quite wonderful in Sidney Lumet’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (made, coincidentally, the same year as “A Thousand Clowns”, so that must have been a fertile period for him), and also in “All the President’s Men”…. which may, in fact, be the performance of his I remember with greatest fondness (I can even quote a couple of his lines from it, he delivered them so perfectly).

 

How good of an actress is Tyne Daly?

 

Good enough to go back to Broadway, after a distinguished TV/movie career in which she won six Emmy awards, and successfully tackle one of the most challenging musical-comedy heroines in Broadway history: Mama Rose in “Gypsy”, previously only played on Broadway by Ethel Merman and Angela Lansbury. She was, in many ways, the Catherine Zeta-Jones of her day: so well-regarded for her movie and TV work that, when she returned to her “roots”, many of her fans were taken by surprise at her hitherto-unsuspected talent.

What were the biggest miscasts in a biopic movie?

 “55 Days at Peking” mixed fictional figures (such as those played by Charlton Heston and David Niven) with genuine historical figures, so it only just counts as a biopic; it was, however, based on a real event (the Boxer Rebellion), so the Crown Prince of China and the Dowager Empress didn’t even have their names changed.

 

Had they been alive at the time the movie was made, both may well have demanded that their names, too, be changed (as were Heston’s and Niven’s) in order to spare them embarrassment: in one of the most bizarre pieces of casting in cinema history, Prince Tuan was played by the Australian ballet dancer, Sir Robert Helpmann, and the Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi was played by that grand English actress, Dame Flora Robson (their qualification for their role was, no doubt, that at some time in their lives each had dined in a Chinese restaurant). There was simply no point in trying to believe anything that was going on on-screen each time those two entered, but at least the movie came to life for those few minutes!

Of course, this casting was really no worse than requiring a seriously-ill Robert Donat to play a Chinese mandarin in “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness”; American movies really don’t do their job well when it comes to the casting of orientals! However, this 1958 biopic seemed to have peculiar casting choices at every turn. Tiny English Gladys Aylward — so small, in fact, that her biography is titled “The Small Woman” — was played by Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, who was, with that heritage, often taller than her American leading men! And for the half-Chinese captain to whom Gladys gives her heart, they chose the very German Curt Jurgens.

It’s a good movie, and all three play very well, but you can’t help thinking that, with that talent, it might have been even more fun if everybody had just switched roles; certainly the casting couldn’t have been any more bizarre, no matter which way the cards fell!

What are five underrated classic Hollywood Westerns that deserve a second look?

No one has yet mentioned “3:10 to Yuma” (the original from 1957), which I always think is the jewel in the directorial crown of Delmer Daves… beautifully acted, beautifully shot, and with a script which rewards close attention. Another film, a little later, with a very similar story, was “Last Train from Gun Hill”, which is another western that deserved more attention than it received.

MGM’s western “The Fastest Gun Alive” never received much attention when it was first released, and, in Australia, soon found itself on the bottom half of double-bills; but it had a great performance by Broderick Crawford, and a tense and economical script which gave a few nods in the direction of “High Noon”.

And then there was “The Bravados”, one of the early films built around the now-overused theme of revenge, and the hero taking matters into his own hands when the law proves unequal to the task… you know the story, but this one had the benefit of being directed by Henry King, having music by Alfred Newman (uncredited) and a fine performance by Gregory Peck; only the last two or three minutes, when it seemed too eager to assure us that there were no hard feelings over three killings, stopped this from being one of the very best westerns.

For the fifth, I am tempted to choose “Bad Day at Black Rock”, but I am not sure that it really counts as a western; it’s one of those movies that defies easy classification. While it looks like a western, since the hero rides into town by the Super Chief (or similar), and drives around in a jeep, it plays fast and loose with the conventions of the genre. Moreover, with actors like Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin being given fat parts, it plays like a ‘film noir’ (but in colour). But whatever it is, it’s terrific.

But, in case someone objects to my choice, I will opt instead for the movie that was my favourite western as a child, and may even have given me my first ‘crush’: “Broken Arrow” (1950), the western (not the John Travolta movie 46 years later) which gave Indians a ‘fair deal’ before such an approach was fashionable, and presented young Debra Paget as such a ravishingly beautiful Indian heroine that I practically cried, at all of eight years old, when her character was abruptly killed. Back then, I didn’t look at the names of directors, but, seeing it again in adulthood, it pleased me to see that it, like my all-time favourite western, was directed by Delmer Daves…. by my reckoning, one of Hollywood’s most underrated directors.

Who’s the most well-known child actor from your city?

 

The city is Sydney, Australia.

We’ve had several who became well-known in Australia— for instance, Rebecca Smart, who, as a very young child, was in “The Coca-Cola Kid” and the TV adaptation of “The Shiralee”, and then, at eleven, had a whole film (“Celia”) built around her, quite a responsibility which she carried off remarkably well (the film is now a cult favourite in Australia). She continued acting in her teens, mainly on television, but the Australian film industry really had little to offer her, and she eventually looked for new worlds to conquer; our loss.

The only actress I can think of who did go on to become a world name after beginning her career in Sydney (not, however, Australian-born) is Nicole Kidman, who made several films as a child in Australia (“Bush Christmas” and “BMX Bandits” are two I recall) before moving to the USA and stardom as an adult.

Are there examples of trash B-movies that attain artistic value because they are exceptionally well made?

 

Your use of the word “trash” would seem to negate the rest of your question… if a movie, whether an “A” or a “B”, is trash, then it is, clearly, unsuccessful with its audience, so “artistic value” and “exceptionally well-made” are concepts which would seem not applicable.

Not all B-movies are trash, however…. in the same way that all A-movies are NOT trash. Some of my best movie experiences have been in watching what, at their first release, were termed ‘B-movies” and consigned to the bottom half of double bills (back then, they used to have double bills!) I can think of many occasions where the bottom-half movie was so unexpectedly outstanding that I quite forgot what the top-billed movie even was! “The Wicker Man” (the original, not the remake) was a good example of this.

Sometimes a studio had no faith in a project, whereupon it would edit the finished product down to nearly nothing, and treat it like a B-movie, regardless of what the producer and director intended. An example is “MGM’s “The Red Badge of Courage”, which finally “came in” at 69 minutes, far too short for a feature. Yet it was produced by Gottfried Reinhardt and directed by John Huston: not people associated with B-movies, but certainly filmmakers whose movies are “exceptionally well-made” and have lasting “artistic value” (many of Huston’s movies are today regarded as classics).

A lot of B-movies had directors who were poised to make A-movies for most of their careers, and were just being allowed to try their wings; people like Robert Wise, Edward Dmytryk and Tay Garnet. Occasionally, the work they did on their “Bs” surpassed their subsequent work on the big-budget stuff which, naturally enough, was more rigidly controlled.

Many B movies — “Crossfire”, “The Narrow Margin”, “Murder My Sweet”, “D.O.A”, “The Next Voice You Hear” — were, simply, beautiful pieces of work, imaginative and original, where everyone involved approached the project as a labour of love. Others followed the rule that (so the Hollywood myth goes) was painted on a sign above the desk of the head of Monogram Studios (which produced only “Bs”): “We don’t want it good, we want it Thursday”. These are the “trash” ones which, thankfully, were allowed to die a natural death.

What is your favorite movie from the year you were born?

 

Now, that’s a hard one, because I was born back in the middle of the “Golden Years of Hollywood”, and there were (according to Wikipedia) 125 movies released in my birth year! And quite a few of them were beauties!

I suppose I should choose as my favourite the one that had the greatest effect on my life: “This Gun for Hire”, which was a tearaway success with the young women of the western world (including my mother) because of the new leading man, Alan Ladd. Well, it’s not a bad first name; I guess I should be grateful Kirk Douglas’s debut didn’t occur until four years later!

Or I could choose “For Me and My Gal”, because it was the first adult role taken by the up-to-then child star that, twelve years later, would become my favourite actress, Judy Garland. That’s certainly a movie I have revisited many times!

But, as I scanned the Wikipedia list, my eyes kept lighting on “Mrs Miniver”, “Random Harvest”, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, “The Road to Morocco” and “The Cat People”. All memorable, but I guess the first of those would have to be “the” one!

What movie never won an Oscar that surprised you the most?

 “A Star is Born” (1954) had several disadvantages at the Academy Awards, the main one being that it was brutally edited (without the approval of the director or star) shortly after its initial release, in order for exhibitors to be able to fit in extra screenings per day, with the result that people who just missed seeing the full version — and that was 95% of cinemagoers — were, naturally, somewhat hostile towards the heavily-cut version, which removed several songs and made nonsense of the film’s continuity. It was never going to win the Oscar for best movie in its truncated version!

Secondly, Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin had written a song which was not only superior to the competition that year, but was probably the best song for any movie since 1939, when Arlen had written “Over the Rainbow” for “The Wizard of Oz”. Yet “The Man that Got Away” not only didn’t get the nod from Oscar, but it lost to a quite-banal little song called “Three Coins in the Fountain”, which, even its composers admitted (with an amusing little story of its history), was the rush job to end all rush jobs.

“A Star is Born” was nominated for, in all, six Academy Awards, but was overlooked every time the envelope was opened. Considering how well-regarded the movie is today, this definitely does not represent one of the finest hours of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!

What are some great acting performances that no one notices?

 

I haven’t got an answer to your question, because, honestly, I wouldn’t know where to start! But there is a comment that perhaps should be made: the wording of your question, itself, provides the answer. Perhaps the hallmark of GREAT acting, as opposed to mere performing, is that you’re never aware that it IS just a performance. It’s real life happening on the stage or screen.

That’s what everyone said about Laurette Taylor in the original New York production of “The Glass Menagerie”: it was like someone just walked in off the street and joined the people on stage and became part of their “story”. You couldn’t believe she was just an actress with lines to read.

What are some finished movies that disappeared without a trace?

“The Day the Clown Cried” is one that comes instantly to mind. It was a Jerry Lewis film made at a time when so many of Lewis’s contemporaries were showing that they could play drama as well as comedy (Danny Kaye, Mickey Rooney, etc). “Clown” was Lewis’s entry: apparently a holocaust story about a clown who entertained children on their way to execution in the gas chamber. It may have sounded like a good idea to SOMEONE — Lewis, anyway, who was very much in charge of his own movies by that time — but the finished product left the studio brass so aghast that Lewis bowed to pressure and decided not to release it. It was reported that the only copy of the film remained in his personal possession, never seen by anyone else.

 

Why do some people disapprove of someone choosing to make a living as a film critic?

 

I have never heard of anyone disapproving of the concept of a critic… I have, however, encountered plenty of people who disagreed with a particular review (I guess I should count myself among them)! If what you say is true, I can only imagine the “disapprovers” see the critic as being essentially a killjoy; they’ve just had a good time at a movie, and the critic is ungallant enough to point out twenty reasons why they oughtn’t to have!

What's your favorite movie that actually won Best Picture? Mine is Ben-Hur for 1959.

 

“All About Eve” (1950). As well as winning the Academy Award for best picture (and five other Oscars.… altogether it was nominated for fourteen!), it also won Best Picture at the New York Film Critics Awards, the British Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards; and the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival!

Think of one of your favorite movies; consider how different artistic choices were made. Which elements were most effective and why? Could the film be turned into a stage play? Why or why not?

 

Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind” is about a brilliant mathematician suffering from a severe mental disorder which causes him to have major hallucinations; these take over his life and his work, so it becomes impossible for him to distinguish reality from his fantasies. The “effective artistic choice” which was made by this movie is that we, the audience, are not allowed to know, until quite late in the story, that his hallucinations are not actual experiences….. Ron Howard shows us exactly what the subject sees, so we are caught up in events involving supporting characters that don’t exist (outside the protagonist’s mind). At the time he learns the truth, and is shocked by the revelation, we learn the truth, and are shocked also.

Since the film’s story is told, mainly, through the dialogue, with only a few sets needed, the screenplay could, I expect, be readily adapted into a stage play; and, if done even half as well as the movie, a compelling experience it would be!

What happens to aspiring entertainers (singers, actors) who aren't successful in their career?

 

If they’re wise, they have a back-up skill to fall back on. Did you know that Ethel Merman (who, of course, never had to use that skill as anything but a hobby) was such a speedy typist that none of her hired secretaries could come close to matching her speed, so she used to give them other duties and type her letters herself?

Careers in entertainment are hit-and-miss, mainly miss. It’s bad enough to fail ten or twelve auditions in a row, but there are aspiring performers out there who complete all their acting or singing courses, and then proceed to fail every audition for ten or twelve YEARS in a row. The last time you spent a day out shopping, you probably walked past a dozen aspiring entertainers who, eventually, gave up aspiring and decided to make their mark elsewhere.

What's the worst film made by an Oscar-winning director?

 

Surely this would be “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), the film that bankrupted United Artists.

Its director, Michael Cimino, had won Best Picture and Best Director for “The Deer Hunter” just two years earlier, and Hollywood, desperate at that time for a Messiah to help it reclaim its past glory, was ready to pamper and indulge him in order to have him perform the miracle of making lightning strike twice.

So United Artists — the studio founded as long ago as 1919 by four Hollywood pioneers — Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith — entrusted its future to Michael Cimino, and he delivered a movie so bad that, try as I might (and have, on three occasions) to sit through it to the end, I invariably give up before I even get half-way through its three-hour-plus length.

Because I have only seen the first half, I am not really qualified to judge how awful it is, but, at the time, it was the “cause celebre” to beat all. Cimino took United Artists’ money and squandered it in a way Hollywood had seldom seen before, but seemed unable to create anything audiences wanted to see. For once, the critics and the public were in accord: “Heaven’s Gate” was a monumental stinker. Of course, it derailed Michael Cimino’s career — it was five years before he could convince anyone to let him direct another movie, and even then he made a film which was nominated for five Razzle awards, including “worst film” and “worst director”. But the fallout went far beyond Cimino’s career: the once proud studio who had entrusted him with its future closed its doors permanently. “The film’s failure,” reports Wikipedia, “marked the end of the new Hollywood era”. The main beneficiary of the debacle would seem to be Stephen Bach, who wrote a best-selling book — “Final Cut” — about the making of the movie and the subsequent unmaking of the United Artists Corporation.

The film eventually resurfaced, of course, since its sorry history at least kept its name alive; it was recut and presented in several editions of varying lengths, eventually finding a fan base and even a bit of critical acclaim. Thirty-two years after its initial release, a “new” edition was presented at Cannes, with Cimino accepting an invitation to attend. He received a standing ovation.

The ghosts of Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford and Griffith were, clearly, not present at that screening, or perhaps the chandelier at the top of the auditorium might have come crashing down!

What are examples of actors turning down iconic roles that made a superstar of the actor who took the role?

 

Alan Ladd, who had done such a great job for director George Stevens in “Shane”, was offered the part of Jett Rink in Steven’s next major production, “Giant”. But, on advice from his agent, he turned it down because it wasn’t the main role and he would have to take third billing (behind Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson). It was a bad decision; “Giant” was a major hit, and the films Ladd chose instead were, by and large, an undistinguished lot, even if he did get top billing in all of them. He soon faded from the scene and was reduced to taking “featured” roles in movies like “The Carpetbaggers”. Moreover, George Stevens gave Jett Rink to newcomer James Dean, who had just made a film called “Rebel Without a Cause” and was reputed to be a hot young property. In such ways is film history made!

 

What celebrities have had the most tragic personal life?

 

Roman Polanski? Separated at age four from his Jewish parents (they were taken by the Nazis); raised in a variety of foster homes; living through (and trying to survive) the holocaust; a fugitive from his adopted country for a quarter of a century when he pleaded guilty to statutory rape; having to deal with his wife and unborn baby being horrifically murdered in his home by Charles Manson and his followers. There will, for sure, be a movie based on his life story one day, and those people watching it who didn’t live in his era will probably ridicule the movie as impossibly far-fetched.

What was your favorite Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau movie?

 

This duo made quite a few interesting movies, and, of course, their most famous one — “The Odd Couple” — is hard to beat. However, I might just choose their 1974 pairing in Billy Wilder’s “The Front Page” as the best of the lot; not because Lemmon and Matthau were substantially different from their other pairings, but because Wilder had added two particularly-memorable supporting players to the cast list: Austin Pendleton and, especially, Carol Burnett (who had just one scene, but, as one expects with Miss Burnett, made such an impression that it was she you thought of all the way home).

What celebrity encounter shocked and surprised you (good or bad reasons)?

Growing up in Australia in the fifties and early sixties, I didn’t see many celebrities who were known outside their own country (and, for that matter, not too many that were even known locally). But occasionally we would receive visits from singers doing their cabaret shows on the other side of the world, movie stars making a film on location, or actors trying out their new production before taking it to Broadway. And, being an autograph hound, I took full advantage of every one of those opportunities.

Most of the “shocks” or “surprises” were good ones; in my experience, visiting celebrities were unfailingly gracious and generous, and some, such as June Christy, Charlton Heston and Johnnie Ray, quite amazingly so.

Their promoters, however, weren’t always so great to them in return. I think Liza Minnelli’s first cabaret visit to Sydney was actually before she won her Oscar, so she wasn’t, then, quite a superstar; but she was certainly well-known enough to be afforded the star treatment.

Several other visiting stars had made the journey out to Channel 9 to appear on “Meet the Press”, and without fail, they always had some kind of entourage — even if it was only one or two sycophants — with them, and a fuss was made of them by the greeters on their arrival. Most had limousines and drivers. But the eagerly-waiting Liza Minnelli fans — both of us — were a bit dismayed to see Liza pull up in what looked like a taxi. No one greeted her, and the driver instantly got out and left her sitting in the back, in a semi-lit and very lonely car park. As we tentatively (as this was not what we’d been used to) approached the car, we saw her sitting, all alone, chewing on a paper-wrapped hamburger. She looked rather forlorn!

However, she rolled down the window readily enough and gave us each a smile and an autograph; but as we walked away, leaving her to her privacy, we mused that this was not really the right way to treat the daughter of Judy Garland and the youngest-ever winner of the Tony Award!

What is the single most important film in the history of cinema?

 

There is no single film that could be regarded as the most important in cinema history. The pioneers of cinema, in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, were making discoveries of the possibilities of the medium with just about every new movie. Innovations introduced by these pioneers are part of every movie you or I have ever seen, and we simply accept them, nowadays, as being the way movies are made.

Rather than ask for a single movie to answer your question, then, you may be wiser to ask for a list of “candidates”. There are many such lists “out there”, which you will find by googling. The lists will, of course, all reflect the opinions and biases of their compilers, so you probably won’t find two exactly the same. But there will be some films that will keep cropping up in everyone’s lists: The Lumiere Brothers’ “Le Voyage dans la Lune” (1902); Edwin S Porter’s “The Great Train Robbery” (1905); D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” (1915); Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920); Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925); Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927); Alan Crosland’s “The Jazz Singer” (1927); Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941).

Since 1941, I don’t think any movie has even gone close to “rewriting” what the movies are capable of achieving, in the same way as these films of the pioneers did; however, if you really want a more-recent entry, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) might go closest to doing what people like Griffith and Porter and Eisenstein did.

What movies were way longer then they needed to be?

 

I can’t speak for any of the new movies, but there are quite a few since the 50s that might have benefited from an editor with sharper scissors. I have never been able to get to the end of “Cleopatra”…. even the thought of seeing Elizabeth Taylor clutch a snake to her bare bosom in the last reel couldn’t keep me watching through hours of people having a conversation in one room, giving the “Hail Caesar and Farewell” sign, walking out the door, and then being discovered in another room for yet another conversation. It seemed to me an epic like “Cleopatra” would have benefited from blue skies, open vistas, and feisty horses in close-up, but the first half seemed to give us precious few of any of those. Maybe I will get to the end one day. But by the time I do, I will no longer care whether Liz ever gets out that asp, or where she chooses to put it!

I have given up saying “Maybe one day” about Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”, however, because I have now had three tries, and, the third time, I started off absolutely determined to see it through to the end. But I don’t have that much strong coffee in the house… it is just plain boring, and not even well-made!

“2001: A Space Odyssey” got off to a bad start, I thought, with a whole series of scenes involving men in monkey suits followed by an overlong tour of a space station, about as interesting as being shown through your brother-in-law’s new house (and featuring actors with even less charisma than your brother-in-law). When it finally got to the exciting part — when ‘Hal’ went crazy and tried to sabotage the mission — it was fine (even though I never did “get” the ending, but I expect that was just my own ignorance); but the film might have been better if Hal had sabotaged most of the first section instead of the Jupiter mission.

“Giant” had a whole slew of stars worth watching — Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Mercedes McCambridge — but it was based on a giant book covering several generations, and as the characters got older and their make-up became less-convincing, it began to wear out its welcome. Towards the end, you spent more time looking at your watch than you did at the make-up man’s bags under Hudson’s eyes.

Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” sprang to mind just as I typed that last sentence about wearing out its welcome. There were some memorable scenes in this movie, with a couple of excellent performances by some young actors who could actually hold their own in scenes with Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt; but there seemed to be dozens, if not hundreds, of shots interposed for no better reason than Malick liked the look of them, and these eventually began to have the same effect as multiple ‘coitus interruptus’ (or should that be ‘interrupti’?). You had to be prepared to start over again, four or five times, becoming involved in the characters, and after 132 minutes, it all just seemed like too much effort.

There are, apparently, quite a few different editions of Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” floating around; he kept cutting and re-cutting in order to find something that reflected his vision yet which audiences liked. The one I saw was called “Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut”; it ran for 213 minutes. Presumably, this is the one that gave us his vision. Whether anyone liked it, apart from “Variety”, whose review is quoted on the cover, I couldn’t say; I do recall thinking, as I watched the whole interminable thing unfold, that I would have gladly swapped it for the shorter one that proudly advertised that it did NOT reflect his vision!

These are a few that came easily to mind; there are dozens of others, and I am sure you will receive many follow-up responses that will make me exclaim, “How could I have left out THAT one!”

(I am sorry if this response is way longer than it needed to be!)

What was the greatest motion picture musical and why?

 

You will get as many answers as respondents on this one, because, of course, there is no such thing as the “greatest” of any work of art, except in someone’s opinion. You can’t even get a universally-agreed on definition of what constitutes a “motion picture musical”; does it mean any movie in which there are songs or dances, and, if so, how many do you need before you can call the film a musical? (This question always comes up in any discussion of the 1954 “A Star is Born”, which featured a major singing and dancing star, and a slew of both original and old-standard songs, but still, in the opinion of many people, is more-properly categorised as a great drama-with-music than a great musical).

 

Anyway, to cut to the chase, a lot of people who know what they are talking about will tell you the greatest Hollywood musical is “Singing in the Rain”. And it certainly is a beauty, although, for me, it would only just creep into the top half-dozen. Another popular choice — this one really is up near the top of my own list — is “Meet Me in St Louis”, which was just one of those once-in-a-lifetime films where everything seemed to work.

 

Whenever I am asked to name my own Number 1, I fuss and fret for a few minutes, but invariably settle on “The Band Wagon”, which boasts the same director (Vincente Minnelli) as “St Louis”. But there are a couple of others that keep buzzing around in my brain, including “The Pirate” (another Minnelli film), “On the Town” (from the “Singing in the Rain” directorial team), and “Kiss Me Kate”.

 

All the above are MGM musicals, and I expect that most of the answers you will get for your question will centre around this studio’s product; however, just in closing I would like to submit one entry from Warner Bros: no, not the already-mentioned “A Star is Born” (because I stand with the group that says it isn’t really a musical in the generally-accepted sense of the term), but the more-easily categorised “The Music Man”.

 

Just as a final statement, the relatively-recent “Sweeney Todd” OUGHT to have been the greatest musical, because it had the best source material; but nowadays box-office returns are everything, and this one was sliced up and reworked in order to accede to demands of running-length and audience-acceptance, and, as it stands, it wouldn’t even get into the top fifty.

Who are those actors who started as extras but now act as leads?

 

There are quite a few!

Sophia Loren was in some of the crowd scenes in “Quo Vadis” in 1951, but was never considered interesting enough to look at to be favoured with a close-up.

Clint Eastwood played “bits” in several Universal-International movies, just getting enough screen time for you to be able to look at the movies today and say, “Hey, there’s Clint Eastwood!” (This scenario wouldn’t often occur, however, because the movies he was in are not ones anybody would care to look at again: “Revenge of the Creature”, “Francis in the Navy”, “Lady Godiva of Coventry” and “Tarantula”, all from 1955).

Everyone knows that James Dean had his first tiny role sitting at a bar in “Has Anybody Seen My Gal” in 1952; however, a year before that, he had walk-on in a Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy, “Sailor Beware”. And just about everyone now knows that, should you ever see a movie called “Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!”, you have to look for a background shot of two girls rowing a canoe; the blonde is Marilyn Monroe.

Tony Curtis was in six films as far back as 1949, years before anyone knew his name or put him in the cast list; most of the films are seldom seen, and I can’t even recall their names; but I do recall spotting him among the guests in a party scene in “Criss-Cross”. He wasn’t much of an actor in his early days, but even as a party extra he had a face that marked him for stardom.

Sylvester Stallone was in several movies before anyone realised that he could do more than fill out the background; I think “Klute” was one of them.

Kevin Costner was hired for a (minor) role, to be seen in flashbacks, for “The Big Chill”; however, all the flashbacks were removed in the editing, so that all that remains of Kevin is a brief shot of part of his torso in a coffin, as a corpse…. I don’t know whether that really counts as being an extra, but it is rather interesting!

What was Orson Welles’ most underrated movie?

 

I am not quite sure what you would like counted as an “Orson Welles movie” for the sake of this discussion; one of your respondents volunteered “The Third Man” (which was directed by Carol Reed and in which Welles had an important but definitely supporting role) and justified it by saying that it counted because Welles wrote some of his own dialogue. The problem there, I suppose, is that Welles often wrote some of his own dialogue in movies which he didn’t direct (“Compulsion” and “Moby Dick” were two more), but so did dozens of other actors, when they found that they didn’t feel comfortable with the words given to them by the scriptwriter, and the director was willing to accede to their requests; so, is credit due to the actor/writer or to the director? In any case, I would be uncomfortable including every film Welles appeared in as an “Orson Welles movie” for the sake of this question (if I were to take this course, I would have to say the most underrated is “Duel in the Sun”, which he narrated but which was directed by (among others) King Vidor and its producer, David O Selznick. From the day of its release it was panned by critics and laughed at by audiences, who liked to call it “Lust in the Dust”, due to its excesses of…. well, of just about everything; like most Selznick movies, it revelled in its excesses! But in today’s world, when we are used to movies which equate excess with box office returns, “Duel in the Sun” looks a lot better than it did in 1946…. it’s great fun!)

At any rate, I think I will just look at the films which Welles signed as director to find an answer to your question, although I haven’t seen all of these (some have virtually disappeared, except for film club screenings, where they are revered). I have seen several in these places — “Journey into Fear” and “F for Fake” being recent ones) -- and I have to say that my own feeling is that Welles’s subsequent work after the brilliant “Citizen Kane” is generally over-rated rather than underrated. Even “Touch of Evil” and “Lady from Shanghai”, which were quite-popular mainstream movies, are given considerably more credit than they deserve, because Welles has been careful to put into each a couple of scenes that are so “show-offy” that even cinemagoers unfamiliar with the mechanics of movie-making can’t fail to notice them; but you have to wonder whether, for instance, “Touch of Evil” would have told its story less-well had he filmed the opening scene in twenty separate set-ups for a fifth of the cost, instead of that one bravura shot that screamed “Orson Welles here!” He served himself in that scene… but did he serve the movie?

None of this is an answer to your question, so perhaps I had better stop rambling and get to the point. There were no spectacular hall-of-mirror effects or bravura, budget-eating flourishes in “The Stranger”, but it was a well-made and intelligent piece of film-making which showed a director involved with telling a darned good story rather than adding to his own legend. It isn’t revived nearly as much as some of his more-outrageous works, because it doesn’t scream “Welles” at you…. but it could well be his most (unfairly) underrated movie.

What terrible crimes committed by celebrities have been totally overlooked since they’re famous?

With due respect to the answers given so far, if a “terrible crime” results in a high-profile criminal trial in which the celebrity is either found not guilty or given a light sentence, that hardly qualifies as “totally overlooked”. I think the important factor here might be that a celebrity who commits a serious crime probably has the money and/or influence to actually have someone else either do the deed for them, or else to make a false confession so that the celebrity is never charged, and maybe never even suspected.

So I would suggest the death of Marilyn Monroe, which, officially, has been blamed on Monroe herself but in which a top politician was certainly implicated (even if he didn’t actually administer the lethal dose himself) might be closer to an answer to your question. Her DEATH wasn’t, of course, overlooked… but it was conveniently passed over as suicide, so no one has ever been charged.

Another case that comes to mind was the murder of Johnny Stompanato. The daughter of a famous movie star eventually confessed to this (and was duly charged), but her motive for the crime was always problematic, and never quite rang true with anyone…. and, someone closely associated with the family admitted, many years afterwards, that the real perpetrator eventually said, in private, “Yes, I killed the bastard and I’d do it again.” By that time, however, she had already retired from a distinguished career, the case was cold, her daughter had been dealt with by the courts, and no one seemed to think it was worth re-opening the sordid affair.

What movie did everyone love, but you just didn't see the big deal?

 

Federico Fellini’s ”8 1/2”. It was the darling of the “in” crowd when it first came out, and everyone was telling me I simply must see it, because it was so deep and meaningful; but, having had a host of past bad experiences with Fellini’s so-called masterpieces (“Satyricon” and “Juliet of the Spirits” being two prime examples), I craftily avoided “8 1/2” like the plague, until, finally, two dear friends who “knew” movies, adored Fellini, and could (and did) discuss qualities such as a movie’s “transcendental values” announced their intention to drag me along, kicking and screaming, to a revival screening with all the other Fellini aficionados. Thereby hangs a tale.

Not wanting to come across as a complete philistine at the inevitable post-screening discussion-over-coffee, I decided to do some research so that I would at least know what all the fuss was about; and I was fortunate to find, at my university library, a copy of the shooting script, which I spent a whole afternoon poring over in a futile attempt to absorb Fellini’s “genius”. The climax of the film sounded to me like Fellini at his most pretentious: the protagonist, disillusioned by life’s unfairness, stumbles upon a group of carnival performers having an outdoor party; he sits in the midst of their celebrations for a while, then slides under the table, producing a gun. He puts it in his mouth and blows his brains out. The partygoers stop partying, suddenly quiet and traumatised; and then our hero abruptly jumps up from behind the table, unharmed and laughing. Everyone reacts delightedly, and they resume frolicking, dancing off happily into the sunset (or whatever). Very deep and meaningful, but at least I knew it was coming and was prepared.

At the screening I sat having my usual “Fellini” time (“what am I doing here?”) for an hour and a half, and finally the “big” scene started unfolding. The party is in full swing; our hero starts to slowly slip under the table…. and suddenly there is the clumsiest ‘cut’ you ever saw in a major movie, and he is suddenly back up again, laughing, and everyone is still laughing with him, and the film proceeds to its end…. without Fellini’s deep and meaningful climax. Clearly, the Aussie distributor had cut it out of the prints because he thought that local audiences wouldn’t “buy” it (which is probably dead right… we were an unsophisticated bunch back in the sixties, treating Douglas Sirk movies as “high art”).

Now, it seems to me that if you cut out the climax of a movie, you are making nonsense of just about everything that has gone before. Yet, at the post-screening, no one seemed to know about this somewhat-significant change: everybody just raved on about how brilliant it was and what a genius Fellini was, and I simply sat there, as I always did in discussions of Fellini’s films, and thought about Gene Kelly musicals.

Only, on this occasion, I didn’t feel quite as much the ignoramus as usual.

 

Are there any child actresses you recommend from the Golden Age who are not Shirley Temple?

 

Shirley was 20th Century-Fox’s big money-maker of the Golden Years, but all the major studios had one or more youngsters who could always play somebody’s daughter or kid sister. Margaret O’Brien was probably the best-known of MGM’s stable of child stars — she played Judy Garland’s kid sister in “Meet Me in St Louis” — but that was only seven or eight years after Judy herself was the little girl winning everybody’s heart in movies like “Listen Darling” and “Broadway Melody of 1938”. MGM also had Virginia Weidler and Elizabeth Taylor, and later Sandra (Sandy) Descher (who played Taylor’s daughter in “The Last Time I Saw Paris”); and Fox had Peggy Ann Garner and Natalie Wood, both of whom (unlike Shirley) stayed with it into young adulthood.

Sam Goldwyn used both Bonita Granville and Marcia Mae Jones — two exceptionally talented child actresses — to great effect in “These Three”, and RKO had Ann Carter, who was just right for the dreamy child in “Curse of the Cat People”. One who was given less credit than was due her was Sharyn Moffett, who was required to carry most of “Child of Divorce” on her nine-year-old shoulders, and did so like a seasoned veteran. Susan Hallaran was another who was seldom seen, but when she was, she could be counted on to give a good account of herself. And Sharon McManus was only in a couple of MGM musicals — being put to bed by Jimmy Durante and as a minuscule south-of-the-border dancing partner for Gene Kelly — but the latter ‘gig’, in “Anchors Aweigh”, was one of the best things in the movie.

Finally, there were the two Corcoran sisters, Donna and Noreen, who came from a family of child performers (their brothers Kevin and Kelly worked as often as they did, and they were all as alike as peas in a pod).

None of them could really be called a rival to Shirley Temple, who was really a phenomenon, but in each case they were able to assume characters, which, for all her talent, was something Shirley could never do… she always just played Shirley.

Can you think of a non-actor celebrity that has appeared in a movie? Which ones should never do it again?

“Ring of Fear” (1954) gives you a chance to see two non-actors making a hash of two leading roles in a film that has only three to start with!

A spin-off from 1952’s big-budget “The Greatest Show on Earth”, which had a killer doctor hiding out in the Ringling Bros-Barnum and Bailey Circus, this B-grade circus movie is about a killer loose in the Clyde Beatty Circus, and the detective assigned to find him. The part of Clyde Beatty was played by…. Clyde Beatty, who couldn’t read lines, but he sure could tame lions, which he did in the one scene that makes this film really worth watching (and which, to give the film its due, is considerably more exciting than anything in the blockbuster which it emulates).

The detective (Pat O’Brien) decides to call in the help of a writer-friend whose specialty is this kind of crime, so he makes a call and out comes crime-writer Mickey Spillane, playing himself. Not only can he not tame lions, he’s not very comfortable with lines, either, so he is of little use to the movie. When he and Beatty do a scene together, you start to think of those middle-school plays you used to take part in. But the animals are pretty!

What movie did you love the original but hate the sequel?

 

“The Innocents” — based on Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” — was brilliant, one of the best ghost (?) films ever made, so it was, I suppose, inevitable that it would yield a sequel which purported to take us deeper into the psyches of the tortured characters in the original.

The result, however — “The Nightcomers” (1972), which was not so much a sequel as a prequel — lacked the ambiguity which made the original movie one you wanted to go home and talk about, and substituted steamy sex for subtle insinuations. As one critic remarked, “it is a deflating attempt to flesh out what is never meant to be fleshed out.” Anyway, despite the graphic sex scenes (from another critic: “it strips the artistry of the Henry James original and leaves us with a hairy, overweight, naked and sweating Brando brutally kneading Stephanie Beacham's breasts into new shapes”), it is actually far less erotic than the 1961 original, which opened with a scene between Deborah Kerr and Sir Michael Redgrave in which nobody sweated and nobody kneaded, but which managed to imply far more sex than Brando and Beacham were able to display with their clothes off.

What are some of the passed on roles which justified the original actor's decision to turn down?

 

Marlon Brando, after a distinguished start to his movie career (“The Men”, “A Streetcar Named Desire”, “Julius Caesar:, “The Wild One”, and “On the Waterfront” in just four years), subsequently made a series of disastrous choices in his movies, seemingly hell-bent on trashing his reputation as the greatest young actor of his generation; but, at least, he made the right decision when he turned down Daryl F Zanuck’s offer to play the leading role in 20th Century-Fox’s big-budget “The Egyptian”.

Like most of the early CinemaScope swords-and-sandals epics, “The Egyptian” had little to offer but exotic costumes and elaborate sets; of the cast of stars assembled to breathe some life into the usual leaden dialogue that, traditionally, doomed the genre, only Peter Ustinov, in a part added merely to elicit laughs (in a film with plenty of these, but most of them unintentional), managed to find favour with audiences and critics. Certainly, Brando’s replacement, Edmund Purdom, wasn’t able to find much of worth in the role, and he, and the movie, were quickly forgotten (the music, however, is terrific: Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann shared the assignment).

What is the best movie that takes place over the course of one evening?

 

The first movie that leapt into my mind when I saw your question was Robert Wise’s “The Set Up” (1949), which ran for just 73 minutes, because that was exactly as long as the story took to unfold; in other words, like “High Noon” and “Nick of Time”, it was made in “real time”.

Being a ‘film noir’ it was set at night, with all the usual trappings of the genre: hotel rooms with flashing neon lights outside, dark alleyways, characters who preferred to stand in the shadows, and a female lead who had known the dark side of life and carried the scars of the past in every word and every gesture. It is not only one of the best examples of ‘noir’, it is also, in my opinion, the best boxing movie ever made.

 

Which Hollywood actresses do you like because of their personalities?

 

Would we really know anything about their personalities just by watching them on the screen? Betty Hutton, on screen, was madcap, goofy, energetic, the life of the party. However, off-screen she was, by reports, a totally-different person. For a while, after her film career dried up, she had a weekly television show, “The Betty Hutton Show” in which she was — naturally — madcap, goofy, etc. But her unlucky co-workers said that the REAL Betty Hutton show was the one that the audience never got to see, when, after the taping, she threw tantrums in her dressing room over every little thing that didn’t go exactly as she wanted it to. The worst that could happen, apparently, was the TV audience not responding with the adulation she felt she deserved, in which case she vented her spleen on the whole cast and crew.

So, what can you do to know their “personalities”? Watch them in interviews? But isn’t that just an extension of “The Betty Hutton Show”? If they can act, they soon learn WHEN to act, and in front of whom. It’s not very often that an experienced performer lets the facade drop to show the character underneath the public persona; Jerry Lewis did it once, in one of his last interviews (which was actually on Quora just a few months ago), to quite devastating fallout from viewers…. but you asked about actresses; and the only way I feel I could answer that would be to talk about an actress I actually KNEW as a person, rather than merely knowing their on-screen persona. I once spent an hour or so with June Christy, and she was just so lovely that the warm glow she projected is still with me, more than fifty years later. Would that count?

 

Which movie plot from a flopped movie needs a second chance?

 

“Bunny Lake is Missing” (1965) was a gosh-awful movie which not even Sir Laurence Olivier could rescue, but it had an interesting idea behind it: a young woman reports her daughter as having vanished from a child-minding centre, but, as the movie progresses, we find that no-one had actually seen her drop off the child at the centre, and, since she’s new in the neighbourhood, no one questioned can recall having seen the child, ever. Just about everyone concludes that the mother is delusional; the case is about to be dropped, when…..

You would have imagined that with Sir Laurence in the role of the investigating policeman and Noel Coward guesting in the role of a suspect/witness, this film couldn’t miss. Unfortunately, in the hands of director Otto Preminger at his absolute worst, it elicits titters of laughter when audiences ought to have been waiting breathlessly for the next twist. It deserves to be resuscitated.

 

What was the last film that had a profound effect on you?

 

There aren’t many of those nowadays, because superheroes, action flicks, and feel-good romantic comedies do not usually lend themselves to a “profound” ANYTHING (can ennui be profound?); but I guess I would have to own up to being deeply affected by “The Woodsman” some fifteen years ago, because today I have a copy on my shelf, and although I see the DVD spine every other day, every time I go to take it from the shelf I pause, and finally say, “No, I don’t think I can put myself through that again”. I guess that’s a “profound” effect.

 

What Hollywood actor or actress was a collector? What did they collect?

 

Edward G Robinson gained fame in the thirties by playing a series of cold-blooded killers, and his characters were often no stranger to a violent and well-deserved death by the final fade-out. However, off-camera he was one of the world’s foremost collectors of post-impressionist paintings, African sculpture, and works by some emerging contemporary artists (at least one of whom found fame and fortune through his patronage). The difference between Robinson’s screen persona and his private hobby (he always disowned the term “collector”, and claimed, in fact, that his works of art collected HIM) was so marked that even he joked about it: “If I hadn’t become a movie gangster, not one of my paintings would have had the chance to collect me…. when Hollywood conveyed me, through devious and sin-stained roles, to a succession of sizzling electric chairs, the paintings began to appear. Crime, it seems, sometimes does pay.”

He was not the only celebrity to use “Hollywood money” to acquire art; it was a not-uncommon investment for the suddenly-rich of the movie world. But Robinson knew what he was buying, and loved what he bought; he selected each work personally, and wound up with a collection of over 90 works which earned him the respect of the world’s foremost art collectors, who welcomed him into their fellowship. He turned a wing of his house into an art gallery and threw the doors open for the world to come and enjoy his collection as much as he did….. he trained everyone in the house to conduct tours in case he was working and unavailable to do this labour of love himself. Many of those availing themselves of his hospitality were Hollywood luminaries: producers, directors, fellow-actors, all of whose lives he enriched by his generosity in sharing his collection with them and with the world. He himself thought that his open-house policy was no more than fair: “I am not a collector. I’m just an innocent bystander who has been taken over by a collection. I am just a lover of paintings. I do what I do for the sheer joy of it.”

Eventually, as nearly everyone knows, it all turned sour; in a bitter divorce settlement, he was forced to sell his entire collection for far less than it was worth, and it broke his heart. It was then that those luminaries were able to repay his generosity to them, as they rallied to ensure he kept working right into old age, and he eventually gained enough financial security to buy back fourteen of the paintings he particularly loved. Who says Hollywood has no heart?

Is the 1996 The Island of Dr. Moreau that bad?

 

I saw it once, and my feeling is that no matter how bad “that bad” is supposed to be, yes, it was THAT bad. And Frankenheimer had directed a couple of my favourite movies, such as “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May” and “The Train”!

I don’t have a copy of the movie any more, but someone who responds to your question probably will have, so perhaps they can clear up a small point which is part of a story indicating the chaos that was going on when this movie was made: was it a waste paper basket or a flower pot?

I am referring to a story told by Val Kilmer and verified by a couple of other people working on the movie at the time. Before a certain scene was shot, Brando and Kilmer were waiting to be called to the set, and Brando picked up the waste basket (or flower pot) and said to KIlmer, “When we play this next scene, I am going to put this on my head.” When Kilmer asked why on Earth, Brando replied, “Because no one will tell me that I can’t. Just wait; no one will even mention that I’m wearing it.”

To Kilmer’s amazement, no one — not even the director — did.

It was clear that this was not going to be another “Manchurian Candidate”!

 

Which technological innovation do you believe has had the greatest impact on film, and why?

 

Smell-o-Vision, surely!

On second thoughts, maybe not. In fact, as far as movie-making was concerned, it was a stinker…. used, if I recall, for only a single movie (“Scent of Mystery”… the puns just keep coming!) which, to put it mildly, did not have the sweet smell of success. Not that the smells didn’t come out at the right time, but it seems no one had worked out a way to get the remaining odours of the previous smell out of the auditorium before the next one came along, with the somewhat-unfortunate result that, an hour into the movie, what audiences were receiving was a kind of “smell soup” which made them sick to their stomachs. Wags said the film would have done that to them without any help from Smell-o-Vision!

So maybe I will put that one on the back-burner and choose a different innovation. 3D was a little less ineffective than Smell-o-Vision, but didn’t exactly set the world on fire either, as audiences complained of headaches (it might have been interesting to make a 3D movie which also used the Smell-o-Vision system, and then you could have had a team of doctors at the ready in the cinema foyer). Sensurround was only useful for earthquakes, so its impact was hardly earth-shattering. So I guess I will have to fall back on an old but easy one: the development of the synchronised sound-on-film technology which removed the need for intertitles and a pianist at the side of the stage, and allowed actors to relax into more natural acting styles. Plus, of course, it made possible the movie musical, my favourite genre.

 

What are some films where the director quit during filming?

 

I don’t know about “quitting”… most directors who find themselves enmeshed in a project that they know is going to produce a turkey don’t walk out on it, but simply refuse to have their names put on it when it goes into release. However, I know of several cases where a director was removed from a movie during shooting, or decided to back out even before shooting began.

An example of the latter would be Sir Laurence Olivier, who was due to be male lead and director in Judy Garland’s comeback musical, “The Lonely Stage”. He had just come through a very difficult time with Marilyn Monroe making “The Prince and the Showgirl”, which he also starred in and directed, and, on its completion, hearing that Judy was, like Marilyn, known to be difficult and demanding, decided that he simply couldn’t go through an experience like that again. So he yielded in favour of director Ronald Neame and star Dirk Bogarde, and the film proceeded with a new title, “I Could Go On Singing”.

Several of Judy Garland’s earlier movies had their directors replaced mid-shooting, either at her insistence (Fred Zinnemann replaced by Vincente Minnelli on “The Clock” because she couldn’t understand the directions given by the first-appointed director; Busby Berkeley on “Annie Get Your Gun” because she had had some bad experiences with him in the past and felt that his bullying directorial style would worsen her already-fragile health) or due to decisions of the production team (George Cukor gave Dorothy, in “The Wizard of Oz” the natural pigtailed look which eventually endeared her to audiences for eighty years, but MGM wasn’t satisfied with his pace, and replaced him with Victor Fleming, who also replaced him in “Gone with the Wind” after he moulded both Vivien Leigh’s and Olivia de Havilland’s characterisations…. but Fleming was great with Gable!).

Some other replacements that were well-documented at the time: Anthony Mann started “Spartacus”, but Kirk Douglas had been impressed with newcomer Stanley Kubrick’s work on “Paths of Glory”, and engineered Mann’s removal from the new project (which was produced by Douglas’s own company) in favour of Kubrick. However, Kubrick, shortly afterwards, suffered the same fate as had his predecessor: he started “One-Eyed Jacks”, starring Marlon Brando, but those two soon clashed over “interpretation” of the script. Since Brando was one of the production executives, Kubrick was swiftly sent packing, and Brando assumed the duties of director as well as star. The film is seldom seen.

Speaking of Brando and his power, Sir Carol Reed was Britain’s greatest-ever director and would have been perfect for MGM’s remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty”, especially since two of the three leads — Trevor Howard and Richard Harris, both Brits — were lifelong “fans” of Sir Carol and would have walked on water for him (Howard, in fact, had one of his first big breaks in a Carol Reed movie, “The Third Man”); unfortunately for everyone (including Bounty’s replacement director, Lewis Milestone, who retired the day shooting ended), the third star, Marlon Brando, was the box-office draw and could always get his own way by threatening to walk off the project; he and Sir Carol could see eye to eye on practically nothing, so MGM kow-towed to their star, and the film practically went down the plug-hole, today being considered vastly inferior to the original (it also, if I recall, lost a great deal of money because of Brando’s excesses).

 

What small detail from a movie do you love?

 

In the 1954 movie “Black Widow”, Otto Kruger has only a supporting role, with one major scene: he is called upon at his home by a man who is a working colleague but not someone he knows on a close personal basis. As he greets his visitor and they move into the sitting room, Kruger walks past a sideboard (or similar) and, as he talks, unobtrusively turns a photograph on display to face down, so deftly that you’d hardly notice.

There is no plot point to be made; Kruger’s character is not someone we need to know much about, or care about. The action is never referred to and has no bearing on the final outcome. But, in my opinion, its inclusion MATTERED. It stuck in my mind after I left the cinema. It told me that these filmmakers cared enough about what they were making to go just that little bit further in building a believable person.

“Black Widow” was an unusually short feature, at just 95 minutes; but, using economical touches like that, it didn’t need to go on any longer. A picture can, indeed, be worth a thousand words.

 

What actors or actresses really destroyed their careers by making really bad choices?

 

Doris Day had a long career which has made her something of a legend, so to say she “really destroyed” it with some bad choices may be quite an over-statement.

However, the fact remains that she had a pre-eminent position as a musical star at 1940s Warner Bros and 1950s MGM, and you could practically guarantee that a movie with her name on it would be of A1 quality and feature some great singing; but then she moved to Universal for one movie (”Pillow Talk”) which presented an entirely new non-musical image for her, and the movie was, surprisingly (because it wasn’t very good!), a tearaway hit with the public. So she had a decision to make: stay with her “old” image through a time when musicals were in a slump, or keep making the “almost-sex” comedies which Universal kept tossing to her, and which allowed her to dress beautifully (with gowns by Judy Garland’s designer, Ray Aghayan) and be coiffured beautifully (by Bud Westmore), but to have to speak the double-entendre rubbish that was the staple of the genre at this time, and forego singing more than an echo-chambered “pop” song in the opening credits.

Her (unfortunate?) choice was to go where the “hot” money was, and the inevitable happened: after a first flush of success (the “new” Doris Day was number one at the box-office for a couple of years), the sex-comedy craze soon wilted, her scripts and co-stars became progressively weaker and more lacklustre, and she never really regained the chance to do what she was best at. After a string of thudders, she actually made one quite-reasonable movie right at the end of the cycle, but then decided to cut her losses and retire from the screen, and, soon afterwards, from show business….although she still looked good and had her great voice intact.

Thankfully, the voice and the talent have ensured her legendary status, but those of us who were around in her bumper years still regret the choice she made to desert her musical “roots” and, seemingly, take just about any tawdry project that happened along.

What's the movie title that represents your country’s darkest history?

 

For Australia, that would probably be “Wake in Fright”.

 

It showed the ugly side of rural Australia, which is generally supposed to be simple, charming, and friendly… like the “good old days”. “Wake in Fright” showed the reality to be very different… and, having lived in a rural area for several years, I knew that it hit very close to the mark! There’s a kangaroo slaughter, in particular, in the movie that is hard to watch, because it is obviously not faked. You couldn’t do a scene like this today, thank goodness!

 

Which child actor has lost almost all of their childhood?

 

I am tempted to say “most of them”, but perhaps in the 21st century there are strategies in place to ensure that this no longer happens. But it was a fact of life in the thirties, forties and fifties, when child actors were so important to Hollywood, because moviegoers were looking for something pure and wholesome to take their minds off such miseries as the Great Depression and World War II, and the aftermaths of both.

Judy Garland stands as one of the prime examples of the “lost childhood” syndrome, performing on-stage from age two-and-a-half, and travelling in vaudeville the length and breadth of America before she was eight years old (she made her first movie at age seven). As an adult and star, when asked what she would change about her life if she had the chance, she said that the one thing she would like to have had was a childhood; and during the making of “Meet Me in St Louis” she became very fond of little Margaret O’Brien, but confided to co-workers that she was so worried about the talented moppet because “she hasn’t got a childhood”.

Even the best-remembered child star of all, Shirley Temple, wrote that all her early schooling was done right on the lot, between set-ups, and that she had never really mixed with “normal” children until she eventually enrolled in a “real” all-girls school in her early teens. And the move was, for a while, a disaster, because her life experiences up to that point meant that she had almost nothing in common with her fellow-students, nor they with her; she was, for a while, the victim of bullying.

Are actors in a negative role seen as a bad person in real life?

 

Seen by whom? Surely moviegoers who are adults know the difference between acting and real life, and can understand how actors such as Edward G Robinson, who often played trigger-happy gangsters, can actually be quiet, erudite collectors of great artworks (actually true in Robinson’s case… he had one of the best collections in America, and was knowledgeable about every item).

However, this may not be the case with actors in children’s movies. Dear Margaret Hamilton, who played the dual roles of Miss Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz”, eventually retired from the screen and lived a “normal” life, baking pies, going grocery shopping and catching the bus, and everyone who knew her said she was a lovely old lady whom you’d want to have as your own aunt. Everyone, that is, except the neighbourhood children; every time she went shopping, it was said, she would be approached by angry youngsters demanding to know why she had been so mean to Dorothy!

Which actors/actresses didn't realize they were in a movie during production up to a certain point?

 

A whole host of top stars — Charlton Heston, Oliver Reed, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Christopher Lee — knew they were making one movie, “The Three Musketeers”, in 1973. But they didn’t know, until a year later, that they had made a second one, called “The Four Musketeers”, craftily assembled from unused scenes shot for the first one and issued as a “new” movie.

Quite naturally, since the producers made two fortunes on the strength of their names, these distinguished actors felt that they deserved to share in the profits made by the second movie, and sued the production company (which, of course, didn’t have a leg to stand on; they had simply, in the first instance, fashioned a script which involved shooting far more footage than they knew was needed for their single movie).

The stars won their case, and were reimbursed; a few of them later commented that the damages were considerably less than their salaries would have been, which might be taken as a signal for other producers to pull the same ruse. I don’t think, however, that the idea caught on.

Should old films be re-released in theaters?

 

Some of them are certainly good-enough quality to stand side-by-side with the movies of today, so if that’s your criteria, the answer is yes, certainly. However, exhibitors are not after quality…. they’re after full houses, and the movies of today come replete with stars the young people of today know, a multi-million dollar publicity campaign, merchandising, and the assurance that you can’t see them on television… at least for a few months (which, in the world of today’s movie audiences, is like forever). The old movies can’t match any of those, so they are usually seen only by patrons who remembered them when they were new, and go out of nostalgia. Since nostalgia doesn‘t, unfortunately, fill the cinemas, these movies are usually confined to cinema clubs for people “in the know” (I saw “Lady from Shanghai” a few months ago at one of these; there were fewer than thirty people present, and we sat on hard chairs).

 

What is one continuous long shot in cinema history?

 

“Russian Ark” (2002) certainly held this record for at least a decade after its release: its entire running time of 99 minutes was one continuous shot, the camera roaming through the Hermitage in St Petersburg, with the cast coming in and exiting as they were needed (often changing costumes before resuming). The producer could hire the Hermitage for only a single day, so it must have been edge-of-the-seat stuff for the director and cameraman (in fact, the first two “takes” had to be aborted early on, because someone made some visible error; the third “take”, however, went like a charm, and it is, indeed, amazing to watch….and scary, too, as you worry that the cameraman , following his cast through some twenty-two rooms full of exhibits, is bound to bump into something priceless and destroy it before our horrified eyes).

Your previous respondent, Aurut, assures us that this record has now been overtaken by Christopher Nolan in “2017”, which I have not yet seen; this may well be so, even though I have heard that, in fact, this film is only crafted to appear to be two continuous shots, in much the same way as “Birdman” in 2014. Special effects are now so sophisticated that who could tell, for sure? But “Russian Ark”, near twenty years old, is “the real deal”.

What's the finest example of Hollywood making an actor or actress crazy?

 

“Finest” is hardly an appropriate term to describe this sad phenomenon, but certainly the most conspicuous example of it that I remember would be Frances Farmer. At her peak she was one of the “Paramount Pretties”, a co-star to such people as Bing Crosby; at her saddest, she was strait-jacketed and committed to an asylum.

She eventually recovered, and wrote a book about her experiences: “Will there Really Be a Morning?” Subsequently, a film was made of her life, with Jessica Lange as Frances and Kim Stanley in the role of the (inevitable) “stage mother” who, of course, gets most of the blame.

What movie have you rewatched the most times?

 

I’d like to say the 1954 “A Star is Born”, which I used to chase up from cinema to cinema when it first hit the Sydney circuit (and still do on the not-too infrequent occasions when it is revived on the big screen); but perhaps the top spot here goes to “The Court Jester”.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I feel that “The Court Jester” is a superior film to “A Star is Born”. It’s just that I brought up five children and now have a slew of grandchildren; and, at whatever age they were at, I could always count oi “The Court Jester” to pass a couple of hours for them in the best possible way: they seldom stopped laughing, and often pleaded, as the last song played out, “Can we watch it again?”

The point is, although it’s a great movie for kids, it isn’t by any means JUST a kids’ picture…. as an adult, I still have a great time watching it, and have been on Quora before with the comment that it is, perhaps, the funniest movie since sound… or, certainly, since the days of the Marx Brothers. So, every time I would play it for the kids, I couldn’t resist sitting and watching it with them. I practically know it by heart!

What’s the worst casting mistake for a lead role in a blockbuster film in the last 30 years?

 

An actress whose work I normally enjoy, Helen Bonham-Carter, was a strange piece of casting for one of the leads in the movie of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, “Sweeney Todd”, as the role required a great deal of singing and dancing, neither of which could, on the evidence of what is up there on-screen, be considered her “forte”. Worse, it had previously been played on stage, to great acclaim, by Angela Lansbury and Patti LuPone, both of whom had played the part “over the top”, and might, then, be considered hard acts to follow.

Miss Bonham-Carter, in an attempt to put her own “stamp” on the role, brought it down several levels, but succeeded mainly in making the character flat and uninteresting…. not easy to do with music and lyrics of this calibre. For the first and only time, she was the most-disappointing element in one of her movies (which was, sadly, a film of quite a few disappointments).

How would you redirect or change one movie scene of your choosing if you were given the chance?

 

A similar question was asked some months ago, and I recall then choosing to mention a shot very near the end of “Dead Man Walking”, when director Tim Robbins, usually the most reliable of directors, made a serious misjudgment which stayed in the mind after the rest of the movie had been forgotten: the scene where the killer/rapist is executed while the Nun watches on is staged to resemble Jesus being crucified, and the comparison (especially in a film where the leading lady plays a Nun) makes assumptions about the relationship between the two protagonists which are quite unjustified. I would have cut that shot in the editing.

I recall another unfortunate shot in, if I recall, “The Hunters”, involving Robert Mitchum and Lee Phillips. In a dispute regarding respect for women (specifically, Phillips’ wife, whom MItchum loves), Mitchum (the chivalrist) suddenly slaps Phillips, hard. Not a punch… a slap. Robert Mitchum is a large man, Lee Phillips quite a lightweight. The use of the slap instead of the more-usual punch-up makes the action look rather pathetic, unworthy of a hero. Although it may well have been justified in the script (if memory serves, Phillips was prepared to compromise his wife for career benefits), the act suddenly took sympathy away from Mitchum, and it took a couple of subsequent scenes before he was able to regain it. A poor decision! I would have removed the slap and perhaps had Mitchum grab Phillips by the lapels and haul him up against the wall.

What are some famous Hollywood movies with a low budget but receive high profit in box office?

 

Frankly, I don’t think there would have ever been a Hollywood if the scenario you describe here wasn’t true. Right from the start, the movies were made by entrepreneurs who didn’t have a dollar to their name, but they had high hopes that, upon their flick’s completion, they could set up a few chairs in a hall and make fifty times their “budget” (however low that might have been), so that they could go out and do the same thing four or five more times before the month was out.

Even when these early one-man (or one-family) “moguls” became the heads of major studios and had millions of dollars at their command, the same formula guided their every production… and, every so often, it paid dividends beyond even their wildest dreams. Whenever it did, the film almost-inevitably started a cycle of similar movies, each one desperately trying to imitate the success of the last, and (in most cases) becoming steadily worse in quality and, eventually, causing audiences to lose patience with the whole concept.

A few examples, just to start the ball rolling: Jacques Tourneur’s “The Cat People”, which, in 1942, cost $134,000 and promptly returned around 5 million dollars (and it spawned at least one sequel that was better than the original!). “Night of the Living Dead”, budget $114,000, return $30 million; “Halloween”, budget $325,000; return $70 million; “Friday 13th, budget $550,000, return $60 million. From the titles, you can get some idea of where the next craze is likely to come from!

Who was the movie star that came from the humblest beginnings?

 

Ava Gardner might just be the one you are looking for. She was born in Grabtown, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children. Her parents were tobacco farmers who lost their property when she was just a toddler, whereupon her father worked as a laborer in a sawmill and her mother as a cook/housekeeper in a school dormitory. Growing up in the rural south, she later reported, gave her a love of earthy language and running barefoot.

Which actor who only performs comic roles has also performed well in a serious role?

 

Mickey Rooney. He was mainly a musical comedy star in the golden days of MGM (although he did have occasional “serious” roles in films like “Boys Town” and “Captains Courageous”). But when musicals lost favour with audiences (in the mid-fifties) he moved easily into dramas, and, in movies such as “Bill” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, gave heavyweight dramatic performances. Like his old partner, Judy Garland, Mickey could do just about everything!

 

Which popular work of entertainment have you boycotted (or would boycott) personally, and why?

 

Unlike the first respondent, I have no particular prejudices, when I see a movie, against specific performers because of their off-screen behaviour; frankly, I never think about it, and all I am interested in is the quality of the performance.

Fortunately, however, your question was worded generally enough to give me some latitude: you didn’t specify films or acting, merely entertainment. So I can throw in my two cents’ worth.

I would never, under any conceivable circumstances, attend a boxing match. I see nothing entertaining in two people throwing punches into each other, and the idea of it makes me feel that we haven’t, really, moved along very far from the Roman gladiators in the arena two thousand years ago. If, tomorrow, this sport were made illegal throughout the world, I would consider that a job well done.

I would also boycott bullfighting events which resulted in the slaughter of the bull. Naive southern-hemisphere person that I am, I attended my bullfight without knowing that this outcome was a “given”. It was a shattering experience; the smell of the blood and sawdust is with me still, nearly forty years later. Leave out the sword, just make it a test of skill with cheers for man and beast at the end, and I would happily go again… they are truly magnificent creatures (the animals, I mean).

 

Can you separate an actor's performance on screen from their personal conduct (e.g. Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, Mel Gibson), or does their personal life affect your assessment of any performance?

 

The first. Just like when I read an answer to a question on Quora, I don’t really care whether or not the author once went to jail for embezzlement or whether he evades paying his taxes. All I care about is how well he has answered the question!

My assessment of the private conduct of an actor will begin the moment he knocks on my front door asking to be invited to the dinner table. Mel Gibson, unfortunately, has never done that, and probably never will.

What movie has spawned the most ripoffs from the original?

 

Just for a guess, and to start the ball rolling, “King Kong” (1933). Not only have there been quite a few Kongs in the last ninety years, there have also been a multiplicity of dinosaurs, giant ants, octopi, scorpions, moths, monster rabbits (true!), and fifty-foot women all wreaking havoc on various cities around the world. The Japanese seemed to base a whole industry on dreaming up new creatures (Godzilla being the most successful of these) to rip off the King Kong concept; eventually, of course, they ran out of ideas and actually made something called “King Kong vs Godzilla”, which, I would imagine, as well as ripping off the King Kong idea, was also a blatant breach of copyright (I have no idea who won, even though I have an unplayed VHS copy somewhere in the house).

 

Why does the same actor play up to two to three roles in a movie? Is it because that the specific actor will get double pay or is the movie crew short of money?

 

I expect you would have to look at each example of this practice on a case-by-case basis; the ones that came immediately to mind when I read your question would not seem to be due to either of the two reasons you suggested, but were simply to make a plot point, such as the good twin and the evil twin in a hundred movies, “Dead Ringer” (Bette Davis) and “Dark Mirror” (Olivia de Havilland) being just two examples (films in which these two appeared were seldom strapped for cash, and neither was renowned for taking roles merely for the size of the pay cheque).

The most conspicuous example of the practice that I can think of is Sir Alec Guinness, who played eight supporting roles in “Kind Hearts and Coronets”, an Ealing comedy from the late forties. If the producers had cast eight different actors in these roles (some of which were on-screen for only a minute or two),  I doubt that Sir Alec would have been interested in taking any one, because the project would have given him no opportunity to advance his career (not quite the same as getting “double pay”). For the producers, spending the extra money on a star name was an investment bound to bring returns at the box office, not only because Sir Alec in any role was a drawcard, but because of the word-of-mouth going around that you would see him play eight parts, which would be a fine joke. And, after all, a comedy looks for ways to make you laugh!

What songs do you love because you heard them playing on movies?

 

So many songs, and so many people providing you with their favourites! For me, the answer would have to be in the hundreds, as I have been listening to (and learning) songs in movies ever since “High Noon”, “Moulin Rouge” (the song, “Where is Your Heart”), and “The Quiet Man” (“Isle of Innisfree”), all in 1952.

Since you already have so many good answers, I thought I would throw in a few that are unlikely to have already appeared in your lists, since, in each case, they go WAY back. From the 1979 movie “Agatha” — a song called “Close Enough for Love”— and the 1967 movie “Hotel” — the song “This Year”, sung by Carmen McRae in what was, perhaps, her only film appearance — were about the best things in their films.

David Raksin wrote great movie themes, not theme songs. However, two of his themes were so loved by jazz musicians that Johnny Mercer wrote lyrics for one (“Laura”) and Dory Previn to another (“The Bad and the Beautiful”). Both are still performed by jazzmen today.

I also have a great fondness for the song “Two for the Road”, from the Stanley Donen movie (1967), “Lost in a Summer’s Night” from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), “Stella by Starlight” from “The Uninvited” (1944), and “Smile” from “Modern Times”, as far back as 1936!

What 30+ year old movies still hold up today?

 

Make it 60+ years, and you may be surprised at just how many.

In the days when there were major movie studios with their own stable of producers, stars, directors, cinematographers, set designers, composers, editors, costumiers, etc, they knew how to make movies. One studio could release a major movie every week of the year — that, in fact, was the ‘modus operandi” of MGM — and, even though they might only occasionally produce an out-and-out masterpiece, they didn’t allow too many “thudders” to go out with the company’s trade mark on them.

And they knew how to please audiences. It was simple, really; to quote the MGM motto: Make it big; get it right; give it class. They hired the top people to write the best stories, cast them with the most popular stars, assembled a team of technicians unparalleled anywhere in the world, and spent as much as was needed to make sure the finished product, to use your phrase, “still held up” a decade, or even a century, later.

If you want some specific titles, I suggest you have a look at answers to questions similar to yours that have already appeared on Quora; under an answer to the question, “Are there any old movies made before the 1960s that would still hold up today”, Glenn Rhoads has provided a list of titles that are, if nothing else, a “good start” (I am sure he would agree that he has only just scratched the surface… there are some great experiences waiting for you in the movies of the past!).

Have any movies been made in 2 separate languages for 2 countries, by the original multilingual actors?

 

“Autumn Sonata”, directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman. Those two were fluent in both English and their native language. I can’t, however, recall whether the supporting parts were performed just in Swedish and then dubbed into English, but I expect that would be the case, so it’s probably not a perfect example of what you’re looking for. Nor would the two “Intermezzo”s, although they were made within a year or two of each other and Ingrid Bergman played the lead in both versions… but it was certainly an interesting idea!

 

What are some examples of side role actors who gained immense popularity due to their talent?

 

Back in the days of the studio system, there were literally dozens of “stock” players whose appearance in the studio’s latest product would invariably elicit chuckles of recognition (or even a little applause) from grateful audiences; these actors always played variations on the same role, and they were one of the ways that moviegoers who walked into a movie in the middle could instantly recognise which studio’s product they were watching.

Thelma Ritter (the straight-talking, proud-to-be-one-of-the-common-folk maid) at 20th-Century Fox, was always one of my favourites (she was “Birdie” in “All About Eve”); or C. Aubrey Smith (the avuncular veteran who looked stern but was really an old softie) and Dame May Whitty (the haughty English dowager who often revealed a kind heart by the final reel), both at MGM. Edward Everett Horton played the same character — the over-fussy, easily-perturbed gentleman’s gentleman — in all those 30′s R.K.O. comedies, while S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall popped up in, seemingly, just about every Warners Bros film, as the lovable English-fracturing store proprietor. And then, of course, there was Marjorie Main — the spinsterly old cook who ran the household — and Margaret Hamilton — the maid who did likewise, and was the terror of the children of the house (she will always be remembered for her one “leading” role, as Dorothy’s nemesis in “The Wizard of Oz”) — at MGM. And for war movies there were always the same faces playing treacherous Nazi officers or sadistic Japanese commanders; they rarely even had to change uniforms from movie to movie, and often had the same line to say (“Ve have vays of making you talk”)!

When these people came on-screen, they didn’t have to “build” their character; you knew instantly who they were and what they were bringing to the movie, so you could just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Which celebrities were you shocked to see because they looked very different in real life compared to how they looked on movies, TV shows, or advertisements?

 

“Shocked”… none. It seems to me (admittedly, from a limited set of experiences) that most celebrities look better in-person than under the harsh lighting of the movie camera. Possibly those hours of make-up they undergo at the beginning of the day’s shooting is to try minimize the ill-effects of all those artificial lights and restore them to what they truly are! Certainly, Gregory Peck, Chita Rivera and Jane Fonda looked ten years younger in-person than they did in the movies that were in-release at the time I met them…. maybe, in the case of Chita, twenty.

So, not shocked, but surprised: and this was the case with Deborah Kerr. What the camera never showed us is that she had literally hundreds of freckles all over her lovely face. After learning that from my in-person encounter, I looked at her movies with new eyes, hoping to see the evidence on-screen. However, I don’t think I ever spotted so much as a single freckle on any of her screen characters (however, I really should check “The Sundowners” again, as it would seem the obvious one to exploit this feature)!

What show is most deserving of a theatrical released movie?

 

Several of the Sondheim musicals haven’t been made into movies as yet… the best you can hope for is a video of the actual stage performance, as we got with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn in “Sweeney Todd” (which, despite its stage limitations, beat the Johnny Depp/Tim Burton adaptation hands down). Sondheim, generally, hasn’t been well-served by movie adaptations of his musicals, possibly because the standard of the writing is so high that the “fiddling” the adaptors do to make the work fit into a two-hour movie is invariably akin to butchering, so if you’re familiar with the original, you sit and grieve. However, Rob Marshall showed, with “Into the Woods”, that a successful adaptation is not impossible, so perhaps someone could try the same with, say, “Company”, “Follies”, “Assassins”, “Merrily we Roll Along”, “Pacific Overtures” and “Passion”. At least the moviegoing public will have something fresh, exciting, and challenging to look at…. and not an avenging superhero in sight!

Why are some child actors fine actors as children atrocious as adults? Is it because awkwardness and insecurity can settle in during puberty? (www.datalounge.com/thread/26208379-emma-watson-is-an-awful-actress)

 

I notice that, in your heading, you refer respondents to a post on another write-in site which rubbishes the adult performances of Emma Watson, who seems to have disappointed the legions of admirers she won as a child star in the Harry Potter series. I read each comment on that site and disagreed with every one, and wondered just why I appeared to be so “out of touch”. Suddenly it occurred to me that this very unfair — really, quite cruel — appraisal of Miss Watson is not because she has changed, but because her admirers have changed. They have grown up, and what they fell in love with back then is quite different from what they look for in a leading lady today.

I like Emma Watson as she is today. I thought she did a rather splendid job in “My Week with Marilyn”, fleshing out what was essentially a minor role and bringing more to it than was on the page; she was an unusual choice for one of Noah’s daughters-in-law, but she slipped comfortably into the biblical milieu in “Noah” (I admit I have not seen her Meg March in “Little Women”, but the character of Meg March is possibly the least-interesting of Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters, so if she doesn’t shine quite as brightly as, say, Saoirse Ronan, it may well have a lot to do with the role; neither Janet Leigh nor Frances Dee were able to do more than hold their own when they played the role in earlier versions).

But I approach Miss Watson from a different standpoint from most of her ex-fans (and, it seems, current disparagers): I never saw the Harry Potter films, except for the first of the series (on television). So I can’t compare her with her child-star image. Maybe, in assessing adult stars who used to be child stars, that’s an advantage; I am not asking her to recreate something she used to have, so I’m not worried if nowadays she offers something different. I’m not comparing her with the child she used to be, and I wouldn’t really want to see her try to maintain that image as an adult (before you laugh too hard at the thought of any actress attempting that, remember the case of Mary Pickford, who was still playing child roles when she was thirty-three, and whose fans were very resistant to her attempts, in her mid-thirties, to move into more adult roles).

Perhaps those people, such as yourself, who look at a former child star and see her adult screen persona as “atrocious” because it is now a quite-different persona, might look again at themselves rather than at the star. Are they attempting to live in the past vicariously through a child star who has been an adult for almost a decade? Is the fault, dear Brutus, in the stars or in themselves?

 

What is a role that has been played hundreds of times but for you, has one definitive actor?

 

Napoleon Bonaparte. After all these years, I still feel Herbert Lom did the best job in the American version (with Audrey Hepburn) of “War and Peace”. I admit that Rod Steiger, whom I don’t usually like, did a great job, also, in “Waterloo”.

 

What are some of the greatest film soundtracks of all time?

 

That’s a hard one! There are several composers of movie music whose work could stand with some of the great classical composers of the last two hundred years, as is shown by the fact that concert halls are now scheduling programmes of their work. John Williams seems especially favoured in this regard, because he scored for big orchestras with lots of percussion and crescendos, like some of the composers for movies back in the “golden years”, such as Eric Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner.

Alfred Newman came along at around that time, with a whole host of memorable scores, of which “Street Scene” would probably be his own favourite, as he not only kept “revisiting” it in the Fox black-and-white New York melodramas of the late forties and early fifties, but chose to conduct this work on-screen in order to demonstrate the marvels of Stereophonic Sound before the credits of “How to Marry a Millionaire”. If David Raksin had been asked to choose for the same purpose, I expect he would have chosen either “Laura” or “The Bad and the Beautiful”. And the great Bernard Herrmann might have chosen “Vertigo” or “North by Northwest” from his catalogue of great movie themes. I can’t give you a personal favourite out of any of those five… and there are still other composers, such as Elmer Bernstein (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), Alex North (“A Streetcar Named Desire”) and Leonard Bernstein (“On the Waterfront”) who simply cannot be left out.

 

What movie do you believe is good, but failed to find a core audience at its time?

 

I went in and out of this question, trying to find the one movie that exemplified your question, but I kept coming back to “Sweet Charity”; it may not be the best answer you’ll get, but it is a film which, I feel, was misjudged at the time of its release and achieved respect only retrospectively.

It is clear that the releasing studio, Universal, was a little worried, right from the start, about what director Bob Fosse had delivered to them: made in 1968, it was held back for release for a year, often a sign of troubled meetings around the long table. Two different endings were shot, and exhibitors were able to choose which of the two they thought local audiences would like; thus, in Australia, Sydney got the happy ending, while Melbourne audiences were allowed to see the original “bittersweet” ending (nowadays, I expect, this is the only one surviving, except in “special features”).

Audiences, too, were divided and, frequently, lukewarm, as a couple of audience appraisals on Rotten Tomatoes will demonstrate: “(Shirley MacLaine) mugs her way through this embarrassing bore. Worst of all, she is no singer…..Only an occasional Fosse moment gives this flop a star”; “As it's Fosse's first serious attempt at a movie, some things are a little sloppy but for the most part it's enjoyably weird”; “a very entertaining movie but released in a turbulent year of 1969 which may have impeded its popularity”.

Something certainly “impeded its popularity”, but I am not sure whether it had anything to do with the political climate, or whether it was, simply, ahead of its time (Bob Fosse’s next film, “Cabaret”, was a huge success and established him as a major director, so that must have been just right for its time). Shirley MacLaine, certainly, was ahead of her time: we weren’t used to seeing performances that honest in a mere “singing-and-dancing” show (perhaps Yul Brynner was the one that started the ball rolling here in “The King and I”; he got an Oscar, but Shirley never even got a nomination for this one). She plays the dramatic scenes as if no one had told her that she was in a musical, and she sometimes makes you feel uncomfortable (a word not used, usually, in connection with musicals… until “Cabaret” made that okay three years later). Seen today, she’s terrific; and “Charity” gave her a chance to show what an all-rounder she is, since she got up there and sang and danced with the best of them (Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly), and never once did Fosse “dumb down” the choreography so that Shirley could do just a few easy movements and then stand there while the other two girls did all the real work. She is as great as they are. And she gets the most out of what is actually a very good score, although all that anyone seems to remember of it today is one song, “Big Spender”.

For me, “Sweet Charity” can stand proudly beside some of Bob Fosse’s subsequent films, and Shirley’s performance can hold its own with any of her five Academy Award nominations (and final win). It is definitely worth more attention than it was given.

 

Who are some actors who blamed their co-stars for a movie flop?

 

I can’t think of a case of one actor blaming another for a flop, although there are cases of actors claiming their co-star was impossible to work with (e.g. Tony Curtis on Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like it Hot”… but that was by no means a flop!). I can, however, recall two cases in which a respected director suddenly turned bitter and blamed his star for a film not performing as well as expected.

The first was George Cukor, who made the disappointing “Justine”, starring Anouk Aimee, of whom he later complained, “The only time I worked with an actress who wouldn’t even try”. The second was no less than Alfred Hitchcock, who was disappointed with the relative failure of “Vertigo” (he was, apparently, especially chagrined that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s small budget black-and-white “The Fiends” (“Les Diaboliques”) was doing far better business at the time than his own big-budget VistaVision entries), and turned on, of all people, his long-time star, James Stewart, claiming that he was looking less than his best in the movie. In fact, Stewart’s obvious “pancake” make-up was a bit of a problem in “Vertigo” (hardly Stewart’s fault!), but it was a minor point compared to some of the plot inconsistencies; and, anyway, “Vertigo” has, nowadays, been re-evaluated to the point that it is often included in lists of the ten or twenty greatest movies of all time… whereas “The Fiends” seldom gets a mention (but it was a good one!).

Why do movies suck now?

Somehow I have heard this question before. In fact, since the early sixties (when I was in my twenties) I have often been moved to ask it myself. As soon as they reach adulthood, everyone seems to think that the new movies “suck”. I remember when, as a boy of ten, I dragged my dear old grandmother along to see Marilyn Monroe in “Niagara”, because it was only on at night…. our local theatre manager didn’t consider it suitable for the kids’ matinee (news about “the calendar” had just hit the papers). As we came out, she turned to me and said those exact words that you said: “Why do movies suck nowadays?” (Well, maybe not those EXACT words, as she was a strict Irish Catholic, but that was her drift). She had grown up with the movies of the twenties and thirties, and she thought that just about everything made after the war “sucked”.

Yes, movies DO suck now…. frankly, I have been going to the movies since around 1948, and I don’t think I have ever seen films in such a deplorable state as they are right now. For me, the forties and fifties were “king”; when “Ben-Hur” won best film of 1959, I began to wonder if the party was over.

But not ALL movies nowadays suck; there are one or two good ones still coming along each year. And back in the thirties and forties (and beyond), not all movies DIDN’T suck; there were always more misses than hits, and some of the misses were absolute stinkers. The “batting average” of the big studios was, by and large, pretty good compared to nowadays, because at least back then the people in charge of the production companies loved movies and even knew something about making them. But, today, when people look back at the movies of thirty years ago, or forty years, or even more years ago, they only look back at the “classics”: those ten or twelve films every year that made the whole moviegoing year worthwhile. Nobody talks much about the two hundred others, because, frankly, no one remembers them. They aren’t worth remembering. They sucked.

A good way to prove my point might be to open any page at random in one of those coffee-table movie-studio books that were published around the turn of the millennium. There will be details of around ten or twelve movies from a particular year on each double page. I have just done it now with the RKO book. On the random page I opened it at (which happened to be for 1944, right in the middle of my own “Golden Years”), I found these listings: “Escape to Danger”; “The Falcon Out West”; “Casanova Brown”; “Action in Arabia”; “Passport to Destiny”; “The Curse of the Cat People”; “Up in Arms”; “Show Business”; “Yellow Canary”. One minor classic (“Curse of the Cat People”), one fairly good programmer (“Show Business”), and seven that might or might not have sucked, because no one can remember them to tell us, and there are no copies hanging around anymore.

Back then, people went to see these movies (including “Cat People”), and invariably came out asking, “Why do movies suck nowadays?” and they looked with nostalgia at RKO’s listings for ten years earlier. The youngsters going to see all this mindless nonsense that is being made now will, in twenty years’ time, come out of the 2040 newest release, look back on the listings for 2020, and ask that same question.

But if you don’t really believe that I have answered your question yet, I will give you one more reason that movies “suck” nowadays. There is a “sucker” born every minute.

Whatever the year, people will pay to see anything new, especially if it has been given a big publicity build-up. The minute they put their money down on the counter, they are helping to ensure that today’s movies, and tomorrow’s, will continue to “suck”.

What are the clues that tell you whether stunts on movies and TV were done with assistance or not?

 

Regardless of who performs the stunt, it is probably fair to say that, if there is any danger, it is done with “assistance”. Accidents on a movie set are expensive, even if it’s not a major star performing the stunt.

If, however, you are asking whether a stunt performed by a star is actually the star or a stunt double, the simple answer is: if you can’t get a clear view of his face in the shot, so that you are in no doubt whatsoever that it is the star, then it’s a double. This is not restricted to dangerous stunts, of course; it can even be run-of-the-mill shots such as over the star’s shoulder to catch the reaction of a supporting player. Why bother the star for such a trivial shot, when a stand-in with a wig will do? As an example, I would cite a very famous scene in “On the Waterfront”, where Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando, playing brothers, are sitting in the back of a car revisiting old wounds. Steiger said, later, that in any shot where his face was favoured, Brando was not even there; he had gone home, and Steiger was delivering his impassioned lines to thin air.

 

What are some movies in which you liked the villain's role and acting more than the hero's?

 

This happens most of the time, as villains’ roles allow the performer to act up a storm. Actors and actresses often say how much they tire of the heroes’ roles and long to be offered the part of someone truly over-the-top wicked.

Ingrid Bergman, when cast as the saintly, long-suffering fiancee of Henry Jekyll in “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, so coveted the other female lead, the grubby streetwalker whom Hyde tortures and eventually kills, that she actually went to Lana Turner, who had been cast in that role, and suggested a swap (she got her way, as Lana was, by that time, tired of playing roles where the only thing on her mind was sex; Ingrid subsequently walked away with the movie, although she then had to go back to playing saints and nuns).

A good example of the villain outshining the hero was the MGM musical drama, “Love Me or Leave Me”, which was a rare dramatic role for Doris Day, playing the unspoiled singer (Ruth Etting) swept off her innocent feet by the conniving gangster who owns her career and wants to own the rest of her, too. Day was fine; but the part of the crime boss (Marty ‘the Gimp” Snyder) was given to James Cagney, who played the role as if he really understood the character. He played it so well, in fact, that you started to see things from his point of view, and Doris’s character soon came across as somewhat cheap and opportunistic. When the film is over, your sympathy is with the villain, not the heroine… and, of course, your applause is for Cagney, the consummate performer who took second billing (unusual for him) and ran off with the movie.

Is it possible for a movie to never be seen again?

 

Certainly, if the people who own it feel that exhibiting it will involve them in more negative consequences than its worth. “The Day the Clown Cried” (1972) was a major film written and directed by Jerry Lewis (who also starred); after studio pre-screenings, it was agreed that the film should never see the light of day. I have read that Lewis had his own personal copy, but it has never been screened for the public.

For a while, back in the sixties, it looked like this fate might befall one of the great movies of the decade, “The Manchurian Candidate”, which dealt with the shooting-assassination of a presidential candidate. The star was Frank Sinatra, who was, of course, a good friend of John F Kennedy and assisted in Kennedy’s election campaign shortly before the movie began filming. When, in 1963, Kennedy was killed, Sinatra was, of course, distraught at his involvement in a project that was “so close to home”, and took steps to ensure that his film (which had already been in release about a year) would never be seen again. And it wasn’t, for many years. Fortunately for cinemagoers, time is a great healer, and he eventually relented on this decision, so that today’s generations can again see the actor at the top of his game.

 

What makes a movie successful?

 

I have, in the last thirty years, seen so many “successful” movies that seemed to me to have absolutely no redeeming features that I confess I am very cynical on this subject.

You know what they say about buying real estate? Three things to look for: location, location, and location. Well, in the 21st century, I think we could adapt this to movies. There are three factors that make for a successful movie nowadays: marketing, marketing and marketing.

Release your movie in every country in the world on the same day. Use saturation marketing in all media so that everyone rushes off to see it within three or four days of its opening. Then, by the time the word gets around about what a thudder it is, it doesn’t matter, because everyone has already given their money to it and the producers have (hopefully) got their investment back a hundredfold.

What are the best movies to make you cry happy tears?

 

“The Miracle Worker” never fails to “get” to me in that last scene, where young Patty Duke (as Helen Keller) is running frantically around the garden, touching every object and fingerspelling its name, while Anne Bancroft (as Annie Sullivan) yells, “She knows! She knows!” to the girl’s family and to the world. As if that isn’t enough, the girl finally comes to a halt, exhausted, and touches the face of the young woman who has wrought this miracle, and spells “teacher”. It’s round about then that I just have to look away. Does that scene have an bearing on my later decision to teach deaf children? I don’t really know, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

I also never fail to “tear” at the end of “Camelot” as King Arthur (Richard Harris), having told the boy, Tom of Warwick, that it is now his task to tell the world about this kingdom, and ensure its message is never forgotten, cries “Run, boy! Run, boy!” And Tom runs….all the way to the 20th century.

Are there any famous actors who have starred alongside their real life parents or children in movies?

 

John Mills started off his daughter Hayley’s career when he suggested her as a last-minute substitute for a key role in his movie “Tiger Bay”, which was not going well because the makers were unable to find a young boy who could play the character around whom the story revolved; Hayley was so strong in audition that the part was “reworked” specifically for her.

Subsequently, they played together in “The Chalk Garden”, “The Truth About Spring”, and “The Family Way”, and Sir John directed her in “Sky West and Crooked”.

 

Does your love for movies diminish as you get older?

 

After seventy-plus years of moviegoing, I can provide a long-term perspective on your interesting question.

My love for GOOD movies hasn’t diminished; what has diminished is my benign tolerance of bad ones.

There was a time when moviegoing meant seeing two films at a single session, as “double bills” with an intermission were standard. Although I learned, very young, to travel a bit farther for the movie I wanted to see, in order to see it paired with a first-half movie that sounded promising, it was comparatively rare to strike gold twice; one learned to be satisfied for a fifty-fifty return on the investment. There was always the Movietone News and at least one cartoon as part of the program to ensure that the balance was likely to be in the moviegoer’s favour.

Nowadays, with only one movie (and a half-hour of previews filmed in two-second grabs and commercials which, being designed for television, tend to assault one’s senses on the big screen), you’d like to think that the feature would give you something for your money. When that doesn’t happen (and, nowadays, it DOESN’T happen, most of the time; while my love hasn’t diminished, the quality of movies definitely has!), I feel not benign, but positively hostile.

What was the scene that made you realize a particular movie was going to be exceptional?

 

The first twenty minutes of the 1954 “A Star is Born” were interesting and showed promise of delivering a good time; but when James Mason walked into the nightclub after midnight, sat in a chair up the back, and watched the girl singer (Judy Garland) singing “The Man That Got Away” — just for herself and the love of the music — suddenly the film was elevated, not merely to an enjoyable three hours, but to a life-enriching experience. Did singing ever get better than this?

What are the five best low-budget film noir classics, and what elements make them so watchable?

 

“Detour”, with Tom Neal, often gets the nod as the best of the films-noir “B’s, but there are plenty of votes, also, for “DOA”, “The Narrow Margin”, “Out of the Past”, “Murder My Sweet”, and “Scarlet Street”. It’s probably best to look at directors rather than individual titles: Fritz Lang and Edward Dmytryk are two names that often come up when “B” films-noir are discussed.

Next to musicals, there is no genre I enjoy more than film-noir, but when you ask a question like “What makes them so watchable?” I confess I am at a loss to come up with anything coherent. I love the use of light and shadow, the laconic, clipped dialogue, the deliberately-restricted sets (most of “Narrow Margin” takes place in a railway carriage), the plots that always seem on the edge of a nightmare, the music (a plaintive horn in the background), and the inevitable hard-edged “femme-fatale”, who usually turns out to be responsible for most of the mayhem (but she often gets to sing a great torch song in her husky, smoke-ridden voice).

In the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, were the scenes that the actors sang pre recorded or actually sung while filming the scene?

 

I can’t answer specifically about the movie that you asked about (although I have seen it more than once), but I can say that in the era that it was made, it was standard procedure to film the musical numbers to a pre-recorded soundtrack. So rare was it for musical numbers to be filmed “live” that, on the few occasions in which this did happen — Peter Bogdanovich deciding to go that route for the musical numbers in “At Long Last Love” and Ronald Neame shooting Judy Garland “live” for the song, “It Never Was You”, in “I Could Go on Singing”, because of time constraints — it was considered newsworthy enough to become a feature in promoting the movie. I can’t recall hearing anything to that effect about the movie you mentioned; but, of course, that’s not the same thing as saying that it never happened! But whatever made you think it might have been done that way… is there a clue in the movie footage?

 

What are some of the best moments of acting from the world's greatest actors?

 

I tend to judge great movie acting by whole-of-film performances, or, at least, scenes, in those cases where the actor is doing only a “spot”. I couldn’t break it down into certain words, or lines.

So I will suggest a few scenes that you might like to follow up if you want to see real artistry at work. First, the celebrated “dressing room scene” in the 1954 “A Star is Born”, where Judy Garland tells of the pain of living with an alcoholic, and you feel the pain, even from the back row. A close runner-up would be Richard Burton, sitting on a swing by a tree-trunk and talking about “bergin” in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”. Their whole-film performances are among the greatest cinema has given us in a hundred years; those scenes, however, are the jewels in their crowns.

Then there’s Humphrey Bogart giving testimony in the trial scene in “The Caine Mutiny”. Or Helen Hayes and Ingrid Bergman in their big “first meeting” scene in “Anastasia”. Or Maureen Stapleton wandering through the terminal in “Airport”, crying, “He didn’t mean it!”, referring to her husband having exploded a bomb on a plane. Judy Garland, again, in the hospital waiting scene in “I Could Go on Singing”, when she went so far off-script that it was clear to everyone in the cinema that they were witnessing a self-revelation. Montgomery Clift in “Judgment at Nuremberg”, reliving his youth in Nazi Germany. Liza Minnelli in the phone booth receiving bad news in “The Sterile Cuckoo”. Shirley MacLaine admitting, “Maybe I did love you the way she said!” to her closest friend in “The Children’s Hour”.

What is interesting about those performances is that there was only a single Academy Award performance (Bergman’s) in the bunch. That’s one of the reasons I chose them: everyone follows up the Oscar winners, but often a non-winner’s performance can be quite-unfairly forgotten.

What's an old good movie that, if you bring it up in a discussion of old movies, folks would barely be familiar with it but you know that movie should have been more famous and well known than it is?

 

“The Clock”, a small-budget black-and-white romantic drama directed by Vincente Minnelli in 1945, following his smash-hit, “Meet Me in St Louis”. It was his first try at a “serious” movie (although, typically, it still had its humorous moments), and although his fiancee, Judy Garland, was the star (she requested him as director because she was so pleased with the way “St Louis” had turned out), there was — a first time for her — no singing. It’s an oddity of a movie, and didn’t quite deliver what audiences were expecting of a film directed by Minnelli and starring MGM’s top musical performer, so it is given far less attention than is its due. Those who have seen it appreciate it for what it is: a beautifully-observed “love tribute” by Minnelli, to both the city he loved and the woman he loved; and watching Judy play her straight role is like listening to Itzhak Perlman playing a Stradivarius (Minnelli later claimed that MGM hardly scratched the surface of Garland’s talent, that she could have been greater than Garbo or Sarah Bernhardt; at least, in this movie, he gave it his best try).

 

Are celebrities clueless about real life struggles?

 

Even celebrities have those; while I don’t know a single celebrity personally, my expectation is that they would, as individuals, run the full gamut of capabilities of handling life’s reversals, as the rest of the population does.

Bette Davis, as an example, had quite a litany of problems in her final years, including a debilitating stroke. But she continued much as she had always done, making a comment which (as someone approaching eighty myself) I now tend to recall, and appreciate the wisdom of, quite often: “Old age,” she snorted, with her usual touch of feistiness, “is not for sissies”. Miss Davis was not a sissy.

 

What advantage did makers of Poverty Row films have over other filmmakers in responding to fads of the day?

 

The lack of money and resources -- the hallmark of the Poverty Row studios -- forced them to fall back on a measure of ingenuity and spontaneity that encouraged them to take advantage of opportunities as they arose.

With no standing sets, they went out into real streets and shot in real locations, something the “majors” always discouraged their directors from doing — often expressly forbade it — as it meant sacrificing a certain lack of control over what turned up on the screen, the very thought of which gave Louis B Mayer and Jack Warner heart seizures…. they spent millions ensuring that every single thing that appeared on the screen was exactly as had been planned months in advance.

With shooting schedules sometimes as short as four days, Poverty Row productions didn’t stop shooting if a shower of rain came along…..they simply improvised, and the rain became an integral part of the scene. An actor who didn’t deliver his line as written wasn’t “called” on it…. if what he said made sense in the context, move straight on to the next shot.

The “raw” look which characterised these pictures was looked down on by the producers at MGM or Warners, until it became obvious that, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, audiences had become disenchanted with artificiality (and the forced “happy ending” which hadn’t happened in their own lives), and actually welcomed the realism which the half-formed acting and real locations gave to these films. Before long the major studios — 20th Century-Fox being the pioneer here — starting emulating the poverty row movies, and even bragging, at the beginning of the movie, that their film was “shot where it happened” (in Fox’s case, it usually “happened” in New York, and to Alfred Newman’s “Street Scene”). Stars were suddenly chosen, not because they looked and behaved like stars, but because they looked and behaved just like everyone else (Marlon Brando and James Dean were two prime examples of this trend), mumbling their lines and allowing themselves to actually look “awkward”.

With movies like “Battleground” and “The Wild One”, the major studios eventually caught up with their poverty-row counterparts, but, for a short time there, Poverty Row actually led the way!

What movie had the best unexpected and unforgettable ending?

 

“Fail Safe” (1964).

Since the movie is now fifty-five years old, I don’t suppose I will get complaints if I reveal the ending!

A group of American bombers has been despatched, due to a transmission error, to bomb Moscow. While the entire Moscow air force is on the alert to intercept them, the US pilots are just too damn clever, and one of the six gets through all the Russian defences and American strategies to get them to turn back, and is homing in on the target, unable to be stopped by either side. This means the start of a nuclear war that could well wipe out mankind.

The president of the US has one card up his sleeve: an offer to the Russian premier that will at least avert the inevitable nuclear holocaust. If the Russians will hold off retaliation, he will order a stand-by bomber to drop an identical bomb on New York City at the exact time Moscow is being obliterated. A major city for a major city.

It’s so quick and so easy; the bombers are stationed right near New York City anyway, so he has one armed and in the sky within a few minutes. The film ends as New York, with no hint of a warning, disappears in a series of white flashes, wiped out by United States weaponry . And you go home thinking, it could easily happen, just like that.

 

Who is a living celebrity you've grown up watching who you'll feel sad about when they pass on?

 

Liza Minnelli. However, since I am three years older than she is, perhaps the second part of the question should be whether she will feel sad about me when I pass on! For me, a safer answer might be Stephen Sondheim, who is at least a decade older than I. He elevated my favourite kind of entertainment — the stage musical — to a level beyond anything I could have dreamed possible, and he is, in my opinion, the greatest composer of the twentieth century. His loss will be incalculable unless we have learned, from his legacy, how to make musicals better than they would, otherwise, have had any right to be.

 

Who do you consider the better actor, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, or Anthony Perkins?

 

It’s a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison, but if you were talking about stage acting, I don’t think there would be any doubt that Laurence Olivier would take the prize, as he apparently raised the bar as far as “Shakespearean interpretations” is concerned (his Othello, which he filmed, is particularly inventive).

However, Olivier seldom reached those heights in his movie performances (although, of course, he did win the Academy Award for “Hamlet” in 1948; but that, like “Othello”, could be viewed as an extension of his theatre work). While he was beyond brilliant as Archie Rice in the film version of “The Entertainer”, he spent a great deal of his post-Hamlet movie career playing guest star “small-but-showy” cameos which seldom taxed him, and it was fairly clear his heart wasn’t in the movies. So I am not sure that he can be fairly compared with, for example, someone like John Wayne.

If your question is restricted to movies, I would have to give the top spot to James Stewart, who has a host of fine performances under his belt in a career that spanned half a century and almost a hundred movies, some of which are remembered today chiefly because of the memorable performances he gave in them. Like Olivier (and all the actors in your list, with the exception of Wayne), he also came from a background in live theatre, and had a conspicuous success on Olivier’s home ground with “Harvey”, which he took to London before making it into a movie for which he received one of his several Academy Award nominations.

Marlon Brando spent just a brief period of his career on the stage before moving into movies as a leading man in his first film, but in that short time he was a sensation — his Broadway performance in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is still talked about — and might well have been an American challenger to Olivier’s pre-eminent position had he not made the career move (he could even play Shakespeare, and was a fine — if unconventional — Marc Antony in one of his early movies, taking his place confidently among more “legitimate” Shakespearean actors such as James Mason and John Gielgud.) In his first few years as a cinema actor he made good choices and gave a string of strong performances, especially for director Elia Kazan. It was not long, however, before it became obvious that he was treating many of his movies — and perhaps the Hollywood scene — with contempt; his performances became more and more self-indulgent and, well, sloppy. His half-dozen best movies could rival anything Stewart has done, but you never saw Stewart walking through his roles, or even deliberately lampooning them; for that reason, Stewart still holds precedence in your list.

John Wayne himself would have laughed at anyone including him in a list with Olivier and Stewart, as he always claimed he was not an actor but a “re-actor”; he simply listened to other people say their lines and reacted to them. He knew what he was good at, and seldom stepped outside his persona to “stretch his wings”. But, within those self-imposed limits, he was just about perfect, and probably represents “Hollywood” more than any of the stars in your list. And he was in a lot of memorable movies, thanks to his long-term association with director John Ford.

Anthony Perkins is an interesting addition to your list, and was certainly an extremely talented actor, both on-stage and on-screen. As well as some interesting screen portrayals, he could sing (he starred in a Broadway musical before moving to movies, and made several LP record albums), and was co-writer (with friend Stephen Sondheim) of one of the most-interesting whodunnits in movies (“The Last of Sheila”). But he made such a splash in “Psycho” that casting directors afterwards tended to see him in similar roles (when asked why he always played “crazies” in his later films, he answered, simply, “Because I’m good at it”), and this limited his growth as an actor. He doesn’t really belong up there with Stewart or OIivier, although his talent was probably no less than theirs.

 

Was Judy Garland A Natural Nordic Blonde?

 

Judy Garland’s heritage was Irish and English; she described herself as an “Irish biddy”. She only ever “went blonde” for a couple of movies: “Till the Clouds Roll By”, in which she played real-life Broadway star Marilyn Miller, and one brief scene in “A Star is Born”, wearing a wig which James Mason swiftly helped her remove. On her English side (through her father, Frank Avent Gumm) Judy was a 17th-generation descendant of William Fitzhugh and Margaret (Margery) Willoughby (who are, in addition, reputed to be the ancestors of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, actors Tom Hanks and Richard Gere, outlaw Jesse James, singer Kenny Rogers, and author L Ron Hubbard).

Perhaps you are thinking of her friend and fellow-singer, Peggy Lee, who was Swedish/Norwegian. Otherwise, Marilyn Monroe’s father came from a small fishing village in Norway: Haugesund; there is even a statue of her at the waterfront, although there is no indication that she ever visited, as I don’t think she ever knew her dad.

 

Was Randolph Scott a good actor?

 

Scott made his first film in 1928, and his last in 1962. There are cases of not-so-good actors lasting five, or even ten, years, but I think a career of just on thirty-five years — many as a major star — speaks for itself.

When I started seeing Randolph Scott movies, in the 1950s, he had become one of those actors who didn’t actually have to do much, on-screen. He just had to be himself, in much the same way as Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and John Wayne had to play themselves. Scott had sufficient “presence” to just say his lines and stand there, in his (always Western) costumes. No one really expected him to dazzle with his performance.

But he could do that, if he had to, and in his last film, “Ride the High Country”, made when he was in his mid-sixties, he proceeded to show what he could do if he really tried. Many of his earlier films are seldom seen nowadays, but “Ride the High Country” is now regarded as a classic, and is frequently-revived. For the definitive answer to your question, you need only chase up that one movie and see for yourself.

 

Do the children of actors live on the set?

 

I presume you mean an away-from-home set, when the actors are on-location in another part of the country or on the other side of the world. I don’t know what the custom is nowadays, but back in the “Golden Years” the children were, at best, occasional visitors to their parents’ sets.

Possibly the most-notorious of all location shootings was the desert location which “stood in” for Mongolia in “The Conqueror”; the spot chosen (St George, Utah) was just 137 miles from where eleven nuclear tests had been carried out in the previous three years, and, unbeknownst to anyone involved in the movie, was highly radioactive. More than two hundred people among the cast, crew, and visitors to the set developed cancer as a result of their exposure during the shooting, including the sons of both John Wayne and Susan Hayward. While the boys’ famous parents died because of their prolonged exposure, in the case of the sons, the cancer was not fatal, possibly because they were just occasional visitors…. they did not “live on the set”.

What is the most disturbing thing you have discovered in a movie and that nobody has noticed?

 

In “Summer Stock”, Judy Garland, playing a farm girl about to purchase the tractor of her dreams, goes over to a wall calendar. The date on the calendar says, in large letters, “June 22, 1949″.

Twenty years to the day from that date — on June 22, 1969 — Judy Garland died, aged just 47 (her birthday was twelve days earlier). A further coincidence was that a newspaper reporting her death had it as the lead item on Page 1, but the second item, on the same page, headlines a massive tornado which had devastated Kansas that very day.

What year was the best for movies?

 

All the smart money will be on the year 1939, and who am I to disagree with the experts? There is even a coffee-table book devoted solely to the film releases of that year, and, to be sure, browsing through it makes you shake your head in wonderment that the studios were working on all of these amazing movies at more-or-less the same moment. Was there ever a year that could come even close to that?

If such a year did exist, I would suggest 1950. My all-time-favourite movie, “All About Eve”, was made in that year; so was “Sunset Boulevard”, which was considered a classic almost from the day of its release.

In addition, check a few of the other movies released during 1950 (Wikipedia has the complete list, some 400):

The Asphalt Jungle

Born Yesterday

The Breaking Point

Broken Arrow

Caged

Crisis

Cyrano de Bergerac

D.O.A.

Father of the Bride

The File on Thelma Jordan

The Glass Menagerie

Gun Crazy

The Gunfighter

Harvey

In a Lonely Place

Julius Caesar

Kim

King Solomon’s Mines

The Men

The Next Voice You Hear

Night and the City

No Way Out

Panic in the Streets

Summer Stock

Under My Skin

Wagon Master

Winchester ‘73.

There isn’t one in that list that you couldn’t see, with pleasure, again and again.

Do stars enjoy watching movies?

 

I’m sure they do, but for a variety of reasons, depending on the situation.

If it’s their own movies, they would like watching the ones they were proud of or which made a lot of money for everyone (especially themselves). However, others they probably want to pretend never existed (you may like to contact Joanne Woodward to see if her husband, Paul Newman, enjoyed an opportunity to watch “The Silver Chalice” at home every couple of weeks).

If they are newcomers and are hoping one day to replace one of the top stars, you can bet they will watch every one of that star’s movies to see what he/she doing that they might be able to copy, and improve on.

If they are movies of his rivals, an actor will probably watch them to assure himself that he is better-looking, has a better voice, and is definitely better-equipped to hang in there for the long haul than those rivals are.

If they are movies made by a director he is interested in working for (or who has expressed interest in him), he will want to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of that director’s catalogue and techniques.

And finally, if the movies are ones he auditioned for and didn’t get, or remakes of movies he previously appeared in, you can be sure he will watch them just to comment on how much better HE would have read that line, or interpreted that role.

 

How come no one who knew what happened to Marilyn Monroe never told anything?

 

They did… but they had to tread very carefully, because telling what happened to Marilyn meant involving some VERY famous people; not just movie stars, but respected professionals, and some of the top politicians of the era. If it could happen to someone whose life was subject to such scrutiny as was Monroe’s, it could also happen to anyone unwise enough to talk too loudly. And, anyway, all the evidence for foul play was circumstantial: people who were in her neighbourhood on that fateful evening who were supposed (and later claimed) to be thousands of miles away. That’s suspicious, but it wouldn’t hold up in court.

Some lies were, of course, eventually disproved. Twentieth-Century Fox claimed, for years afterwards, that Monroe was so unreliable during the making of her last movie (“Something’s Got to Give”) that all they were able to get on film were a few minutes of colour test shots of her modelling wardrobe designed for her to wear. I guess that lie helped in any insurance claims over the failure of the film to ever be released (it was eventually re-shot with Doris Day): they needed someone to take the blame. For years, however, whispered rumours persisted that the studio had cans and cans of the film stashed away in a dark corner of their vaults….enough to be cut together into a releasable movie. Eventually, someone within the studio smuggled the cans out, and it was shown privately to people who could hardly believe their eyes.

Fox eventually owned up to their “error”; enough footage has turned up on Youtube, and even on an official release from Fox itself, to show that it would have needed only minor tweaking — much less, for instance, than had to be done with “Twilight Zone” for Vic Morrow and “Brainstorm” for Natalie Wood — to have the film up and running in cinemas as positive proof that Marilyn was looking great, acting well, and perfectly in command of herself, all the time she was being portrayed as unable to function and potentially suicidal.

I am nowhere near an admirer of Marilyn Monroe as are most people of my era; frankly, in many of her movies I thought she was either inept or vulgar. However, I remain outraged that a great injustice was, almost certainly, done to her, and done by people who have managed to secure their own place in history by means of some covert dealings, abuse of power and position, and utter ruthlessness.

 

Why do Hollywood remakes ignore films from great sources but failed because of poor acting or directing?

 

The operative word in your question is “failed”. Hollywood remakes successes, not failures. The quality of the written source is immaterial: either people have shown they will spend money on a movie adaptation, or they won’t. If they have spent money once, they can (hopefully) be talked into doing it again; if they ignored it the first time around (for whatever reason), then why risk millions of dollars trying to prove that they shouldn’t have? That’s the reasoning, anyway: long shots don’t attract “backers”; you don’t invest in failures.

 

"Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four" - Katharine Hepburn. How do you take it, positive or negative?

 

Dear Katharine Hepburn was putting herself down, of course, because if anyone knew what great movie acting was, it was she and her partner, Spencer Tracy. But they made it LOOK so easy that maybe she had heard people say, “There’s nothing to it”. She probably even heard Spence say it, since he, also, was well-known for the gentle put-down of his contribution to the cinema (once, when asked what he looked for in a script, he replied off-handedly, “Days off”.)

So I take the comment with a smile, which is how I hope the interviewer took it when Kate first uttered it. The irony in the comment is that Shirley Temple, who COULD “do it at age four”, found it harder and harder to do as she left childhood behind, and retired from the screen when she was barely out of her teens!

 

Who is the most unfortunate actor of the movie industry, and why?

 

Do you mean historically, or right now? If we can go back to the early days of the industry, you’d have to say that one of the unluckiest of actors was Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, whose career — and life — were ruined by gossip and innuendo.

He was one of the most popular stars of the silent era (at one point the highest-paid star in the world, mentor of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin), largely because of his roly-poly shape (he weighed 266 pounds) which made him a natural for the very-physical comedies that were popular at the time. He played the chubby innocent, and the public liked to believe that he was exactly that, in real life. No one wanted to think of him as one of the carousing, womanising hedonists of post-war Hollywood.

So when it was revealed that he had attended a “party” at which budding actresses were also present, and that one of these had died a few days afterward of some kind of internal problem (subsequently revealed to be peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder), rumours ran rife about the scandalous goings-on that had led to this tragic outcome. Arbuckle’s size and weight suddenly became his greatest liability. Was any other man at the party — which was now categorized, in the minds of the public, as an orgy — of sufficient size and weight to inflict, in the throes of passion, such injuries on a woman that she could actually die as a result?

It scarcely mattered that it came out, in three subsequent investigations into the death, that the young woman had chronic cystitis, and that the pain she periodically experienced from the inflammation of the bladder was exacerbated by alcohol; and, moreover, that at previous parties she had been seen writhing in pain and tearing at her clothes to get some relief. It also didn’t seem to matter that Arbuckle swore that he had entered the room to find her on the floor in a drunken stupor, and had picked her up and laid her on the bed, but her writhing and tearing at her clothes had caused her to roll off. The indisputable fact was that she and Arbuckle had been alone in that room together some little time before she started screaming in pain, and that, as she was carried off to hospital, she muttered, “Arbuckle hurt me”. That was enough to damn him in the eyes of the state, for a short while (he was, eventually, acquitted of any wrong-doing, a doctor having failed to find any sign of sexual assault) and of the public for the rest of his life (he was spat on at his court appearances during the ensuing investigations).

Roscoe Arbuckle never made another film. The case led to the establishing of a Hollywood censorship board, which ruled that Arbuckle should never work in the industry again…. possibly the first Hollywood blacklist. He did continue to work behind the scenes — he is credited with having discovered Bob Hope — but he paid for his attendance at that party for the rest of his life. He was just 46 years old when he died.

What are some of the most embarrassing movie mistakes that made it into the final film?

 

I recall one beauty…. I saw it at least twenty years ago, but it was such an embarrassment for the actor involved that I never forgot it. Whether or not it was a “mistake”, however, I can’t tell you. I know the director and his star didn’t “get on” at all, with the star routinely running roughshod over the director’s decisions, so it is quite possible that the shot was deliberately set up in order to have the “last laugh”.

The director was John Frankenheimer, the movie was “The Island of Dr Moreau”, and as an unlikely choice for the mad doctor, we are treated to a grossly-overweight Marlon Brando running around in a caftan, with white suncream caked onto his face. The movie has been described as “shambolic” and “incoherent”, and, certainly, Brando’s approach to his role must take the blame for a great deal of the mess that wound up on the screen. Probably because of his weight, he isn’t required to move much, as everything seems to revolve around him as he preens and postures; but there is one physical scene where, I think, someone chases him around a room, and furniture is upset.

Frankenheimer sets up the shot from not-far-above floor level, so, at the moment Brando’s bulk spins around, the hem of the caftan flies up, exposing elephantine legs. These are not the legs of a star (and certainly not one who was, in his youth, regarded as the Great White Hope of American movies), merely of a middle-aged man with a serious weight problem; but it all happens so fast that there’s no time for you to look away.

As I stated before, it can’t be regarded as a “mistake”, since a director and his editor made the decision to use that take in preference to others; it certainly qualifies, however, as “most embarrassing”, and one can only assume that Brando wasn’t, by that time, taking enough interest in the proceedings to pay attention to where the camera was being set up for the shot. Or maybe he just thought no one would go see the movie anyway.

 

Is Marlon Brando the greatest actor American film studios produced in the past millennium?

 

Broadway “produced” Marlon Brando; as good as some of his early film performances were, I don’t think he ever surpassed the raves he got when he played the lead in “A Streetcar Named Desire” on the New York stage. So he came to movies “fully-formed”, as it were.

As for the term “greatest actor”, well, I would respectfully suggest that it is impossible to judge something like that. Fashions change in acting just as they do in clothing; while people like Sarah Bernhardt were considered the “greatest” of their day, their histrionics might look a little ridiculous in today’s acting world. Brando was a good enough film actor to win an Academy Award for his sixth movie role (and a second award, much later), and to influence a whole raft of young actors who came after him (Paul Newman, James Dean and Warren Beatty among them; it should not, however, be forgotten that John Garfield and Montgomery Clift influenced Brando in much the same way).

That, surely, doesn’t make him “the greatest”; it does, however, indicate that he came along just as the movies had need of him, and, in his brief term at the top, made a difference. But so did — for example — Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracy, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart. And their careers, in the main, lasted longer than Brando’s, who, in his later years, let his distaste for his scripts show in the finished product… something the others never did.

Martin McDonagh has said that he has greater respect for cinema than for modern theatre, and that "theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be". Do you agree with these views of his?

 

I neither agree nor disagree, as I have no way of knowing what he means by “edgy in the way I want it to be”.

All I can say is that I visit theatres often and cinemas rarely, nowadays, because I find most of the movies of the last forty years seem to be aimed at people in their second decade of life, and I never did feel that razzle-dazzle special effects were any kind of substitute for good actors delivering a great script.

However, I still see plays which are worth listening to, and the theatre seems to have no lack of actors who can deliver those words in a compelling and memorable way. Quite often I come out of a play and talk about it for hours, even days. This happens very rarely in cinemas (not since “Locke”, and that was at least six years ago), and, when it does, it is almost certainly because the movie I have just seen is the film adaptation of a play which has been altered from the original as minimally as possible.

Are movie reboots better suited for obscure movies that had potential, but were poorly done, rather than a classic that can't be improved upon?

 

If it “can’t be improved upon”, surely remaking it would be a fruitless exercise. Better (and cheaper) to re-release the old one. Trevor Howard, who was in the appalling remake of “Hurricane”, actually said this, when the producer flew out to the location a copy of the original “Hurricane” so that the cast and crew could screen it and laugh at it; it turned out it was obviously so much better than anything they were filming that it totally destroyed everyone’s morale.

It would seem to me that the best reason to remake a movie that had potential but wasn’t satisfactory the first time round is in the cases where the original was unable to discuss its material honestly because of censorship restrictions in force at the time. William Wyler chose to remake his 1936 movie, “These Three”, in 1961, commenting at the time, “I had to wait twenty years for the censor to grow up.” The original had to bend over backwards to hide what Lillian Hellman’s play was actually about!

Wyler ran into the same censorship problem in 1951 with his “Detective Story”, which, once again, was about a subject that was positively taboo at the time, so all the script could do was to drop veiled hints; naive audiences must have been left bewildered at why the leading man was making such a fuss just because his wife had been to a doctor he didn’t like, several years before he even met her. Wyler never remade that one, because the original, in spite of its ambiguous script, was edge-of-the-seat stuff, impeccably acted by Kirk Douglas and Eleanor Parker; it probably wouldn’t have been any better even if the leading lady had been allowed to talk about her (gasp!) abortion!

Do actors really eat when it’s required in a scene, or do they spit it out after the take?

 

Very often they don’t eat at all; they raise their full fork to within an inch of their mouth as they deliver their line, then we cut to a reaction shot of the dining table partner, and when we return to the actor with the fork, that fork is mysteriously empty, he has just finished chewing, and he’s proceeding to load it again from a plate with gradually diminishing food. Look at Robert Mitchum in “Second Chance”; his dinner plate goes from full to empty without so much as a morsel of the food actually disappearing into his mouth.

Sometimes, I expect, the director will insist that the food be actually consumed, and then it can get awkward in the event of multiple takes. It was well-known that Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando were not getting along on at all during the shooting of “Guys and Dolls”, with Sinatra referring to Brando as ‘Mumbles” because of his careless diction. So, in the “Mindy’s cheesecake-or-strudel” scene, where Sinatra has to eat cheesecake while Brando merely has to watch, Brando took his revenge. As the take neared its end, and the cheesecake was all-but consumed, he would deliberately “blow” his line, necessitating a retake (and, of course, a brand new piece of cheesecake to be placed in front of Sinatra). Brando did this eight times in a row, and by the ninth take, even the thought of cheesecake was making Sinatra nauseous. He refused to speak to Brando for the rest of the shooting. Nevertheless, on screen, he looks like he is thoroughly enjoying his cheesecake!

Which would be the most successful movie ever that has a real story behind it?

 

It’s always difficult to answer a question evaluating how successful a movie is, because I am never quite sure whether, by “successful”, you mean the most critically-acclaimed, seen by the most people, or having returned the largest profit. So your “most successful” movie could, for example, be the silent version of “King of Kings”, made by Cecil B de Mille in 1927 and seen by 500 million people (which, for 1927, is a lot of people!).

However, they probably all paid a nickel, so the box office returns wouldn’t look like much when set beside today’s prices. If you want a relatively-recent film as an answer to your question, how about 1977’s “Titanic”? While it never pretended to be a true story, it did have a “real event” behind it, and it was, I have no doubt, that real event that made people put their money on the counter to watch it, since the main story (“a young, naive aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist”) was hardly likely, by itself, to set the world on fire!

What obscure movie did you watch a lot as a child but, no one else you know has even heard of it?

 

Not exactly “watched a lot”, as I saw it in a cinema and then chose to go back a few weeks later for a second look, but certainly few people seem to be aware of the movie, “Time Limit”, with Richard Widmark and Richard Basehart, and directed by the actor Karl Malden. It was a small-budget black-and-white 1957 film, and both times I saw it it was on the lower half of a double-bill; but I even remember snatches of its dialogue (especially the last two lines), whereas I can’t even recall which films were on the top half of the bill.

I have never seen it on DVD or even on VHS, and it never seemed to be shown on free-to-air TV, but it deserves to be remembered.

What is your favorite Stanley Kubrick film?

 

Without doubt, “Paths of Glory”. It was one of those unheralded films which, as you exit the cinema, makes you find a poster in the lobby so that you can check the name of the director. And you know you’re going to hear that name again in the future.

I think “Paths of Glory” is, quite simply, the greatest war film ever… even better than Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, which its battle scenes emulated. Kubrick’s masterpiece, so early in his career.

Are British movies so bad because they don't have Hollywood so they have to use normal stage actors?

 

British movie-makers never had to fall back on Hollywood actors in order to make their movies better; in fact, it was more likely to be the other way around, as British actors were usually stage-trained, with all the versatility and self-discipline that this background entails. The major Hollywood studios used to send talent scouts across the Atlantic just to go see plays, as, with a bit of luck, they might just happen to catch, say, Greer Garson or Maureen O’Hara on-stage at the Abbey in Dublin.

With no lack of talent on their own shores, British films employed Hollywood actors simply to make their movies more marketable in the United States, which was their biggest overseas market. Americans would rather see one of their own on the screen than someone whom, unless they’d visited the west end in London and seen a few stage productions, they wouldn’t recognise, either by face or by reputation. So perfectly-good scripts were often “reworked” so that, while the film might be set in the British Isles, the hero was a visiting American who just happened to be in town for a few days. Listening to the three or four lines in which the hero explained his presence in the “foreign” locale was often good for a grin or two, as the screenwriters seldom came up with anything either original or convincing.

 

Which line in a movie made you tear up?

(1) “In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart”. Millie Perkins, as Anne Frank in “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959).

(2) “She knows! She knows!” Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan, in the last scene of “The Miracle Worker”(1962).

What awesome individual scene almost persuaded you that a bad movie was good?

 

I can think of two movies which may just qualify as an answer to your question:

I was, at best, lukewarm towards “Planet of the Apes” when it was first released (although it was, at least, better than any of its sequels), as the sight of such generally-interesting actors as Kim Hunter, Roddy MacDowall and Maurice Evans running around in monkey suits wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. However, I saw the movie before word about what happened in the very last scene had got out, and I confess that the shock of that final shot just about made the whole evening worthwhile.

The 1953 movie “Niagara” would probably have been relegated to the first half of double bills if not for Fox’s decision to replace their intended leading lady (Anne Baxter) with one of their up-and-coming young stars who was in the headlines over a notorious calendar shoot made years before but only recently “discovered” by the gossip columnists. With their new leading lady (Marilyn Monroe) ensuring box-office queues regardless of the movie, they assigned Henry Hathaway as director, and, while he couldn’t do much with either the script or with Marilyn’s acting, he did at least put together an imaginative scene for a murder (actually, Marilyn’s) in the Rainbow Carillon Bell-Tower. The camera looks down through the fifty-five bells, as they play, at the sinister events taking place below, in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock. Apart from this scene, however, the only real suspense in the movie was wondering how long it would take for the sheet which Marilyn seemed to be almost-covered in for several of her scenes to slip down to the point where the Hayes Office would have sent someone over to Fox to close down the production!

When watching a movie, what interests you more, the acting, the story line, or the scenes and camera effects?

 

I really wouldn’t know how to include “the scenes” in your list, as it would seem to me that a scene is made up of all the other elements you mentioned: it usually has a narrative structure, has lines written for actors to act, and the actors are shot in accord with choices regarding camera placement and visual effects. The scene is, therefore, the sum of all those parts.

So, leaving “scenes” out of the list, I would have to say that I rarely go to the movies nowadays for a story, as there seem to be no new stories anymore; but if I am interested in the actor(s), I am often eager to go along to enjoy their performance, And, now that I am a captive audience, a good story line will certainly provide a rewarding vehicle for watching that performance. Camera effects I can respond to, such as the brilliant use of framing and lighting in “Night of the Hunter”…. but while I appreciate their occurrence, they, alone, would hardly constitute a reason for going to see a movie. “2001: A Space Odyssey”, to use a classic example, was crammed full of innovative visual effects, and while I was as awe-struck by them as everyone else at the time, they alone couldn’t dissuade me from thinking that the movie was grossly overrated, and really quite boring.

Can a movie producer change anything in an idea that a movie director gives him to make his movie happen?

 

I would imagine that most of the important ideas regarding the movie actually go in the other direction, FROM the producer (who “owns” the finished product and is ultimately responsible for it) TO the director (who has to go along with what the producer decides because, of course, “ideas” cost money, and it is the producer’s money being spent).

Within that framework, the producer will expect the director to put his own “stamp” on the enterprise, which will almost certainly be in accord with the producer’s vision, or he wouldn’t have chosen that director in the first place. But if, by chance, the director starts inserting into the movie anything that is NOT in accord with what the producer wants, then yes, he can change anything he chooses… including the director!

Which are your picks on the best gangster movies of all time?

 

There are a lot of good ones, but just to keep it simple, here are five that are worth researching:

“White Heat” (James Cagney)

“High Sierra” (Humphrey Bogart)

“Dead End” (Humphrey Bogart)

“Key Largo” (Edward G Robinson)

“Some Like it Hot” (George Raft)

Are there any examples of actor’s injuries being written into a plot?

 

In “The Swimmer”, Burt Lancaster’s character had to demonstrate to a teenage admirer that middle-age hadn’t really affected his physical prowess, and he did some fast running and jumping over fences while she watched and admired. While physical tasks presented no challenge to the circus-performer-turned-actor, he actually twisted his ankle during one of the takes, so, rather than hold up shooting until he had recovered, the team simply carried on, with Lancaster’s limp written in to the movie.

Opinion: Alfred Hitchcock's movies are more dull and unwatchable than most old movies worth mentioning. Would you agree or disagree?

 

Disagree, unless you are referring specifically to a couple of his very last movies, which were clearly not up-to-standard… but I am sure you weren’t, because you did say “movies worth mentioning”, which those final ones certainly were not. But the films he made when he was in his prime — and that includes several that he made before he even went to America — still hold up today in spite of the primitive technology of the era, and show more imagination and ingenuity than most of the movies made nowadays (these, of course, often include remakes of some of his old movies, whether acknowledged or not, and, therefore, comparisons are easy… and almost always favour the original).

Must we conscientiously look for meanings in movies that are meant for just entertainment?

 

I guess the issue here is whether you KNOW there are deep meanings in a movie, or whether it was, indeed, simply intended to be “just for entertainment” (which, I presume, means contains nothing meaningful).

How would you know? Movies don’t usually announce a deep meaning that is supposed to be non-obvious (or there’s not much point trying to make it non-obvious!), and even those that have these deep and meaningful objectives usually try to be entertaining, on some level, or why would anyone sit and watch?

This is where reading reviews — REAL reviews, not the ones that are quoted on DVD jackets and insist that everything walks away with 4.5 stars and is a “must-see” — is very useful, in order to alert you to what to look for in a movie. A good reviewer does his homework, so he will have done the “conscientious” part for you, and will be eager to share with you the fruits of his experience and insight. So you can proceed to uncover the meanings with confidence, and without worrying about whether you should be just sitting back and letting the “entertainment” wash over you. Actually, recognising the clues indicating that the writer and director actually did have something to say can, itself, be VERY entertaining!

But be warned… once you start enjoying this aspect of movies, you might find the “other” kind — the movies that don’t have any other purpose than to entertain you for an hour and a half — rather shallow and unsatisfying. It’s easy to be lulled, rather than challenged, by entertainment, and the movie-makers are quite happy to see you lulled, because this also means that you are uncritical. It is good for you, and good for the movie industry, that you demand more from the cinema than just keeping you comfortably occupied for a couple of hours.

Are there any Hollywood celebrities who never divorced? Why does it seem like celebrities are likely to get divorced frequently?

 

I expect that the reason it seems like celebrities are often involved in divorces is simply that this sad event makes good copy. There are many celebrities who had long and happy marriages, but a long and happy marriage doesn’t sell magazines.

James Stewart was only ever married once. and his marriage lasted 45 years, after which he spent the remaining three years of his life as a widower.

Fred Astaire became a widower after twenty-one years of marriage, and did, in fact, eventually marry a second time, quite late in life; however, he, also, never entered a divorce court, and was, in fact, so devastated when his first wife died (at age 46) that he pleaded to drop out of the film he was making at the time, even offering to pay the movie production costs so far accrued, out of his own pocket (fortunately, he was eventually persuaded that going on with the movie was probably the best therapy he could have).

When did Hollywood start putting a lot of makeup on its actors and actresses?

 

Actors for the movies had to come from somewhere; in the earliest days of cinema, they usually came from the stage, which, in the nineteenth century, was often lit by gas lights of such intensity that they drowned out all the features on the actors’ faces. Greasepaint was developed to “tone down” the reflective effect of light on unmade-up stage faces, and every working actor came with a kit of essentials for making himself up before walking on-stage. When these actors walked into early Hollywood, they brought their kit with them, and, for a while there, made up for the movies much like they would have if they were still performing on-stage.

 

Audiences of the day seemed to accept the bizarre look that resulted for both men and women; in any case, since most of the movies being made in the silent era were short slapstick comedies, the lack of realism in the make-up was as acceptable as the make-up on clowns in a circus. No one expected clowns to look “natural”.

Since then, the trend has been to gradually use less and less-makeup, as lighting in the movies has improved and audiences demand a much-greater degree of realism in sets, in characterisation, and, yes, in the make-up which the actors employ. Its main function became to hide blemishes and signs of age, especially in the female stars of the “golden age”, who were expected to look flawless; in the 21st century, however, even these “flaws” are starting to be considered acceptable, especially in men (no one minded that all of the signs of wear-and-tear on Robert Redford’s were right there, on display, in “All is Lost”).

In short, then, since the use of make-up preceded Hollywood, it never actually “started” anything; it merely carried on a tradition already several hundred years old.

 

Why do critics say Buster Keaton was more talented than Charlie Chaplin?

 

I have never heard anyone say that Buster Keaton was more “talented” than Charles Chaplin; I have, however, heard people (myself among them) say that Keaton’s comedies were funnier.

Keaton’s persona was surely more humorous than Chaplin’s, relying, as it did, less on dress and make-up and more on simple facial expressions and posture, marks of a great actor. That, and his longevity in the business (he was still making people laugh in 1966, in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, the clear stand-out clown in a movie full of clowns) could certainly help argue the case that he was the funniest of all the silent comedians, Chaplin included; but, again, this is not the same as claiming he had more talent. Both could write and direct the films in which they starred; Chaplin, in addition, wrote the scripts for his talkies, and composed the scores as well, so he certainly had areas of expertise which Keaton never got a chance to display. I guess all of those ingredients go into the “soup” that we call “talent”, and, in this case, the balance may well tip in favour of the Little Tramp.

But no one made me laugh as much as did Buster!

 

What was the most unforgettable movie from the last decade?

 

For me, coming up with a single title was easy, because — not being a fan of superheroes, spectacular action, and CGI — I seldom have a great time nowadays at the movies. But I just loved “Locke”; an original and quite daring concept, it actually had a script worth listening to, the single character in the movie was totally believable and you became involved with him and his dilemma, and, with just a single set (the interior of a car with a lone driver at the wheel, and the entire plot revealed through his carphone calls), it was willing to take a risk with audiences being used to being blasted with action and multi-channel sound. It was the high-water mark of movies made, not just in the last decade, but so far in the third millennium.

 

Which movies made the most impact on your particular generation?

 

My generation grew up in the 1950s, and this was the era of the teen movies… the movies (often with “teen” in the title) which were made specifically for the drive-in cinemas, and utilised, as often as not, the “talents” of the latest one-hit-wonder rock ’n’ roll sensation.

Before the fifties, teenagers were hardly recognised as a defined audience for movies; there may have been a few films that were especially popular with young people, but, in the main, they went to movies aimed at an adult audience, and starring adults.

On a website listing the teen movies of the forties — films such as “Little Annie Rooney” and “Junior Miss” — the compilers were able to find just five films. That’s five in the whole decade. But for the fifties, they found thirty-three, and I am sure they missed dozens more. The fifties was the era of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and movies such as “Rock Around the Clock” (which, like “Rock Pretty Baby” and “Don’t Knock the Rock”, the site missed….although it did list “Rock! Rock! Rock!”; all four of these gems were released in 1956). Other titles of movies of that era include “Jailhouse Rock” (Presley), “The Wild One” (Brando), “Rebel Without a Cause” (Dean), “The Blob” (Steve McQueen), and those appalling cut-price “horror” flicks, such as “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”, “Teenage Caveman”, “Teenage Zombies”, “Teenagers from Outer Space”, “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein”. Then there were the movies about teenage problems: “High School Confidential”, “Teenage Rebel”, “Teenage Thunder”, “The Restless Years”, “The Violent Years”, “This Angry Age”, “The Delinquents”, “Hot Rod Girl”, “Hot Car Girl”, “Teenage Doll” and “A Dangerous Age”. The serious moviegoer had to choose carefully in order to ensure he didn’t wander into one of these masterpieces by mistake!

Which studio had the worst reputation during the golden age of Hollywood?

 

Probably Monogram, because it was the one the other studios used to joke about. Mind you, it wasn’t the ONLY studio they joked about: RKO came in for a bit of drubbing also (during the war, one of the major studios was said, by the “wags”, to have erected a sign for its employees: “In the event of an air-raid, go directly to RKO. They haven’t had a hit in years”).

But, while RKO wasn’t so great at making a lot of money, it did turn out some acknowledged masterpieces during that time, so that more than salvaged its reputation. You would be hard-pressed, however, to find a single masterpiece, or even a near-miss, emanating from Monogram during its entire period of production. This shouldn’t be construed as failure, however; it was perhaps the poorest of the poverty-row studios, and it didn’t try to advance the cause of cinema with its output. It was simply after a quick profit. It was said (probably by those same “wags”) that the head of the studio had a sign on the wall behind his desk: “We don’t want it good, we want it Thursday”.

Much of its product looked like it might have even been delivered on Tuesday.

Have some actors actually gotten angry for real and gone off-script while shooting a scene with an argument?

 

Of course… when that happens, it adds an extra dimension to a scene, so directors are often more than happy to let them ad-lib to their heart’s content. In “Kramer vs Kramer” (a film with quite a bit of ad-libbing), Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep have an altercation in a restaurant. At the end of one take, a furious Hoffman spontaneously picked up a glass from the table and threw it against the wall behind Meryl’s head. Watch the scene and see her jump! She didn’t expect it, and her reaction was so “real” that, of course, that was the take that was used in the movie.

I’m sure there are dozens of other similar examples, so I expect you will get lots of responses.

Are Holiday Inn and White Christmas the same movie?

 

“White Christmas” was planned as a remake of “Holiday Inn”, with Crosby and Astaire reprising their roles (and Bing reprising his number-one hit song), only this time in VistaVision and colour. Fred Astaire found that he had other commitments, so they went with Danny Kaye instead, and, of course, that major change led to other changes, with the result that there are quite a few differences (one major one being that “Holiday Inn” is pretty good). But, yes, they are, essentially, the same movie.

What was your favourite movie when you were aged 12?

 

That was a long time ago… in 1954… but I was, back in those days, crazy enough to keep a list of films that I saw, award them star ratings, write a few sentences as a “review, and even give awards at the end of the year. So, the answer to your question comes back to me quite readily. My favourite movie of all time, released in that year, was “The Caine Mutiny”, with Humphrey Bogart (whom I chose as my “Best Actor” of the year).

Which director has won the most Oscars?

 

This question was the final one on a TV quiz programme for which the prize for a correct answer was a staggering amount of money… possibly the whole million. They even gave you four possibilities from which to choose! From my armchair, I confidently yelled “Frank Capra!”, and waited confidently to be proclaimed the household know-it-all. And I got it wrong. It was, the programme assured us, John Ford, who won four times, as against Capra’s three.

 

Why do many Hollywood stars direct movies? Is it easy to become a director if you’re already acting?

 

If you have a bit of “clout”, I expect it’s an irresistible temptation for a star to try to overrule a director and ensure that scenes in which the star appears are done exactly as that star wants it. It was said that Betty Hutton kept demanding retakes on “Annie Get Your Gun” if she even got a hint that her co-stars might have been upstaging her whenever she was in the shot. She actually reminded Howard Keel (a gentleman who never put her in her place) that the name of the film was “Annie”, and NOT “Frank Butler” (his character), and on one occasion demanded thirty-five takes on a scene until she was satisfied that all eyes would remain on her. I guess from there, it’s a small step to directing your own movie.

Barbra Streisand had one of Hollywood’s most-renowned directors, William Wyler, on hand for her first movie (“Funny Girl”), but she was so insistent about how he was to direct her scenes that one of his colleagues was moved to whisper to him, “Be gentle with her, Willie; after all, this is the first movie she’s ever directed”. For her second film, she had Gene Kelly as director, and he, too, was a gentleman and tolerated her demands; but her co-star, Walter Matthau, finally said aloud what many of the cast and crew had been thinking, and suggested to her, “Why don’t you let the fucking director direct the fucking picture?” It wasn’t too long, of course, before Barbra Streisand started to exercise official control over her movies, and sign them herself; from “Yentl” onwards, no one would ever speak to her again as Matthau had.

What supporting performance was equal to or better than the actor/actress in the lead? Why?

 

There have been many such instances, but, just for openers, the two leads in “West Side Story” were adequate, but never seemed equal to the demands of their roles. The two supporting players, however — Rita Moreno and George Chakiris — were quite sensational, and both picked up Academy Awards for their contributions, beating such consistent “high-fliers” as Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift, both of whom had been nominated for “Judgment at Nuremberg”.

In what movie did you like the bad guy more than the good guy?

 

The MGM musical drama "Love me or Leave Me" was the story (based on fact) of the wannabe-musical star, Ruth Etting, who caught the eye of a gangster named Marty Snyder, who became so besotted with her that he took over management of her career (and her personal life) even though she was in love with her piano player and thought that a sweet "thank you" was all she owed her benefactor.

The film was a big step up for Doris Day, who had previously made all her films for Warner Bros, where they were more interested in promoting her as the uncomplicated girl-next-door than in allowing her to expand her range with dramatic roles like this one. Doris was good, but perhaps not quite strong enough in a role that had originally been slated for Ava Gardner. The role of Snyder, however, was given to James Cagney, one of the few actors in Hollywood who could play a gangster and still show his human side. And show it he did, in a performance so well-rounded, and so convincing, that audiences began to see things from his point of view, and Doris's character came across as opportunistic, ungrateful, and, well, a bit tawdry. You tended to feel genuinely sorry for Snyder when his career, and his life, came undone, whereas you didn't much care whether his singer became the number-one star that she wanted to be or not.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Why do movie sequels tend to get worse as time goes on?

 

Possibly the main reason is that the creative forces behind the originals have normally “used up their juices” with the first — or, at least, the first and second — editions, and, having nothing more to add to the project, move on to other pursuits. The people who take their place often have neither the creative ability nor the drive to attempt anything more than a pale imitation. What they are relying on, more than anything, is, usually, scoring easy points thanks to pre-sold titles and pre-sold characters; their hope is that these will be enough for their project to turn a quick profit without too much original thinking on their part.

Of course, the audiences have something to do with this, too; what we found original and exciting in its first offering doesn’t always please us quite as much when we have to watch it served up again, like yesterday’s dinner. So we are probably conditioned to be, at least, a little disappointed, because the makers of the sequel, whatever they might bring to the party (and, with modern movies, like the “Jurassic” series, they are at least able to bring an improvement in the special effects), are unlikely to be able to duplicate that thrill of a brand-new experience.

Who is your favorite cinematographer of the golden age of Hollywood?

 

There were a lot of great cinematographers working during the Golden Years, and it would be hard to choose a single one; but, if pressed, I guess I would choose James Wong Howe. I recall, on several occasions back in the forties and fifties, seeing films with photography which I thought was particularly interesting but, in many cases, hadn’t attended to the opening titles carefully enough, so I didn’t know who deserved the credit. Checking up afterwards, it was, quite frequently, the name “James Wong Howe” that I came across.

Among the films of his I recall with pleasure, mainly for his deep focus black-and-white, which was such a pleasure to watch, were “Body and Soul”, “Picnic” (the only one in this list in colour… but few people ever used it to better effect), “Sweet Smell of Success”, “Hud”, “The Outrage” and “Seconds”. In very recent years (long after Howe’s death), I recall a movie called “Nebraska”, starring Bruce Dern; watching it, I thought, “Why, this cinematographer uses his camera like James Wong Howe used to do.” I guess that’s the ultimate compliment to pay an artist.

 

What are some of the plot twists in Hollywood movies that went too far?

 

This answer might serve as a “spoiler” for what was a very good film, full of plot twists: “Predestination”, a science fiction film about time travel. So if you haven’t seen it yet and plan to, don’t read a single word further.

Since the plot of the film was virtually about people travelling through time, changing their appearance (or sex), and then meeting themselves in the past or the future (and even falling in love with themselves, or killing themselves in a past or future incarnation) — rather complex concepts, you have to admit — then the writers were able to play fast and loose with the audience’s suspension of disbelief; I mean, who could possibly say what was possible and what was not? So you learn to just go along with such strange events as a man going back in time to steal, from a foundling home, a new-born baby girl which is actually him, anyway; it’s only afterwards you try to figure out the logistics. And most of the time you have to admit that, yes, given the story’s basic premise, an event such as this just might be possible.

However, I drew the line at suspending disbelief for one plot twist, which, I thought, was taking the concept a step too far. Can a person go back in time and give birth to herself? That seems to be what the film is asking us to accept. Or did I get that part wrong? If you know better, please write back and explain it to me, so I can, red-facedly, delete this post to hide my embarrassment!

Was Humphrey Bogart’s performance in the African Queen (where he won the Oscar) his best work?

 

It’s certainly his most-honoured work, of course, since this was his only “Oscar”; but, of course, cinema history is full of instances of Academy Awards being given to actors for work which was far from their best, but happened to be stronger than the competition in that particular year. I think this is true of Bogart; I have always believed that his best performance was as Captain Queeg in “The Caine Mutiny”, which was especially impressive because it was quite a departure for him, and (unlike “African Queen”) played on a much tighter scale, full of tiny gestures and fleeting facial expressions. Running a close second would be a film which is not often seen, but if you do track it down, you may agree with me that seeing both the movie and Bogey’s performance is like striking gold: “In a Lonely Place”.

 

How popular was the actress Grace Kelly in the 1950s?

 

Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn both rode the crest of a wave which was, essentially, a backlash against the “bosoms-with-cleavage and minuscule waists” trend which began with Marilyn Monroe and included such Monroe “clones” as Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren. Grace and Audrey looked like real people, spoke and walked with a degree of elegance and refinement, and, all in all, looked like they had a bit of “class”.

For a few years, Grace was very popular indeed, although her star status lasted for far less time than that of Audrey. Grace’s brief time at the top was helped immeasurably by her association with Alfred Hitchcock (who probably kicked himself that he hadn’t discovered Audrey!), who used her in three movies in quick succession (and, of course, further elevated by the now-notorious Academy Award which she won for her performance in “The Country Girl” (1954), playing, against ‘type’, a woman who didn’t know how to dress and to do her hair).

While Hitchcock was largely responsible for making Grace Kelly’s career, he was also, ironically, the main reason for its sudden (and early) termination… or, at any rate, change of direction. Against his usual inclinations (he generally hated location-work, preferring the complete control which a studio-shoot allowed), he decided to film his French-Riviera romantic thriller, “To Catch a Thief”, in Monaco. That decision, of course, changed the course of Grace Kelly’s life, and resulted in her permanent exit from Hollywood, although she still remained the world’s most popular princess for quite a few years afterwards!

How do low budget movies afford big name actors to star in them?

 

One way, I guess, is to catch the star when he’s just coming out of a slump.

Mickey Rooney had been one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during the 1940s — at one stage, even beating Clark Gable in the “most popular actor” stakes. However, by 1950, he was without a home studio (MGM was on an economy drive and was letting its major players go) and was not working nearly as frequently as even five years earlier. So he was talked into putting some of his own money into a film-noir “quickie”, a B-movie called “Quicksand”, which ran just 79 minutes. Neither the film itself or Rooney’s investment proved to be a major money-maker, but it had the benefit, as far as he was concerned, of showing his mature talents in a straight drama, without singing, dancing, and playing every instrument in the orchestra (as he liked to do in his time at MGM). And, it seems, on that level it worked; soon, offers started rolling in for big-budget “straight” dramas such as “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, and Rooney’s career was once again on an upward swing.

Frank Sinatra had made a few disastrous career moves and personal-life decisions in the early 1950s, and suddenly found himself without either a recording company or a move studio behind him. In 1953, he talked his way into a major movie, “From Here to Eternity”, by offering his services at a fraction of what he used to command, and the word started to get around Hollywood that what he was doing in his supporting role was quite a revelation. Perhaps it was this scuttlebutt that encouraged small-time producer Robert Bassler to jump in and offer Sinatra the lead in a 77-minute B-thriller he was preparing called “Suddenly”. Sinatra took the part for a meagre salary, and in rapid succession, “From Here to Eternity” was released, he won the Academy Award for his performance, his price went sky-high (but not, of course, for the now-completed “Suddenly”), and Robert Bassler found himself with a B-movie that distributors started treating as if it was an “A”. I expect he made a lot of money from that canny decision!

How different would The Godfather (part 1) have been if the other top choice for Vito Corleone, Laurence Olivier, had gotten the role?

 

Everyone seemed to want Sir Laurence for just about every “important” role at that time, as he (and his make-up box) moved easily between characters of various races, cultures, accents, appearances, and ages. So he was cropping up as Jewish cantors (“The Jazz Singer”), Teutonic princes (“The Prince and the Showgirl”), Russian doctors (“Uncle Vanya)”, Muslim religious leaders (“Khartoum”), Parisian roues (“A Little Romance”), Nazi war criminals (“Marathon Man”), Transylvanian professors (“Dracula”), Greek gods (“Clash of the Titans”), and even Negro generals (“Othello”). So it’s not surprising that he would have been considered for a Sicilian patriarch, and, of course, he would have brought it off — as he always did — very cleverly: looking the part, sounding the part, even the special walk in place; but always being Laurence Olivier doing a party trick. You seldom really believed in his characters as people, so, instead, you sat back and admired his technique.

So how would he have compared with Brando? In “The Godfather”, Brando pulled off all the tricks one associates with Sir Laurence at his best (or worst); he changed his appearance, his face, his voice…. yet it was always just Brando mumbling away, doing his party trick with cotton balls (or whatever) stuck in his cheeks. Neither actor was really right for Vito Corleone, and casting either one would have been the usual case of sacrificing the authenticity of the movie in order to have a star name above the title. Richard Conte would have been more authentic than either of them, but he was an actor, not a star, so he was given, instead, a minor part with no more than a half-dozen lines. If forced to choose between Olivier and Brando, I think probably Sir Laurence would have been the more interesting to watch, and no less-convincing….and, more importantly, you would have understood every word he said. But Brando won the Oscar for those cotton balls, and Sir Laurence didn’t even get a nomination for any of the roles I listed above (well, maybe one), so who am I to question the wisdom of the Academy?

Why do some trailers use special footage?

 

It is the job of the editor to select, from all the footage that has been shot, exactly what goes into the movie. That editor, however, would not necessarily have anything to do with assembling the trailer. In the days of the major studios, there was a special department assigned just to produce trailers, and they were routinely given access to alternate takes or snippets that had been removed from the final print. If the trailer department felt that a few frames from these alternates gave a more accurate impression of the strengths of the scene (or the actor’s performance) than the footage which the editor had selected for the release print, there is no reason why they couldn’t make an “executive decision” and slip that footage into their trailer. It is unlikely that either the producer or the director would be looking quite that closely, anyway, since there are often several trailers constructed for exhibition in a variety of locales; just as long, of course, as the trailer didn’t actually mislead!

 

Why did Audrey Hepburn do her own singing in Funny Face (1957)?

 

Simply because her voice was perfectly good enough for the job. She wasn’t playing a professional singer, so she didn’t have to sound like Maria Callas; she was partnering Fred Astaire, who is also a perfectly-acceptable singer, but with a light and undistinguished voice (his specialty is delivery of a lyric… and, of course, dancing), and, really, the only person in the movie who had a voice which might have shown them all up was Kay Thompson. So why bother to dub, which (as hundreds of movies have demonstrated) never really works anyway, as it’s hard to “match” accurately with the speaking voice around the song?

The proof of this last statement can easily be seen by looking at another Audrey Hepburn movie — “My Fair Lady” — in which she WAS dubbed, because it was feared she couldn’t compete with the versions of those songs which everyone knew….sung, of course, by Julie Andrews. So Marni Nixon stepped in to sing for Audrey, and Marni can sing as well as anyone, but she simply didn’t sound like Audrey, and the whole film — and especially Audrey’s performance —suffered as a result. Years later, Audrey’s original readings of the “My Fair Lady” songs were released on the Special Edition DVD, so you can listen for yourself to see who did the better job. Nixon’s voice is clearer and she has a greater range, and flawless intonation; Audrey, however, was able to fit the character better (especially in “Show Me” and “Wouldn’t it Be Loverly”), expressed the lyrics flawlessly, and, well, sounded like Audrey, which would have been a BIG “plus”!

The jury is still out regarding the decision to dub Audrey in “My Fair Lady”; for myself, I would have liked the film more if Audrey’s vocals had been used, even if they did have to drop the key in “I Could Have Danced All Night” to accommodate her range, or even change a note here and there. Fortunately for all concerned, I don’t think that there was even any talk about dubbing Audrey for “Funny Face” (or for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), and I have never heard so much as a whisper of complaint about her vocals in either film.

 

Who is your favorite actress from the golden age of Hollywood?

 

Judy Garland, because she was the most talented performer in every area of the business. In the golden age of Hollywood, MGM was the golden studio, and Judy was the studio’s top star in the films that it could make better than any of the others: musicals… the glorious dance-down-the-street fantasies, and the ones that had a dramatic background.

She could act so well that she won a juvenile Academy Award for her performance in “The Wizard of Oz” way back in 1939, and received several subsequent nominations, right up to 1961. She could sing and dance with the best of them… in fact, since she was able to hold a concert stage all by herself in the 50s and 60s, and give a series of concerts which earned her the title of “the greatest entertainer in show business history”, I think it’s fair to say that, as far as the singing was concerned, she WAS the best of them. Yet she could do a television interview without a script, and have the audience and the interviewer in fits of laughter. “The funniest woman in America” is what Lucille Ball called her. There just seemed to be no limit to her talent.

She conquered, in turn, the vaudeville stage (before she even turned ten!), the movies, radio and records, the concert stage, and, finally, television; in all of them, she became a legend. There were a lot of great performers in Hollywood’s golden age: Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, just to name three. But no one even came close to Judy.

Before Audrey Hepburn, other actresses considered for the role of Holly Golightly included Shirley MacLaine and Truman Capote’s preferred choice Marilyn Monroe. How do you think they would’ve fared in that role?

 

I didn’t know that either was considered, so that is interesting information. Shirley would have been good, also, as she has that vulnerability-underneath-the-brash-exterior which Audrey brought to the part. Don’t know about Marilyn, but I suspect that Capote would have pushed her name forward because that would have ensured the movie of his novella would be a multi-million-dollar hit., and his next adaptation would have displayed his name above the title.

 

What is the biggest mistake an actor has made onstage?

 

This is not exactly an earth-shattering mistake, but it was certainly one that was done in front of perhaps the largest and most distinguished audience in the world: the televised ceremony for the 1984 Academy Awards, telecast world-wide to around twenty million viewers, and watched ‘live’ by an audience of Hollywood’s finest. The evening’s final presenter, chosen to give the honours to the year’s best movie, was Sir Laurence Olivier, one of the most-experienced stage actors in the history of the theatre. So what could possibly go wrong?

Maybe it was Jack Lemmon’s teary (and a little overdone) tribute to Sir Laurence to introduce him to the star-studded audience that did it; Lemmon actually compared him to a Greek god, if I recall, and then said that this was an understatement! Anyway, Sir Laurence walked humbly on-stage to a standing ovation from his peers, and, it seems, “lost it”.

Instead of following instructions, and reading out the list of nominees on the front of the envelope clutched in his hand, and then ceremoniously tearing open that envelope to extract the paper bearing the winner’s name, Sir Laurence, without even glancing at it, tore it open, out of sight, while gratefully acknowledging the tribute just given to him. By the time he had finished his humble response, all he had left in his hand was the paper with the winner’s name; totally ignoring the other four nominated movies (whose producers, of course, were eagerly awaiting the mention of their film as one of the top five) he said, simply, “The winner is “Amadeus”, and stood back while the music played, the production team ran eagerly from their seats to the stage, and the organisers in the wings, aghast, wondered how on earth they were going to salvage the situation.

Fortunately, the producer of “Amadeus” did it for them, acknowledging each of the nominees, in turn, in his “thank you” speech. Sir Laurence was forgiven; perhaps wisely, he never agreed to appear as presenter again.

Of all the movies you have seen, which one did you discuss most times afterwards?

That may well be “Judgment at Nuremberg”.

What was so interesting about that movie was that, while it dealt with what might seem, to a new generation, a black-and-white “good vs evil” issue, it acknowledged that the “evil” side at least had a case to make, and that simply labelling them as the bad guys (which was the usual way for American movies to treat the enemy) was an oversimplification. Abby Mann, who wrote the screenplay, gave approximately-equal time to both sides of the argument, and director Stanley Kramer took pains to choose his cast so that both arguments could be presented eloquently and convincingly. What’s more, that cast was so exceptional — Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich — that you could come out of the movie and talk for hours about their compelling performances, as well as vigorously discussing the larger issues presented by the screenplay. A three-hour movie worthy of six hours of discussion-over-coffee. Who can ask for more from the cinema?

Which is the best mystery movie ever made in the history of cinema?

 

“Witness for the Prosecution” is always one of the front-runners here, because, concocted by Agatha Christie, it is devilishly cunning and has enough twists and turns to ensure that there will always be something in the finale that you didn’t see coming. In addition, it is so well-played by the excellent cast (especially the great Charles Laughton, who, as usual, shows off outrageously, but is just so much fun to watch, and also by Marlene Dietrich, who HAS to be better than she has ever been before — and she is — or the entire denouement won’t work) that, even if you had read the play and knew the outcome, you’d be bound to have a great time.

I also have a genuine fondness for “The Last of Sheila”, a murder-mystery so convoluted that, when the long and involved (and a little improbable!) explanation for all the inexplicable events is given, in the last reel, the only way the writers could ensure that you would keep watching — and listening — intently was to have one of the great actors of the screen (James Mason) come out and explain it all, in a six or eight-minute monologue which, even if it’s too complicated to fully grasp the first (or even second) time round, gives you a rare opportunity to sit back and enjoy THAT voice, such a delightful experience that you won’t really mind if you’re still a little confused (it’s a pity that Mason didn’t have more to do in the preceding ninety minutes; unlike “Witness for the Prosecution”, this one doesn’t quite have the “dream cast” to turn it into a classic).The piece was written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and I think this might have been the only collaboration of these two great minds; they must have spent many a New York evening chuckling over their own ingenuity.

Why do shows replace the actor of an established main character?

 

I guess the first thing to say in trying to answer this question is that they don’t, if they don’t have to.

When the departure, for one reason or another, of a main actor in a series takes place, the producers have a problem, because the departing player takes a lot of fans with him, and the replacement is, therefore, going to have a hard row to hoe, regardless of how talented he may be.

So, whenever possible, the writers adjust the script to take away most of the pain associated with the change. During the run of “Bewitched”, when Emmy Award-winning Alice Pearce, playing the nosey neighbour reacting to the devilish goings-on next door, died mid-season, it was not terribly hard to find a replacement who could react with the same “always-gobsmacked” expressions that dear Alice had perfected; the trick was doing the switch so that few viewers would notice the difference. So, suddenly, “Gladys Kravitz” had gone on an extended vacation, and her home was being looked after by her equally-nosey (and easily shocked) “sister”, played by Sandra Gould. Once that point was made, the writers didn’t even have to change a line!

But what happens if it’s a main character? A neighbour, or an aunt, or the corner-store grocer, are easily explained-away with a well-written sentence or two; it’s less-easy if the lead’s husband or parent (for instance) has to be suddenly replaced. This happened, too, to the unhappy “Bewitched” writers, who must have started to believe they really were; “husband” Dick York became seriously ill, and had to be swiftly replaced by an actor who could play in the same style. Fortunately, the producers knew of the perfect choice, since their replacement, Dick Sargent, had actually been offered the role from the beginning, but had, at first, declined. Perplexed viewers just had to remember the golden words of Alfred Hitchcock: “Ingrid, it’s only a movie!”

 

In all the time that you have seen the Academy Awards, at what time were you surprised by who was receiving an award? What was the movie, and what was the category?

 

I guess ever since “The Greatest Show on Earth” won the award for Best Picture in 1952, and Judy Garland LOST the award for Best Actress in 1954 (and to a somewhat-routine performance by her competitor), nothing has ever really surprised me in the Academy’s choices.

But when Richard Burton was overlooked (for about the dozenth time) for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (probably the best performance any screen actor EVER gave) while Paul Scofield got the nod instead for his “distinguished” reading of Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”, I do admit to feeling gobsmacked.

Also, when Marlon Brando, mumbling even worse than usual with cotton balls in his cheeks, was awarded for “The Godfather” in the same year that Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier were nominated for “Sleuth”, that was really just about the last nail in the coffin.

Before Audrey Hepburn, other actresses considered for the role of Holly Golightly included Shirley MacLaine and Truman Capote’s preferred choice Marilyn Monroe. How do you think they would’ve fared in that role?

 

I didn’t know that either was considered, so that is interesting information. Shirley would have been good, also, as she has that vulnerability-underneath-the-brash-exterior which Audrey brought to the part. Don’t know about Marilyn, but I suspect that Capote would have pushed her name forward because that would have ensured the movie of his novella would be a multi-million-dollar hit., and his next adaptation would have displayed his name above the title.

 

What actors/actresses were big stars but were involved in scandals or controversies and were subsequently blacklisted or haven’t done anything noteworthy since?

 

There have been books full of stories of unfortunate individuals whose careers were derailed because of something that had happened in their private lives, right from the days of silent movies (Roscoe ‘Fatty” Arbuckle, who attended a party where a girl was fatally injured) to the present day (will Johnny Depp survive unscathed?). Luminaries as significant as Charles Chaplin, Paul Robeson (both political undesirables), and Ingrid Bergman (a “woman of moral turpitude”!!) were forced into exile because the government, or public, declared something they had done off-screen to be so scandalous that they didn’t deserve to even live in the USA.

The biggest time for blacklisting was, surely, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee Investigations (commonly referred to as the McCarthy Hearings) , in which scores of actors, writers, and directors were told, quite simply, that “You’ll never work again in this town”, and either changed their names (a common ploy for writers, such as Albert Matz and Dalton Trumbo), changed their addresses (directors who weren’t welcome in the USA, such as Jules Dassin and Robert Rossen, were still feted in more-sober Europe), changed their jobs (or just didn’t work at all), or committed suicide.

Just one case in point — a particularly sad one as the Committee shot down two talented people with a single bullet — was that of Larry Parks and his wife, Betty Garrett. Parks was blacklisted by the Committee because he had, at some point in his life, attended a meeting with what were referred to as “Communist sympathisers”. The man who had starred as Al Jolson in two wildly-successful big-budget movies, and whose face was recognised all over the western world, suddenly found that he wasn’t welcome at home, and had to travel to England to find work. Betty Garrett was punished simply because she was married to Larry Parks… that alone was enough to keep her on the sidelines instead of in the spotlight, where she surely belonged. When Judy Garland dropped out of the movie “Annie Get Your Gun” — one of the ‘plum’ roles of the entire ‘forties and a starmaker if ever there was one — the part was offered to Betty on condition that she “ditched that Commie-loving husband of yours”. When she refused point-blank, instead of playing the sharp-shooter, she herself was shot down: there was little left for her but to accompany her husband to England, and, talent notwithstanding, she was seldom seen again in a Hollywood movie.

What are some roles that now-famous actors and actresses wish they could erase from history?

 

Paul Newman was so embarrassed by his movie debut, in “The Silver Chalice”, that when, after years of gathering dust in someone’s vault, it finally resurfaced and was shown on television, he took full-page advertisements in the trade papers apologising for it.

Frank Sinatra never stopped rubbishing “The Kissing Bandit”, made, against his own better judgment, when he was a contract player at MGM. Actually, there were quite a few of his early movies of which he was less than fond, but that was, apparently, the bottom of his barrel (I wonder what he thought of “Miracle of the Bells”?)

I’ve heard that the very mention of “The Marriage Go-Round” was enough to spoil James Mason’s Day (although he is my all-time favourite actor, that is the only one of his films that I have consciously avoided, so I can’t comment on the reason for his hostility). I expect that “Prince Valiant” didn’t exactly brighten it, either!

Finally, I have no doubt that, after winning the Tony Award on Broadway and the Academy Award in Hollywood, Anne Bancroft would be quite happy to quietly omit the movie “Gorilla at Large” (in which she apparently spent a great deal of screen time being carried around by a man in a gorilla suit) from her resume.

What are some good Hollywood movies to improve vocabulary?

 

The movies where the characters really talk to each other, and in which the story is advanced through the dialogue rather than through long action sequences. This would suggest that what you might well look for are movies which began their life as stage plays; films like Denzel Washington’s “Fences”, or “August Osage County” or “Frost/Nixon”. Movies with strong scripts are, perhaps, a lot scarcer in the era of CGI than they once were, but they do still make them occasionally, and they don’t all have to be based on Shakespearean plays and spoken in a language that hasn’t been used in five hundred years! But, as Shakespeare said when he anticipated your question: “The play’s the thing”. Happy hunting!

Who was an actor you didn't like but started loving after a great scene?

 

After a string of sub-par movies and even-worse performances (starting as far back as his peculiar approach to “Sayonara”), I had quite given up on Marlon Brando, and that saddened me, because at the beginning of his film career I thought that he was just great…. I mean, “The Men”, “Streetcar”, “Julius Caesar”, and “On the Waterfront” all hit the screen within two or three years! But, when I balanced these against “Bedtime Story”, “The Nightcomers”, “Candy” and “The Island of Dr Moreau” (to name just four… you want more?), I decided that, whatever he had in his youth, he had well-and-truly lost it in his maturity. I didn’t even like his performance in his Academy-Award-winning role in “The Godfather”; in fact, I thought he was the only weak link in what was otherwise a first-class movie, and I decided that his Oscar was in memory of the place he once held in the history of cinema, and not for anything that he was actually putting on the screen there and then.

But then he made a film which I hesitated to see for quite some time because of the publicity surrounding it, and finally succumbed to with some reluctance and meagre expectations. Maybe that’s why I was so blown-away by one scene in “Last Tango in Paris”. It was a long time ago, and I haven’t seen the movie since, so I will accept, with good grace, corrections in the comments section; but my recollection is that he had a scene in which he had to emote over his mother’s coffin, and he was, well, just great….. again. At last!

I can’t say that I ‘loved’ him after that one scene in that one movie; but I did, at least, concede that he hadn’t “lost” the talent he had way back in the fifties; he’d merely tucked it away until he found a film to which he was sufficiently committed to take it out of the back drawer, one final time.

 

Did the audience really sing with Judy Garland?

 

Only when she invited them to, which she did half-way through her movie medley (a staple item in every concert). The audience joined along for about eight bars of “For Me and My Gal” before she took it back from them and ripped into “The Trolley Song” (whereupon they were too busy cheering to sing). Garland’s audiences came to hear her every word and her every note, so they wouldn’t have sabotaged their own evening out by singing the songs with her and drowning her out!

I know the recent movie, “Judy”, has the audience coming in and singing “Over the Rainbow” for her when she couldn’t handle it; I have heard tapes of several evenings of the 1969 Talk of the Town” engagement in London (one is released on record), and while she wasn’t in her greatest voice by that time and did far too much patter when she should have been singing, she had certainly not sunk to the level of not being able to sing “Over the Rainbow”, which had been her theme song (and sung at every concert) for, by that time, a full thirty years!

Who are some actors who turned down roles to popular movies and regretted it later on?

 

Joan Crawford was offered the female lead in “From Here to Eternity”, but turned it down because she felt that a star of her magnitude deserved a more glamorous wardrobe than the one which the director, Fred Zinnemann, had specified as being appropriate for the wife of an army captain (Deborah Kerr had no such worries in eventually accepting the part, and it was, for her, a career-changer).

“From Here to Eternity” won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture of the Year, and would have been a tremendous boost for Crawford’s career in 1953, by which time she was being offered less than “A”-material. Did she later regret turning it down? Of course, she was unlikely to have admitted as much; but, possibly, it did cross her mind later, when she was reluctantly agreeing to lend her talents to movies such as “Strait-Jacket”, “Berserk”, and “Trog”!

Why do Oscar nominations exist? Why not skip that step and award people or movies directly?

 

Because a series of nominations means you have a contest, and the people who buy tickets to the movies just love a contest and the “election campaigns” that go with such enterprises. It’s exactly the same as the TV quiz shows, such as “Millionaire”; much more fun to let the contestants thrash it out before an audience on the edge of its seats than quietly giving the entrants a general knowledge test in the comfort of their own home and then mailing a cheque to the highest scorer.

And, of course, even a nomination is money in the bank for a producer, and a “feather in the cap” (which equates to more offers and a salary increase) to each of the nominees. So if you have nominations, you have more “winners”. That’s show biz!

Why is the private life of actors so important for the American film industry?

 

Right from the early days of the silent movies, and the new phenomenon of actors suddenly becoming rich and famous virtually overnight, with “fans” hanging on their every movement — walking, talking, and dressing and doing their make-up just as their idols did — the private life of the stars has been of concern to the people who made the movies.

The reasons were twofold: first, the combination of undreamt-of fame and unheard-of wealth is a heady mix, and many of the early stars lost all sense of proportion, believing that they were entitled to live lives of unbridled hedonism, free from restriction and consequences; second, of course, is that the public is notoriously fickle and can turn against a star in an instant, attacking him with the same ferocity and single-mindedness which they had previously put into their hero-worship. And the profits of thousands depended on these stars: their conduct on-screen and off, and the public’s continued support and tolerance of their screen image and their not-so-private lives.

Careers such as those of Roscoe Arbuckle and Charles Chaplin were virtually ruined by rumour and innuendo, usually (wouldn’t you know it) related to excessive sex-lives (the public loved to see this on-screen, but didn’t want their stars to actually be living it off-screen!) Ingrid Bergman and Paul Robeson (among others) were virtually exiled from Hollywood and from the United States of America; others whose life-style had displeased the public were either censored and censured (Mae West being a good example) or else swiftly labelled “box-office poison” (Errol Flynn might fill the bill here), whereupon their films played to empty houses.

Today, of course, audiences are much more enlightened and tolerant… or are they? Mel Gibson and Kevin Spacey — to name just two — might be inclined to say that things have never been so tough for the actor. Nowadays, in the age of constant scrutiny and “dish-the-dirt” reporting, it seems that actors — especially ones we’ve turned into superstars — can’t afford to slip up anywhere!

Who would be considered a character actor?

 

Actually, the term can have different meanings, but, as used today, I think it means an actor who specialises in one particular type of character, which he does particularly well — it may be the nosy Jewish neighbour, the sadistic Nazi commander, the lovable flabby-cheeked grocer with the impossible accent, the slimy sycophant, the easily-shocked maiden aunt, the ever-suffering butler — and which he “carries” from one movie to another, with only the name changed. This doesn’t, of course, imply that they can play no other role, if given half a chance; what it does mean is that the “type” has become so identified with them that casting directors tend to look no further when that character turns up in a script. And, of course, it’s easy for audiences, too; as soon as the actor appears on-screen, there is a grin of recognition, as if meeting an old friend. You know exactly what you are going to see, and there is usually no work involved in working out the character’s background, motivations, and likely responses to any situation.

What actors refuse to sign autographs for their fans?

 

I heard that Paul Newman absolutely refused to sign autographs after one incident where, stranding at a urinal in a men’s room, he had a piece of paper handed to him to sign before he had even finished taking care of business! I expect many other celebrities would have had similar experiences which would make them reluctant to just drop everything and scribble their names on a piece of paper for a stranger.

I used to be an avid autograph hound (not, however, going as far as the men’s room!), and I guess I was lucky that I never had anyone turn me down… not even Gregory Peck, whom I happened to run into in the street when he was just being a private citizen and might have resented the intrusion. I do admit to getting cold feet when it came to Judy Garland: I just wasn’t game to knock on her door, because, after all, it was Judy Garland, and who invades HER privacy? I was chagrined, as you can imagine, some time later (after the opportunity had passed) when I spoke to someone more courageous than I who had done what I was too timid to do, and had succeeded without any problem.

There was one celebrity who put a condition on her autograph; that was Celeste Holm, who was friendly and gracious, and perfectly happy to sign, but only after we came across with a coin donation for her favourite children’s charity. She actually issued receipts, along with the autograph! You had to love her for that!

What is your favorite British film?

Most people don’t even hesitate when they answer this question: I think that “The Third Man” is universally-acknowledged as the high-water mark of British movies. And it would certainly be one of my top five, also.

But if you want my own personal choice, I would have to plump for “Brief Encounter” (interestingly, both these movies starred Trevor Howard, which must tell us something about this underrated performer). I love “Brief Encounter” because it seems to me that no other country’s film industry could have made it anywhere near as well. It’s so perfectly understated, with the performances delivered in tiny gestures, quick glances and fleeting expressions. It is not quite the perfect film; Rachmaninoff’s music always seemed a little over-heavy for the delicate story being woven over the top of it, as if the makers were just a little concerned that the whole thing was just TOO small, TOO delicate, to resonate with audiences. But, for me, it’s sublime; I always felt — as I usually didn’t, when watching the Hollywood product of the time — that I was witnessing real people in a real setting dealing with a real crisis. Beautifully acted, beautifully scripted, and beautifully shot: this is what films ought to be!

 

Why do critics, especially written articles, bash a movie at the start and then by the end they praise the movie?

 

I haven’t actually noticed this, but my guess is that if those critics are employed by a publication or TV station that actually relies on the distributor of the movie for advertising revenue, then there may be gentle pressure applied about not being TOO hard on the customer’s product.

I know that was true in a TV programme widely shown in Australia some years ago…. too big a “pan”, and the distributor could choose — and threatened to do so! — to withhold his studio’s product from being offered to that programme for review, and, of course, that meant no programme next season, and no employment for the reviewer! You might get away with one or two, just for appearance’s sake… but then it was time for a positive review, even if the movie was something the reviewer, privately, loathed (and there are plenty of those around, despite the four-star ratings).

What I have noticed, rather than the phenomenon you have described, is reviewers praising the first release of a movie franchise, and, later, when a second one is made, praising the sequel by saying what a vast improvement it is over that appalling first one, which has suddenly, in their minds, become a “bomb”! I guess if you can’t destroy it on the spot, you just tuck your opinion away for use when the adverse comments are “safe”, and serve your revenge cold.

 

How does the musical/broadway community standardize their thresholds of excellence if nothing is typically recorded and people are only able to see shows live?

 

Peter’s answer is full of relevant facts, and there is really only one other thing that needs to be said: it is not correct to assume that “nothing is typically recorded”. As far as the Broadway world is concerned, a great many shows — possibly the majority — are recorded and preserved, even though the making of the recording may not be well-publicised and the results are not always packaged for a TV presentation. I had a friend who used to direct productions in Australia of shows that were known to him only through their original cast albums, and it was almost “standard operating procedure” for him to visit New York and the Theatre Archive Center (I am not sure of the exact name or its location…. maybe part of the New York Public Library, or the Lincoln Center) where, after jumping through a few membership hoops, he was able to sit and view performances of original casts of productions from virtually the whole of the last half of the twentieth century! It used to knock me out when he would return home and tell me about the shows (and the stars) from the Golden Age of Broadway which he had been allowed to sit and watch, in private (maybe someone out in Quora Land would like to give me a ticket of access to the Center for a couple of days…. or months; I’d consider it a most-welcome old-age gift)!

Even the stars themselves sometimes didn’t know — or had forgotten — about this permanent record of their triumphs. I recall an interview with Ben Gazzara, who was in the original cast of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (of which he was very proud) lamenting that there was not even a frame of his performance left to show the world just what he had accomplished; when the interviewer doubted this, he insisted and insisted… definitely nothing had been captured for posterity (when the interviewer returned later and showed him his younger self on-stage with Barbara Bel Geddes, Gazzara actually wept for joy!)

I don’t know what the rules are about someone like you or me going to see these carefully-preserved recordings, but they are there…. and, presumably, accessible to those who really need them.

What are some films that were great but still felt unfinished?

 

I don’t know whether a film that feels unfinished could ever truly be termed “great”; but I do recall having a good time, at least, in “The French Connection” but wondering why the makers chose to end it on such an ambiguous note, with that famous off-screen gunshot indicating that the final shoot-out was continuing.

In a retrospective interview, the director (William Friedkin) explained in commendable detail the rationale behind the decision to leave the film “hanging” (we never found out who fired the shot and at whom, and only the end titles told us what happened, subsequently, to the two protagonists and the criminal mastermind they were on the verge of cornering), and his explanation seemed perfectly acceptable (at least, acceptable in the context of a film where they chose to proceed, undaunted, when a clerical error had caused them to sign up the wrong actor — totally wrong for the part, as the makers admitted — for the third-lead, an error which no one “tumbled to” until he turned up on-site, by which time it would have been awkward to change! Obviously, we are not dealing with David Lean or George Stevens here!)

I still wish, however, that the film had sent us out of the cinema with that at least that final scene, if not the whole saga, played out to its resolution.

What movie sequels do you like better than the first and why?

 

I had such a great time watching the first “That’s Entertainment” that I was delighted (and not too surprised) when, just a couple of years later, it spawned a second, and then — a further eighteen years later — a third. What did surprise me was that the second was considerably better than the first, and the third — which, it was revealed, was the one which its creators had wanted to make all along — was easily the best of the three. It’s now been more than twenty years since that one, but I am still hoping for a fourth.

 

Who are the Hollywood actresses that don't need makeup?

Certainly, Ingrid Bergman didn’t; she had one of those fresh, natural faces which, on the rare occasions when a director insisted on a heavily made-up look as part of the character (such as in “The Visit”), actually looked less-appealing.

Of the more-recent crop, Cate Blanchett is the most-obvious example: by not worrying too much about whether or not her age shows in her face, she has relaxed into a look that is, without any artificial assistance, genuinely lovely; a Bergman for the 21st century.

 

If you could remove a scene from any movie to improve it, what scene would you get rid of?

 

Everything after the words, “You still have Rhoda!” in the original movie of “The Bad Seed” (1956). From that point on, the film had to start desperately back-pedalling on the original idea of the play on which it was based, in order to appease censors scandalised at the unpalatable goings-on in the first ninety minutes.

So the scriptwriters had to ensure, first, that the long-suffering heroine survived her own suicide attempt (since she had shot herself in the head with a revolver, that change, alone, can’t have been an easy “write”!), and, secondly, that the evil 9-year-old murderess had to be punished by SOMEONE… so it may as well be God, via a midnight lightning strike at the scene of her latest crime. It was all balderdash, and William March (who wrote the original novel) and Maxwell Anderson (who wrote the play on which the film was based) must have both died a thousand deaths when they saw what had been done to their creation. That the film is still very absorbing and eminently watchable is, indeed, a tribute to the skill of the actors (most of whom had moved straight from their roles in the Broadway play to the movie adaptation, and probably just tried not to think about their work in the movie’s final fifteen minutes).

Did Joan Crawford really fill-in for her daughter?

 

Yes; Christina Crawford, the daughter whom she was supposed to have mistreated outrageously and then disinherited, was playing a supporting role in a television “soapie” called “The Secret Storm” when she needed leave of absence for an operation. The character she was playing was in her early twenties, and ‘Mommie Dearest’ was all of sixty, but she unhesitatingly offered her services as a replacement for four episodes, thereby ensuring that, not only was she on the front pages for several weeks as a paragon of dedicated motherhood and self-sacrifice, but that the undistinguished TV series was, for a while, the talk of the town. Joan offered to do the show for nothing, but television contracts forbade that gesture, so the producers paid her ‘scale’, which was all of $165 per show; she used that money to pay her own hairdresser, who accompanied her to the set each day.

The jury is still out regarding Joan’s motives for this atypical act (as, indeed, it is still out on the motives behind Christina’s later tell-all book in which she very-effectively trashed her mother’s reputation for future generations of movie-lovers); Joan herself said that she did it so that “they wouldn’t hire somebody else”, which might have put Christina’s job at risk. Insiders who knew Joan better took a different viewpoint, lumping the magnanimous gesture alongside Marilyn Monroe’s famous wardrobe malfunction (a broken strap in front of dozens of photographers), about which incident Joan herself had taken a highly-critical stance.

What debut performance by an actor/actress made you sit up and say “wow”? Why?

 

Most of my contributions here would refer to what the readers of Quora would probably think of as back in the Stone Age: people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando and Barbra Streisand and Jodie Foster. If I had to choose one from, at least, the “Middle Ages”, one that certainly stuck in my mind was Leonardo di Caprio in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”. Why? Well, that may not, in fact, have been his first film, but I had never seen him, or even heard of him, before, so I didn’t have any “background” on which to judge him; just what was up there on the screen. And I admit, I wasn’t quite sure if he was an outstandingly-talented young actor or if they had, indeed, gone with a “special-needs” kid (as they did, for instance, for several of the roles in “A Child is Waiting”) and allowed him to just be himself. When you can’t be sure the person up on screen is actually acting, or if that’s how he is, then that, I would suggest, is a good reason to say “Wow!”

Why was Sean Connery forced to return to 007?

 

He wasn’t forced… he was finally persuaded, contrary to his previous protestations, and all those assurances that he would never play the role again.

Whether it was just the money (he would have been offered a lot more than in his early days as Bond!), or the quality of the script (not that any of the 007 movies worried too much about that aspect of the movie!), or simply because he found himself with a bit of time on his hands and wanted to keep busy, I couldn’t even hazard a guess. But he wouldn’t be the first actor to swear never to return to a role and then change his mind (another example: Barbra Streisand, who was always adamant that she would never revisit “Funny Girl” after she had made such a splash in the original — joking, at one stage, that she fully-expected to be offered, eventually, a movie called “Funny Old Grandma” — but who changed her mind quite soon afterwards and made “Funny Lady”, declaring that “this script is much better than “Funny Girl”; of course I’ll do it”.)

Sometimes a movie has a sequel that's so bad it taints the memory of the original. So, what movies do you wish never received a sequel?

 

“The Innocents”, Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw”, was one of the best ghost stories ever filmed, and managed to leave the motives, the recollections, and the reactions of the characters sufficiently ambiguous to ensure that you had plenty to talk about after you left the cinema. The only trouble with that, of course, is that other filmmakers could find a half-dozen ways to expand on a story that needed no expansion, by cunningly removing all the ambiguities with their own graphic explanations of what James had only hinted at.

Enter a brand new decade, the era of the Hammer Studios sex-and-horror sagas, where restraint was equated not with good taste but with prudishness; and enter, also, director Michael Winner (who is no Jack Clayton) and screenwriter Michael Hastings (who is no Henry James), two filmmakers who may be many things, but they are not prudes.

Their “sequel” — really a prequel, since the implied corruption of the innocents had already been accomplished before James’s story took place — was called “The Nightcomers”, and I think it is fair to say that Henry James would not have been amused. Nor, thankfully, were most moviegoers, because the film, in spite of the participation of a top star (Marlon Brando) quickly sank without trace, and is, today, seldom seen.

 

Are any of the cast of The Wizard of Oz still alive?

Almost certainly. Several of the Munchkins — particularly the girls — were played by young children, not midgets, so that some of them are still with us is not as unlikely as it might first seem. There was a list of surviving cast members compiled by B W Rocks as recently as May this year, at which time he was able to confirm five survivors, all female and all just entering their nineties. It wouldn’t take a great deal of research to find who among those have died in the last three months.

How do you rank The Shawshank redemption, Citizen Kane and the Godfather?

 

While I wasn’t (quite) around when “Citizen Kane” had its first release, I did catch it some sixteen years later, and even then it was ahead of its time. It was years afterward that I read Pauline Kael’s treatise on the movie, but when she wrote, “It’s as if you’d never seen a movie before”, it was as if she had put into words what I had been thinking since the day I first saw it.

Since then, I have seen a host of outstanding movies and the occasional great one; among them are several which I have enjoyed more than “Citizen Kane” and return to more frequently. Neither “The Godfather” nor “The Shawshank Redemption” is among that batch, however.

I thought “Godfather” was a fine movie, but the presence of Marlon Brando with his stuffed cheeks and his mannered vocal delivery kept taking me out of the movie and back to Old Hollywood. “The Shawshank Redemption” seems to have acquired a reputation among Quora’s devotees as something special, but I found it so unmemorable that, as recently as early this year I swore in one of my Quora answers that I had never even seen it. When I finally took the blu-ray off the shelf and put it on, I watched nearly two hours of it — until the scene where Tim Robbins emerges from the sewer pipe in his jail escape — before it rang a bell in my memory and I realised I had, in fact, seen it on first release, but nothing much in it had hung around in my consciousness. I still can’t see what the fuss is about, and I admit that I am a loss to see it mentioned in the same breath as Orson Welles’s ground-breaking masterpiece.

 

How much ‘creative liberty’ should be allowed in a biopic?

 

How long is a piece of string? We have both seen biopics in which the only real resemblance between the character on-screen and the real-life person on which the film is based is the name; a famous person in the title of your movie is a good way to ensure box-office interest, regardless of whether you plan to give more than a cursory glance to his ‘real’ biography.

At the other extreme, some biopics have such an interesting subject that their main task is to decide what to leave out of his life story… and, of course, whether the film chooses to take a positive view of that person’s life, or the opposite (lately it seems that biopics have a greater chance of success if they take pains to show character weaknesses in people we thought didn’t have any).

Nearly all biopics fall somewhere between the two extremes, and unless the script makes a glaring error of fact (such as the movie which showed Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots chatting away in Mary’s cell) or omission (such as Fanny Brice’s marriage at around age 15, years before she met Nicky Arnstein, in “Funny Girl”), no one except the hapless subject of the biopic is likely to lose much sleep (nowadays, most biopics — such as the excellent “Good Night and Good Luck” — have a credit title admitting to inventing or conflating minor characters and scenes for the sake of a cohesive plot, and this admission certainly helps their overall claim to accuracy).

Are censored movies shown on TV networks without commercials shorter than the theatrical versions?

 

The standards (with regard to appropriateness of material for public viewing), for free-to-air TV (with or without commercials) and cinemas are seldom the same, and the variations in what is allowable (from country to country, and even district to district) mean that there are many different “edits” floating around of controversial material. So an “always/never” answer to your question is not possible.

The short answer, however, is, if the TV presentation is, indeed, a “censored version”, then, yes, that means that something will have been taken out; it will be either shorter than the theatrical version or (in the case of, for instance, Louis Malle’s “Pretty Baby”) be specially “shaded” in certain scenes so that the offending material is no longer visible.

Although not remembered as well as other Hollywood actors of the same era, Glenn Ford made some great movies. Which one is your favorite and why?

 

I think I’d plump for “3:10 to Yuma” as Glenn Ford’s most-interesting performance; I have always thought it is just about my favourite western of all time, and the two leading performances (Van Heflin being the other) are what made it so great.

“3:10 to Yuma” was made around the time that he had moved on from his Columbia “film-noir” days (of which I always found “The Big Heat” the most memorable) and was starting to play heroes; however, for this one he reached back into his past roles and used his noir skills, leaving Heflin to play the person the audience was rooting for. At the same time, he added a dimension to the villain’s character that made him a whole person rather than just “the bad guy” (there’s an early scene in a bar — with Felicia Farr as the bar girl — in which the genuine tenderness his villain displayed stayed with you, to balance out his “shoot-’em-in-the-back” acts in the rest of the movie, so you could never really lose sympathy for him). It was a finely-tuned performance which I can come back to again and again. In fact, there isn’t a western I watch more often.

 

Why do book to film adaptations add scenes that didn't exist when they could simply take internal monologues and make dialogue?

 

Well, just for openers, if you take an internal monologue and turn it into dialogue, then, by definition, you have added an extra character to the scene, and that, surely, means that you have changed it.

Even though a book is great, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will make a great movie “as written”; conversely, if the film-makers know what they are doing, a mediocre book like “Night of the Hunter” can be made into a masterpiece which will live on long after the book is forgotten. Although, nowadays, there are authors who write their books with the eventual film adaptation up-front in their minds, most books are not ready-made film scripts, and need altering if they are to be successful motion pictures. Few scriptwriters will leave the original work untouched when preparing their shooting script, even if it is for a book they revere. Erich von Stroheim tried it, once, with his film of “McTeague”: he changed the name to “Greed”, but then simply started at page one and filmed the book exactly as written. The result ran for over nine hours and, according to the few people who saw the uncut version, was virtually unwatchable.

Somewhere in all that rambling exposition is, I hope, an answer to your question (though Nathan’s answer is, in itself, so complete that it hardly needs anything added). The changes you mention are conscious choices made by the film makers in order to keep intact the elements of the book which attracted them in the first place, but, at the same time, keep audiences in their seats until the end of the movie.

 

What will the result be if we take a film with only adult characters and replace them with children?

 

When Alan Parker and David Puttnam did it in 1976 (with, among others, a young Jodie Foster), the result was “Bugsy Malone”. It was actually some half-dozen gangster films from the 1930s rolled into one, with music added… an interesting experiment, but not one that anyone was much interested in imitating. It was, itself, something of an imitation, as it clearly took its inspiration from a series of short films in the 1930s called “The Baby Burlesques”, which starred a (very) young Shirley Temple, playing “femmes fatale” in diapers with outsize safety pins.

What is a movie that you find quite enjoyable but has an actor/actors in it that you aren’t too fond of?

 

I have never been a Jim Carey fan, but I have to admit that he was perfectly cast in “The Truman Show”, and he rose to the occasion superbly. It’s a great film (much more than “quite enjoyable”), and he never for a moment let the team down.

Rod Steiger is another actor I am far from fond of, and I think his overblown performances have sabotaged many a movie; however, in the unlikely role of the singing farm-hand in the musical “Oklahoma!” his acting style played against the tone of the rest of the movie and became one of its most-memorable assets. The result was another movie that was way beyond “quite enjoyable”.

What's Robert Altman's best film?

 

I presume you mean as director (he also acted in a few movies, and wrote and/or produced movies directed by others). For me, the choice is easy, although my pick is by no means one of his best-known films, and, in fact, is often overlooked in discussions of his work: the 1982 movie, “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”.

What's your favorite movie role of Sean Connery?

 

Sean Connery has a pretty remarkable track record, even discounting the James Bond series, so choosing just one would be quite a task! I admit to a fondness for the two films he made with Sidney Lumet back in the days when Lumet was working in black-and-white and on a shoestring budget: “The Hill” and “The Offence”.

Another favourite is “The Man Who Would be King”, which John Huston had been trying to make for decades by pairing the top stars of the day, beginning with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. When he finally brought it off, it was hard to imagine any of the stars of the 40s and 50s making a better fist of it than did Connery and Michael Caine.

One final — and somewhat easy choice — would be “The Untouchables”. He wasn’t the lead in this one, but he played his supporting role with such obvious relish that, fairly early in, everybody else in the movie seemed to be supporting him! The Academy Award he received for that part was such an easy choice that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the other four nominees had decided to stay home that evening and watch the proceedings on TV, instead of getting all dressed up for nothing.

What events made up by screenwriters are often mistaken for historical fact?

 

How about the blowing up of the Kwai Bridge in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”? After the involved plot involving an expedition through all kinds of jungle hazards in order to reach it from an unsuspected direction, and blow it up without interference, it seemed, to the filmmakers, a pity to have to admit to audiences that, in fact, it never did get blown up and was still there, intact, fifteen years later. So, seemingly on the theory that, as long as we saw a full-size bridge come down while a full-sized train was steaming across it, we’d be having such a good time that we wouldn’t mind watching a total fabrication, the screenwriters gave us the “money shot”, and the climax we’d been hoping for.

 

Which movie scenes have been captured without the knowledge of the actor?

 

There is a wonderful example of this in an otherwise-undistinguished western called “Two Rode Together”… one of John Ford’s lesser efforts, and without his usual star, John Wayne, but with two actors who were clearly good buddies, and who relished the chance to work together: James Stewart and Richard Widmark

While Ford was supposedly setting up the scene, Stewart and Widmark sat at their allotted places (on a river bank), and went through the scene that was about to be shot. Since this was, essentially, a rehearsal in which they were working out how their respective characters would approach the lines, they were relaxed and spontaneous, not hesitating to deviate from the actual script when it seemed “right”. Ford hadn’t told them that, in fact, the camera was actually ready to roll while they worked, and quietly gave instructions to the cameraman to shoot the rehearsal.

The interplay between these two old pros, saying their lines with much kidding around, was so delightful — easily the highlight of the movie — that Ford used that “take” in the finished product. I am sure that, on discovering his ploy, either Stewart or Widmark could have vetoed his inclusion of that shot in the release print, but, it seems, they were good-natured enough to acknowledge how much the spontaneity they had demonstrated in the scene had added to the film and to their characters, so it is there for all to see.

 

Can a blacklisted person be a director?

 

Even if everyone in the industry supports the blacklist, a director can always employ himself; “produced and directed by” is a not-uncommon sight in opening titles. Of course, if he’s REALLY been blacklisted, he may find, at the end of it all, that cinemas decline to book his product; but he is still a “real” director with his name on a “real” movie!

In the “real” world, most blacklisted directors had other strategies: they found a more-enlightened government which cared little about their personal political credo, and made their movies away from home. Writers changed their names or submitted their work through non-blacklisted writers. Few people, in the days when the Hollywood blacklist was infamous world-wide, couldn’t find work ANYWHERE; not if they had talent.

But the wording of your question puzzles me; it implies that blacklists still exist for movie-makers. I haven’t heard the term used in half a century; are there, as we speak, still blacklists, somewhere in the world, which might stall the career of a would-be director?

 

What classic films are really just mediocre?

 

There are so many which I feel fit easily into that category that I hardly know where to begin…but I can at least give you a time frame for when this problem became endemic. In the late fifties and early sixties there were a plethora of new screen formats being tried out in order to lure the first TV generation back to the cinema, and the first-releases of films in the new processes — Todd-AO, Ultra Panavision 70, Camera 65, Super Technirama 70 — were advance-ticket, inflated-admission affairs designed to convince audiences that what was going on within this super-size frame was actually better than what they had seen in the past. Every producer, it seems, wanted to make his movie an instant classic by assuring us that bigger (and longer!) was, indeed, better.

Of course, a few of these over-inflated products did, actually, “deliver the goods”; but there were quite a few others that remained “wannabe classics”, and, by their mediocrity, turned-off audiences to the extent that studios were looking into the jaws of bankruptcy when their costly “hard-ticket” promotion came to nothing.

So, to conclude, here are a few films from that era that you might have heard were classics, but, in reality, had little to offer audiences: “Ryan’s Daughter”, “Raintree County”, “The Agony and the Ecstasy”, “Doctor Dolittle”, the remakes of “Lost Horizon” and “Goodbye Mr Chips”, “Doctor Zhivago”, “The Greatest Story Ever Told”.

What was potentially the greatest movie that was never finished or released?

 

In submitting an answer to this question, I am going to place great stress on that word “potentially”; there are, of course, a great many movies that reach the planning stage and are aborted early, but whether they would have been any good if they had actually proceeded is a moot point; obviously, someone in a position of responsibility decided they wouldn’t.

So the movie I have chosen is one that was announced, begun, abruptly abandoned, and then started again, and brought to successful completion…but is, at it stands, no more than a pale ghost of what might have been.

The movie is the 20th Century-Fox 1955 production of “Carousel”, which, as originally planned, had all the ingredients to make it one of the best movies of its era. For a start, it was based on one of the best-loved Broadway musicals Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote, and was considered a sure-fire hit from the moment Fox acquired it, planned as their “prestige” enterprise of that year. Secondly, it was to mark the first-ever screen pairing — the fourth attempt to bring them together — of Hollywood’s two greatest musical stars, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, both at the very top of their game (Sinatra having won the Academy Award two years previously, and Garland having just released, to great acclaim, her pet project, “A Star is Born”). Henry and Phoebe Ephron were to do the writing, Alfred Newman was to arrange and conduct the beautiful score…. with all this going for it, what could possibly go wrong?

According to Henry Ephron, Garland bailed first. She noted that virtually all the best music had been given to Sinatra’s character, including a seven-minute major work, “Soliloquy”, which was the highlight of the whole production…. and in which she was nowhere to be seen. She requested, therefore, that Rodgers and Hammerstein rework the number to give her a soliloquy of her own, and when the composers declined to tinker with the show, she withdrew from the production (she was, clearly, having a great deal of trouble deciding on the “right” follow-up to her triumph in “A Star is Born”, and dropped out of several other productions, including “The Helen Morgan Story”, “Indiscreet”, “Born in Wedlock” and “The Three Faces of Eve”; she eventually didn’t make another film for six years).

Sinatra, it was reported, was not pleased with the recasting of the leading lady…. but, for a while, at least, said nothing. However, he now proceeded to find fault with just about every aspect of the production, including the location-shooting on the other side of the continent. He did, however, record “If I Loved You” with his new leading lady (young Shirley Jones, who was sweet and pretty, if hardly mature enough for the demands of the role… but Richard Rodgers liked her, as she, herself, made no demands) and, with Alfred Newman’s lush orchestration, it is something to hear.

The big break-up came after Fox had decided that this would be the production to introduce their new high-definition process called CinemaScope 55, and Sinatra learned that he would, therefore, have to shoot every scene twice: once for the regular CinemaScope cameras, and then again for the new process. As far as he was concerned, this was virtually making two movies for the price of one, and, what’s more, meant a longer location shooting; he flatly refused to do it, saying his contract hadn’t called for this extra imposition, and followed Judy out of the production.

“Carousel” eventually did get made, and, what’s more, in CinemaScope 55, and with “Soliloquy” retained as a soliloquy (for its new leading man, Gordon McRae). And it wasn’t a bad movie… not with those songs and that gorgeous location! But it had lost its two major assets, and the chance to make the best Hollywood musical of all time had been lost forever.

What are the top three comedy movies from every decade since the 1950s?

 

My area of knowledge covers only a small part of that six-decade period, but here are a few to at least start you off. “Some Like it Hot” actually has a production date on it of 1959, but it was 1960 when it was widely circulated, so can we start with that? Also in the 1960s came Mel Brook’s original “The Producers” with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder… those three names are worth googling for more titles. The name Neil Simon is worth looking at for this period, although he is a writer, not a director; but you’d want to include “The Odd Couple” and “Murder By Death”. And right at the end of the 60s Woody Allen burst on the scene with “Take the Money and Run”… Allen is another name to research for some of the funniest films made in the last three decades of the 20th century and even into the 21st.

1972 was actually a very good year for comedies (not many years can claim that, after the Marx Brothers had left town and after Ealing Studios in England had ceased production!): you have two from Woody Allen (“Play it Again, Sam” and “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex”) and Peter Bogdanovich got lucky (but didn’t pursue the genre) with “What’s Up, Doc?”.

In 1974 there was “Young Frankenstein” (Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder again), and in 1977 Woody Allen gave us “Annie Hall”. Into the eighties, and Mel Brooks gave us “To Be or Not to Be”, which was his second spoof on Adolph Hitler, and Woody Allen was behind just about everything else that could be laughed at; at least, until the last two or three years of the decade, when along came the actor Billy Crystal, who could make anything sound funny; you’ll catch him in “The Princess Bride”, and “When Harry Met Sally” in this period.

I’m not even going to tackle the last three decades of your six-decade span, because, I suppose, comedy changed and I changed, and we didn’t necessarily go in the same direction. So I can’t give you many newer titles from personal experience of having seen them, except by accident on TV (and a really good comedy deserves to be seen in a cinema, where the audience is laughing so hard at the first joke that you’re liable to miss hearing the second and third). But I would imagine that other Quora writers will have dozens for you, since they are all younger than I and have more modern tastes. Hopefully, the bakers’ dozen I have mentioned will constitute a good start.

What were the most awful disasters in movies due to copyright/licensing issues?

 

It seems that, back in the forties, a production company, even one as illustrious as MGM, only held ownership of a film they released for twenty-nine years. When that anniversary rolled around, it was the job of someone in the company to renew the copyright…. not a difficult nor expensive process, but an important one, because a slip-up here would mean that your movie was now in the public domain: anyone could make money out of it, as you no longer owned it.

Of course, slip-ups did occur — and probably still do — with the result (as everyone will have noticed) that some old movies are suddenly turning up in legal but quite-inferior DVDs that are sold in the two-dollar shops, often with several movies crammed onto one DVD. The company could, if it wished, issue its own pristine copy, but since they wouldn’t be able to compete on price, most of the time they just kissed the movie, and future revenue, goodbye. This happened to a bunch of MGM movies from the forties and fifties, including a couple of early Elizabeth Taylor films: “The Last Time I Saw Paris” and “Father’s Little Dividend”.

Well, the studio wouldn’t have lost too much sleep over those two programmers, but one of their absolutely-top, all-star-cast musicals was also in the batch that somebody forgot. “Till the Clouds Roll By” was the biography of Jerome Kern — Kern even worked as consultant when it was being made — and it was a “no expense spared” musical which, of course, is what MGM did better than anyone in the world. To sing Kern’s music, a roster of stars like you wouldn’t believe had been assembled: it seemed that if you were on the payroll at MGM in 1944, you’d just better be prepared to spend a few days on the set of “Till the Clouds Roll By” and earn your keep. There were Judy Garland, June Allyson, Lena Horne, Angela Lansbury, Frank Sinatra, Cyd Charisse, Van Heflin, Kathryn Grayson, Tony Martin, Gower Champion, Van Johnson, Virginia O’Brien, Dinah Shore, Robert Walker, Esther Williams; directors who worked on it included Vincente Minnelli, George Sidney and Busby Berkeley.

“Clouds” was a gold-mine for MGM, right up to the day when someone in the office forgot to check the renewal date; today you can buy it as part of those twelve-movies-on-three-DVDs packs for just a few cents (and anything can be cut out of it at the whim of the company distributing it), while MGM can only wish their office staff had spent a bit of time rehearsing THEIR duties, as all those A-grade stars had done for Mr Kern!

What famous movie didn't stand the test of time?

 

Like Roy and Jeff, the first movie that sprang to mind when I read your question was “Birth of a Nation”, and for obvious reasons (explained very concisely by Jeff, so no further words are needed from me on that choice). I guess there are many other famous movies that have suffered from the shifting in social attitudes since they were first released, to then-unbridled approval. “Gone with the Wind” is probably the “Birth of a Nation” of the 1930s: glorifying the “gallant” South with its slave-led economy, perpetuating the myth of the “Mammy” as a desirable outcome for Negro women, it now seems to belong to another world… as, indeed, it does.

“Gone with the Wind” is interesting in another aspect of your “test of time”, also. On its release, the acting of just about everyone in it was praised to the skies, and it dominated the Academy Awards that year. The one person in the cast who was omitted from the praise was Clark Gable, who was judged as not really up to the standard of his fellow-performers, and as “walking through” his leading role. Seen today, just about everyone in the movie seems to be overacting outrageously (Leslie Howard’s performance, in particular, does NOT come out looking good when judged by the “test of time”!) and, suddenly, Gable emerges as the best performer of the lot, acting naturally and easily, fifty years ahead of his time. You could probably come up with a thousand similar examples of performers who were either down-graded or over-extensively praised in their time (James Dean springs immediately to mind as one of the latter), but, by the standards of today, appear to have either been underappreciated in their day, or to have lost the electricity that lit up the audiences of the time.

You can then go on to discuss music in movies, and how, today, we laugh at some of the “mickey-mouse” musical scores which, while considered an asset in their day, now effectively destroy a scene by their obtrusiveness, over-punctuating every scene and doing more emoting than the actors! Or the special effects, which, when first seen, seemed so real (the children of my generation really believed that maybe dinosaurs did walk with those jerky stop-motion effects as in “King Kong” and his offspring), but today seem laughable.

Heroes with white hats and villains with black hats…. the fact is, that a host of “famous movies” of the past don’t really bear watching by the audiences of the present, because they are the product of another era which we can’t even hope to understand. When I sat my children in their armchairs and played “Citizen Kane” for them, I lamented that they couldn’t really see it through the eyes of the young man of the early 50s who came out of the cinema, swearing that he’d never seen anything like it. And, of course, they didn’t; they quite liked it, but I doubt if any of them remembers it the way I do, as one of the great motion picture experiences of a lifetime. Even “Kane” doesn’t really stand the test of time!

 

Who is the best actor in Australia?

 

No one has yet mentioned John Meillon or Geoffrey Rush.

Meillon never did become as famous as Peter Finch (both came along at around the same time); this was more because of his lack of ambition than any lack of acting talent. While Finch left home for England and became buddies with the Oliviers and the Redgraves, Meillon was content to sit in his favourite pub seat in Balmain, Sydney, and wait for the roles to come to him. He didn’t look, or act, like a star, and when people asked him who he’d worked for, they were somewhat taken aback when he was able to rattle off Stanley Kramer, Fred Zinnemann, Nicholas Roeg, Peter Ustinov….. people who knew about acting knew about John Meillon.

Geoffrey Rush doesn’t look like a leading man, either, and he may well be more-suited to the stage than he is to movies, but he is, very simply, one of the best actors in the world. Some thirty years ago I accompanied a friend to a tiny theatre in Sydney to see a performance of a one-man play in which I was not even remotely interested, so I hadn’t even bothered to check the cast “list”. I sat there, flabbergasted at the performance of the single actor who held the audience spellbound from the first word to the last… I had, quite simply, never seen anything like it in my life. It wasn’t until we were out in the lobby that I was able to find out the name of the young man who had literally taken me out of the world for a couple of hours; and that was the first time I saw the name “Geoffrey Rush”. I was not at all surprised at the path his subsequent career took!

What are the lesser-known movies of actress Diana Rigg?

 

Diana Rigg had a comparatively-minor role, but a comparatively-major song, in the seldom-seen movie of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music”. Maybe it was the quality of the song that helped her to be outstanding, but, twenty years later, I remember her contribution to the movie more than I remember anything that the female lead (Elizabeth Taylor) did… and Liz got “Send in the Clowns”!

 

Who is the best actor in Hollywood from the 1960s?

 

You want the BEST actor of that decade, is that correct? Not someone’s favourite, but the single actor who gave the strongest set of performances throughout that period.

Jack Lemmon would certainly be a contender, even though, on analysis, he might have contributed more to the 1970s and even into the 1980s. But he was great in quite a few pre-70s movies, including “Some Like it Hot”, “The Apartment”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, “Irma la Douce”, “The Great Race”, “The Fortune Cookie” and “The Odd Couple”.

Perhaps the Man of the Decade, then, was Richard Burton. He gave what I believe was the single greatest male performance of that decade (or, indeed, of any other) in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; and in addition, the sixties saw him shine in “Night of the Iguana”, “Becket”, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”, “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Anne of the Thousand Days”. The problem with Burton was that he also allowed himself, in the sixties, to appear in less-distinguished films, and, when the movie was bad, he was quite capable of being as bad as anything in it; witness “The Sandpiper”, “Candy”, “Dr Faustus”, “The Comedians”, and “Boom”.

I can’t think of any other actors that came anywhere near to those two, though there were, of course, no lack of one-hit wonders….. as well as the great stars of the forties and fifties, who were still hanging in there (such as Spencer Tracy and James Stewart), and the up-and-coming stars (like Dustin Hoffmann) just starting to be noticed as the decade drew to its close.

What is the movie with the lowest IMDb rating that you enjoy watching multiple times despite its low rating?

 

I admit that this question fired my interest, because I really didn’t have any idea of the answer. It never, until now, occurred to me to compare my own personal feelings about a movie with IMDb’s rating, even though I have, of course, occasionally noticed that the site did give these ratings, when I was researching some movie or other, to find a detail not readily available anywhere else (IMDb is particularly useful, I find, for full cast and crew lists: you can quickly put a name to that face which only appeared for a minute or two, but which stayed with you afterwards — whether for good or bad reasons!).

Your question inspired me to go into the site for the next forty-five minutes after first compiling a list of, not of my twenty favourite movies, but the twenty movies I keep returning to for yet another viewing (those two lists wouldn’t be the same, although, of course, there’d be overlaps).

I am not sure what the final result says about my tastes, but the range of scores in that list of twenty was surprisingly small: just 1.4. I hadn’t written down any “thudders” that scored ratings under 5.0 ….but neither had I written down any out-and-out masterpieces (in IMDb’s opinion, anyway) that scored anywhere near 10.0. So I guess I am, by IMDb’s standards, a “middle-brow” movie-lover.

My choices ranged from a low of 7.0, scored by three of the twenty (one of which, I was dismayed to find, was the film which had easily topped my list of “most-frequently revisited”: “I Could Go on Singing”, which I have never even bothered to file away, but have left to stand permanently, next to the DVD player, for frequent and easy access) to a top of 8.4, shared by two movies (“Witness for the Prosecution” and “Rear Window”; I was glad to see that others share my taste for those two!).

The rest of the list would surely be of no interest to anyone other than myself, but, just for the record, the other two 7.0-scorers were “Funny Face” and “The Pirate”; clearly, musicals are not all that popular with IMDb’s reviewers, since “The Pirate”, in particular, was one of the most innovative and brilliantly-executed movies that MGM ever gave us, and would probably find itself included in both lists.

 

What is a movie that you thought would've been a flop but actually wasn't?

 

I am surprised that “Judy!” was such a success, and was liked even by many Garland fans, who had seen her and knew better.

When the project was first announced, I suspected it would be the usual hatchet-job Hollywood likes to do on superstars of the past, and since the real Judy Garland had been dead for half a decade, I doubted whether anyone would know or care enough to put money on the counter. After all, there were no sex scandals or revelations of unnatural practices in the saga of Judy’s final year; the worst the writers could do was to clump together just about all the on-stage mishaps that had befallen Judy Garland over the last few years of her life (which only amounted to some flubbed lyrics, some late starts, a few disgruntled audiences, and a voice that frequently wasn’t quite up to the demands she continued to make of it), embellish them as much as the law would allow, and condense them into a single engagement of just a few weeks.

It would, I confidently expected, be ignored by just about everybody. It seems Renee Zellweger might have feared that, too; in an interview she recalled telling an inquirer that she was making a movie in which she played Judy Garland, to be greeted with the response, “Who’s she?”

But — perhaps because Zellweger genuinely admired Judy and was determined to bring out the positive elements in both her character and her late-career performances — audiences and the Academy Awards voters took the movie to their hearts, and it was one of the tearaway successes of 2019. Even more surprising, instead of merely trashing Garland’s reputation and convincing all the world that her later career was a train wreck, it actually revived interest in her work; her original recordings (especially her 1961 Carnegie Hall concert) became “hits” all over again!

I expect that the producers made millions of dollars out of their rather tawdry attempt to exploit a great star of the past, and, of course, that’s the usual way to go, and they’re entitled to do it that way; it seems, however, that the big winner out of the whole episode was, of all people, Judy Garland herself! Or, maybe I should say, the NEW legions of Garland admirers, who have only discovered her body of work in the last twelve months, and all thanks to that movie!

What did the 2001 movie on Anne Frank get right and wrong about Anne Frank’s everyday life?

 

I haven’t seen the mini-series and am basing this answer on the plot summary at Wikipedia (something I don’t usually do, so I am on shaky ground here regarding accuracy!)

While the summary seems to be at least as accurate as the previous retellings of Anne Frank’s life, it may have gone out on a limb definitely ascribing the family’s betrayal to Lena Hartog-van Blaneren. She was, indeed, a suspect, one of around seventy-five whose names have been suggested over the years; and, in fact, she was one of the people whom subsequent investigators actually followed up, as she (apparently) survived the occupation. Upon interview, she denied working at the Frank’s factory, even though other people testified that she did clean there (her husband was a permanent employee until 1944), which certainly throws suspicion on her testimony, which was that she did, indeed, know of the inhabitants of the annex, but learned this only after the raid. Suspicion is really not enough to convict her; there are numerous others who had at least equal opportunity to do the deed, and, in fact, at least one recent (2016) article suggests that the family may not, in fact, have been “betrayed” at all.

What movie sequels are nothing like the originals?

 

After a whole series of ‘Planets of the Apes’ (Beneath, Escape From, Conquest of, Battle for) the assigned writers must have been in a real quandary when they were required to say something new about a planet where apes rule and humans are the inferior species.

So they cheated; what they actually wrote, for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), was a virtual remake (never, as far as I know, admitted to!) of a Matthew Broderick 1987 movie called “Project X”, and had nothing to do with apes dominating humans: it was about scientists experimenting with chimpanzees in order to increase their intelligence. The simians were, if I recall, kept in cages while the humans wore white coats (Planet of the Scientists?); Pierre Boulle would probably have preferred it to be the other way around.

Footnote: “Project X” was actually very good, with real, trained chimps giving the human actors a run for their money; “Rise of”, however, had men in monkey suits, and…. well, like a bad souffle, it just didn’t rise.

 

What well-known movies were "stolen" by a great performance from a supporting actor?

 

I guess this is the place to put in a good word for the lady who might just be my most-favourite supporting actress of all time, someone who brightened up the movies of the forties, fifties and sixties without actually seeming to act at all… you just felt that’s the way she was.

Possibly, few people today would be able to call to mind Thelma Ritter just by name; but if you’ve watched some of the best movies of the “golden years” of Hollywood (especially those from 20th Century-Fox), you will certainly know her face, and (like me) you will probably smile at the recognition.

She was Birdie in “All About Eve”, and, yes, I know it was Bette Davis’s film, but when the two were on-screen together, guess who you looked at? She was the home-care worker looking after James Stewart in “Rear Window”. She was Molly Brown (though they changed the name) in the original (and still the best) “Titanic”. She cried over Leslie Caron’s letters to Fred Astaire in “Daddy Long Legs”. And, possibly best of all, she was Moe, the “tie lady”, in “Pickup on South Street”, probably the “fattest” part she ever had, and did she ever make the most of it! She even had a death scene… and, in a movie full of good moments, that was the one you thought about after you got home. It was this film, and her performance in it, that finally convinced me to offer an answer to your question.

I hope I am not the only one who remembers Thelma Ritter with such fondness; the Golden Years of Hollywood were even more golden because she was part of them.

Which comedy movie contains the most jokes?

 

Certainly, Bill Johnson’s no. 1 choice, “A Night at the Opera”, would come close. Possibly another Marx Bros movie, “Duck Soup”, is even more crammed-full of jokes, because, unlike the films the brothers made for MGM, it doesn’t feel the need for a pair of musical comedy stars to provide some light romance and songs between jokes; it’s the Marx Bros all the way, and it is one of those movies which you have to see more than once in order to catch some of the jokes you were too busy laughing to have caught the last time.

Why do many film adaptations of Doctor Dolittle fail?

 

I’m not sure whether you mean “fail at the box office” or “fail to capture the spirit of Hugh Lofting’s original”. If the former, I can only imagine that the novelty factor in talking animals has, with the dozens of Disney and Warners cartoons since Lofting produced the first of the series in 1920, simply worn off for younger viewers, and older ones (who, like myself, may actually have read the books in their youth), could never see either Rex Harrison (1967), Eddie Murphy (1998) or Robert Downey Jr (2020) standing in for the rotund, rather-quaint doctor (who seemed to belong to an older, slower world even when the books were “new”) created by Lofting.

If you mean that they didn’t succeed in capturing the spirit of the original books, the reason is that there isn’t a production company in the western world today that could in any way relate to that spirit (much less replicate it), and hasn’t been one, sadly, since Ealing Studios in London closed its doors at the beginning of the 1960s. The world of Hollywood, nowadays, is far too noisy and full of movement to tolerate the tone of Lofting’s work for an instant; it just wouldn’t make billions of dollars unless they poured millions bringing it up-to-date…. which, of course, means utterly destroying it.

If you could only pick one movie about war for the best war movie ever, what would it be?

 

Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory”. Not only did it have the most realistic “trench warfare” scenes since Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, but it had a gripping story-line in the scenes away from the World War I battle ground.

Stanley Kubrick made this small black-and-white film early in his career, before he became one of the most revered of America’s directors; it remains, in my opinion, his best movie.

Which British TV show or film set during the World War II era is your favourite?

 

Britain loved to make films about how it survived the war, and even though many were made on a shoestring during those first few years of peace and austerity, most of the ones I saw back then had that feel of authenticity about them (unlike the big-budget epics that came along a decade afterwards, most of them made by Hollywood and featuring an American star to lead the Brits and show them all how to win a war.) At the time, of course, I didn’t realise that that authenticity came from the fact that so many of the writers, players, and directors had just returned from doing it for real!

Just off the top of my head, I always had a fondness for “The Wooden Horse”, “The Cruel Sea”, “Morning Departure” and “The One That Got Away”.

The television show was the easy one to choose: “Foyle’s War”. It wasn’t a series about the war (Foyle was a policeman investigating civil crimes in Hastings during the war years), but, as well as being a devilishly clever whodunit (only once in about thirty-six episodes did I ever guess the killer), it also provided insights into what England was like during the six years of World War II which — for me, anyhow — were a revelation, and on which I pondered long after the identity of the villain had been forgotten. And Michael Kitchen, as Foyle, was just superb!

 

What is the best job in the film industry?

I don’t know the answer to your question, but it reminded me of a line written (and delivered) by Woody Allen, in “What’s New Pussycat”; he had just told Peter O’Toole that he had found a new job at the Folies Bergere.

Woody: I help the girls in and out of their costumes.

Peter: Pretty good job!

Woody: Forty dollars a week.

Peter: Not much money.

Woody: It was all I could afford.

Maybe you could swing the best job in the film industry on the same terms!

 

Which one of Alfred Hitchcock's films would you say is the most unlike the others?

 

Not counting some very early movies he made in England (one or two of which were non-thrillers), I would say that “Jamaica Inn” and “Under Capricorn” would be two that were quite a departure for him, as they were both ‘period’ films, and Hitch, otherwise, confined himself to stories that were set right now, in the present.

What is the biggest movie mistake you know?

 

Whoever titled the big-budget disaster movie, “Krakatoa, East of Java” (about the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano) didn’t take the thirty seconds needed to check his atlas. Krakatoa is actually WEST of Java, as every schoolchild over nine was eager to point out to exhibitors. The producers ran with the title for a couple of years (possibly the publicity material had already been prepared), but eventually withdrew the film, reissuing it (with all new posters, lobby cards and newspaper displays) as “Volcano” (I had to look up that second title on Wikipedia, as, accuracy notwithstanding, it didn’t stir up anywhere near the interest that the first title did, and was — like the movie — easy to forget!)

What Wikipedia doesn’t tell us is the cost of all that extra work, over the kind of mistake that would have been, prior to release, so easy to rectify.

What’s your comment on Rosemary's Baby? I feel it’s among the best movies ever. How can a movie from 1968 be that good? The sound, picture, conversation art, and costume was awesome.

 

I’m really very happy that you enjoyed “Rosemary’s Baby” so well, because, although I don’t fully agree with your assessment (and there were, I assure you, hundreds of movies before 1968 that were heaps better; by the time this came along, TV had already forced movies into a long-term decline), I do feel that it was an outstanding example of the genre, and the kind of movie which you learn something more about with with each repeated viewing. The two leads were, I thought, outstanding; of course, John Cassavetes is always outstanding, but he’s not easy to cast (you can never quite decide whether he’s the hero or the villain), and seldom found a role quite as tailor-made as this one. And Mia Farrow was just amazing, much better than anyone who had seen her work until that time could have predicted.

And, of course, it was worth the price of admission just for those opening shots of “the Bram”… actually, the famous Dakota, once home to Judy Garland, and the place where John Lennon was murdered (on the sidewalk outside as he was exiting).

Like all horror movies, “Rosemary’s Baby” required you to suspend disbelief until the final fade-out; but, unlike just about all the others (“The Innocents” being another notable exception), this one is totally convincing while you are watching it: a tribute to the acting, the script, the music (I loved the lullaby which Farrow croons in the credits!) and, of course, to Roman Polanski’s expert direction: he knows how to press your buttons (in the scene where Mia Farrow is using the scrabble letters to solve the anagram, you could have heard a pin drop in the packed cinema; in at least one other scene, this same audience was so involved that they were actually calling out to ‘Rosemary’ to warn her of what was going on out of her line of sight!).

I recall that it was released, in Sydney, at the same time as “2001: A Space Odyssey” (the cinemas where they were showing were opposite each other), and everyone was saying that “2001” was the best film of the year; I thought then — and still think — that “Rosemary’s Baby” was a far more-memorable production: not “among the best movies ever”, but certainly among the best films of the sixties, and virtually unsurpassed in its genre.

 

Who has starred in the most number of movies in a single year?

 

Before Mickey Rooney took his last name, he was known to cinemagoers as Mickey Maguire, and, from 1927 (when he was just seven) to 1934, made a whole string of movies under that name (it was actually the name of the character he played).

In all, there were around seventy short Mickey Maguire movies (Wikipedia says seventy-eight, but can only come up with sixty-four titles), and one feature-length one, in seven years, and he was the star of all of them.

Towards the end of the run, he was appearing in full-length features as “Mickey Rooney” while continuing to make the MIckey Maguire series and, as well, voicing the cartoon character “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” for Disney! In two of the years of the Maguire movies — 1928 and 1933 — he made thirteen movies per year, and, in a couple of others, twelve. I very much doubt if anyone in the history of cinema could beat that record!

 

What movie was so terrible that it still aggravates you?

 

If I can mention an entire genre which irritates me, it would be the biographies of famous people which set out to capture everyone’s attention by trashing the reputation of their subject.

I expect that the biographical films of Hollywood’s “golden age” — which normally just used the name and one or two incidents in the life of their subject, and then built a fabricated “biography” around these elements — inadvertently set the scene for an eventual swing towards the opposite viewpoint. To watch films on the life of, say, Lorenz Hart, or Al Jolson, or Glenn Miller, or Cole Porter, you’d think that these people, as well as having good looks and great talent, were just the nicest folk you could ever hope to meet, virtually without blemish; anything unsavoury in their real lives was totally omitted or carefully “reinterpreted” to show the subject in the best possible light (Larry Hart’s periodic disappearances were because he was looking for the “right girl” to replace the love of his life who had ditched him, etc).

A backlash against this kind of biography was probably inevitable (especially as film censorship was gradually relaxed in the sixties and seventies), but it was a pity to see the pendulum swing so far in the other direction that, suddenly, all the high-achievers in the Arts, in politics, in Science, or in the military found themselves portrayed as out-and-out scoundrels: their achievements minimized, their failings amplified, their personal tragedies (and the more of these, the better) sensationalised and exploited for the voyeurs and cynics who now made up a sizeable proportion of the cinema audience.

I had always admired the work of Billie Holiday, but, underlying her achievements in advancing jazz vocal music, she had lived a somewhat notorious (and quite tragic) life, and it was not too surprising that she was one of the early choices for the “new” type of biography: “Lady Sings the Blues” (1972). If the makers had, at least, waited until they had a suitable actress/singer to play Miss Holiday, showing us the quality of her work and what made her so unique, the distortion and sensationalising of her life may not have been quite so offensive; but the best they could do, it seems, to guarantee queues at the box-office, was to cast the “Motown Queen” of the time, Diana Ross (lead singer of the Supremes); Miss Ross tried, I guess, but her musical performances of songs associated with Billie Holiday paled so much, compared to the originals, that audiences unfamiliar with Billie’s recordings must have been puzzled as to how she had become such a legend that singers such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Carmen McRae swore that they learned much of what they knew about singing from listening to ‘Lady Day’ (three-quarters of the way through the movie, Ned Glass, playing the agent, enthuses, regarding Billie’s proposed comeback, “We’ll get you Carnegie Hall!”, and you wonder what on earth the singer you have been watching could do in THAT venue).

At the time “Lady Sings the Blues” was released, I thought it was just about the most appalling “biography” of a twentieth-century icon that I had ever seen; if I had known, then, that its director, Sidney J Furie, was the man who had given us such masterpieces as “Dr Blood’s Coffin” and “The Snake Woman”, and would go on to direct “The Entity”, which (according to Wikipedia) deals with “a single mother in Los Angeles who is continually raped by an invisible assailant” (one of the scenes in the shooting script of “Lady Sings the Blues” which he decided to save for a whole new movie, perhaps?), then possibly I would have been less-surprised.

“Lady Sings the Blues” must have done very good business, however, even if its only real “achievement” was to trivialise the achievements of one of the great singers of the twentieth century; virtually every subsequent biography of a musical figure took exactly the same approach, letting the audience in on their “inside” knowledge that all our heroes are, in reality, nowhere near as good as we are… and this has continued right up to last year, when “Judy!” took as its subject the one girl singer who was probably even more revered, and more influential, than had been Billie Holiday in her lifetime (thankfully, the movie about a woman being raped by an invisible assailant had already been made, so the worst they could do with Judy was to find her unwell and under-prepared at some of her concerts).

 

Can you post a video clip from the most memorable scene of your favorite movie and tell us why you chose it?

 

(youtube.com/watch?v=gNDu75gEiIo). I am so happy you asked! Although, if you play the scene above, you will scarcely need me to explain why I chose this particular clip. This was 1954, when popular singers just didn’t sing as great as that; this was a lesson for every aspiring singer of the day, but the only performer who ever topped it was the original, herself, going on to greater and greater heights for the next decade.

 

Which version of A Star is Born is the best?

 

I have seen the last four (which, really, might be called “all of them”, since the very first one came out with a different title: “What Price Hollywood?”)

Two of the four are, frankly, pretty dreadful, Streisand’s being the worst (to the point where I left early, so I can’t tell you if it suddenly turned great in the last forty minutes). Gaynor’s version is one of the good ones, but, from 1937, it is now VERY old, and would seem “quaint” to modern audiences. It wasn’t a musical, either.

By far the best was the 1954 version with Judy Garland. That movie is getting on in years, too, but no-one listens to Judy Garland sing and says “quaint”! She’s a powerhouse at acting, too (I don’t think I ever saw as good a performance as Judy in that film), and, for its whole 185-minute running time, you will sit there and feel privileged to be part of the audience. It’s one of the great movies of the sound era (which is, of course, why Streisand and Lady Gaga were drawn to it, and why it will be made yet again in a couple of decades).

 

Why is Ava Gardner still considered more beautiful than Angelina Jolie?

 

Who is the “most beautiful” is always just a matter of opinion, but possibly the reason for Ava Gardner still being considered more beautiful, not only than Angelina Jolie, but than just about all of today’s stars, may be that she had a long screen career — 45 years — which co-incided with the “glamorous” years of Hollywood, when all the resources of an actress’s home studio (and, for some time, Ava’s was MGM, the cream of the crop when it came to beauty) were brought to bear on making sure she looked at her absolute peak in every frame…. no matter how long it took or how many retakes were required. When you saw Ava, either on the screen or in publicity shoots, what you were seeing was an army of hairdressers, beauticians, lighting experts, and wardrobe designers all working around the clock, if necessary, to ensure that you loved what you saw. Also, back then, Ava was (rightly) considered just about the best of the best, and that reputation stays with one, even after the career is over.

Not counting her part supporting her father at age seven, Angelina Jolie’s career is still quite young, compared to Ava’s… a mere 27 years. And those years were well after the decline of the studio system and the 24-hour-per-day concern over how the star was presented. Nowadays, hand-held cameras use natural light, instead of the hours that the studio used to take to make sure their star was lit “just right”. Wardrobe departments and make-up departments may well still exist, but they’re not what they used to be…. the budgeting simply wouldn’t permit it. Angela virtually has to “make it” on her own; the fact that she is even mentioned in the same breath as Ava Gardner is, in itself, a tribute to her beauty.

What are some doomed movies saved by last-minute reshoots?

 

MGM’s 1945 movie, “The Clock”, was assigned to one of its stalwart directors, Jack Conway, who made the (unusual for MGM) decision to film on-location in New York, an added complication unlikely to find favour with the already-troubled star, Judy Garland, who performed best surrounded by familiar crew and artistic collaborators. Early in the shoot, Conway fell ill and was replaced by a Polish-born Austrian, Fred Zinnemann, a talented director (even Judy admitted that), but whose accent meant that instructions were not always easy to understand; his star began to feel even more insecure, and the future of the film looked shaky.

Finally, Judy pleaded for a director with whom she had already had great success (in her previous film, “Meet Me in St Louis”), who, she was well-aware, preferred the added control which filming in the studio allowed. Even though this meant virtually rebuilding, at vast expense, Pennsylvania Station on the sound-stage at MGM, and re-shooting just about everything that had been shot so far, the studio acquiesced to Judy’s wishes, and Vincente Minnelli stepped in…to the relief of its star and the satisfaction of everyone else (the film, as it turned out, was absolutely delightful, shooting went smoothly, and, of course, the star and director married during the production, resulting in the birth of Liza Minnelli soon afterwards).

Would it be better to make a movie showing how bad war is instead of the Hollywood cliches thrown in there?

 

With respect, it’s already been done; in fact, they’ve been doing it since “The Big Parade” (1925) and “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930).

While there are ample examples of the kind of war films you abhor — the American hero demonstrating both his physical and moral superiority, turning the battle into a great adventure in which we cheer as the enemy is wiped out and cities annihilated — there have always been directors who have tried to deal with the subject honestly, avoiding cliches and warning us that war is not a comic-strip. Stanley Kubrick made a beauty in “Paths of Glory”; William A Wellman made sure that “Battleground” was free from the usual cliches, and it looked like no other film ever made at MGM; Frank Sinatra directed “None But The Brave”, which was careful to treat both the Japanese and the Americans with equal respect and empathy; in “Home of the Brave”, Mark Robson and Stanley Kramer presented a side of U.S. troops in World War II that created quite a controversy in its time, because it wasn’t at all cliched, broke a few taboos, and made everyone feel discomfited.

There were lots of others: Lewis Milestone’s “A Walk in the Sun”, Robert Aldrich’s “Attack!”, John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate”. All commendably cliche-free, and each one showing just how shocking war can be, with few heroics, no glory…… just victims.

What actor/actress only had one brilliant performance among all their films?

 

Robert Walker. He was a “good” actor for most of his career, playing the shy, boyish but socially gauche nice guy, and occasionally was cast so well (for example, in “The Clock” and “Since You Went Away”, in both of which he played a soldier who really didn’t understand what he was doing in a war) that he was a definite asset to the movie. But he seemed doomed to play essentially the same character for his whole career; he gave no indication that he had more to offer than a consistently-acceptable performance.

But Alfred Hitchcock saw another side to Robert Walker, and offered him a role for which, judging by the past, he couldn’t have been less-suited: the hyper-confident, scheming, homosexual psychopath with murderous intentions towards his father in “Strangers on a Train”. I have no idea what made Hitch think, even for an instant, of Robert Walker in this kind of role; but Hitch, at the top of his game at this stage in his career, could make inspired decisions like this. And Walker, taking the bit between his teeth, gave himself to the role so completely that, in his twenty-first film, he surpassed everyone’s expectations (except, perhaps, those of his canny director, who used this performance to create one of the best thrillers of his distinguished career).

Robert Walker made ‘Bruno Antony’ one of the most unforgettable characters in movies. A whole new career seemed to be his for the asking. Yet he made only one more film, and died before its completion (the studio had to ask Hitch for some outtakes from “Strangers on a Train” to deftly insert into “My Son John”, just to complete Walker’s contribution). But, thanks to this one brilliant tour-de-force, he is unlikely to be forgotten.

What are the advantages of seeing a film at the cinema?

 

Well, if the film was made for TV, arguably no advantage at all. However, if it was made to be shown on a cinema screen, then there is no other way to take it “as prescribed”, is there? Seeing it on TV can give you only a pale impression of what its makers had in mind; that’s not, of course, the end of the world, because a good script is still a good script, and a great performance is still great…. but I don’t think I ever watched a film on television with quite the same enjoyment as when I had seen it on its cinema release, in front of an audience (and never forget that the audience reaction is an important part of the experience! It was a great shame when exhibitors raised their prices so as to exclude ninety percent of the movie-going public, with the result that you had to see the film with just another half-dozen people in the cinema; that, to me, is a real downer!)

Which Hollywood actors made the transition from sports stars?

 

Just for openers, Esther Williams, the star of all those 1940s-50s MGM swimming musicals.

In her pre-movie days, as a teenager, she was a member of the Los Angeles Athletic Club Swim team, and set several regional and national swimming records. In fact, she was all set to represent the USA at the 1940 Olympics when Adolf Hitler intervened and the Games were abruptly cancelled. So she, instead, got a job in Billy Rose’s Aquacade, where she was spotted by an MGM talent scout…. and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

What are some of the best movies related to music and musicians?

 

Generally, Hollywood hasn’t done very well with biographies of musicians or composers; the early ones in the thirties through to the mid-fifties usually discarded most of the facts about the subject and invented a banal “feel-good” story (with an occasional nod to a real event) just as an excuse to give audiences a feast of the relevant music (but, at least, there was plenty of that).

Then, for the next decade and a half, stories of musicians concentrated on triumph over mid-career tragedy (Jane Froman, Lillian Roth, Marjorie Lawrence, Ruth Etting), so the music frequently took a back seat to the tear-jerking. From the seventies onward, the last-act triumph became less important than the fall from grace: now we had tell-all melodramas, which seemed bent on trivialising the music and concentrating only on showing us that musical talent didn’t equate with personal worth…. the subjects were not only no better than you were at living their lives, they were far worse. With these biographies, the music didn’t much matter, and could, therefore, even be performed poorly (as in “Lady Sings the Blues”, or — more recently — last year’s “Judy!”). So, depending on the era, you either left the cinema feeling let down because you never really learned much about the musician, or feeling relieved that you never had to run into him!

An exception, perhaps, was “Music of the Heart”. the story of Roberta Guaspari, who brought the beauty of music to a poverty-stricken neighbourhood that didn’t boast much beauty of any other kind. With real locations (such as Carnegie Hall), and real musicians (such as Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman) lending some authenticity to its story, it was engrossing, uplifting without being syrupy, and musically exciting. What’s more, the subject was played by Meryl Streep, so you knew right away you were in for an honest and well-researched acting performance while you waited for those great musicians to come along and do their stuff.

I don’t know whether it won any Academy Awards — as did, for example, “Amadeus”, which was glorious to look at and listen to, but effectively destroyed the private reputation of Wolfgang Mozart — but “Music of the Heart” is one musical biography that left you feeling entertained, enriched and enlightened.

Which movie were you the most excited for before its release regardless of how good it was after?

 

Probably “This is Cinerama”. In Sydney, Australia, in the early fifties, there was only one cinema large enough to accept the 76-foot-wide screen which was needed for the original three-projector Cinerama, and only then with quite a bit of reconstruction necessary. So the Hoyts Plaza was closed down, temporarily, for the installation, and we early-teen movie buffs could walk past and see it taking shape, with that huge curved screen like nothing we had ever seen. To us, it looked like a whole new world of cinema opening up before our eyes, and we couldn’t wait for the experience, planning exactly where we were going to sit in this “new” theatre to get exactly the perfect experience of the technological marvel. When we finally sat in those seats, and watched as Lowell Thomas pronounced the words, “Ladies and gentlemen (pause)..… this is CINERAMA!”, the film, regardless of its actual quality, could do no wrong.

What was the most manipulative movie you've ever seen?

 

“The Sound of Music”, maybe? It had cute kids who sing, even cuter nuns (who also sing), Rodgers and Hammerstein songs for everyone to sing, and the Austrian Alps as backdrop to all that singing. And, of course, Nazis who are easily fooled by nuns who know how to disable a jeep (and confess their sins with the purloined distributor in their hands). And a hard-hearted widower who melts at the sound of his previously-unruly children suddenly singing like angels. And… but there is really no need to go on, is there? You have to give credit where credit is due: the producers didn’t leave a box unticked…. except, perhaps, that they (unaccountably) forgot to put leg irons on one of the children (the prettiest, of course), so we could cheer for her feisty independence as she worked twice as hard as everyone else, stubbornly determined to keep up.

No matter how easy it was to spot the fact that you were being manipulated, and how much you hated yourself for letting it happen to you, these people are such experts at what they do that what other recourse was there for the viewer but just to give in?

What is the single best uncut scene in movies in your opinion?

 

It’s a toss-up between two. Both are LONG — five minutes in one case, seven in the other — takes in which the dialogue was improvised on the spot. Both featured the same player: Judy Garland, probably the most talented and versatile performer ever to grace the movies.

The first was in the 1954 “A Star is Born”, and has become famous as “the dressing room sequence”. If you’ve ever seen the movie, you won’t need reminding of what it’s about. And if you haven’t yet seen the movie, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble recognising it when it comes along, although it may have already been running for a couple of minutes before you realise that there hasn’t been a single cut, and that it’s going to continue to the end of the scene without one.

Can you offer any explanation as to how Judy Barton - in Hitchcock's Vertigo - managed to disappear from her room in the McKittrick Hotel and get into her car and drive away without Scottie Ferguson seeing her escape?

 

While “Vertigo” is fascinating to watch, and Bernard Herrmann’s music is supremely beautiful to listen to, frankly, there are so many instances of plot inconsistencies sprinkled throughout its running time that the one you quoted ranks only as a minor case of logic being thrown to the wind in order to get the story told. The logistics of the murder — a woman who is the dead-spit, right down to her clothing and hairstyle, of the victim lying at the foot of the tower going unremarked-on, people hiding undiscovered at a murder scene (no-one even bothered to look at the place where she “jumped”?), and, apparently, a getaway made using a conveniently-parked car nearby which had somehow escaped the notice of Scotty, the police, and all the custodians of the mission — don’t stand up to even perfunctory analysis; and what can one say about the peculiar behaviour of the character played by Kim Novak who, having been painstakingly taught how to dress, speak, and do makeup like a genuine goddess, immediately reverts to her cheap, low-class clothing, mascara and speech as soon as she is paid off? The best word to describe the story of “Vertigo” is “goofy”; yet, for all of that, it was totally engrossing….. just don’t ask for explanations!

Maybe Hitch himself gave us the best explanation, even though he was speaking to another leading lady (who also wanted to see the logic in what she was doing) and about another film: “Ingrid, it’s only a movie!”

Why has the old Italian film Shoeshine been forgotten?

 

If it has been forgotten (I hadn’t realised that), I would hope that this is only a temporary affliction and that it will one day be remembered and revived by film societies. It certainly shouldn’t be forgotten, because it’s a deeply-felt and skilled piece of work; at the time I saw it, less than a decade after its first release, I thought it was the best foreign-language film I had ever seen (admittedly, I was working from a very narrow base!)

The neo-realism of the post-war Italian movies doesn’t, of course, translate well into 21st-century film-making styles, so modern audiences could never really be impacted by it to the extent that cinemagoers brought up on Betty Grable, Judy and Mickey, and Rita Hayworth were. I recall that, on early release, everyone was so impressed by the realism of “Open City” (also Italian, and made in the same year as “Shoeshine”) that some cinemagoers thought it was a documentary, and that Roberto Rossellini was shooting, spontaneously, what he found happening on the street. I didn’t see it for another fifteen years, and, in the interim, acting styles had changed and filming “in the streets” was no longer innovative. I was dismayed at how UN-realistic it all seemed, with Anna Magnani playing in a style more like “grand guignol” than neo-realism. All the other film-makers had simply “caught up”, and a new kind of realism was expected by audiences.

I haven’t seen “Shoeshine” since 1960, so maybe it has suffered the same fate… almost certainly, it will have, because the leading players in de Sica’s film were children, and, of course, child actors nowadays are just so breathtakingly skilled (compared to a half-century ago) that they not-infrequently outshine the adult actors in movies in which they feature. I would like to see “Shoeshine” remembered and revived, but it would only be fully-appreciated if the cinemagoer could mentally go back to its year of production, and see it when it was brand new. But, then, that’s probably true of, say, “Avatar” and “Inception”, too!

 

Who, in your opinion, is the greatest (actress, star, personality) out of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis?

In terms of acting skill, influence in Hollywood, length of career, variety of roles attempted, and uniqueness of persona — all of which adds up to “greatest” — to choose either one would be to insult the other. Both were superb, and how lucky for Hollywood — and for cinema audiences of the twentieth century — that they both came along at around the same time!

In "12 Angry Men" (1957), what are the strongest arguments both for a guilty verdict and a not guilty one?

 

It’s easier to take the arguments for “not guilty” first. In short, the main reason he was found not guilty was because every single one of the eyewitnesses was deemed unreliable; they didn’t tell the court exactly what happened, they told the court what they believed might have happened based on the little bit that each one saw or heard. And their stories were coloured by bias and pre-judgement.

Since they were the only testimonies we, the audience, heard discussed, that doesn’t leave me much to say about the evidence for a guilty verdict, does it? The main “evidence” in favour of finding the accused boy guilty was that he was the last person known to have seen the victim alive; they parted on hostile terms following an argument; at the police interrogation he couldn’t remember his subsequent movements on the night sufficiently to establish a convincing alibi; and he owned — and knew how to use, since the crime took place in a neighbourhood not unfamiliar with violence — a knife very similar to the murder weapon. And also, of course, because everyone in the court (including most of the jurymen) took one look at him and said, “Oh, yes, we know his type, he’s just the kind of boy you’d expect to do something like that!”

Not exactly overwhelming evidence…. but, then again, the film wasn’t about the boy’s innocence or guilt (you got only one glimpse of him, before the opening credits, so there was no chance to build up any empathy); it was about crimes that can be committed right there in the courtroom, and in the jury room, because good citizens are unable to put aside their prejudices and do the extra thinking (and work) required to make a rational and just evaluation. It was the courtroom system, not the boy, that was on trial…. and Lumet found the system guilty as charged.

Is it possible to impress young current movie lovers with the films of Alfred Hitchcock?

 

I would hope that a true “movie lover”, young or old, would appreciate that movies are a product of their time, and would not readily discount one because it didn’t meet the criteria of what is deemed necessary for “success” in today’s movies. Frankly, I don’t think today’s criteria are “up to much”, anyway; the big successes of today aren’t aimed at movie lovers, they are aimed at young people whose tastes are not very demanding and who have “ready money”. My proof here is that, when you ask a young moviegoer to tell you about a film he has just seen and enjoyed, he can’t really find much to discuss. Who wrote it? (Shrug). Who directed it? (Shrug). Who wrote the music? (Shrug). It’s all finished now, so none of those things matters… it’s off to the next one.

If your young person really loves “movies” and not just “a night out at the movies”, then Hitchcock is a safe bet for an easy introduction to the style of the forties and fifties. My two young daughters (mid-twenties) LOVE Hitchcock’s movies, and right now I am showing them, nightly (for about a year), works of some of the great directors of the past. We have done Lang, Berkeley, Cukor, Wellman, Wyler, Minnelli, Wilder, Chaplin, Welles, Zinnemann, Capra, Fuller, Siodmak, Stevens ….. but I am saving Hitchcock till last, because they are always pestering me to get to him, so that they can see (again) “Strangers on a Train” or “North by Northwest” or “Rope” or “The Man Who Knew too Much”. It’s easy to recognise one of his movies, and, at his prime, there are few directors more deserving of the title of “auteur”. For a movie lover, young or old, Hitch is a sure thing.

How can I become a film director without going to a film school?

 

Well, it’s a little easier than to become a brain surgeon without going to medical school, I suppose, but you’re still pushing your barrow uphill if you remain determined to crash straight into the business without prior training. I know that was the way that it USED to be done, when the movies were “new”, but back then there weren’t millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs wrapped up in every production. You can continue to hope that watching and analysing hundreds of movies is, in the long run, just as good as going to Film School…. but if you want to make a career out of directing, then that is building your castle on sand.

I am not “in the movie business”, so I have no real expertise in answering your question (the next respondent will, I am sure, correct my misinformation); I would suspect, however, that even would-be-directors who HAVE been to film school are finding it far from easy to get a job when they step out into the real world. It’s a competitive business. Turning your back on the school that might teach you how to do it (and give you something to put on your curriculum vitae) is just giving yourself an extra hurdle to overcome.

Which is the best Romeo and Juliet movie?

 

It seems your nine answers, so far, have been fairly evenly split between Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann and “West Side Story”; no one has chosen the 1954 British movie which was actually filmed in Verona (plus some fill-ins in Venice and Siena). I think it was considerably better than Luhrmann’s dismaying effort (which remains one of the very few films I have walked out on), and on a par with Zeffirelli’s version (“West Side Story” was better than any of them, but not as an adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet”; it was a daring, original, and brilliantly-executed idea, but one responded to the music and the dancing rather than anything Shakespeare had brought to the party. To call it a “Romeo and Juliet movie” is a little like calling “Forbidden Planet” a remake of “The Tempest”).

For my money, the best “movie” of “Romeo and Juliet” isn’t actually a movie at all; it’s the 1978 BBC version, made as part of a series for British television. At nearly 170 minutes, you get most of Shakespeare’s words; you also get actors who know how to read them, such as Sir John Gielgud (who was in the 1954 version), Alan Rickman, MIchael Hordern, and, surprisingly — as the nurse — the wonderful Celia Johnson, whom everyone remembers fondly from “Brief Encounter”. The young lovers look young enough for their parts, but are still experienced enough to make Shakespeare’s language sound unforced. This version doesn’t (as did Luhrmann’s) “modernise” the story to make it relevant to young audiences; and it doesn’t (as did Zeffirelli) cast the leads for age-appropriateness and eye-appeal, with their ability to handle Shakespeare’s prose coming a clear third (the BBC got the best of both worlds with their Juliet, Rebecca Saire, who was, in fact, just fourteen when she played the part, but still rose to the challenge of using Shakespeare’s lines as if they had just formed themselves inside her own head).

Watch this version first, for sure; and then turn to the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical for a very different kind of thrill; the rest you can forget.

Why is it called the Golden Age of Hollywood?

 

Because it was a time when it seemed that everyone in the English-speaking world wanted to go to the movies for their entertainment, and the money was flowing… so much of it that the movie studios in Hollywood, the centre of film production for English-speaking audiences, became big and powerful, and were able to hire artists and craftsmen who were experts at all aspects of movie making. They had the money to take advantage of every new innovation: colour, large screens, better microphones, casts of thousands; the race was on to make your product better than anyone else’s.

The Hollywood studios were cities in themselves… everything anyone could need to make a movie was right there, inside the walls, and they were capable of turning out a movie every week…. and, in most cases they did just that. So the stars of these movies became as recognisable to audiences as members of their own family, and audiences clamoured to see them again and again, and to know how they lived their lives when they weren’t on the screen. Whole new industries grew up around the movies of Hollywood: fan magazines, publicity campaigns, fashion and make-up houses, gossip columns.

Until television, and new laws controlling the studios’ ability to run their own chains of cinemas, Hollywood was on a golden path to unheard-of prosperity….. it wasn’t all that easy to lose money! So the studios were populated by people who loved what they were doing, and it showed in the product that was being made.

In the years following the advent of television, the studios found that, suddenly, it was very easy to lose money, unless you happened to have made a product that would lure people away from their TV screens. A good movie wasn’t an innovative one, or a controversial one, or one that showed you the best talent in the world; a good movie was one that kept the cash registers jingling and cost less than it returned to its makers. So, innovation or controversy were sacrificed because of the risks to profitability. The people revered in Hollywood became, gradually, not the beautiful faces and the great writers and the singers, composers, and dancers, but “number crunchers” who could ensure that their project would turn a healthy profit. They no longer had to love movies, or even know anything about what was good or bad in a movie. What they had to do was to emulate last year’s success, and do whatever it took to minimise risk. And, as the accountants took over, and a movie became a “package” to be sold to the highest bidder, the Golden Years of Hollywood became no more than a memory.

What was the most undeserving Oscar win by an actor?

 

There have been quite a few instances of well-loved actors nearing the end of their careers who have taken a role that, finally, “owns up” to their real age, and have been honoured for that brave act more than for any “new” skills they had learned as actors. John Wayne put on an eye patch and let the script joke about the size of his paunch, and walked away with the Oscar for “True Grit”; but the actual performance he gave was no better than, for instance, “The Searchers”, for which he wasn’t even nominated. To compound the felony, his Oscar for “True Grit” prevented (yet again) Richard Burton from taking home the award, in this case for “Anne of the Thousand Days”.

Elizabeth Taylor gave several outstanding performances in the late 1950s, and was a not-infrequent nominee; finally cut loose from MGM, she was able to take on more-challenging roles, and most observers knew an Oscar was only a matter of time. However, she owed one final film on her MGM contract, and, eager to be done with them, accepted a script which she disliked, and knew was well beneath her…. and her performance reflected her attitude. But she had a bout of near-fatal pneumonia (which required a tracheotomy) at around the same time, and the Academy, fearing she might be lost to the cinema, decided not to wait: her Academy Award for “Butterfield 8” was for her least-committed performance in years.

Marlon Brando squandered some of his most bankable years making - and contributing to the failure of - a string of movies in which he seemed to be parodying himself, and was on a downward spiral when Francis Ford Coppola, seeking a “name” for his risky venture “The Godfather”, offered Brando (against advice) a feature role in what turned out to be the first “quality” film he’d made in years. The Academy was so thrilled to see him back, at last, in an ‘A’ movie that it overlooked the fact that he was no better in it than he had been in most of his recent tawdry efforts, and gave him an Academy Award (thus overlooking better performances that year by Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier and Peter O’Toole), which, to show his contempt for the Awards system — or was it a pang of conscience? — he declined.

I could also go on to cite Grace Kelly in “The Country Girl”…. but that win has become so notorious that it hardly needs any further comment from me (anyway, I am unable to claim impartiality when discussing that particular award… I have mentioned it on Quora too many times already).

 

Are there any silent movie stars still alive?

Surely not. Except for a couple of recent movies made as silents (for example, “Silent Movie” and “The Artist”), the silent era ended in the late 1920s, which means that a player who was nine or ten years old at the time that talkies came in would be a century old this year. And there were few “stars” that were under ten at that time: one that springs immediately to mind, Jackie Coogan (he was the star of Chaplin’s “The Kid”), for instance, died in 1984, as did another child star from the silent era, Mary Miles Minter.

Diana Serra Cary, who was known as “Baby Peggy”, in her silent days, and “Peggy Montgomery” when she made the transition to sound movies, lived to 101, dying as recently as February 24, 2020. I doubt if there is anyone around to contest her claim as the last surviving star of the Silents.

How can we tell if a movie will be great?

 

You mean, before you’ve seen it? Well, if it’s right there, in the cinemas, and has been reviewed by all the critics, you could always look up their appraisal, and take your cue from that; you may not agree with them, but if the experts think it’s great, at least it’s in there with a chance when you decide to try it out.

Or do you mean that the movie hasn’t even been made yet and you are part of the production team, and you want to know if you are about to make a great movie? In that case, I would suggest that you can’t. All you can do is to ensure that all the most-promising ingredients are being mixed into this “soup” that you’re putting together. For a start, the right source material: can you draw sweet water from a sour well? Secondly, the right director: is he fully-committed to the project and passionate about the source material, and does he occasionally “strike gold” with other films? You can go on and on through all the other elements until you’re confident that all is in place for a movie everyone will think is “great”.

And, of course, ninety percent of the time you will be quite wrong. That’s why so many films come to us in different editions: director’s cut, redux, etc. Producers who clearly missed the mark big-time go back to the editing room for a second try, to see if, somehow, they can turn their sow’s ear into a silk purse. Oliver Stone’s “Alexander”, for instance, has three or four editions floating around, of varying lengths and with varying constructions (e.g. opening with the big battle which was originally the climax), all trying to capture his original “vision”… which was, of course, a film which everyone will call “great” (I have the edition called “Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut”, and, as long as you are only talking about its length — 213 minutes — I suppose it could be called “great”).

I like musicals but couldn't make it through La La Land. What am I missing?

 

I couldn’t, either…. and Musicals are my favourite genre! So your question is, for me, a valid one: what does “La La Land” fail to deliver that fans of musicals want to see?

I think the answer may be much the same as considering what went wrong with “Everyone Says I Love You”. Have you seen that? Try and get hold of a copy and see if you feel the same way about that one. Woody Allen is usually a “safe bet”, and he has been responsible for half a dozen of the most interesting movies made in the last forty years; but I kept feeling that he’d “missed the boat” with that effort.

Neither movie is a stinker; Woody wouldn’t know how to make one of those, and “La La Land” almost won Best Movie of the Year. The forty minutes I saw of it had a feast of great camera work, and interesting shots while the musical numbers rolled on… and there was a lot of music! The problem was, I think, that what you responded to in those scenes wasn’t the music or the performances; it was the technological wizardry and the location work that made everything look so spectacular.

When you look at a movie like “Ziegfeld Follies”, you have to admit that Vincente Minnelli, one of the great directors of musicals that you and I COULD “make it through”, was no slouch when it came to clever camera work and technological wizardry (he wasn’t so good with location work). But, with Minnelli, if you noticed these at all, it was probably just in passing, because what he was presenting was extraordinary musical TALENT: singing, dancing, choreographing, orchestrating, composing….. he would make sure that your breath was taken away by the sheer beauty of what these people were doing under his direction. His cameras and his sets and his colours “framed” the performances, but never intruded upon them. When Fred or Gene were dancing, or Judy was singing, Minnelli didn’t even like to make a cut, because that kind of genius, he knew, needed to be seen without interruption or intrusion.

You may well applaud people like Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (in “La La Land”) and Edward Norton, Natalie Portman and Drew Barrymore (in “Everyone Says I Love You”) for their willingness to get up there and do their singing or dancing “live” (not, apparently, true of Barrymore, I later heard), and for wanting us to recall, with them, the innocence of the musical cinema of the past, and for not caring too much if they were out of their depth; but you couldn’t use the word “genius” (as you could with, say, Garland, Astaire and Kelly) to describe anything you were watching. I stayed with “Everyone Says I Love You” to the end, because I knew that if Allen had put Goldie Hawn in a musical, he would eventually have to give her something musical to do; but I didn’t see anyone resembling Hawn in the credits of “La La Land”, so I made the decision that what I had seen in the first forty minutes was all that Damien Chazelle had to show us. So, like you, I turned off and looked for something directed by Minnelli.

I have just watched "I'm alright Jack" with the actor Terry-Thomas. What films of his would you recommend?

 

Virtually all Terry-Thomas’s British-made movies are worth chasing up, as he was at his best when partnering with some of the other British comedians of his day (as you saw in “I’m Alright Jack”)…. he was quite unique, and added something special to every film he appeared in. I especially liked “Make Mine Mink”, but, if you chase that up, make sure you check that it’s the complete edition (I have an old VHS copy, and his very best scene has, unaccountably, been edited out!)

I always thought is style of comedy was best-understood by British directors, and he was less-effective in the films he made in the USA, where they encouraged him to overplay his “English-ass” persona. While he never seemed as comfortable in that situation, he did have some good bits in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”).

Who is your favourite British actor and what are his movies?

 

Vanani’s answer could hardly be bettered; of the crop of British actors in film today, it would be hard to come up with a better suggestion than Colin Firth.

Reaching back as far as the Golden Years, there was a whole slew of excellent British actors, many of whom helped rebuild the British film industry after the war before, eventually, succumbing to the lure of Hollywood: Noel Coward, John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Olivier, Stewart Granger, Richard Attenborough, and my own special favourite, James Mason.

I just loved listening to that voice — surely the best speaking voice ever to grace the movies — and I admired Mason’s courage in taking on roles that interested and challenged him, rather than roles that were likely to bring him any kind of personal popularity. He often stepped into parts that other actors had turned down because of the risks to their reputation: the middle-aged lover of the child “Lolita” (turned down by Noel Coward), the alcoholic film star who kills himself in “A Star is Born” (turned down by Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart) and the misogynist Scotsman in “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” (turned down by Clifton Webb). And then, of course, there was the drug-addict teacher of “Bigger than Life”, considered such an unlikely prospect for popular acclaim that he had to produce and write it himself, in order to get it made.

However, he did get it made, and he made it without compromise or even so much as a glimpse towards his “star” status. That, really, was his special contribution to the films of his era: stardom could come and go, but a great role was deserving always of his best efforts. And there were few who could match Mason at his best!

What is a movie that got turned into a musical that ended up better than the said movie?

 

Not, alas, “Sunset Boulevard”.

I guess that the prize here might go to the 1954 “A Star is Born”, which was a remake of a straight drama (the leading lady in the original was an aspiring actress, not a singer) made in 1937. The original (itself a remake of “What Price Hollywood?”) was actually very good, but Judy Garland had seen the possibilities of making it into a musical ever since she did a non-musical radio production of it in 1942. In fact, she pestered Louis B Mayer into turning it into a musical for her every time they ran into each other, and even had her “ideal cast” of MGM stars worked out for it; Louis B was, however, reluctant to let “little Judy” take on such a weighty role, and equally reluctant to allow any of his major male stars to play a washed-up has-been who commits suicide. So he kept stalling, and, eventually, Judy left MGM and proceeded to produce the film under her own company’s trademark (Transcona Enterprises).

It was, as everybody says, worth the wait; subsequent remakes have always maintained the concept of the heroine making it in the singing world, so it seems that everyone agrees it’s better as a “musical” (although, I always think of the 1954 “Star is Born” as a drama with music rather than as a “traditional” musical).

What movie based on a book has surpassed the popularity of its source material?

 

Arthur C Clarke wrote a story called “The Sentinel”, which was enjoyed by science-fiction readers but was hardly a world-wide sensation, and is not often mentioned today. However, the film made from this story (“fattened up” with a few ideas from two other Clarke stories, “Encounter with the Dawn” and “Rescue Party”) — “2001: A Space Odyssey” — seems to have caught everyone’s fancy, and that title would, today, be far more recognisable than the title Clarke gave to his work.

 

Which actors or actresses got paid a lot of money for a very small movie or television role?

 

One of the happiest stories I know of in regard to ultra-high salaries was the case of Sir Alec Guinness in the first of the “Star Wars” movies. George Lucas, new to the cinema at that time, knew this was a risky venture which could easily lose a lot of money, so he decided to do what so many producers had done before him: put a bit of money aside to entice one big-name star to join the cast in a featured role that would require little effort and only a few days of the star’s time. The role of Obi-Wan Kenobi was ideal for this purpose, so he began to hawk it around to the better-known names in Hollywood.

His problem, of course, was that, on paper, his science-fiction story sounded like something most big-name stars would be careful to stay well away from, and so his early approaches met with swift refusals. I don’t know how many people he approached before he lit on Guinness, who — with his background on the British stage playing Shakespeare and T.S. Elliot, and a reputation for building his career gradually and carefully, with impeccable judgment — must have been the most-unlikely actor working to be interested in playing a laser-wielding alien dressed in a caftan, from a galaxy far, far away. Guinness listened to Lucas’s pitch, and the money on offer (which was an insult to an Academy Award winning actor of his reputation, although he was far too polite to point this out bluntly), and, of course, declined…twice; when Lucas seemed at his wit’s end, Guinness relented: “I can’t play it for the money you’re offering; but I will play it for you without any up-front fee at all. I’ll do it for two and a half percent of your gross”.

Lucas could hardly believe his ears; since he didn’t expect to turn a profit at all (nor, I would imagine, did Guinness), here was one of the most distinguished actors in the English-speaking world virtually offering to play his role for nothing! The deal was done on the spot, and, of course, the rest is history. “Star Wars” became one of the most profitable films in Hollywood history, Guinness had a not-unpleasant and quite short “shoot” (even though he privately told his friends that the whole thing was “rubbish”), and, for the rest of his life those royalties just kept rolling in, making this modest-living, mild-mannered gentleman one of the richest actors in Hollywood.

 

Which child actor was/is living the saddest post-actor life?

Many child actors have come to a sorry end…. one might almost be justified in saying that it is the most common outcome for fame at an early age. But the saddest, and most unfair, would have to be Bobby Driscoll.

He was, in his youth, more than just a “child actor”; he was a genuine star and Academy Award winner, Walt Disney’s number-one player in his live-action movies (and Disney used him as the “model” for the look of Peter Pan in the feature cartoon, and what you hear in the movie is his voice).

As a multi-talented child (he was, apparently, an artist as well as an actor) he could, it seems, do no wrong, and there is no doubt that he made a lot of money for Disney (and for RKO, to whom Disney loaned him for “The Window”). But then, Driscoll did something unthinkable: he grew up. The legend — hopefully not true — is that, as a teenager he developed terrible acne, and Walt Disney, aghast, simply cut him loose, seeing no future for him in his “pretty” movies.

Driscoll’s life went downhill swiftly after the termination of his contract with Disney, and he turned to drugs. He was eventually arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, and spent time in the Narcotic Rehabilitation Centre. He tried to resume his career as “Robert Driscoll”, but found little work, and simply dropped out of sight. He was found dead “sleeping rough” in an abandoned tenement building in Manhattan, and, with no immediate identification and no one coming forward to claim his body, he was buried in an unmarked grave at Potters Field, where his body still lies.

Which actors and actresses famously dislike each other?

 

There are probably scores of these, but when you say “famously”, I can only think of the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. There was hardly anyone in the western world who was unaware, at the time, of the acrimony between them!

Well, it’s possibly not true that Jerry disliked Dean; in fact, after Dean passed, Jerry wrote a book about how much he loved his ex-partner and how their break-up tore him apart. However, when it was all happening, colleagues of both felt that Jerry treated Dean, not like a partner, but more like a lackey, giving him orders and referring to the films they made together as “MY picture”. The team’s movies, wildly successful at first, soured in the minds of the public when it became public knowledge that they weren’t even speaking off-camera, and in one of their last films together (“Pardners”, perhaps? Aficionados of the team will be able to correct me, I’m sure), as the end title came up on-screen, the two actors stepped out of character and spoke directly to the cinema audience, saying, in effect, that they had kissed and made up, and that the partnership was still solid.

They made, I think, just one more movie together, and things were worse than ever, so Dean simply walked out. Jerry went on without him, and for a while it looked as if Dean had walked out on his career as well (even though buddies like Frank Sinatra kept telling him that he was actually funnier than Jerry, and, as well, far more versatile). Jerry took over complete control of his own movies, made a couple that were very popular with audiences, but, as he lost his “kid” look and became obsessed with broadening his scope, his popularity waned. His last film — “The Day the Clown Cried” — shocked distributors to the point where it was never released (even though bits of it have turned up in recent years on Youtube); Dean, on the other hand, went on to lasting fame as a singer, comedian, and dramatic actor… and, as everyone knows, the host of a wildly successful TV series. He didn’t speak to Jerry for twenty years, and then, finally, only because Frank Sinatra brought them together on live television and told them publicly that it was time they made up.

But, even at that late stage, Dean’s heart wasn’t in it (though he went along with it for Frank and for the world-wide audience). Like so many other people in Hollywood, he had simply had enough of Jerry Lewis.

 

What's the best/your favorite film version of Eugene O'Neill's "A Long Day's Journey into Night"?

 

I confess I have only seen one film version (have there been others?), and that is Sidney Lumet’s version with Katharine Hepburn. I thought she was absolutely brilliant — in fact, everyone in it was brilliant — and it seemed like a very faithful version of the play (it was certainly long enough!). I have to say, however, that its length and relentless verbosity played against it; when it was on television a few years ago, I tuned in an hour late, and felt that I hadn’t missed a thing.

I did see a TV version, just once (and a long time ago), with Laurence Olivier playing the lead; it was, I recall, part of a series of televised plays in which Olivier came on, every week, with a brand new face, a brand new voice, and a brand new walk, and played some of the great leading characters in American theatre (other programmes showed him interpreting “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “Death of a Salesman”, and “Come Back Little Sheba”). It was fun, I suppose, to see Olivier take on all these parts as only he can, but I remember little else of the “Long Day’s” episode (or, for that matter, of any of them).

 

What films sat on the shelf for years before they were released?

 

“Jet Pilot”, starring John Wayne and Janet Leigh, was filmed in 1949 (and periodically re-edited up to 1953), but it was 1957 before producer Howard Hughes finally agreed to release it. By the time it actually hit the screens, it already looked WAY out-of-date, as both stars had, by that time, entered a new phase of their careers (as, indeed, had the jet planes featured in the movie as the “last word” in technology… by 1957, they were on the scrap-heap!).

I don’t know why Hughes kept it out of circulation for so long, but I do know that it was a personal favourite of his, as, in 1955, when he sold RKO Studios and its entire film library, he subsequently had second thoughts, and (I read) bought back the rights to just two of his films (“Jet Pilot” and “The Conqueror”) for more money than he had been paid for the whole studio and all its product! Well, after all, it WAS Howard Hughes!

“The Day The Clown Cried” was not only held back “for years” by the aghast production company that had invested in it, but, believe it or not, it is still on the shelf… and it was made in 1972! In the nearly-half-century since its completion, various pieces of it have emerged on Youtube, and, at present, there is certainly enough available for public viewing for interested filmgoers to see exactly what it’s about (and to make some judgment on whether they really need to see any more). I hear that, now that its star, producer, and director (Jerry Lewis) has passed on, there are plans to release it in its entirety; but, during his lifetime, only a handful of people were privileged to see it (he had his own personal copy at his home). Without going into any great detail about its subject, it is fair, I think, to say that it was quite a departure for comedian Jerry Lewis, and distributors at the time were fairly certain that audiences used to his simple-minded performances in simple-minded comedies would be unlikely to “warm” to it… unless you really wanted to see a clown acting like the Pied Piper and leading Jewish children into the gas chambers!

 

What does Liza think of the movie “Judy”?

It was reported that none of Judy’s children liked the IDEA of “Judy”, which was, basically, just another “hatchet” job, inventing incidents, distorting others, inserting yet more from other time periods, and conveniently ignoring anything that had “success” or “triumph” written into it. They claimed they weren’t going to see it… and who could blame them?

As a Judy admirer of long-standing, I stood with them and said the same; but after Renee Zellweger won her Academy Award, I relented, and had a look. I was outraged by it, also, as, I am sure, were Judy’s children, friends, admirers and working colleagues.

However, I hope their justifiable anger would not be vented on Miss Zellweger, who, I felt, approached her role with the understanding, respect and admiration that is appropriate, when, after all, you are playing “the greatest entertainer the world has ever known”. One formed the impression that Miss Zellweger, at least, was eager to stress the positive aspects of the character, and that she, if not her writers, had done her homework.

Renee Zellweger, if no one else connected with the enterprise, could, I feel, walk proudly up to Liza or Lorna or Joe and stand by the quality of her interpretation. I would hope — and expect — they might acknowledge that.

 

.Which actors or actresses died before their films were completed?

Natalie Wood was drowned during the making of “Brainstorm”, and, since she was the lead in this big-budget production, there was much consternation about how they could make it work without starting all over again. At one stage it was suggested that they use her sister (Lana) as a stand-in and shoot her from the rear, and, in fact, this may have actually happened for one or two shots. Finally, I think, they simply rewrote scenes to give Natalie’s dialogue to other actors. It is easy to see, in the finished product, examples of establishing shots, where all the actors in a scene (including Natalie) walk into a room and sit down at a table (or similar), followed by the whole scene played in one-shots and two-shots which don’t involve Natalie at all; then there is a final shot of everyone walking out again, and Natalie, having contributed not a word to the scene, is among them. That must have required some deft re-planning! Fortunately, the climax of the movie had already been shot, so all the re-working involved earlier scenes, more amenable to alteration.

Tyrone Power died early in the filming of “Solomon and Sheba” (he was Solomon) and was replaced by Yul Brynner. The film was almost-totally reshot; however, there are still a few long-shots of Power in the released print (the same is true of Vivien Leigh in “Elephant Walk”, except that, of course, she didn’t die during that shoot but merely fell ill, and was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor, who did all her scenes “on the cheap” in the studio; the expensive location long-shots — in Sri Lanka — are still Vivien, and fairly-obviously so).

Robert Walker died before finishing “Edward, My Son”, and, in order to complete the movie, the studio had to approach Alfred Hitchcock, who had directed Walker’s penultimate film, “Strangers on a Train”, to acquire some out-takes from Hitch’s film which could be deftly inserted into the unfinished movie to allow completion. I don’t know how much re-writing was needed to make this unusual strategy come out right, but “Edward, My Son” was, eventually, released without much comment on Walker’s abrupt clothing or make-up changes, etc.

And, of course, there was the notorious case of Vic Morrow, who was killed (alongside two child actors) in the middle of an elaborate shot — the climax of the sequence involving his character — in “Twilight Zone: The Movie”. For a while it looked like the only course of action for the producers of that film was to just abandon the whole project (there were rumours that the director was to be charged with reckless endangerment causing death, or similar). However, they eventually re-wrote Morrow’s sequence (since it was a science-fiction-cum-supernatural film, the plot didn’t really have to make logical sense) and assembled the film craftily enough to make it look like this is what they had been aiming for in the first place.

What are some highlights of the 1940 film Rebecca?

 

This is a difficult question to address, as I am not quite sure what you are looking for; “Rebecca” was, as one expects from a David O Selznick production, a slick, well-written and expertly-made production, and Selznick’s choice of Alfred Hitchcock as director gave it a quality which ensured that it would be re-screened for a half-century after its initial release. What could possibly be added as a “highlight”?

If you have the DVD release of “Rebecca”, with its special feature of the audition reels of Hollywood actresses reading for the leading role (eventually given to Joan Fontaine), you may just find the answer you are seeking. Some of Hollywood’s finest — Vivien Leigh, Margaret Sullavan, Anne Baxter and Loretta Young among them — sought that plum part, and, as the tapes show, any one of them would have “made a good fist” of the role (Baxter, in particular, was extraordinary, and her audition shows just how skilled this often-undervalued actress was); but Joan Fontaine gave a unique quality to the role that none of the others could have brought to it. I don’t know whether it was Hitchcock or Selznick who finally gave the nod to her as the Number One choice (it certainly wasn’t co-star Laurence Olivier, who was so anxious for Vivien Leigh to score the part that he consented to play opposite her in her audition); but, whoever made the decision, that choice alone ensured that “Rebecca” would emerge as a film for the ages. Joan Fontaine was just so “right” that one wonders, can the remake possibly come up with an actress who can bring as much to the role as she did?

Who was the least deserving winner of an Academy Award?

 

David Lean for “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. Lean certainly deserved to win awards for other movies he directed, but “Kwai”, frankly, wasn’t worth at least half of the praise it received when it came out (I seem to remember it won five Academy Awards and was sold as a “hard-ticket” movie at inflated prices), and Lean’s direction seemed merely an affirmation that he could, indeed, handle large crowds of people on huge sets in far-away locations; he became, for a few years, Hollywood’s specialist in this kind of blockbuster, but “Lawrence of Arabia” was the only one which deserved most of its praise.

“Bridge on the River Kwai” was not always well-cast, its music score sounded like all of Malcolm Arnold’s scores (actually using themes which we already knew from “Dunkirk” and “Inn of the Sixth Happiness”), and had the corniest ending of 1957, with one of the characters screaming “Madness!” at us, which seemed to indicate that Lean’s writers weren’t sure he’d brought out that aspect sufficiently in the telling. And Lean’s use of two players doing comedy turns, as if they’d just stepped out of “Stalag 17” (only not as skilled) seemed a decided lapse in judgement in a film about war atrocities which planned to kill off most of its cast in the climax.

Give me ”Brief Encounter”, “Madeleine”, “Hobson’s Choice”, or “Great Expectations” any day!

 

What are some awful movies by directors that you think are brilliant? How could they have been saved?

 

At his peak, there was no better director than Alfred Hitchcock, but, very late in his career, he appeared to lose interest in what he was making, and the films that came out under his name were somewhat lacklustre (a word no one would ever have thought of using in reference to the man who made “Notorious”, “Shadow of a Doubt”, “Rear Window”, “Strangers on a Train”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “North By Northwest”).

Probably the least-memorable of all was “Topaz”. His previous film, “Torn Curtain”, had been grossly and destructively interfered-with by his studio (Universal), who insisted that he dismiss his long-term musical collaborator (Bernard Herrmann) because his music wasn’t “commercial”, and also that he use sure-fire box-office draws to fill the leading roles despite both their clear unsuitability for the parts they were playing and the fact that Hitch had absolutely no interest in either of them (and had his own stable of loyal favourites on whom he could easily have called to help him turn the film into something memorable).

“Torn Curtain” managed to slip by, thanks largely to a bravura performance by one of his supporting players (Lila Kedrova), but — possibly in protest against past studio interference — Hitch cast “Topaz” with, largely, unknowns, thus robbing audiences of the chance to see some of our favourite Hitch stalwarts (he had hoped to use Sean Connery again) making their usual massive contribution to the goings-on on-screen. To make things worse, Hitch and the screenwriter (Leon Uris) disagreed on just about every aspect of the movie, and the “favourites” to whom he turned after Uris had been dismissed (leaving an incomplete screenplay on the table) either declined to handle such an unpalatable job (Arthur Laurents) or agreed reluctantly out of respect to Hitch (Samuel A Taylor, writer of “Vertigo”, who submitted some scenes for “Topaz” mere hours before they were committed to celluloid). Hitch disliked the ending that was written, and commissioned a new one; the studio thought that Hitch’s new ending would confuse audiences, so a third one was commissioned, which wound up pleasing nobody (apparently, the DVD gives you all three, so that you can make up your own mind).

You know a Hitchcock film — usually a “sure bet” with critics, who always went into ecstasies about his ingenuity and his clever tricks — is in trouble when just about every critic, seeking something good to find in the dreary goings-on, had to resort to praising the way the heroine’s red skirt “pooled out” as she was killed! In the old days, Hitch wouldn’t have got out of bed to film anything quite as pedestrian as that.

“Topaz” really doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as all those Hitchcock movies people have loved for seventy or eighty years. How could it have been salvaged? Well, I guess, he could have thrown the screenplay into the bin, rung up Jimmy Stewart, and re-made “Sabotage”.

Which movie of Charlie Chaplin do you want to watch the most?

 “City Lights” is probably my favourite Chaplin film, but perhaps I am biased here because it was actually the first film I ever saw in my life. But even today, when the film and I are approaching our centenary (I have a bit farther to go than the movie!), I can always get a great laugh out of watching that one!

“The Great Dictator” and “Modern Times” are also a sure-fire bet for an enjoyable couple of hours; they came from that unique period in his career where he could impose silent-film values on his sound films: they were “talkies”, and had musical scores (often written by him) and background sound effects, but, when it came time to do his comedy turns, he could “turn back the clock” and pull out all the tricks he used in his early silents, so that for a few moments, the sound track became quite irrelevant (which, I suspect, he always believed it was).

Can you think of an example of any actors not being aware they were being written off a show they were on?

 

This is not an exact answer to your question, but it’s an interesting (and quite notorious) story from the 1950s which is perhaps appropriate here.

Julius La Rosa was an Italian-American pop singer not unlike Frank Sinatra (perhaps more similar to Vic Damone or Buddy Greco) who actually got fired from his regular show while it was “on the air”!

He was a “regular” on Arthur Godfrey’s weekly TV and radio shows, and Godfrey, having given him his “big break”, regarded him as “his” property. When La Rosa started making career decisions for himself, Godfrey took it as a personal insult, and, on the radio show of October 19, 1953, introduced him, allowed him to sing his number (“Manhattan”) as planned, and then, as it faded out, announced that this was La Rosa’s “swan song” with the show, and that he was now “his own star” and would not be returning. It was a shock to everyone, especially Julius La Rosa, who, it is claimed, actually wept for the remainder of the evening.

Julius La Rosa never did become another Sinatra, or even another Vic Damone. He had a great voice and sang with style and gusto, and was, therefore, able to earn a living as an occasional guest for the next forty years, but that incident followed him around for the remainder of his career.

What is a movie genre that you wished never existed in the first place?

 

The slash/horror type of movie, which started around the time of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (and, apparently, is still alive and well with such recent offerings as “A Serbian Movie”). I know it’s only special effects, but I just can’t see that I am being enriched by having to watch dismemberments, beheadings, disembowelling, and other “desecrations” of body parts, no matter how well-crafted.

 

How do you critically evaluate a movie?

Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe there are books written on this subject. Everyone who sees a movie evaluates it, and on any day of the week you can find two people whose evaluations of a given movie are diametrically opposed. So who’s to say which one (or either) is right?

All I can say as a (somewhat feeble) answer to your question is that you evaluate a movie the way you evaluate anything else, from a meal to a mattress to a mate. If you’ve never met a single person in your whole life, you would hardly be in a position to “critically evaluate” the first person who suddenly came along. You learn to choose your mates from meeting a host of people. Same with the meal, the mattress…. and the movie. Go see lots of films; learn a bit about the history of the cinema (don’t just look at this year’s crop of movies… they’ve been around for a hundred years) and the backgrounds of the people who made the movies you watch. Don’t worry too much about “critically” evaluating them, as if there was some secret key to a door which others possessed but you didn’t. Just let the movies “come” to you.

After you have seen fifty, or a hundred, suddenly you start to recognise cliches (with dismay) and bursts of originality (with delight). The filmmakers become real people, not just names in the credits, and you start to see how these people have real ideas and real aims and, occasionally, compelling reasons why they want to reach out to you by means of a movie camera instead of writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. And, just as importantly, you recognise the ones who have nothing to say, and just want to take money from people who don’t demand much in return. Suddenly — I hope — you are critically evaluating without even being aware of it, and the movies have enriched your life.

Maybe that all sounds so stupid! I really can’t think of a good way to express what I would like to say in answer to your question! Well, I did come clean right at the start, didn’t I? “Frankly, I don’t know!” But you’ll have fun on your journey of learning!

What is your favorite swashbuckling movie?

 

I always liked “The Crimson Pirate”, the film in which Burt Lancaster and his former circus partner, Nick Cravat, used the genre to show off all their old tricks. It came at a time when serious pirate movies were the norm, and when Burt Lancaster’s name was associated with films noir and stark black-and-white melodramas; so this light-hearted spoof with its grab-bag of aerialist stunts took everyone by surprise.

How hard is it to work with real life animals in the making of movies?

 

Of course, a lot would depend on the particular animal; I recall that Judy Garland and ‘Toto’ (actually ‘Terry’, and a female) got along so well during the making of “The Wizard of Oz” that Judy actually took her home at night during the shoot. But the other side of the story is probably exemplified by Rex Harrison, a staunch animal-hater, who found himself required to work with cows, sheep, ducks, geese, llamas, and a parrot (to name just a few) in “Dr Dolittle”, and found the experience a sore trial (Rex wasn’t all that easy to work with, even if you were another human, and his co-stars often found themselves on the side of the livestock!)

Of course, Rex’s problems were probably exacerbated by the fact that the animals in his movie were not amenable to training; unlike Terry, who came to adore Judy and would happily follow her anywhere (as you can see watching the movie), the animals in “Dr Dolittle” had to have invisible wires and ropes attached to various parts of their anatomies in order to make them respond on cue. They probably weren’t any happier with Rex than he was with them….especially if he ‘blew’ a line and needed a retake!

 

What’s one of the most epic moments in the history of cinema?

Do you mean epic in scale or epic in its significance to movie history?

If the former, it would be hard to go past the funeral procession of Mahatma Gandhi in Sir Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi”. More than three hundred thousand extras were hired for the 1982 re-staging, and, even to this date, no scene has been filmed which even came close to this one, for sheer size (in the days of CGI, it’s easy to make a couple of dozen people look like a huge mass, but “Gandhi” did it for real). So, for size it wins, hands down; and it was also “epic” in the sense that it re-created a 20th-century historical event of considerable significance.

But if you want, not historical significance, but significant to the development of movies, perhaps the most important moment (not counting the very earliest attempts to actually make movies move, if only for a few seconds), then perhaps the “big” moment was “The Jazz Singer”, the first “synchronised” talking picture, in 1927. There had, before, been silent movies in which singers mimed records while a recording was played off-screen; but, when Al Jolson turned to the cinema audience and said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, folks!”, a new art form was born; movies — for better or worse — were never the same again.

What is the most cringey movie youve ever watched?

 

There are two, both from that terrible decade from the last half of the 1960s, during which period it seemed that all the craftsmanship that had made Hollywood movies the envy of the world for half a century was wilfully discarded by the “new breed”, who knew nothing about movies and cared nothing for audiences. All they wanted to do was take everyone’s money, and there were no depths to which producers like Ross Hunter and Carl Foreman would not sink in order to bring about this end. There is, I feel, some poetic justice in the fact that both these turkeys, absolutely unmatched for absurdity and ineptitude, actually lost money on their domestic market, although I hear that Foreman’s movie, at least, did very well in countries where movies were still a novelty and cinemagoers undemanding.

Rodd Hunter’s movie, directed by Charles Jarrett, was the musical (I use that word loosely) remake of Frank Capra’s wonderful “Lost Horizon”. It is hard to know what to attack first with this movie: the awful songs? The appalling choreography? The performances of the musical numbers by actors who can neither sing nor dance nor even have some idea on how to fake it? Or the dismay at seeing genuine actors such as Charles Boyer and John Gielgud caught up in all the nonsense and trying desperately to give the project some kind of legitimacy? “Lost Horizon” is a film you watch open-mouthed, and for years it stood proudly as the absolute-worst film I had ever seen. Then I saw Carl Foreman’s “Mackenna’s Gold” (directed by J Lee Thompson, who had actually made a good movie when he was working in England…what could possibly have happened to him in less than a decade?), and now, frankly, I am not so sure.

This film has what looks like, on the face of it, the strongest western cast since “How the West Was Won” (and there are signs, in between the lack of continuity, appalling editing, laughable day-for-night shots, amateurish back projection, crummy indoor sets, pathetic miniature-work for “special” effects, and astonishing colour and picture-quality changes, literally from shot to shot — it seems to have been shot in 70mm, 35mm and 16mm, all at once — that it was, in fact, trying to emulate this Cinerama production): Gregory Peck (miscast, and not first-choice for the role; he was normally more-careful in picking up other actors’ discards), Omar Sharif (miscast and overplaying so badly that you long for him to go back to his stoic readings in movies like “Dr Zhivago”), and the damnedest string of top-drawer character actors you’d be likely to find: Burgess Meredith, Edward G Robinson, Lee J Cobb, Raymond Massey, Eli Wallach, Keenan Wynn, Anthony Quayle.… all of whom come in, say a line or two, and then are summarily “bumped off” in Indian raids, so at least their disgrace doesn’t have to be borne for long. And a lot of stock footage of vultures, inserted, for no earthly purpose, except, perhaps, to demonstrate that the filmmakers couldn’t even carry out this simple editing task convincingly (they can’t tell a story, either, and Victor Jory has to come in to narrate it while you just watch horses dashing here and there across the landscape).

Don’t get me started on the earthquake at the finale, with square-screen shots of house plants stretched to wide-screen in the hope they’ll pass for trees… the same shot used used again and again. Or the toy horse and rider on the swaying bridge (the camera does most of the swaying). Or the raft in the rapids, tossing and turning in white water, even though everything becomes suddenly blue and placid as the close-ups show Greg and his colleagues jumping off it. Or the lost canyon that no one has ever seen with a major road visibly running through it, and a whole wall covered with bright gold paint. Or the shadow which lengthens (not shortens!) as the sun rises; this is a major plot point, and it looks so absurd you won’t believe your eyes.

“Mackenna’s Gold” is the worst film Peck, Robinson, and the others have ever been involved in, the worst western ever made (including the spaghetti westerns), and, probably, the worst motion picture ever to come out of Hollywood… maybe even worse than my long-despised “Lost Horizon”. At whatever cost, chase it up and watch. gob-smacked, at the wonder of it all.

Who do you consider to be the best actor in movies in the last 20 years? What makes them so good?

 

I toyed for a while with the name “Sean Penn”, but, finally, decided that it was a toss-up between John Malkovich and Frank Langella. They have a unique quality which makes me think of the word “original” every time I see them (which, in both cases, is not nearly enough, but perhaps that’s part of what makes them so special…. they choose their roles so carefully that they are not always easy to track down).

Both just keep on surprising me with how deftly they hold the screen, so that you never for a moment take your eyes off them. I never fail to have a good time while they are in a scene, and producers using their services can save tens of millions of dollars on razzle-dazzle special effects which distract audiences from the paucity of what is actually being said up there on the screen: John Malkovich and Frank Langella can make even ordinary lines sound like they were worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Which low-budget underrated horror movie would you recommend to someone?

 

When you say “low budget”, I instantly think of the Val Lewton movies of the 1940s, which were somewhat underappreciated by contemporary juvenile audiences (and maybe some of their parents!) because you never actually saw anything on screen that could be defined as “horror”. Lewton’s movies deftly substituted, for the explicit content, shadows or sinister sounds, or someone’s face registering terror; elements that defiantly stayed in your imagination (and, ironically, were thus decidedly more horrifying than anything he could have shown on the screen). I always thought his best movie was “Curse of the Cat People”, but, in spite of his name on it and that scary title, it was not really a horror film at all, and bore only a passing resemblance to the hit movie of which it claimed to be a sequel, “The Cat People”. You might find the original a more traditional “horror” film, or one of Lewton’s other sinister offerings, such as “I Walked with a Zombie” or “ Leopard Man”.

What actor or actress got their big break from a low-budget movie?

 

There weren’t that many lower-budget movies, in 1958, than “The Blob”; according to the Wikipedia entry, it cost just $110,000. I don’t know how much of that was given to the young actor who starred (but not in the title role), Steve McQueen; I did hear that he was offered 10% of the gross profits but turned that down, being sure that the finished product was so silly that there wouldn’t be any profits. Since the movie made four million dollars within a short time of its release, that decision cost him a lot of money; however, the exposure he got from the film among the drive-in set was probably worth more than money could buy: a year later he was starring with Sinatra in “Never So Few”, and, the year after that, he was one of “The Magnificent Seven”.

Why is the Wizard of Oz a classic?

 

Why is any film a classic? Or, perhaps a better question is, why is one film regarded as a classic while another one released at the same time is virtually forgotten? It certainly isn’t just a matter of how good the movie is…. “Casablanca”, for instance, is just an average Warner Bros 40s melodrama, no better than a dozen others with mostly the same people in front of and behind the camera; but, today, it’s a classic and they’re not…. and it is hard to work out why.

“The Wizard of Oz” struck a chord with the public. It gave them something that, in 1939, they obviously needed. And when it was revived in the forties and fifties, and eventually went to television in 1956 (where it has resided ever since, always at the ready for yet another re-telecasting), it still found audiences who needed to hear what it had to say. People who had loved it at the time of its first release, who were, then, the same age as Dorothy, wanted to share the experience with their children… and, later on, their grandchildren. It became more than a movie; it was part of the legacy of treasures passed down through the generations.

The treasured performer — Judy Garland — had many ups and downs in her subsequent life, but so did everyone who had watched her and fallen in love with Dorothy; and they kept seeing Dorothy in every new phase of the performer’s career. The treasured song — “Over the Rainbow” — spoke, not just to audiences of 1939, but to cinemagoers every year for the next seventy years….and it is still going strong as probably the best-loved song that has ever been written (awarded, unanimously, the title of “Song of the Millennium”).

There were other great performers and other great songs; but somehow “The Wizard of Oz” served these, and all its other qualities, up to us just at the time we were most ready to receive them, and age has not withered it, nor new fashions dulled its lustre. It’s a classic because we want it to be a classic; it seems we need movies like “The Wizard of Oz”, and performers like Judy Garland, and songs like “Over the Rainbow”, in our lives.

 

What is the best Hollywood movie without an Oscar?

 

That’s such an interesting question, and I will be following the thread to see what Quora’s movie buffs can come up with. I suspect there are quite a few films which the Academy “forgot”, and later regretted the oversight. Did, for instance, “Night of the Hunter” win any Academy Awards?

Anyway, I have one for you, just to start the ball rolling: the 1954 “A Star is Born”. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, and was considered a dead certainty for two of them (Best Actress for Judy Garland and Best Song for “The Man That Got Away”). However, on Oscar night, it was stubbornly overlooked in every category. Today it’s considered a masterpiece: the first film chosen to be restored by the Motion Picture Academy’s Preservation Department. And that performance, and that song, are considered not only the best of the year, but possibly the best of the decade, or even the half-century. On that occasion, the Academy got it VERY wrong; and they have been hearing about it ever since!

Which celebrities have famous adopted children?

 

Joan Crawford adopted two children, and, being Hollywood “royalty” (at least in her own mind), proceeded to instil in both children (a girl and a boy) a full sense of the responsibility that comes with being the offspring of a reigning queen. Surrounded by luxury, they were taught (relentlessly) self-denial and “noblesse oblige”, but shown virtually no genuine parental affection: Joan played the mother-figure to perfection, never missing a cue, but, it seems, never knew how to be a mother.

Both children, of course, bitterly disappointed their “loving” mother, and were publicly disinherited (and humiliated) when Joan’s will specified their exclusion from her list of beneficiaries. Christina Crawford, who had had tried to follow in her mother’s career footsteps by taking a featured role in a TV soap-opera, subsequently wrote a tell-all book about the “real” Joan Crawford which shook Hollywood to the rafters and ensured that she left her own special stamp on the Crawford name. Christina may never have been a star, but, as the author of “Mommie Dearest”, she was undoubtedly a celebrity.

 

What's your favorite movie with Frank Sinatra? Why is it your favorite?

Those Sinatra fans who have followed his career since the very earliest days, and who loved his music, might be inclined to choose one of the MGM musicals that he made in the forties and fifties, when he frequently played second fiddle to Gene Kelly, but did a lot of singing. “On the Town” was probably the best of that crop; “Guys and Dolls” (unfortunately, without Gene Kelly) was another one that showed his maturing talents.

After he branched out into dramatic roles and kept his singing for his record albums and live concerts, he gave an Academy Award-worthy performance in “The Man With The Golden Arm”, and this is the film that comes immediately to mind whenever I muse on my “favourite” Sinatra performances. The only problem with that choice is that, Sinatra aside, practically everything else in the movie is lousy: everyone overplayed their roles, all the dramatic points were stated so emphatically that the director (Otto Preminger) seemed to have feared we might otherwise not recognise them when we saw them, and the background score stubbornly refused to accompany the film, seemingly convinced that it was the film that was accompanying it.

When it looked like Sinatra had really given up on making anything worthwhile out of the acting side of his career, along came “The Manchurian Candidate”, which, I note with some gratification, has already been mentioned by both your previous respondents. Sinatra clearly cared about this one, and approached it in the same way that he approached his singing: as if it were something for the ages. It may not be the absolute-best moment in a film career that, after all, spanned fifty-five years…. but it was certainly a career highlight. And, for once, everyone else in the film was just about as good as he was!

 

What is the most ridiculous movie plot/premise you've seen?

 

“Ridiculous” is a word that is often called to mind when one reflects on some of the sci-fi movies that flooded the market in the days of the drive-in craze. Occasionally genuine Hollywood stars were talked into lending their talents to these unmemorable efforts: Ray Milland, an Academy Award winner and long-time star of major movies, found himself as half of “The Thing With Two Heads”, and the only fun in having to watch this was musing on how the two actors playing the “thing” had to position themselves, with the chin of one resting on the shoulder of the other, depending on who was speaking (occasionally the heads spoke to each other). Neither head, alas, was even nominated for an Academy Award for this one!

Janet Leigh turned up in a monster movie called “Night of the Lepus”, in which the marauder was not (as you might have supposed) a mutation of a leopard and an octopus, but, of all things, a colony of giant rabbits, each looking like nothing so much as one of those big cuddly toys you win at state fairs. Making the film can’t have given much satisfaction to the actress who had previously been called in to act for Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles; but what the result lacked in entertainment it made up for in educational value, since not everyone knew, when they bought their tickets, that “lepus” is actually the scientific name for a bunny!

Was Pola Negi, the first femme fatale of Hollywood, the actress of the mute cinema or voice cinema?

 

Mainly silent cinema, although she did make the adjustment to sound, and was in quite a few movies from 1929 right up to 1964 (this last one for, of all people, Walt Disney!)

Like many famous actors and actresses, she was a woman of more than one talent; when silent films learned to talk, she showed that she could sing, and even had a hit, a song that has become a standard: “Paradise”.

What is your favorite Anna Paquin role and why?

She never did get the accent quite right, but she was, I think, inspired casting for the part of Frankie Adams in “The Member of the Wedding”.

She had large shoes to fill. Julie Harris had originated the part, and was (apparently) the darling of Broadway for her portrayal…. so much so that, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t Hollywood box-office, Stanley Kramer bought her, along with the rights to the property, for his 1952 movie. But Julie was, after all, around 28, and playing a 12-year-old-girl in a movie full of close-ups was a stretch, even for her. Still, it was hard to see anyone of the right age being able to come within a mile of the nuances needed for the part of Frankie.

And then along came the TV remake, and the part went to Anna Paquin. For a full five minutes after learning of THAT casting, I thought, what on earth can they be thinking of? Then I thought some more, and realised that Miss Paquin could have been born to play the part of Frankie Adams. She not only possessed the qualities that Julie Harris had been able to bring to the part, but she was even the right age (practically)!

Her reviews weren’t great; maybe Julie Harris had put her stamp on the part so completely that no one wanted to see a mere movie actress play the role. But Anna Paquin was an outstanding Frankie Adams, and it is the performance of hers that I always return to.

Are there examples of great movies that were badly directed? What saved those movies (script, acting)?

 

No, I don’t think there are. It’s like asking if there are any great books that are, nonetheless, badly written!

While movie-making is (unlike writing) a collaborative affair, the director, more than anyone else connected with the project, is the one who is responsible for how all the elements come together. It is, of course, very possible — and not uncommon — to see a routinely-directed movie which has a great performance which transcends all the other elements, or one which has a memorable musical score in spite of the quality of the scenes it underscores. And there are many movies which start off with a great book, or a great script, yet never seem to deliver the goods. But these are not your great movies… they are movies which got “over the line” in spite of the director’s best (or worst) efforts.

In other words, these are most of the movies on-show. Great movies are, frankly, a fairly rare “bird”,

A great movie doesn’t have to be directed by a genius; but it does have to be directed by a man who knows genius when he sees it, and who is skilled enough — and committed enough — to ensure that it is shown off to the best-possible advantage.

 

What 1960s films made you cry?

 

“Mackenna’s Gold” made me cry for the reputations of people I loved being trashed on the altar of a film of such incredible ineptitude and complete absurdity that it defied description. It assumed that cinemagoers knew nothing about movies and would accept anything, and the reputations of Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Edward G Robinson, Lee J Cobb, Raymond Massey, Keenan Wynn, Eli Wallach, Burgess Meredith and Anthony Quayle all came tumbling down with it. When a film like that could actually make money, it made you wonder if there was, in fact, any life at all left in the Golden Years of Hollywood; and just four years later (1973), along came “Lost Horizon” and finished the job. But that last title is outside your time-frame, and, anyway, I expect that’s not what you were seeking in your question.

Films that actually moved me to the point of tears? “The Miracle Worker” (last ten minutes) is the obvious example from the sixties, although I have to admit that “Sundays and Cybele” came fairly close. There may have been more, but “Mackenna’s Gold” is the kind of film that erases everything else from your mind and makes you want to forget the sixties altogether.

Which movie character would have made no difference to the storyline if it was removed?

 

Janet Leigh’s character in “The Manchurian Candidate”. I like Janet Leigh, and I loved “The Manchurian Candidate”, but the simple fact is that she didn’t really have a part. She was just there, it seemed, so that Frank Sinatra would have a pretty face to play some scenes with. Why the producer felt it necessary to hire someone as well-known as Janet for this inconsequential (and quite small) part has always puzzled me; perhaps he felt that Angela Lansbury as the top female name in the cast list just wasn’t enough to ensure box-office success.

Which actors became famous after taking a role that was turned down by somebody else?

 

Dirk Bogarde didn’t actually turn down the title role in “Lawrence of Arabia”; he knew it was the role of a lifetime, and was quite prepared to put all plans on hold in order to be ready when the much-postponed project finally started shooting.

However, he was under contract to J Arthur Rank, a rival studio to the company producing “Lawrence”, and his contract called for one more film in his unchallenging but well-liked “Doctor” series of comedies. Rank pulled rank; Bogarde reluctantly went to work in the last (and least) of his series as Simon Sparrow (“Doctor in Distress”), and watched in genuine distress as the newly-appointed director of “Lawrence”, David Lean, scouted around for someone readily available, eventually lighting on Peter O’Toole, veteran of just two films.

 

Why is Japanese cinema so dark and pessimistic?

 

I suppose the first point to bring up here is that, unless you survey the entire Japanese movie output for a given year, it is not possible to come to a blanket decision on the nature of Japanese cinema. It may simply be a case of the American/European distributors of Japanese films deciding that “dark and pessimistic” movies are what non-Japanese will pay money to see; Japan cinema certainly approaches dark and supernatural subjects with considerable expertise, and movies like this would probably have a wider international appeal than, say, the Japanese equivalent of “Singing in the Rain” (if such a genre exists in Japan… but why wouldn’t it? And, unless you live there, how would you know whether it did or not?)

I am inclined to think the answer to your question is, indeed, just that: exhibitors trying to make money. As evidence, I had a look at the forthcoming Japanese Film Festival in my city, which, of course, has as its aim the promoting of Japanese culture, not just making money. There are twenty-five Japanese films in the list: Animation, 9; Drama, 7; Romance, 3; Comedy, 2; Musical, 2; Mystery, 1; Fantasy, 1. Apart from the very-heavy (but understandable) emphasis on Animation, the spread would seem to be approximately what you’d expect if it were the British Film Festival, or the Polish.

If, however, your proposition happens to be correct, it could mean that the Japanese psyche has a dark side — Jung’s “shadow” — that the society is careful to keep suppressed (I once read a book, titled “The Actors”, which hypothesized that Japan’s post-WWII society was tightly regulated so that all its citizens were required to play a role which was, essentially, the opposite to their private personas… they were, thus, all “actors”). The cinema, obviously, is the logical place for repressed dark feelings to be released harmlessly.

Or perhaps they are just very good at this kind of movie and like to emulate past successes!

 

Does a film improve the viewer's understanding of historical events?

Well, it could, if it set out to do just that; but, most of the time, it has quite different aims, and the most you can hope for is that it will simplify issues for you.

The best kind of film to watch if you want your understanding of historical events deepened is, generally, a documentary. A series such as “The World at War” was the product of years of painstaking research by a vast team of dedicated people, and the producers gave plenty of time to interviews with survivors who were there when it all happened. That’s probably a more accurate retelling than, say, Tom Cruise setting out to assassinate Hitler in “Valkyrie”!

Which actor did the best portrayal of the president of the US?

 

Every name you have been given so far is worth a mention; I was particularly gratified to see that wonderful actor, James Whitmore, given the credit due him for his portrayal of Harry Truman. My vote, however, would probably go to someone not yet mentioned: Frank Langella as Richard Nixon in “Frost/Nixon”. Having been knocked out by this brilliant performance, I simply couldn’t get enough of Frank Langella for months afterwards, and started chasing up every movie of his I could find. And he was excellent in every performance I found! One of the great actors of the last twenty-five years, and not nearly as well-known as he ought to be.

 

Is the original or modern version of Hamlet better?

 

If, by the modern version, you mean the 4-hour Kenneth Branagh version, then, yes, it’s the best, because, even though the time frame has been fiddled around with a bit (moved from Elizabethan times to the 19th century), it is the only one that is anywhere near complete; the “original”, which I expect is Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, won a whole slew of awards, but it is heavily condensed (155 minutes), and, therefore, one feels that Shakespeare might have justifiably complained that some of his best scenes had wound up on the cutting-room floor. And Branagh’s production has a performance by Derek Jacobi as Claudius that is probably the best you will ever see. Then there’s Richard Briers as Polonius; some great acting in this modern adaptation, and you will hardly notice that you had to sit there for 242 minutes to appreciate it!

What is the best comedy movie according to you? Why?

 

“Liberty” (1929, directed by Leo McCarey).

As is the case with many movies from that era, it is just 19 minutes long. It could have gone on for three times that length, but it didn’t need to; it is perfect, just as it is. You will laugh, I estimate, around two hundred times…. but it’s hard to count, because it seems like you laugh just once, and the laugh goes on and on. But if we can, indeed, split up the gags, then around ten belly laughs a minute is not a bad haul!

 

Which film of Marlene Dietrich do you like?

 

Most of your respondents have mentioned “Witness for the Prosecution”, and with good reason. That is probably the performance which stretched her acting talent the most, and she rose to the occasion better than anyone could have hoped. Director Billy Wilder actually had another actress standing by ready to take over for some of the scenes (I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it by mentioning which ones) in case Marlene couldn’t handle them…. but the other actress was never used; it is all Marlene.

The film that hasn’t been mentioned by the previous respondents, but should have been, is “Judgment at Nuremberg”, which “stretched” her in quite a different way. It required her to play the widow of a German soldier who had been executed following the war crimes trials; a woman who had known Hitler socially and had been present in the years of the holocaust. Of course, in real life she had fled the Nazi regime well prior to World War II; having detested Hitler, she later refused his personal overtures to her to return to Germany as a show of support for “her” people, and had, instead, actually joined the Allies as an entertainer, putting herself in real danger — and winning the hearts of Americans — by visiting the combat zones. In “Judgment at Nuremberg” her character had to speak some lines which were, to put it mildly, sensitive, and which would hardly endear her to some of her countrymen; she almost couldn’t go through with the part, and at one stage, I read, co-star Spencer Tracy, aware of her discomfort with the screenplay, took her aside and said to her, “These are words that need to be said; and you’re the only person who can say them”.

For even playing the role, as well as for the performance she gave in that film, both she and the movie deserve to be remembered.

 

Who are some actors who went uncredited for major film roles (and why)?

 

In “The Bride of Frankenstein”, Elsa Lanchester had a dual role; in the prologue, and at the end of the movie, she played Mary Shelley (author of “Frankenstein”), narrating, to friends, her story’s terrible sequel, in which the mad doctor was persuaded to create a monstrous mate for his creation.

Miss Lanchester received proper billing in the movie for playing Mary; yet she got no billing or recognition at all for playing her other role in the movie: the pivotal part of the “bride” (but not of Frankenstein; that was Valerie Hobson. Miss Lanchester had the part that everyone came to see the movie for: the monster’s repulsive mate, the creature with “that” hairstyle and those jerky movements).

In the credit titles at the beginning, and the cast list at the end, the credit for the “Mate” was merely a series of large question marks, so contemporary audiences weren’t allowed to know who was under all that hair. Today, there isn’t a horror-film fan alive who couldn’t tell you, without hesitation, that Elsa Lanchester played the “bride”; it’s the role for which she is best-remembered.

 

Which actor was so amazing as a child that he/she could not be just as an adult?

 

The sad fact is, just about all of them, if they were wildly successful as a child! While there are, admittedly, a few who have gone onto successful adult acting careers (Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Donald O’Connor, Natalie Wood), the vast majority of the child high-fliers found that to be an adult high-flier it was probably best to go into some other profession.

The example that springs instantly to mind here is Shirley Temple. As a child star she was possibly the most famous face in the entire western world, and her films were seen and loved by everyone; her worth to the nation during its hardest years was even mentioned publicly by the President of the Unites States.

As a teenager she just managed to get by, starring rarely, and being obliged to take supporting roles so that she could learn an acting skill she had never been required to bother with as a child star: play a character. By the time she reached young adulthood she was so disenchanted by her future prospects in Hollywood that, eventually, she looked elsewhere for a fulfilling future, and, as everyone knows, had a long and distinguished career in diplomacy (she was United States Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and served as Chief of Protocol of the United States).

Which actor or actress is good at both comedy and drama?

 

If you are a “good” actor, I feel you should quite-easily move between comedy and drama, and even some of Hollywood’s (and Britain’s) most famous dramatic actors have taken their turn at comedy, without having to ask to have their names removed from the credits. Similarly, actors renowned for being funny usually long for a dramatic role (even Jerry Lewis, who would have seemed the least-likely to “travel” between genres), and people such as Mickey Rooney, Bob Hope, Charles Chaplin, Danny Kaye, Dean Martin, and — more recently — Billy Crystal and Jim Carey, have given a fine account of themselves in unfamiliar territory.

However, if you want just one name as an example, for your “actor” I would offer Jack Lemmon. He has been so good in his dramatic roles — “Days of Wine and Roses”, “Save the Tiger”, “Missing”, “The China Syndrome” — that, watching them, you wonder how he could even think of trying to be funny. Then you have a look at “The Odd Couple”, “Some Like it Hot”, “Mr Roberts”, “The Out of Towners”, and…. well, you get what I mean.

For “actress” I would suggest Carol Burnett. Most people know her as the zany hostess of one of the funniest TV shows ever to grace the small screen; however, in her forays onto the big screen, she has given ample proof that REAL talent can do just about anything demanded of it. In “The Front Page” she had a small part amidst all the crazy goings-on with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau; she played it straight, and turned her six or eight minutes into the highlight of the movie. She also had dramatic roles in “Friendly Fire” and one which (regrettably) I never saw, “Life of the Party”, about alcoholism, a subject she had spoofed in “Annie”.

 

What actor or actress walked off set because they could not stand the director?

 

Not exactly an answer to your question, but close.

When, at Elizabeth Taylor’s exhortation, Montgomery Clift was assigned the leading male role in “Suddenly Last Summer”, he was not in good shape; he was, as was later said, going through the “longest gradual suicide in Hollywood history”. He could, however, still give some brilliant performances (and did, for Elia Kazan in “Wild River” and Stanley Kramer in “Judgment at Nuremberg”), needing only the encouragement of his peers, and tactful and sympathetic handling by the director.

The first of these he most certainly received on-set; Elizabeth Taylor was always his champion; it was even said that he was the love of her life. And Katharine Hepburn had always admired Monty for his talent and commitment to his roles, readily supporting him on-set and whenever he needed another “take”. However, the director — Joseph L Mankiewicz — was, apparently, less-tolerant; a writer as well as a director, he was particular about lines being read exactly as written, and with the exact inflection he had demanded. His callous treatment of Monty on any occasion he appeared unready (or unsteady) so outraged Katharine that — having held-in her resentment throughout the shooting, and having waited until the final scene had been committed to celluloid — she walked up to Mankiewicz, it is reported, and spat in his face. (I expect that THEN, her point made, she “walked off the set”!)

The critics had to wait a few more months before they could do the same thing…. metaphorically, at least.

Why do some actors prefer not to view their own work?

 

Not being a movie star (or even having a movie star among my acquaintances), the short answer is that I don’t know. However, I have had been reading, watching, and listening to interviews with movie stars for more than half a century, and you may be surprised at how often a star will volunteer the information that, “I never watch myself on the screen”…. often accompanied — metaphorically or sometimes literally — by a dismissive wave of the hand.

I have to say to you that, after the first ten or twelve of these, I began to take their claim with a grain of salt. It was almost-always said as a kind of putdown of their movies and their work on-screen, as if to say, “What I do up there is so trivial, so beneath my REAL talent, why should I bother?” We mortals, ready to worship at their feet, love them even more for this attitude, because we think their work is just the greatest thing we’ve ever seen, and here they are dismissing it as less than nothing! They must really be super-people to be able to do that, to simply turn away from their genius as if it were of no account!

In short, for every hundred stars who say it nowadays, maybe one or two are telling it like it is. I suspect the others just want us to think they are “above” that kind of thing, so that we won’t get a mental picture of them examining every frame, every lighting set-up, every wisp of hair, in order to heap it onto the poor director or cameraman or lighting man for not making them look as good as they know they are. But this is probably the more-likely scenario. Remember Shirley MacLaine’s comment on Frank Sinatra, whom she knew well: “Hell, he listens to his own music all the time at home.”

 

Which actor and director have worked together the most?

 

John Wayne appeared in no less than twenty-four of John Ford’s movies, so this might well stand as the record; otherwise, you might look at some of the other members of what became known as the John Ford Stock Company; Ford clearly liked to surround himself with familiar faces, and you don’t have to watch much of his product before you begin noticing Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Jack Pennick, Mae Marsh, Victor McLaglen, and the director’s own brother, Francis Ford, doing their same special “schtick”, irrespective of the genre.

 

What were your favourite movies when you were growing up?

That was a long time ago, and, even though I can remember some of them quite vividly, as they are still among my favourite movies today, I fear that the titles won’t mean much to the predominantly-youthful readers of Quora. However, if you really want some titles from someone born during World War II, here are a few:

The very first time I talked about a “favourite movie”, it was “The Caine Mutiny”, and I was still in my first year of High School. I love it to this day, even though, of course, it didn’t stay as my favourite movie for too long. Fairly soon, along came “Picnic”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, “Witness for the Prosecution”, and “A Star is Born” (the 1954 one). This last one sent me on a quest to find other movies with Judy Garland, and I started haunting the revival houses. It wasn’t long before I found Garland’s “Meet Me in St Louis”, and some other great musicals, such as “The Band Wagon” and “On the Town”. Then there was “Sunset Boulevard”, and the movie that remains my favourite to this day, “All About Eve”.

I also discovered “The Yearling”, and I thought that was just the saddest movie I had ever seen. On the other end of the scale, along came “The Court Jester”, and nowadays hardly a year goes by before I play that one again; I’d have to even if I didn’t want to, because my children, and now my grandchildren, all think it is just about as funny as any film is likely to get.

The interesting thing about these dozen movies is that I still love every one of them! So I guess my taste hasn’t developed all that much.

What is the most underrated movie that you think deserved to be better known?

 

The original (1957) “3:10 to Yuma”. It was made at a time when the western was making leaps and bounds into psychological territory, with complex characters and adult themes…. and I don’t think any western ever did it better, not even the best-known ones, like ”High Noon”, “Broken Arrow”, “The Searchers” and “Shane”. I think “3:10 to Yuma” is probably my all-time favourite western, the jewel in the crown of director Delmer Daves.

Maybe the public had already had its fill of “thinking westerns” when “3:10 to Yuma” hit the screens; or maybe they just expected, after the VistaVision of “The Searchers”, that a top-class western ought to be in colour.

Whatever the reason, this underrated gem slipped in and out of cinemas virtually unnoticed; even the presence of two popular male stars (Glenn Ford and Van Heflin) at the top of their game seemed to fire up little interest. A pity, because “Yuma” is beautiful to look at, has a taut, believable story line, offers three-dimensional characters you really care about (the villain has a tender scene in a bar with the new girl in town that lingers in the memory for days afterwards…. did Glenn Ford ever play a better scene in his career?), and, overall, is a far better movie than the recent reworking of the story with Russell Crowe (it was satisfying, however, to see that someone in Hollywood at least thought it was worthy of a remake!)

 

Can you name a movie with captivating dialogue throughout?

Director Joseph L Mankiewicz was, first, a screenwriter (brother of Herman Mankiewicz, one of the writers of “Citizen Kane”), and when he started directing the movies he had also written, the emphasis was always on the dialogue (a directing style which occasionally brought derision from critics, who said he possessed little visual flair; he just set up the scene so that the actors could be seen saying his words).

The best of all his films — in fact, my pick for the most enjoyable movie ever made — is “All About Eve” (1950), for which he assembled a stellar cast to read the best lines he had ever written, about a subject he knew more about than anything else: directing and writing). Bette Davis got most of the best lines, and she attacked them with such relish that people still, more than seventy years later, remember her lines and mimic her delivery. George Sanders, Celeste Holm and Anne Baxter (and a very young Marilyn Monroe who had only a few lines to say) were among the rest of the cast, making Mankiewicz’s words linger in the memory for a lifetime.

 

Do actors prefer to take roles they can relate to/are similar to their lives/interests?

 

If so, this could be taken to mean, “Do actors want to get paid without being called upon to create?” It’s fairly easy, I would imagine, to play yourself…. you or I could probably make a reasonable fist of it. For an actor who is serious about his craft, it would be a walk in the park, providing no challenges except the rather pedestrian ones of remembering a few lines of dialogue and knowing where the camera is. Where’s the creativity?

Sir Alec Guinness was a quiet, unassuming, most unactor-like person who succeeded best when he played characters totally unlike himself (“Tunes of Glory”, “The Ladykillers”). I have a feeling he would have been quite uninterested in playing Sir Alec, as he would have considered the character rather bland. Sir Laurence Olivier spent hours perfecting a new face, a new nose, new hair, a new walk, and a new voice for every character he played, and only when he had got those elements down “pat” did he feel he could actually ACT the role; in other words, he wanted the character to be as unlike himself as it was possible to get, and then, just let him at it!

Getting away from the great Shakespeareans, how about Heath Ledger? I never saw his “Joker”, but, apparently, it was the best part he had ever had, simply because he could let his hair down with it and PLAY it without trying to make it look like Heath Ledger. Lucille Ball spent most of her acting life playing a screwball housewife who couldn’t mastermind her way through a doorway; in real life, she was as clever as they come, and wound up owning RKO Studios, where she had started as a bit player. The fact that she WAS so smart was, I am sure, half the fun in playing someone who was the exact opposite… and she never minded when people thought she was actually the character she played.

All of these, of course, are first-class actors who spent years perfecting their craft. There are, I am sure, many others who are exactly what you suggest in your question… content to just amble through their careers being themselves. And some of those — Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart — are so wonderful playing themselves that we wouldn’t have it any other way. Even then, sometimes their most-committed performances are the ones where they branch out and take a part that you would never have expected them to be even considered for (such as Bogie as the cowardly, paranoid Captain of the Caine, and Cary as the ne’er-do-well drifter who can’t even hold down a job in “Penny Serenade”).

What was the rejection of a part that some actors regretted the most later on?

 

Alan Ladd became a star in an era when it was considered very important to be first-billed in a movie, and when George Stevens, who had directed him in “Shane”, offered him the part of Jett Rink (which was third lead) in his forthcoming film, “Giant”, he turned it down because he didn’t want to be billed after Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.

A quiet, private man, he never said publicly whether he later regretted that decision; but “Giant” became a huge hit, and second-choice James Dean made quite a splash as Jett Rink. Ladd, meanwhile, careered from one third-rate movie to another (“The Deep Six”, “Guns of the Timberland”, “One Foot in Hell”), clinging on to his top billing but quickly slipping from the top echelon of stars, a position he was never able to regain.

What films caused film studios to go bankrupt?

 

While, in the 1960s — in a desperate effort to lure viewers back from their TV screens — several major studios literally gambled their future on a single massive “make-us-or-break-us” enterprise, I can only think of one movie that did, indeed, bankrupt its studio, removing, once and for all, the distinguished name of United Artists (founded by pioneers D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford) from the roster of major motion picture studios.

That movie was Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”, a western which squandered its budget — a virtually unlimited one, since United Artists “knew” that Cimino was a young genius whose product would rake in billions of dollars if the studio could just stay with it to the end — quite shamelessly; and, what’s more, unjustifiably, as almost none of the over-expenditure showed up on the screen (or, for that matter, on the soundtrack, which is of extraordinarily poor quality for a major movie…. audiences sometimes had to strain to understand what was being said). Cinemagoers, knowing a turkey when they saw one, stayed away in droves, eventually making it “the most-discussed and least-seen film in modern movie history”.

The mismanagement of this project was so all-encompassing (not ALL the blame attaches to Cimino!) that it would be pointless to even begin making a list here. Stephen Bach wrote a book about it: “Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate’”, which will give you a week’s absorbing reading (as it did for movie producers world-wide; today, few production houses will put up the total cost of a blockbuster movie, preferring to spread the risk around in the event of another “Heaven’s Gate”….. and few of them are exactly eager to listen to any new proposal from Michael Cimino!)

Why is Audrey Hepburn’s acting in My Fair Lady so bad?

 

I might ask, compared to whom (or what)? I thought Audrey was just fine in “My Fair Lady”, and was very disappointed when the film was winning Oscars all over the place and none of them was directed her way. She was a major asset towards its success.

There were people at the time who had seen Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews play the roles on Broadway or in London, and expected that the same duo would carry-over into the movie version….and, indeed, Julie Andrews had proved that, vocally, she could outshine just about any of the Hollywood contenders for the part. However, those who watched her acting said that she was fine as the “early” Eliza, selling flowers at Covent garden, but that she never could carry off the transformation into the “royal blood” Eliza of the second half of the show. Audrey, by contrast, looked, walked, and carried herself like a true princess — in fact, she had been doing that since her first starring role — but was never the perfect fit for the gutter-snipe, because you could always see the “class” underneath the make-up. Neither, therefore, was the perfect choice, but Audrey was at least as good as anyone else would have been… and, of course, she was great at bringing depth to the scenes and making you see Eliza as a real person. George Bernard Shaw would probably have been delighted.

And, incidentally, Audrey did some good vocals for the songs, too….. I always preferred listening to her “Show Me” than to Marni Nixon’s (or Julie’s), and I wish Warner had been brave enough to drop the key of some of the higher songs and let Audrey both play AND sing the part!

What are the most overrated and underrated Martin Scorsese movies?

 

I can’t really tell you about “overrated”, because I haven’t read all the reviews of his recent movies; if “Shutter Island” was well-received by the critics, than that might just be the one, since the best you could say about it is that it “held its own” in its battle with a crazy screenplay and overacting.

However, when you ask about underrated, that at least gives me a chance to shout out about a wonderful little movie Scorsese made towards the beginning of his career: “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”. It gave Ellen Burstyn the best role she had had up until that time (and, perhaps, afterwards), and it was also the first time Scorsese used the services of a young actress whom he would shortly help to make famous: Jodie Foster.

Which of the AFI Top 20 US films of all time have you never watched? Are you likely to ever watch them?

 

I am lucky enough to have seen everything in the top 20; in fact, the first film in the AFI’s list of a hundred that I realised I had never actually seen is Number 71 (“Forrest Gump”). No particular reason… I think I just saw that “box of chocolates” scene so often on television that I decided that I had seen all I wanted to see of the movie.

I also haven’t seen “American Graffiti” and “Goodfellas”, but for no compelling reason; I am simply not as “blown away” by Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas or Martin Scorsese as are most voters. And since both are down there in the lower twenty percent, among a few films that I have seen and wished I hadn’t, I am not over-anxious to fill in the gaps (when I saw “A Clockwork Orange” and “Jaws” actually sitting in the top fifty (!), I realised that the AFI and I were never going to agree on much).

Why were the Jaws sequels so bad?

 

The original was no great shakes, either, when seen again years later; but, for reasons unknown, it stuck a chord with the public and became a tearaway success; people got the idea that it was some kind of masterpiece, which it most certainly was not…. but at least, as the first, it was new.

But by the time the sequels started to roll out, the basic premise was no longer fresh and exciting, so the writers had to come up with something to give the story that extra ‘oomph’! Writers writing from desperation, not from passion, are seldom at their best and are unlikely to produce anything they’re particularly proud of.

Cinemagoers must have sensed this, and worked out that, in spite of such extra added attractions as sharks eating helicopters (thanks, Gregory; I never saw the sequel, so I didn’t know that) and sharks coming straight out of the screen at you, the fact was that the emperor had no clothes. Many — perhaps most — sequels were doomed to the same fate (did anyone see “Superman IV”?)

Why does Eddie Murphy look at the camera in trading places?

 

I haven’t seen “Trading Places” recently (is it the one with Don Ameche?), so I have no idea whether you are talking about a single incident or a repeated technique; but I am reasonably confident in saying that if, indeed, he did look directly at the camera, it was NOT just an accident but a deliberate strategy on Murphy’s part, with the director’s assent.

The technique is by no means original to “Trading Places” or to Murphy; in fact, it was fairly common, in comedies of the Golden Age of Hollywood, for actors to step out of character for a moment and deliver a line directly at the audience (and, like the “stage whisper” technique, he could do that without any of the other actors in the scene taking any notice). The idea, of course, is that the audience would think it was an ad-lib — even though it was, in fact, an integral part of the script — and we would feel as if we were not just observers, but part of the action.

The master of this technique back in the forties and fifties was surely Bob Hope; in the “Road” series which he made with Bing Crosby, stepping out of character, and actually mentioning Paramount Studios — or their contract, or the script, or what they were planning to do after they left the set, or how old the other was looking — when their characters were supposed to be stranded in Morocco, or Zanzibar, or Bali (or wherever), was always guaranteed to get the best laughs in the movie.

Jack Benny, also, was a master at looking directly at the camera when someone in the scene said something which displeased him: his expression, delivered straight to us, saved a whole page of unnecessary dialogue.

Do actors really eat in movies?

 

Not if they can help it. Most shots require multiple takes, and an appetising meal becomes far less appealing if you have had to swallow bits of it twenty times in a single morning. Directors are usually skilled at cutting away just as the actor is about to actually put the food in his mouth (if it’s the star, that’s probably something you don’t want to see, anyway, as it is an act seldom performed eloquently, especially while delivering lines).

There are exceptions, however; in “Guys and Dolls”, the two male stars — Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra — did not get along at all, partly because of Sinatra’s dislike of both Brando’s acting style (he referred to him as “Mumbles”) and of his insistence on multiple takes for every scene so that he could work his way into the emotions of the character (Sinatra, by contrast, felt that the spontaneity of the first and second takes was what made for an outstanding performance). When the two had a long scene together, in a restaurant where Brando’s character had to talk while Sinatra’s character ate cheesecake, Brando had his revenge. As the end of the scene approached, and the cheesecake was all but eaten, he would deliberately “blow” his line, requiring another take, and, of course, another full piece of cheesecake to be placed in front of Sinatra. After Brando had pulled this stunt nine times in a row, not only had Sinatra lost that spontaneity which, he felt, kept his delivery alive, but even the thought of having to eat yet another piece of cheesecake was making him feel nauseous. He bad-mouthed Brando in his concerts, when introducing his “knock-‘em-dead” reading of Brando’s song (“Luck, be a Lady”), for years afterwards.

What is the best psychological film ever made?

 

“The Heiress”, perhaps? Certainly, it’s one where you talk about the three leading characters for hours after you come out of the cinema, trying to understand their world from their particular point of view and musing about how you might have acted if you were in their place.

“The Heiress” was the first film version of Henry James’ “Washington Square”, and I always thought James was superb at weaving stories which made you wonder about the minds of the characters involved. Another movie made from one of his works — “The Innocents”, based on “The Turn of the Screw” — was also a quite-brilliant psychological drama, masquerading as a simple haunted-house story for those who didn’t want to have to look too deeply into the psychological implications of all the goings-on.

Actor Danny Kaye was almost a genius, I discovered. So why did he seem corny to me in his movies?

 

Of all the movie genres, comedy seems to date most quickly, and the movies we laughed at twenty years ago often seem embarrassingly gauche as the world moves on. You are looking at Danny Kaye from your era, but the routines that laid audiences in the aisle were conceived and performed in an era you didn’t exist in, and couldn’t really understand.

Kaye came along around the time when audiences laughed hysterically when Milton Berle made an entrance on his weekly TV show dressed as a June bride; but, by the time those shows played in Australia (we were a few years late getting television), Berle’s humour already seemed, to use your word, “corny”. The comedies that are being made today — such as ones where Robert de Niro plays a crusty old grandfather (or similar) — wouldn’t have been considered at all funny back then (and won’t, I’d hazard a guess, seem even faintly amusing in 2025…. maybe de Niro should borrow Milton Berle’s June-bride outfit?)).

There were comedians whose humour did, in fact, pull off the near-miracle of spanning generations and causing audiences to split their sides almost a century after their routines were created: Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Tony Hancock come immediately to mind. But Danny Kaye’s face-pulling rapid-pace routines fell into that other category, along with Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams and the aforementioned Milton Berle: funny only when they were brand new and knew exactly what their audiences would respond to.

I can’t end this rant, however, without coming to Danny Kaye’s defence for one of his movies: “The Court Jester” (1956) was funny when it was made, and is just as funny when seen today. It’s his golden moment…. but, interestingly enough, he is not the funniest person in the movie; Cecil Parker, Basil Rathbone and Mildred Natwick are the supporting players that keep the movie alive (not to mention his wife, Sylvia Fine, who wrote the clever lyrics he sang), and their work provides such solid support that Kaye really couldn’t go wrong.

Why does the Golden Age of Hollywood seem so special?

 

I fear my answer will sound cynical, but it would be the same answer if you asked me why the Golden Age of Broadway or the Golden Age of Popular Song seem so special: it’s because we either weren’t alive in that era, or, if we were, we were so young that we managed to miss most of it before we even realised it was happening. People only recognise a golden age when it has become history; you may be living through a Golden age of movies right this minute, but it will be the people of the next generation, or the one after that, who will give it that name, and lament that their own age has such meagre pickings to offer.

Why do theatrical release movies have to exceed their budget in ticket sales in one weekend when they can do it in multiple weeks?

 

You’re quite right… costs can always be recovered over weeks, months, years, or even decades. But, for the many production companies who are generally involved in making a movie, it can be very comforting if they recover their outlay almost-immediately, because they can, at least, relax, safe in the knowledge that they don’t have to go into receivership this time! And, also, since the money they put into the production was probably borrowed anyway, a quick return means that shareholders are happy and they can look around for another project to make everyone even richer.

The days of waiting, sometimes years, for the red entries in the ledger to turn black were quire commonplace when the major studios were doing nothing but making movies, and they were turning them out at a rate of one a week, sometimes more. One tearaway hit could balance the books for half a dozen clinkers, and those expensive ones which were made for the prestige could quietly smoulder away, clawing back a proportion of their budget every year. A good example of this is a film that everyone knows and loves, and today you couldn’t imagine there was ever a time when it was considered a loss to its home studio: “The Wizard of Oz”. But those sets, costumes and special effects set MGM back $2,770,000, an enormous amount for 1938/9, and it was a full twenty years before the ledger entries finally showed positive … not, in fact, until after “Oz” was sold to television, which hadn’t even been invented when the movie first hit the cinemas!

Why don't European movies get much recognition?

 

Where would you like them to get recognition? If a film is good, it can expect to get ample recognition in any country where its language is spoken or readily understood. It will, naturally enough, receive less recognition in countries where prints have to be subtitled (a distraction) or where voices are dubbed (usually a disaster from every standpoint).

Like it or not (and I expect the Chinese do not), English is, right now, the “lingua franca” of the world. I don’t think I ever went to a country where I couldn’t find someone to converse with me in English within five minutes. So movies made in English are likely to find widespread recognition, if they’re good, because they make fewer demands on the viewer.

That may work to the disadvantage of some European countries making films in their own language, but by no means all. Wouldn’t you regard England (at this moment, anyhow) as part of Europe?

Which in your view were some great television shows which were eventually made into terrible movies?

 

“Twilight Zone: The Movie” might be a good one to start with.

Somehow, the makers of the movie came up with the idea that to bring off a success on the big screen, just about every inspired touch that made the small-screen series such a success had to be turned on its head. What made the original such compulsive viewing was that it was short and sharp, pared back to the bare essentials, not a frame or a line of dialogue wasted, proof in every half hour that less is more. The movie came at you as if they were making “Ben-Hur”, with everything too big, too bright, too loud, and much too long. As each segment ended, leaving the viewer wondering why they even used the title of the original series, a new episode would begin, and you would get your hopes up again: maybe THIS is the segment that will “do it” for us the way the TV show did. Alas, it never happened; in this case, more proved to be less.

What movies have been shot in Venezia, Italy?

 

Two particularly interesting movies set in Venice were David Lean’s “Summertime”, with Katharine Hepburn having a love affair with the city and one of its inhabitants, even while she knows she is destined to lose both; and Nicholas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now”, which gave us a totally new perspective on the maze of walkways, stairs, and tiny bridges, seeing them, not as romantic, but as full of menace and impending evil. Both movies were exceptional insofar as the city was much more than a backdrop to the plots…. it served as one of the principal characters in each story!

Do you think people set their expectations on how good a movie will be too high at times?

 

Definitely not. As a member of the order of “movielovers”, we do neither ourselves nor the motion picture industry a service by saying, “Oh, well, we don’t expect movies to deliver a great experience any more… not like they did when the movies were new. We will be satisfied with an okay movie”.

We must set our sights high, and we must be very vocal when our expectations are not met. Reviewers should start getting tough on the movies again, because, it seems, nowadays no matter how bad a film is (and, boy, some are stinkers!), the distributors can always find a critic somewhere whom they can quote in the publicity, assuring us that someone who knows what he’s talking about says it’s a great experience (I often suspect that the distributors might just dictate these reviews themselves, and money changes hands under the table).

A truly great movie — not necessarily the ones that cost hundreds of millions of dollars — can provide an experience that will stay with you all your life, and enrich you as much as it entertains you (there was a time when you could count on four or five of those every year; nowadays, you might get one every four or five years). The minute we start to doubt the ability of movies to be better, and let it be known that we will put money on the counter for something that merely amuses us for a couple of hours, we are doomed to suffer movies of that mediocre standard every time we go to the cinema. Producers will supply us with the minimum we will accept.

 

Which stars used their real name in the movies?

 

There are quite a few examples — especially in comedies — of stars playing themselves and using their real names as part of the joke (Mel Brooks’s “Silent Movie” used a whole list of these, including Burt Reynolds, Ann Bancroft, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman and Marcel Marceau), or guest stars in musicals doing their bit using their own name (for example, both Judy Garland and Mel Torme in “Words and Music”); but I expect you want an answer that digs a little deeper than that.

The only example I can think of in a drama is not quite an answer to your question, as it works the other way — someone choosing to adopt the character’s name as their professional name — but it might just be interesting enough to at least start the ball rolling. I don’t know the real name of the young actress making her movie debut in “The Caine Mutiny”, playing the love interest of the young mutineer-hero, but she was so new to movies that she hadn’t yet chosen a movie name. The character she was playing was “May Wynn”, and it seemed to sum up her hopes for her future in movies, so that became her “real” name from that role onwards.

Just as a coda, if you’ve seen the movie of “The Seven Year Itch”, in which the very-married Tom Ewell has an imaginary affair with the girl upstairs (played by Marilyn Monroe) and is anxious to hide the infatuation from family and friends, you will have smiled at his answer when confronted by someone who asks him, straight out, who is the person he’s been dallying with: faking righteous indignation at the very suggestion, he replies, “Who knows? Maybe it’s Marilyn Monroe!” It got the biggest laugh in the movie.

What is the most infamous moment where a film had taken 'creative liberties' with a historical event?

 

My favourite is “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, a big-budget, critically-acclaimed account of the building of the famous bridge as part of the wartime railway line built by the Japanese, using POW prisoners to do the deadly work. The spectacular climax of this movie was the blowing up of the bridge by British soldiers at the grand opening ceremony, just as the first troop train was going across it (thus foiling Japan’s plan for the “through line” and taking out one of their supply-laden trains at the same time). It was a spectacular ending…. but it never happened. The British plot to blow up the bridge failed; it remains standing, undamaged, to this day.

 

Was Doris Day the housewife's stereotype?

 

Doris Day had a long and mainly distinguished career, during which she portrayed many types of women, but she was at her best playing the confident, extrovert girl with the bouncy walk who oozed optimism and the conviction that she could take responsibility for her destiny. Only once or twice — “The Thrill of it All’, and “With Six You Get Egg roll” — could she have been said to play a “typical” housewife, and only then if you were prepared to overlook the fact that few typical housewives had the funds to acquire a wardrobe and beautician who could work such miracles. And, anyway, they weren’t the roles you remember her in.

The fact is, Miss Day was atypical: she was one hell of a singer when she got the right role, and, in the hands of a skilled director (which, unfortunately, was seldom her lot when she threw in her chips with Universal-International) such as Alfred Hitchcock, she could turn in a better-than-average dramatic performance (she was a wife and mother in his “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, but hardly typical!).

I remember her best of all in “The Pajama Game”; she did her best singing in that one, looked like a dream without the exaggerated glamour that sometimes made her look artificial in her post-Warner Bros films, and played a character which, I think, was probably very close to the REAL Doris Day: determined, in control, committed, and capable of intense emotion. That’s not a stereotypical anything… except maybe a stereotypical Doris Day!

Which movies have great music (not musicals)?

 

Movies which have great music are movies for which the music is written by the great movie composers…. and there have been a host of those around since sound first came into the cinema. Many of the great composers came from the one extended family — the Newmans, of whom Alfred Newman, the man who wrote the 20th-Century Fox fanfare, as well as virtually all the great music from that studio in the Golden Years, is the best-known. There was also Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, Dimitri Tiomkin, Miklos Rozsa, Alex North, Franz Waxman, Elmer Bernstein, Jerome Moross, Herbert Stothart, John Green, Victor Young, Bronislau Kaper, George Antheil, Jerry Goldsmith, and, more recently, John Williams (and several more Newmans). The names of these instantly-recognisable composers are on many hundreds of films made in the first ninety years of sound cinema.

While all the composers mentioned above wrote their most-famous works for the cinema, it was not unknown for Hollywood to commission already-revered classical composers to write a score every now and then. Aaron Copland composed the music for “The Heiress”; Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the scores for several movie versions of Shakespeare’s plays; Sergei Prokofiev composed the score for the celebrated Russian movie, “Alexander Nevsky”; Leonard Bernstein wrote some wonderful music for “On the Waterfront”; and possibly the most bizarre of all was the little B-movie, “Rocketship XM”, which unexpectedly found itself with a few thousand dollars in the kitty for a musical score, and approached none other than Ferde Grofe, composer of “Grand Canyon Suite”(who usually charged much more, but, apparently, they got him in a quiet week)!

 

Do you think a film or a book can convey more emotions?

 

I can’t see that the answer is as easy as simply saying one more than the other. It depends entirely on the skill of the author of the book, and the collective skills of the writers, director, and cast making the movie. And, I suppose, how skilled the ‘buyer’ is at responding to emotional cues……someone who doesn’t want to put in much input towards having his buttons pushed would find the film easier to respond to, while someone prepared to spend a bit of time imagining the pictures that the words and the language trigger in his mind would probably prefer the book.

I admit I’ve become teary in movies: in “The Yearling”, in “The Miracle Worker”, in “The Diary of Anne Frank”. But, then, Anne Frank’s book affected me so much that, at one stage, I had to put it down and come back to it later when I had more control over myself. It all depends on who’s pulling the strings!

Which is the biggest movie scene shot without a cut?

 

Steven’s answer beats mine by one minute of running time! However, I am sure he will not mind me chiming in with “Russian Ark”, the 2002 Russian film set in the Hermitage and directed by Alexander Sokurov. Filming in the Hermitage, one of the most important (and revenue-raising) buildings in the world was not a privilege granted every day, and he was given one single day to bring in his 96-minute movie, which involved a cast of hundreds (some claim thousands), a fortune in costumes, and a single camera and sound crew roaming though the building from room to room, “capturing” scenes from several hundred years of the building’s existence.

He filmed the whole thing on one take, and, against all odds, brought it in on the third try of the morning (the first two tries went wrong very early in). You can only really appreciate the logistics of his feat by going to see the movie…. but, I assure you, it is so fascinating (and edge-of-the-seat stuff as you wait for something — anything! — to go wrong) that I came out at the end and looked up the time of the next showing so that I could go back and assure myself that he hadn’t faked the whole thing. He hadn’t.

 

Which films were notoriously shot badly?

 

If you are talking specifically about the look of the movie — choices made by the cinematographer and director of lighting — then I can think of one that has niggled at me for at least thirty years.

The musical “Mame” went into production at a time when a lot of big, expensive musicals were losing their studios millions of dollars: movies like “Star!”, “Doctor Dolittle”, “Goodbye Mr Chips”, “Darling Lili”. Warner Bros hadn’t (thus far) been involved in any of those, and it wanted to ensure that its big-budget entry didn’t meet the same fate, so it contracted one of Hollywood’s luminaries, a star whom everyone in America had loved from her long-running TV show: Lucille Ball would be Mame.

It had been some years since the golden age of Lucy on TV, and while Lucille Ball had a great deal of zany comedy talent to bring to the role (let’s not talk about what she brought to the songs, however!), someone connected with the production (maybe Lucy herself) was worried that she wasn’t going to look quite young enough and fresh enough in colour Panavision on a giant screen…. hers had been a face most people had seen only on TV.

It was decided that she needed to be “softened”… that some material (possibly cheesecloth, though one critic joked that it may have been chicken fat) be placed over the lens to give her a wrinkle-free, unblemished, ethereal look. This might have worked quite well if they had just made that choice for the whole movie; no one complained when Hitchcock did it for “Vertigo” or Brian di Palma did it for “Obsession”. But, with Lucy, it was only her close-ups that got the treatment (and there were, of course, a lot of them); everyone and everything else was photographed in crystal clear high-definition Panavision, befitting a hard-ticket musical extravaganza.

The abrupt changes from clear to fuzzy every time Lucy got anywhere near the lens was so noticeable that, not only couldn’t you miss noticing it, but you couldn’t help but be annoyed by it. You weren’t able to just sit back and enjoy Mame’s adventures… you kept thinking about Lucy’s predicament, and wondering just how bad could her face have been for her to be treated so outrageously by the cinematographer.

The reviewers, who thought she wasn’t right for the role anyway, had a field day and tore strips off her appearance, her dancing, her voice…. and her film. Their comments hurt so much that America’s once-favourite TV comedienne retired from the silver screen then and there. It was a sad swan-song for the star once described as “the funniest woman in America”, and the irony was that it didn’t have to be that way. The film virtually served her up on a plate to be ridiculed; a simple sane decision at shooting time could have saved both her and the movie.

 

When was the golden age of horror cinema?

 

Universal Pictures wasn’t famous for much… but it did, surely, have the market cornered, in the Golden Years (specifically, the 1930s), as far as horror was concerned. James Whale and Tod Browning were the directors behind Universal’s classic output (though, as is the case today, sequels were often directed by lesser talents), and their advantage was that they got in a couple of years before the Production Code placed severe restrictions on what could and could not be shown. So, in the original “Frankenstein” (1931), the monster, quite innocently and playfully (he was originally intended to have a “soft” side, a pure soul in a cruel world), drowns a little girl in the river; when the Code, two years later, made that kind of thing unacceptable, the movie was “edited” and first you see the two playing, and suddenly it cuts to the drowned child and distraught parents. That cut didn’t do the monster’s reputation a bit of good!

“Dracula”, from the same studio in the same year, originally contained some blood-curdling screams which were later deemed to have transgressed the Code’s rules, and were removed. But, even in its altered version, it remains one of the best-regarded horror movies of all time, and is one of the works that made the 1930s Horror’s golden age.

 

Why do movies always take place in New York City?

 

Among many other reasons, New Yorkers are (in contrast to the natives of many other cities) not unused to having movie crews working in their streets, and are, therefore, unlikely to disrupt the shooting in order to wave at the camera!

Having said that, I must admit that I know of two notable exceptions to this rule. When Anthony Perkins had to do an outdoor shot on a bench opposite Macy’s Department Store for “Evening Primrose”— all he had to do was sit and gaze towards the store for a few minutes — the simple shot, reportedly, took most of the day, because, just as everything was looking good, someone would come up, sit beside him, and recognise him.

The other, more notorious, example is the Prometheus Statue scene at Rockefeller Plaza in “On the Town”… but maybe that doesn’t quite count, because it was 1949, and around that time only low-budget black-and-white films with minor players were being shot in the streets, and that mostly to save the producers money on building their own sets. “On the Town” was a major musical with Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, and, for the scene, the three had to mime to the previously-recorded soundtrack, which was broadcast so loudly that not only the players but everyone in the district could hear it. And everybody in the district came to sneak a peek at “Frankie”; it became so impossible to avoid shooting the fans that, as director Stanley Donen pointed out, they eventually just went ahead and allowed the camera to catch the crowd of bystanders watching the three dancers as they worked. They’re all there, quite visible, in the finished movie.

What is the greatest comeback of a washed-up has-been movie star?

 

“Washed-up has-been” is a strong term, and I am not sure if the stars in the answers so far given could really be regarded as having sunk that low. But Frank Sinatra, around 1952, really did seem to fit the description.

A lucrative contract as part of MGM’s stable of musical stars was torn up after his behaviour under the MGM roof offended its father-figure, Louis B Mayer… but MGM’s rivals had only minor projects, like “Meet Danny Wilson”, to offer him. He walked away from his record company (Columbia) when the new A&R Director, MItch Miller, decided that, instead of recording standards by Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen for his coterie of serious (but now mature, no longer the bobbysoxers of old) admirers, he should try to appeal to the youngsters of the day by recording drivel such as “Mama Will Bark” and “Big Fat Polka” with washboards and novelty sounds…. and, with his reputation for demanding what was best musically, not merely what would take him back to the top of the hit parade, he couldn’t find a new home at any other recording studio.

A lot of his die-hard fans, as well as the Catholic Church, regretfully turned away from him because he walked out on his devout Catholic wife (and their children) and started a tempestuous affair with Ava Gardner, making headlines for all the wrong reasons. And his live performances began to suffer — possibly because of all the stress — until, in his own words, “One night on stage, I opened my mouth and nothing came out” (in fact, he had suffered a throat haemorrhage, as a result of which he had to find a new, less-crooning, singing style). With few admirers and fewer friends (most of whom liked him better when he had money), he was, finally, reduced to travelling to Kenya as Ava’s companion for location shooting on “Mogambo”, idling around the set while Ava and her co-stars (Clark Gable and Grace Kelly) went to work for John Ford, who, previously, might well have directed HIM.

But he came back. In his idle time, he read “From Here to Eternity” and realised that the part of Maggio in the upcoming film version was the chance of a lifetime to put the dark days behind him. “I knew Maggio…. I WAS Maggio,” he declared, and campaigned for the role by offering to play it for almost nothing. It was a supporting part, non-singing, but he went at it like it was the lead, and won the Oscar that year… simultaneously reviving his recording career with a new record company (Capitol), a new arranger (Nelson Riddle), and a whole new sound… stronger, deeper, more swinging, more “felt”. Listening to the playback of his vocal to Riddle’s swinging orchestration of “I’ve Got the World on a String” (he was once again singing Harold Arlen songs), he commented: “I’m back”.

Going into 1953 with virtually nothing but memories of his days in the sun, he came out of it at the end with the world at his feet.

What terrible movie was saved by a single actor's performance?

 

“The Man with the Golden Arm” was (for 1955) a highly-controversial topic, and — having already achieved welcome notoriety for having directed an earlier controversial movie (“The Moon is Blue”) — director Otto Preminger chose to cement this dubious reputation by attacking his new project with all the stops pulled out (he soon became Hollywood’s self-proclaimed specialist in movies tackling “taboo” themes, and I don’t think even one of them was any good). In “Golden Arm”, he encouraged his actors to play, not people, but archetypes; just about everyone (even usually-reliable Eleanor Parker) overplayed outrageously…. almost comically. Since the sets looked just about as unrealistic as the acting, and the background music somehow came up with the idea that it was the foreground music, this would have been the gob-smackingly awful film of the year…. had it not been for Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra had recently won an Oscar for “From Here to Eternity” and had just lost the lead in “On the Waterfront”, which he had coveted and which had been promised to him, so I guess he felt he had a lot to prove in Preminger’s movie. As everything else went further and further over the top, and you wondered if Preminger had ever heard of “subtlety” or “restraint” (or if he believed his audiences had even a shred of intelligence), Sinatra quietly picked up the movie and turned it into a memorable experience, about a real problem and a real human being. A finely-honed performance in a film where everything else is simply heaped on top of you with not a shred of finesse. It’s worth watching, but only to see Frank Sinatra give the performance of his career.

What changes would you like to bring in certain movies after having watched them? Why?

 

This answer refers to just about every non-children’s movie made in the last twenty years:

Cut out the curse words. They are an irritation, they impede one’s enjoyment of the movie, they obscure the occasional literate lines of dialogue, so that we may miss the REAL words because we’re trying to avoid listening to the expletives, and they no longer serve their purpose in shaping our opinion of a character because they are so grossly overused by just about every movie script. A continuous flood of curse words is not entertainment, it’s not enriching, it’s not enlightening, it doesn’t provide fodder for a skilled actor’s development of a character, and it doesn’t advance the plot; what, then, can it possibly give to moviegoers in return for their money?

 

What is your review of "Deliverance" (1972 thriller film)?

 

It may be no coincidence that “Deliverance” and “confronting” have the same number of letters. It’s not an easy film to watch, but it stays with you, even years afterward. A review by Kim Morgan called it “thoughtful, disturbing, haunting, controversial, shocking”; it is all of those and more, but its strength is that it is so well-played and so convincingly-crafted that you respond to it more like a witness to a tragedy (or a series of tragedies) than like an audience.

It’s not only a traumatic experience for the viewer; by all accounts, the actors, also, had a hard time coping with what they were being asked to go through (it was Ned Beatty’s first feature role, and while he has given a host of fine performances since, this is the one that invariably comes up in interviews). A lot of more-eminent stars were considered for some of the leading roles: Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, Gene Hackman, Charlton Heston, Robert Redford, Donald Sutherland, Jack Nicholson, Lee Marvin, Warren Beatty; when names like that are being bandied about, you know the film-makers think they have something a little bit special on their hands, and James Dickey’s modern myth is certainly that.

Well, they didn’t get Brando or Redford or Heston (whom, I presume, would have played the Burt Reynolds character, the only time Burt ever played a role that allowed us to see the self-delusion behind his braggadocio); the cast the producers settled on, however, all gave the performances of their lives, and, what’s more, put themselves in real danger to bring it in (clearly, that’s really Reynolds in that canoe being buffered by the rapids). Their commitment to the film is evident in every scene, and, of course, this adds immeasurably to the realism… and your discomfort.

It’s probably a film to admire more than to like; but, whatever you feel about it, I doubt if you will be able to forget it.

What movie can you not believe is liked by so many people?

 

I don’t suppose profitability is quite the same as saying that people liked the product after they had paid their money, but I don’t quite know how else to answer your question.

So I will look at the highest-grossing movies. I haven’t seen “Avengers: End Game”, which, apparently, just squeaks in as the number 1 grosser, but I saw at least some of the number 2 grosser (“Avatar”), and I was rather dismayed that this is what people consider a masterpiece in the 21st century: characters with cartoon faces in relentlessly-artificial settings talking exactly like the people you see in TV sitcoms aimed at teens.

I note that there is now to be an Avatar 2, as director James Cameron assures us that THIS is the one he originally wanted to make, but that back then the technology simply wasn’t “up to the task”….so he had to settle, in 2009, for something even he knew was second-best (but he didn’t tell audiences that, at the time!). So maybe my judgment of the movie back then wasn’t so far off after all, if its creator has to go back ten years later to make the film he had in mind all the time.

But, at the same time, I am approaching the new one with some trepidation: if Cameron is now able to make the film he always wanted simply because the TECHNOLOGY has come ahead in leaps and bounds (not because scripts are better, or ideas are richer, or acting has improved), then what does that tell us about what, nowadays, makes a movie “great”? Are films nowadays just demonstrations of technology; is this, today, primarily what people go to the cinema to see?

There was a time when geniuses made memorable movies without even sound and colour. What they had instead was a desire to show us people, so we could learn something about ourselves by watching what was there on the screen. I don’t think I learned much about people by following around animated characters in an oppressively blue-lit land called “Pandora” (isn’t the colour in these CGI films just horrendous!); I did, however, learn a lot about having the wool pulled over my eyes and being required to settle for admiring tricks of the trade in lieu of being enriched by anything approaching “substance”. Maybe that’s a dirty word to the cinemagoers of the 21st-century. Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t like movies much nowadays: they just go because, well, isn’t that what you do?

What was a movie moment where there was more than meets the eye between the actors and their roles?

 

I can think of several such instances of actors bringing their private lives into their work to “inform” their portayals; two, just for openers, would be the scenes between Jane Fonda and her Dad, Henry Fonda in “On Golden Pond”, and Christopher Reeve’s late-career remake of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”.

Jane Fonda actually mentioned, in interview, many years later (after her Dad had passed; “On Golden Pond” was his final film), that some of the dialogue between her character and that of her father could have been lifted from her own troubled relationship, going back years, with her Dad, and that playing those scenes together was like releasing pent-up emotions — resentment and hurt — that had been locked away inside both of them. There are several moments in that movie where neither of them is acting, and — in Jane’s case, in particular — you can see the tears welling and hear the bitterness and disappointment.

I only thought of Christopher Reeve’s movie when I was reading Todd’s entry (below) on “The Shootist”, which is now famous as the film in which John Wayne finally laid it all out in front of us (and Lauren Bacall and Jimmy Stewart brought their own life experiences to the scenario as well). The only film I can think of which took this macabre idea even further was the remake of “Rear Window”, about a wheelchair-bound invalid who cannot even breathe without a machine to help him, played by real-life quadriplegic Christopher Reeve, who, at the time, was teaching himself to talk again, and who needed to be attached at all times to a machine which “breathed” for him. It’s a terrific plot, and had already been turned by Alfred Hitchcock into one of the best films of the 1950s…. but, while the story still had plenty of life in it by 1998, I am not sure whether giving it that extra dose of realism didn’t cross a line somewhere!

Why do some movies take years in post-production?

 

I am sure there are many answers to this question; a common one is that the producers have had a look at the finished product, and they don’t think the public is going to accept it as it is. Having wagered all their money on a success, they are faced with a difficult decision: either shelve the movie completely (as they did, for example, with Jerry Lewis’s last movie, “The Day the Clown Cried”, which they believed was unsalvageable), thus not throwing good money after bad in the distribution and publicity processes, or else take the footage they have, and the outtakes, and re-edit it — even reconstruct it — in order to salvage from it something that will at least have a chance at the box office. Sometimes — as in the case of Howard Hughes’ “Jet Pilot”, which was made in 1949 and finally released in 1957, by which time it was starting to look “quaint” — this can take years.

A couple of notorious examples of drastic re-assembling in post-production would be “Brainstorm”, which had to allow for the death of its leading lady with much of her scenes still unshot, and “Twilight Zone: The Movie”, which almost didn’t make it into cinemas at all, because it was a bit hard to know what to do with a film that had actually killed off its leading man and two of its child extras in a filming accident which was blamed on the director’s insistence that a helicopter filming the big climax come in dangerously close for the “money shot”. Both films were abandoned, at least for a while, but eventually they were put together by some vigorous re-writing and post-production work.

“Something’s Gotta Give”, Marilyn Monroe’s last film, was one that almost never saw the light of day — not officially, anyway; in fact, the official word was that it actually never got made! The studio producing it, plagued with escalating costs for another of their movies, “Cleopatra”, which threatened to bankrupt the studio, found that one of its biggest assets to keep it solvent was, of all things, an insurance policy on Marilyn’s film, which could be cashed in if their troublesome star was unable to deliver her services through tardiness, unpreparedness, or recurring illnesses. When she died with a few scenes left unfinished, the existing footage — almost a movie’s worth — was carefully hidden away and conveniently “forgotten” about. The word was put about that only some test footage had actually been shot; there was (the studio claimed) nothing usable to show for their expenditure, and it was all Monroe’s fault. It was many years before the truth came out, when a studio employee managed to smuggle out something like a dozen cans of film which, when shown secretly, told the true story. Eventually, the film was assembled and some scenes released in an abridged version of the film…. but that was a quarter of a century after the death of its much-maligned (and unfairly: she looks wonderful, and does long takes without a single flub) leading lady.

Are there any movies in the public domain?

 

Hundreds. If you go into a two-dollar shop and see those cheap editions of oldies-but-goodies, frequently sold in packages of five or ten movies, it’s a pretty safe bet that the distributors have gone through the catalogues and come upon movies for which the copyrights weren’t renewed by the due date. Yes, even major studios like MGM occasionally missed a due-date deadline (deliberately or otherwise), and you often find movies such as “Till the Clouds Roll By” (Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra), “Father’s Little Dividend” (Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor), and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” (Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson) squeezed onto multi-film DVDs. The packaging is usually of poor quality, and you can be sure that the quality of the reproduction won’t be significantly better…. but the movie is yours, if you choose to distribute it yourself. I hear that “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, usually regarded as the worst movie ever made, is available, also…. probably worth re-issuing before one of the present generation of directors makes a movie which topples it from its pedestal (I fear, perhaps, that may already have happened).

 

When you watch films from the 1950s, why do their voices sound so different compared to films from today?

 

Actors were taught to enunciate clearly back then; many of them had come from the stage, and were used to “projecting” so that their every word was understood by patrons in the back row. And the movie sound men helped them along by having microphones dangling just outside the frame (sometimes the cameraman goofed, and you caught sight of the mike that the actors were playing to). Films back then were often told through the dialogue… miss that and you wouldn’t have a clue what the film was about!

Today, movies are, more than ever, a visual medium, and what people seem to want from a movie is something to see… something bigger and louder than anything they have seen already. So background noises no longer appear to be muffled a little to ensure that the actor didn’t have to compete… it’s more important that they have something to do than something to say. The training ground for most actors today is likely to be television rather than the stage, so clear enunciation, and pitching to the back row, are no longer primary virtues. Mumbling your lines, or saying them while turned away from the camera, is considered “realism” — much more important nowadays than audibility!

And, anyway, actions speak louder than words, so if you only catch one word in three, then no one is likely to complain…. except, possibly, the screenwriter who may, in fact, have written incisive and intelligent lines that will never be heard. No wonder that nowadays they write whole pages of curse-words; at least their meanings are easy to catch (no matter how hard you try not to!).

This is not intended as a put-down to the actors of today, even though, reading over it, I am aware this is how it “comes across”. Today’s actors are, in many cases, far superior in becoming a character than the stars of the forties and fifties (who tended to be the same in every movie, so the plots were built around their personas). Those “old” stars were, however, more fun to listen to, because their speech was so finely-tuned that it was, in many cases, worth the price of admission: think of George Sanders in “All About Eve” or Ronald Colman in “Random Harvest”, David Niven in “Separate Tables”, or James Mason in ANYTHING. These were voices you wished you possessed… when, in fact, you actually sounded more like Sean Penn or one of the Afflecks.

What songs are attached to a motion picture many years ago and are still popular even today?

 

“Many years ago”…. well, with sound movies, you can’t go much farther back than 1936, and, as far as “still popular today”, I guess you couldn’t go far past “Smile” by Charles Chaplin (“Modern Times”). Everyone still seems to wants to try his/her hand at this one; even Tony Bennett, recording from home during the COVID lockdown, decided that this song was relevant to what we are all going through in 2020.

What are some really great movies that don’t get the credit that they deserve?

 

I expect there are hundreds of these over the past eighty years, and I am tempted to jump in and do my usual rant about 1963’s “I Could Go on Singing”, but since you already have over fifty answers, I will restrain myself and mention just two that, for me, always rankle:

(i) “3:10 to Yuma”. The original (1957) one with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, directed by Delmer Daves. When people talk about the greatest westerns, the invariably light on several made within five years of “3:10 to Yuma”, as this was, quite clearly, a golden age for westerns; but they always seem to leave this one out, and, in my opinion, it may just be the best of the lot. It has, for a start, the best performance Glenn Ford ever gave, and maybe it’s Van Heflin’s best also, although he had such a great track record that it would be hard to choose just one! The story is good enough to tempt Russell Crowe to rework it fifty years later, the cinematography is the kind of black-and-white which makes you wonder why they ever bothered to invent Technicolor, and the characters come across as real people… even the villain has his gallant side. I never get tired of watching, and admiring, “3:10 to Yuma”.

(ii) “Judgment at Nuremberg”. Stanley Kramer knew that his film was unlikely to appeal to everyone, as it discussed Nazism and the concentration camps (with real footage which, at the time, hadn’t been seen before) just sixteen years after the end of the war. And, what’s more, he chose not to just portray the Germans as the villains and the Americans as the good guys (the usual approach in post-war movies), but to give both sides, as they say, “their day in court” (a rather apt description, of course, given the plot of the movie!)

So, to make what was bound to be a bitter pill somewhat easier to swallow, he laced the movie with a slew of top Hollywood stars, even in supporting roles…. and, for many critics, that proved Kramer’s undoing. “An all-star concentration-camp drama with special guest-star victims” was how one influential critic put it, and, with appraisals such as that, the film tended to be dismissed as something of a stunt. In fact, it’s as near to a perfect film as you are ever likely to see: it is scripted intelligently and with fairness to both sides; it gives the audience the opportunity to make up its own mind, yet, in the final moments, steps forward boldly and tells you, without equivocation, the values that the film stands for; the acting is almost-uniformly brilliant, simply because the people involved — Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell — believed passionately in the project, and were more interested in the quality of the film than in whether or not it swelled their fan base; and it holds you spellbound and involved for a full 2 hours and 59 minutes (and you leave the cinema and talk about the issues for a further 2 hours and 59 minutes… and then some!). “Judgment at Nuremberg” strides boldly, but sensitively, with hardly a misstep; it, deserves to be regarded as a Hollywood classic.

 What are the most tragic movie endings?

I really don’t know what would qualify as the “most” tragic ending for a movie, but I recall arguing with a neighbour once over the ending of “The Heiress”, because, while I thought it was a tragic ending, with the heroine wilfully throwing away her last chance for marriage and happiness, my neighbour thought the ending was a victory for good over evil and felt we should be cheering the heroine’s decision! Neither of us could understand how the other came to the “wrong” conclusion, and I never got around to asking anyone else how they “read” that terrible walk up the staircase with the candelabra, so, to this day, I can’t tell you whether the ending was REALLY supposed to be tragic.

But it is certainly unforgettable, and, if any Quora writers reading this have seen the movie (Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, based on Henry James’s “Washington Square”), perhaps they would like to comment below with their interpretation….. is this the happiest ending of the year, the heroine having finally freed herself from the hurts and insults inflicted on her from childhood, or is it about as tragic an ending as a film can have: a life which might have been reclaimed by a last-minute opportunity instead thrown away, just for the satisfaction of having the last laugh on someone who had had previously caused her hurt and humiliation?

 

What actor or actress could not deliver their lines for a specific scene?

 

This is not really a scene for a movie, but is a spoken-word record, but it certainly involves one of the great actresses — both stage and screen — from the second half of the 20th century: Julie Harris (who, among other things, was James Dean’s leading lady in his first big movie, “East of Eden”).

Julie had been asked by Spoken Arts Records and director Arthur Luce Klein to read an edited version of Anne Frank’s diary for a double-album, and, over the course of a week, she spent her evenings lending her vocal skills to the best reading of that diary that anyone is ever likely to hear. And, like all great actresses, she began to identify more and more, as the sessions went on, with the author whose work she was immortalising on record. At the final session, she had to read the last few pages of Anne’s book, plus the brief epilogue, which says, simply, that the diary had ended abruptly because Anne’s hiding place had been discovered, and that Anne had, shortly afterwards, died in Bergen-Belsen.

Julie got as far as the epilogue before she broke up. Half way through the last sentence, she stopped abruptly, and for a moment, on the record, there is silence. Then you realise that she is crying softly at the microphone. “I can’t say it… I can’t say it,” she weeps, and the director chimes in from the sound booth asking if she needs to stop. Still weeping, she replies, “All right… all right…I’ll say it in a minute,” and there is a brief silent time as she pulls herself together. She then delivers the final sentence telling of Anne’s death, and there is silence.

It is, of course, the task of the director and editor to “tidy up” the recording so that no hint of any problem or error shows up in the finished product. On this occasion, however, everyone connected with the project thought that Julie Harris’s reaction to the words she was reading, and the subsequent exchange of words between star and director, told the listener so much about both Julie and about Anne’s diary that the whole incident was left in, exactly as it happened, on the record. It is quite a listening experience.

What is your least-favorite change from a book to a movie?

 

If I can substitute “play” for “book”, this might well be the movie of “Hazel Flagg”, the Broadway musical which had its leading lady changed to a leading man for its transition to film. Enter “HOMER” Flagg, and exit around seventeen of the nineteen original musical numbers (by no less than Jule Styne, who wrote “Gypsy”, “Funny Girl” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”) to make way for a host of knock-‘em-dead comedy routines played by our heroine turned hero and his singing straight man. The film was now titled “Living it Up”, and it was such a slow mover — in spite of the presence of Janet Leigh and Fred Clark in support and the long-suffering (in these films with his partner) Dean Martin as the singer — that the audience actually only started living it up after the curtain had come down. However, there were compensations: at least we got to see Jerry Lewis doing such side-splittingly funny routines as….. well, come to think of it, I can’t even remember one! Time for a remake, perhaps, with the music re-instated and the mindless gags thrown back in the water, as you do with dead fish?

Which film with an amazingly talented cast was the biggest let down?

 

For “let-down”, fans of musicals just can’t go past “Pepe”. There are so many top stars in it that you could hardly read all the names on the poster. Just for openers: Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr, Maurice Chevalier, Bobby Darin, Shirley Jones, Jimmy Durante, Jack Lemmon, Dan Dailey, Debbie Reynolds, Andre Previn. That’s only a dozen of 35! And the director was George Sidney, who had given us “Show Boat”, “Annie Get Your Gun”, “Anchors Aweigh”, “Bye Bye Birdie”. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe it was just that no one had their heart in the project. Judy Garland, for instance, just sent along her voice… you never actually saw her. Sammy Davis Jr had his one song cut down to something less than 50% of what is on the sound-track record, so you may as well have not seen him.

“Pepe” came along in 1960, around the time when everyone was saying the musical was a dying genre. After “Pepe”, they started to use the word “dead”.

What are some of your favorite pieces of narration in a film?

 

There are so many “pieces of narration” that have been featured in movies since sound came in that I decided that I wouldn’t even try to answer this question until a few other respondents had written their answers, just so they could refresh my memory and give me some ideas with which to agree (or disagree). But your question has been up for a couple of days now, and no one has chimed in, so I guess I ought to start the ball rolling, and then, perhaps, come back later, after five or six wiser answers, with some afterthought revisions.

When I was around ten years old, I remember that “War of the Worlds” (the original, not the Tom Cruise remake) had a narration by Sir Cedric Hardwicke — always a voice worth listening to — which made quite an impression on me, especially right at the end, when he explained how Man couldn’t kill the invaders but “God’s tiniest creatures” could, and did. I loved the voice, and I loved what he said; it probably isn’t the best piece of narration in the history of cinema, since it was only a George Pal science-fiction thriller….. but it was my very first, and, even today, I think it is rather good!

What movie initially flopped because people didn’t understand it at the time, but later became a classic?

 

Get ready for a hundred responses, all nominating one or more of the many scores of films which have suffered the fate you describe. I will start off by mentioning just one, as this was, I thought, a particularly notorious case of the syndrome, and is especially sad because even after nearly seventy years, few people have ever been able to see it.

The film is “Night of the Hunter”, directed by Charles Laughton in a style not seen since the German expressionist days. The kind of movie that you just have to see more than once, because you know that something original is going on in there, but it’s a little hard to work out exactly what is on the director’s mind. But, even seeing it the first time, you have a feeling you’re never going to be able to forget it.

 

Why doesn't Hollywood make new stories anymore?

 

I expect this is because movies nowadays cost many millions of dollars and frequently involve several production companies, all of whose shareholders are interested only in a “sure thing” which will fill the coffers. That doesn’t mean that they are averse to new stories; it does, however, mean that if someone can come up with a pre-sold title, pre-sold characters, and proof that the last two times around the story in question made hundreds of millions of dollars for the lucky production companies, then they are likely to consider that project a “safer bet”. That may not be the same as saying they think they can make it “better”…. I don’t think a great product is the number-one priority (it’s hard to imagine that the producers of the “dumb” remakes of some of the great old movies (or shows — I am thinking of the movie of “Sweeney Todd” here, as an example) actually believed, in their hearts, that theirs was a better movie!); it’s the seven-figure profit at the bottom of the page, not the number of Golden Globe Awards it brings home, that spells “success”.

Is the movie Judy an example of Hollywood timing and overrated?

 

Yes, and yes. It was timed very nicely to coincide with a new interest in its subject engendered (in part; the 80^th-anniversary of “The Wizard of Oz” helped, also) by the tell-all book by her ex-husband (which became a documentary film hitting the airwaves almost the same week as the movie hit the big screen).

“Overrated” is also, I think, applicable, because people treated the movie as if it was really telling them something new about the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century; in reality, it was, for the most part, just the same old rehash that they always make about idols of the past, making us feel good about ourselves by assuring us that these idols had feet of clay and, all the hype notwithstanding, were no better than we are.

Which actors always played villains you hated in your childhood days and later you find how cool were they?

 

How about Robert Ryan? He wasn’t always a villain (e.g. in “The Set Up”, one of his best-ever roles, he was a tragic hero), but, more than likely, he would play the cold-hearted cynic who’d been knocked about by life so many times that he believed in “doing unto others”, but getting in first.

I don’t know how many years it was before I started to realise that what I was looking at was one of the greatest actors on the screen. I think it was “Billy Budd” that did it for me. I haven’t seen that film since the year of its release (1962), as it wasn’t what you’d call a hit; but I still remember the name of the character he played (”Claggart”), and his performance was one of which you could genuinely say, “once seen, never forgotten”. After that, I started looking, again, at some of his earlier performances — in films such as “Clash By Night”, “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “Crossfire” — and realised that here was a top-drawer star who was satisfied to take second or even third billing if the role was right, and didn’t give a hoot about gaining audience sympathy.

Nowadays, when I list my favourite actors of all time (usually in answer to a Quora question!), Robert Ryan is invariably in the top three or four.

When did mid-credits scenes in the movies become a standard?

 

Do you mean mid-opening credits or mid-closing credits? Delaying the opening credits (and then, sometimes, drawing them out so that the names of the writer, producer, and director didn’t actually flash on the screen until a couple of important scenes had already taken place) came into fashion in the late fifties and early sixties, when movies started to realise that their ultimate destiny was the late-night movie on TV (where the custom was to open with such a “socko” scene that the viewer didn’t have time to reach for the change-channel switch before you had “hooked” him). It was around the same time that you began to realise that films were suddenly being edited so that, every ten minutes or so, the background music would come to a climax and the scene would round off naturally…. very pragmatic, as it allowed for the commercial inserts that would eventually be the movie’s fate. But it wasn’t always right, logically or dramatically, and I think that it was around that time that I gradually became fed up with movies and started going monthly — and then quarterly — instead of twice a week.

Delayed and drawn-out opening credits were used by just about everyone during this period, but the master of the technique must surely have been Robert Aldrich; two of his movies (“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” and “Hush — Hush, Sweet Charlotte”) are so far into the drama by the time that he announces the title that, when they appear, the credits are a bit of a shock, as you’ve forgotten all about them! (This actually defeated the whole purpose of “hooking” you early, because the sudden appearance of the credits actually took you out of the drama, and after they had passed on you had to try and rekindle your earlier interest). I think, also, the James Bond movies — the post-Connery ones, anyway — liked to start out with the movie’s second-biggest set piece before you even saw the inevitable silhouette with the gun.

I can’t really talk about mid-closing credits, as, back in the era that I know something about, the closing credit was normally a single screenshot just repeating the cast list in case we needed to quickly check who played that tiny part that had caught our eye; the only inserts I have ever seen in the interminable closing credits of 21st century movies are occasional bloopers, which are, apparently, a device to stop you walking out ten minutes before the copyright laws are finally revealed to you.

Do actors know when they are making a bad movie?

 

They may not know it when they turn up for work on Day 1 (although the script they signed off on, or the one that was, soon afterwards, forced on them by “revisions”, may have given them a clue even as early as that), but, if they’re at all perceptive, it won’t take them long to work out that THIS film isn’t going to bring them any glory, and the best you can say about it is that will pay the light bill.

The actor may, of course, decide to take matters into his own hands and turn the film, regardless of everything else in it, into a personal triumph… throw everything he has into the part, and just maybe get good personal notices (Olivia de Havilland played her hand that way in “The Swarm”, reading the lines as if they were Shakespeare but succeeding mainly in making a holy show of herself). Most of the time, however, he will just get the job done as swiftly as possible and tell his agent to make sure that his next vehicle is stronger than this current project.

There are compensations (apart from that light bill) in being in a movie, even if it’s a stinker (as Michael Caine, the veteran of scores of those, might be the first to agree): steady work, with one film following hard on the heels of the last one, means that top directors never get the chance to assume you’ve died or retired; the pay for a bad movie will be just as good — perhaps better; Alec Guinness could talk about that side of the business! — as for a good one; and, if it flops, it’s somebody else’s problem, not yours. You just need to take some satisfaction in knowing that you didn’t put your own money in it.

 

Are there any films that have been remade that are better than the ones made before?

Not nearly as many as there should be, but I can think of three, at least, that spring immediately to mind: one because the original movie was so lousy, another because the remake was finally allowed (by censorship laws) to come right out and mention what the film was all about, and the third because, well, as the director himself put it, the original was made by a “gifted amateur”, while the remake was made by a seasoned professional.

The first is “Ocean’s Eleven”. I didn’t think the remake was anything to write home about, but I must admit it was better than the lead-footed original, in which nearly everyone walked around as if they hadn’t quite woken up from the carousing of the night before (two exceptions: Richard Conte, as always, was excellent, and Dean Martin scored well with his song, “Ain’t Love A Kick in the Head”; but you had to put up with a lot of boring talk to get to either of those, and, to Sinatra’s shame, he stoops to taking a personal swipe at an old private enemy in one of the script’s lines).

The second was “The Children’s Hour”, with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. William Wyler had earlier directed “These Three”, based on the same Lillian Hellman source, but had had to make a major change in the plot-line back then, as, back in the time of his original movie, the idea of lesbianism, even if unrequited, was considered unacceptable as a subject for film. “These Three” was still awfully good, however, and the performances of the children were probably better in the original than in the remake; but Shirley MacLaine in the new one was simply beyond sublime!

Finally, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. Alfred Hitchcock had made quite a splash with it the first time around, but he knew it was a subject that cried out for the Technicolor, VistaVision and location-shooting of the 1950s (even though it took a lot of persuading for Hitch to go on location anywhere, and there was a generous use of back-projection in the Morocco-and-London-set remake). With Bernard Herrmann to handle the music, Doris Day stepping up in a role that surely would have been better-suited to Judy Garland (but she soon made you forget that), and James Stewart as an eminently-likeable hero, Hitch made an even better fist of it the second time around.

How would it be different if the Wizard of Oz was filmed today? Would it have the same impact and success?

 

You can always remake a movie — that’s easy, and they have done it several times with “Oz”, in each case trying to bring it sufficiently up-to-date so as to have “relevance” to today’s audiences — but you cannot re-create the overall experience. This is not 1939, and you no longer have ‘Yip’ Harburg writing lyrics as clever as those, or someone who can play a cowardly lion quite the way the much-loved Bert Lahr did, or a co-producer who was just crazy about his leading lady and would fight with anyone and everyone to ensure her talents were given full reign, or a troupe of Munchkins who were willing to travel from all over the USA just to be part of the project, with no thought of equal-rights and anti-discrimination barrows to be pushed at every opportunity. Above all, you don’t have Judy Garland to pick up Dorothy and fly with her, over the rainbow and into history.

 

You may well make a “better” film of “The Wizard of Oz” today than MGM did in 1939 (though I seriously doubt it), but we live in a different world from the one Dorothy lived in in Kansas, and the impact of a remake, regardless of how good it is as a movie, is likely to be about as underwhelming as the recent “Oz, the Great and Powerful” (so memorable that I actually had to look up the title on Google to make sure I got it right).

What actors don’t seem to act since they have the same cadence with their dialogue and tone in every movie?

 

These are the stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood (and Great Britain) who were popular not because of how well they played characters, but how well they could maintain their own personas while reading lines that had nothing to do with their real life. Had they tried to change their persona to suit the character, fans would have been outraged; they were paying to see John Wayne play John Wayne, or Gary Cooper play Gary Cooper, or James Stewart play James Stewart.

Knowing exactly what their idols were going to look like and sound like in their next movie was what kept audiences coming back…. with the result that, for instance, in “Mutiny on the Bounty” — in which Clark Gable played a sailor in the British Navy, which absolutely forbade moustaches and beards — whether or not to make Gable shave his upper lip for historical accuracy, or keep his face exactly as it was and please his fans turned out to be a major issue (he shaved, and fans learned to live with it; but he kept his usual American accent, as having him speak like an Englishman as well as with a bare lip might have been too much for his fans to cope with).

Do the best actors need to master the characters they portray in movies from within?

 

Some choose to go that way, and it would seem a logical approach to acting; but there are plenty of “best actors” who start with the facial make-up, add the hairstyle, then the accent or speech patterns, then the wardrobe …. and work their way in from there. One who comes immediately to mind is Sir Laurence Olivier, who, in one of the two books he wrote about acting, admitted that he always had to get the exterior right first, and, only when he could look in the mirror and “see” the character, and not Laurence Olivier, he could then begin to “inhabit” the part. It’s not exactly Lee Strasberg and the Actors’ Studio, but it worked for him!

 

Why do movies never seem to provide eye protection props for their actors/actresses (who are in roles of soldiers) to wear but fake gas mask props are easy to come by?

 

You asked specifically about actors playing soldiers, but there are other roles that are risks to the actors’ eyes; one of the things that people don’t realise about Hollywood movies is that actors are often asked to put their eyes, or any other body part, in real danger for a scene, and the issue of “protection” is left strictly up to them.

The perfect example — because she lived with the results for the last third of her career, and everyone who went to see her movies could notice it — was surely Katharine Hepburn, and this was a case of eye protection. The film was the British film “Summertime”, directed by David Lean before he went to Hollywood to make epics; to get a star of Kate’s magnitude in a modest English film was quite a feather in his cap, but, in spite of this, it seems that neither he nor anyone gave a thought to Kate’s safety, except Kate herself. And this one time she slipped up.

One of the scenes in this movie, filmed on location in Venice, showed Kate backing up to snap a photo, and taking a step too far back, with the result that she takes a tumble into a canal. Kate took one look at the canal she had to fall into, and knew that, since no one else thought anything about it (after all, it wasn’t they who had to take the tumble!), she had better make sure she looked after herself. In her dressing room, she coated literally every pore of her skin with vaseline in preparation for the shot, confident that, when she hit the water, she was a hundred percent microbe-proof.

But she only thought about ninety-nine percent. She totally forgot about her eyeballs, and that was all that it took. David Lean got his shot, but Kate got the reward… a permanently-watering eye which stayed with her for the rest of her career, and made it especially difficult to play comedies. After “Summertime” she made a further fifteen movies, always as the star… and she was teary in every one. Needless to say, she made a lot of tear-jerkers in her later career!

 

What is the biggest challenge in Hollywood for an actress?

 

Kuriakose’s answer is excellent, and I doubt if it could be bettered. I’d like, however, to approach the question from a different angle. I think the biggest challenge for one of those beautiful faces that she mentioned is what to do mid-career when that face suddenly isn’t as beautiful as it used to be and the actress starts to wonder if she has anything else to anchor her career to.

Established stars always reach the point where they suddenly don’t look quite the same as they did when they reached that lofty status. I recall a review of the movie “Fire Down Below”, made just before Rita Hayworth decided to bow to the inevitable and take roles in which she admitted to having reached “a certain age”. The review commented on how great her figure looked, and how lustrous her hair looked….”but something terrible has happened to her face”. Wisely, in her next film she played a mature woman, toned down the sexy walk and the come-hither glances, and suddenly her face seemed “appropriate”.

Of course, some stars are smart enough to prepare themselves (and their admirers) for the inevitable by accepting roles in which they proudly show the face that they wear at home. Katharine Hepburn had so much talent that it was easy to imagine that she would have been quite prepared to walk in front of the camera without even stopping by the make-up department on the way to the set. Bette David fired up a whole new career, in “All About Eve”, by looking her age and using it in her lines. Maureen O’Hara aged so beautifully that she could well have played the daughter in movies where she was playing the mother…. but she was canny enough not to take that route. Elizabeth Taylor got fat and simply learnt to act, so what did she care. But other stars, first hired for their glorious face, went through agonies trying to keep that face exactly as it always was, refusing to accept even the tiniest flaw. Marlene Dietrich had used the same photographer for publicity stills for a couple of decades, as he was a master of lighting; but, eventually, the day came when she looked at his latest crop and was less than pleased. So, of course, she blamed him: why had he done such a poor job lighting her face this time? Why couldn’t he show her flawless beauty the way he had done twenty years ago instead of the slapdash work he had handed her this time? A patient and tactful man, he responded, with a rueful smile, “Ah, but Miss Dietrich, you must remember, I was much younger then.”

 

Which actors had all the talent, but for various reasons or others, are never brought up as some of the best actors? Did their careers take odd turns? Did something cause them to leave the industry?

 

When you wrote about careers “taking odd turns”, I immediately thought of Betty Garrett, who was just starting to be noticed in her second-lead roles in MGM’s musicals of the forties (she was Sinatra’s love interest in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and “On the Town”… both players, of course, being “second bananas” to Gene Kelly and his romantic interest), with stardom only a step away, when fate intervened…. twice!

Betty had as much talent as a singer and dancer as anyone at MGM — and they had the best — and all she needed was the right part. Annie Oakley, in the forthcoming movie “Annie Get Your Gun” was, without doubt, that part; a star-making role if ever there was one, and one which required exactly the kind of talents she possessed in abundance. But, of course, she wasn’t even considered, by the money men, for the role; it was shaping up as one of the most expensive projects MGM had ever embarked on, and it had been purchased specifically for its top musical star, the one person whose name would guarantee the kind of box-office returns which would justify its outlay: Judy Garland.

Judy, however, was, at that point in her career, desperately sick, desperately unhappy, and desperately in need of a rest; she was in no condition to carry a mammoth project such as this on her fragile shoulders, and there were problems from the first weeks of shooting. Eventually, she had to step down from the production, and MGM, with everything else in place for the shooting, looked urgently around its stable for her replacement. Betty hadn’t dared hope to ever play Annie, but suddenly, it seemed, she was about to get her big break. There was just no one on the lot who was so perfect a “fit”.

However, fate intervened yet again. Betty was married to Larry Parks, the actor who had experienced a meteoric rise to fame by playing Al Jolson in the two musical biographies of Jolson’s life. The House Un-American Activities Committee — the notorious McCarthy hearings — had Parks in its sights because the FBI had uncovered evidence that he had, in his youth, attended Communist meetings. He was called before the committee to confess his sins and atone for them by “naming names”: dobbing in his colleagues who had attended similar gatherings, and whose presence in Hollywood was, in these hysterical times, considered a major threat to American freedom. When he declined to co-operate, he was “blacklisted”…. and his shame was visited on his wife, even though she hadn’t even known him in the days when he was supposed to have politically transgressed.

Was MGM about to gamble on the public’s acceptance of Betty Garrett, wife of a suspected “Red”, in its major musical of the year? Betty was given an ultimatum: Annie was hers on condition that she would “ditch that Commie-loving husband of yours”. As much as the part meant to her, her loyalty to her husband meant more. She walked away: from “Annie”, from MGM, and, for half a decade, from Hollywood. She and Larry Parks eventually returned to their home town, but Larry, in particular, found that his popularity had evaporated in the meantime, and he made only one more movie. Betty Garrett returned, eventually, to movie musicals, and made quite a splash in Columbia’s “My Sister Eileen”, stealing the show — just as she would have done as Annie Oakley. But while she could steal a musical from just about anyone, by 1955 musicals had run their course; what had been stolen from her was her career as a major musical star.

And, of course, the world lost a great “Annie Get Your Gun”…twice. Judy in good health would have been the Annie of everyone’s dreams, and Betty would have been just about her equal. However, after her courageous refusal, MGM looked outside the studio for someone to take over the role, and wound up with a very different Betty…. and a very different movie!

 

What is your favourite movie scene from the 1970s?

 

That was a long time ago, and in that ten-year period I saw a lot of movies! So, unless I gave the matter a lot of thought, and researched all the titles from the era, anything I could offer this evening would probably not hold up tomorrow in the cold light of day.

On the other hand, maybe an “off-the-top-of-your-head” answer is what you’re looking for, and certainly, when I read your question, there was one scene that put its hand up immediately…. it was in a movie I was lukewarm towards (a film of moments, but it seemed to lose its way every now and then), but I have often looked for it on DVD so that I could play just that one scene again…. and again.

The film was Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York”, and it was one of the musical numbers. Not, interestingly enough, one of the big, splashy MGM-type numbers in the movie, such as “Happy Endings”, but a song which featured a single performer filmed in a single take by a single camera which started from the very back of the room and tracked slowly towards the solitary figure, ending in a close-up of her face as her performance climaxed. The singer was Liza Minnelli and the song was “But the World Goes Round”.

Scorsese’s way of filming the scene wasn’t by any means brand new; fifteen years earlier, Ronald Neame had filmed Liza’s mother, Judy Garland, on-stage at the London Palladium, in exactly the same way, for the movie “I Could Go on Singing”: as Judy sang “It Never Was You” with a single guitar accompaniment and just a pin-light on her, Neame tracked — so slowly that you hardly noticed that the camera was moving for the first two minutes — all the way from the back stalls to the stage, turning the direction of the shot gently, so that, as she reached her last phrase, all that was in the shot was Judy’s face, in profile, and that single light, finally in full view. And, as she finished her last note, the light went out and the screen went black. Sheer magic, and the only surprise is that it took a decade and a half before someone reworked the idea.

But, when the lightning finally did strike twice, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Liza may not have been quite the singer her mother was, but she took the bit between her teeth for four minutes in this scene, and told us a story with her performance: the story of an artist who, having been knocked down repeatedly and having to climb back up again, transforms herself from a good singer into a great one, as we watch, by reaching into herself and releasing a lifetime of pent-up emotions into the words and the music. The theory that a great singer reveals her innermost self through her singing was never demonstrated more eloquently.

Who are some of your favorite directors from Classic Hollywood/the Golden Age of Hollywood?

 

There are so many, but, when I sat down to list my fifty favourite movies, I noticed that William Wyler was represented more than anyone else, so I guess it is he, by default. However, Alfred Hitchock and Billy Wilder were both heavily represented as well. Hitchcock, I suppose, just because I am very fond of the genre in which he worked; I doubt if he would have been so great at, say, directing a musical or a western! So perhaps I should add three more directors, all of whom specialised in one genre: for musicals, Vincente Minnelli; for westerns, Delmer Daves; for human interest stories, Frank Capra.

Do artists love their own work?

If you read what they say about some of it, years after its appearance, you may realise that they are likely to be their own harshest critics… or, at any rate, to put it about that they are!

Saul Chaplin, the lyricist, is possibly a good example. In both trips that I have made to Europe in the last decade, I have had reason to think of him, and commiserate with him over one of his lyrics.

Chaplin was a lyric writer, arranger, and musical director for MGM back in the forties and fifties, working with, among others, Judy Garland (he did THAT arrangement for "Get Happy") and with Gene Kelly. He wrote a book about his experiences at MGM and subsequent studios, and he comes across as a thoroughly nice guy who was able to work within the crazy world of Hollywood without ever losing sight of the real world and real people.

Most of his work is supremely good, and he can even carry a vocal, once (in 1963) duet-ing with Garland (it's on YouTube and is worth a listen); but, around 1948, he accepted an assignment to write a song in a hurry, for "the Jolson Story". With everyone around him waiting on his lyric and looking at their watches, he did the unthinkable...he wrote a stinker, and handed it in with his hand covering his eyes, consoling himself with the conviction that the song would surely sink without trace and he would never be called on to account for it (his worst line is "the stars seemed to know, though a word wasn't said". Which word was that, I wonder?)

Well, of course, "The Anniversary Song" became a runaway hit, and everybody in the world was singing it, and there was that terrible lyric with his name on it, and he was hearing it every day. In his book, written a quarter of a century later, he says that even to the present day, he can't bear to listen to the song, and consciously avoids any place where it might be likely to surface.

Well, Saul has since left us, but the song survives.....at least, in Europe. On a recent trip to Paris, we couldn't go for two blocks without running into one accordion player or another performing it. Every blessed day. We simply couldn't avoid hearing it. I recall once we got into a crowded metro carriage, and suddenly, into the carriage burst an accordion player, and proceeded to play the song repeatedly for about two stops, finally changing carriages a split second before we resorted to the same strategy.

Our subsequent visit excluded France (not because of that song!), but took in Potsdam. Just down the street from our hotel was a square where the locals congregate...and there he was, Saul Chaplin's nemesis. He played “The Anniversary Song” over and over....he was playing it repeatedly while we were having breakfast nearby, he was there playing it at lunch time, and he was still there at twilight after we had spent the afternoon far away (not just to escape the song…. maybe!). It was the ONLY song he played....and, to make matters worse, he played it very badly. Only the first eight bars had the right time values, and even then, his harmonies were teeth-grinding. But the remaining twenty-four bars were unlistenable: grisly harmonies combined with wrong notes, notes left out, and the timing all shot to pieces (everything was reduced to minims or crotchets). The only song he knew, and even then he didn't know it! The Potsdam population, of course, was far too polite to throw things...they merely smiled indulgently, dropped a coin into his case on cue, and continued strolling.

But if there is a Hell, for poor Saul Chaplin it would have to be an eternity in Potsdam! Well, at least, he wouldn't have to hear his lyric!

Why, nowadays are there no other actors on par with Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, and Eddie Murphy?

 

I think you need to put your question — and these actors — in perspective.

When I was a young boy dragging my grandmother to Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, my Nan used to lament about these “newcomers” not being of the calibre of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and Robert Taylor. Doubtless, HER mother would have looked at Nan’s four and lamented that they were no match for John Gilbert, Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore.

Before too long, my children were dragging me along to their movies, and I wondered what the special appeal was of, say, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty and John Travolta. Then along came the four you mentioned in your heading, and suddenly I felt quite warmed towards the actors of that previous generation.

There are plenty of fine actors around right now. Wait for the world to spin around a few more times; some of the new crop will attain the “cred” that you give to your four, simply by hanging in there, honing their craft.

Is it bad for a director to appear in their own film?

 

Only if the director gives into the temptation to make the film a love poem to himself (or herself…. one of the most-often brought up directors when this discussion comes up is a female star who struck gold in the first movie she made — which was directed by no less than William Wyler — and soon afterwards decided that she could do that job, too, and better than those old guys), and starts to disregard everyone and everything in the movie that isn’t directly related to the character he (she) is playing.

Even if the director is only doing a supporting role, he is playing a dangerous game, as director, if he jumps to the conclusion that he himself is the only reason people will come to see his movie. I never saw the Charles Chaplin film, “A Countess from Hong Kong”, starring Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren and Chaplin, but Brando was full of criticism, later, for his director’s lack of interest in whatever the other two stars were doing on-screen, so long as his own bit of business was screamingly funny. Of course, this may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, as when Brando fired young Stanley Kubrick from the movie he was making (“One-Eyed Jacks”) and took over the direction himself, audiences didn’t get much of an opportunity to look at anything else except close-ups of the star. The movie was a terrible flop, panned by everyone, but Brando, at least, knew what he wanted to see!

Were there any TV shows/movies considered so prestigious or fun that big name actors did it at base pay?

 

I can’t tell you how much she finally got paid for playing her part, but I can think of one actress who considered a particular forthcoming movie so important for her to take part in that she offered to take any role (even just in the background), for any money (or none at all)…. and wound up walking away with the Academy Award for her contribution!

The movie was George Stevens’ “The Diary of Anne Frank”, and the actress was Shelley Winters. When she heard that Stevens, with whom she had worked before (and received an Oscar nomination for her work back then), was preparing the movie, she knew that contributing to his film was more than just a desire; it was a duty which she owed to now-deceased members of her family who had actually been sent to concentration camps at the time Anne Frank was going through her trials.

So Shelley Winters contacted George Stevens with her offer: forget her star status, forget her star salary, forget billing. Give her a role where she simply walks down the street in an exterior shot. Anything at all, as long as she can know she’s contributed.

Stevens examined his script and her offer, and saw that there was one role which she could probably play better than anyone else: the part of Petronella Van Damme, mother of Anne’s first infatuation. Shelley threw her heart and soul into the part, and was rewarded, not just with the knowledge that she had done her duty to her forebears, but with the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She donated the golden statuette to the Anne Frank house, where it has been on display for more than half a century.

Are movie makers dumber now than in the 50s and 60s?

 

No, I don’t think they are dumber. I do, however, think that they believe you and I are dumber than the audiences in the fifties and sixties. And because of that, they will dish up just about anything as long as it will motivate us to put some of that “dumb” money on the box-office counter.

What are the best examples of the perfect Hollywood movie star?

 

James Stewart might just fit the bill. While he was a major star from 1935 to 1991 (more than ninety films!), and is ranked as the third most-popular actor of all time by the American Film Institute, he never seemed to let his exalted position go to his head. He was a master of just about all the movie genres — thrillers (for Alfred Hitchcock), westerns (for John Ford, Delmer Daves, and — late in his career — Anthony Mann), comedies (for George Cukor), human interest stories (for Frank Capra) — he even sang in the musical “Born to Dance”, and introduced a Cole Porter hit song (“Easy to Love”) — and an Academy Award winner; but his main selling-point was himself: he had an easy-going, likeable manner that he carried with him into just about every role he played (he could seldom play the villain, because audiences would just not have believed it).

What’s more, he seemed to embody that “just-a-normal-guy” persona in his real life. He married once (in 1949, when he was already in his forties), and stayed married for forty-five years, until his wife passed (he never remarried). He had a distinguished military career in World War II — in fact, probably the most distinguished career of any established movie star, receiving several awards and being promoted to brigadier-general; he actually acted as adviser to movies dealing with the war, and was one of the interviewees in the British TV series, “The World at War”. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and promoted him to the rank of Major-General, Air Force (retired).

He lived in Hollywood during his retirement, and was the darling of the tour operators who took tourists on drives around the homes of the movie stars; one of them told me that, while most of the stars locked the gates and drew the curtains when the tour buses came by, if James Stewart happened to be in his garden — which he was, often — he would put down his tools, hail the bus, and have a chat with the tourists.

There are, I guess, many stars who will be put forward in this forum as an answer to your quest for the “perfect” Hollywood movie star, but I doubt if anyone could take the crown away from Jimmy Stewart!

What are some bad film directors that turned good?

 

It would have been easier to answer this question the other way around… there are a lot of directors who start off by making wonderful movies, and then Hollywood makes the mistake of telling them that they are geniuses…. and that’s the end of the greatness. There are, however, a few that started with films no one would care to remember and then graduated into a late-career masterpiece.

I always hated Brian di Palma’s films… the early ones, anyway. He seemed to go for the cheap schlock effect every time, and there were no depths he wouldn’t sink to, to get a response from his audience. That hand reaching out of the fresh grave at the end of “Carrie”, for example, and a long scene with Angie Dickinson in the shower in a movie I can’t even remember the title of (maybe “Dressed to Kill”… sounds like a title you would have expected from him back then). His were the kind of movies you would pay good money to avoid.

But I wound up giving in and seeing “The Untouchables” because it was on as half of a double bill with “Days of Heaven”, which I was very eager to see. That turned out to be one of those evenings at the movies that you never forget. I came out raving about both of them, and I had to completely change my tune about di Palma!

Who is your favorite character from an Alfred Hitchcock film?

 

Bruno Anthony in 1951’s “Strangers on a Train”. But only because Robert Walker played him so brilliantly, always bringing more to the character than was on the written page. Of course, we probably have to give a lot of credit to Hitch for Walker’s ‘tour-de-force’, as he had never been quite THAT good in a movie before (although he was just right for “The Clock”, which had another top director steering him along).

But he approached “Strangers” with a kind of “boots-and-all” abandon that he had never dared show us before, and came up with a characterisation that dominated the movie and all the other performances of that year (and which must have given the censors of the time some decidedly uneasy moments!)

Thanks to Robert Walker, “Strangers on a Train” is one of the very best of Alfred Hitchcock’s films… and that’s really saying something!

Needless to say, he did not win the Academy Award that year. Was he ahead of his time, or did the Academy tend to downgrade performances in Alfred Hitchcock’s movies?

 

Have you ever laughed loudly in a movie theater while no one else did?

 

By the time she made “Sudden Fear” in 1952, Joan Crawford’s acting was already looking fifteen years out-of-date: overplayed, overdramatic, faintly ridiculous. And Leonore J Coffee and Robert Smith’s screenplay — itself quite over-the-top — gave her full rein for all the bad habits she had learned as the queen of the 40s melodramas. So the movie, instead of being the thriller that it might have been with, say, Barbara Stanwyck in the lead, was a bit of a giggle from its first minutes. But it moved along swiftly, and it had Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame providing solid support, so, for the first hour, one could just sit back and smile silently at Joan’s histrionics.

But, shortly after an hour had passed, there was one shot which caused the dam to burst. Joan, sure that her husband is plotting to kill her, is looking for proof, and rifles through a closet. She pulls out a bottle and looks at it. Cut to a close-up of the bottle, and the label says, just simply, “POISON”, in large letters, with the skull and crossbones emblem underneath. No name, no details, no instructions; just “POISON”. Exactly like in the Road Runner/Wile E Coyote cartoons (and the expression on Joan’s horrified face would not have disgraced the animators of the cartoon, either… all she needed were the eyes on springs).

I’m afraid that did it for me; I not only disgraced my companions by bursting into laughter in an otherwise-silent cinema, but, every time I would pull myself together and try to attend to what was happening on-screen, I would think again of that bottle and of Joan’s face, and it would all start again. I kept thinking of Jack Palance walking into a drugstore with a list of purchases, and finishing with “… and a bottle of poison, thanks”, and the druggist, expressionless, placing THAT bottle on the counter! “Sudden Fear” turned into the funniest movie of the year…. for one cinemagoer, anyway!

Which Hollywood movie was ruined due to actor replacement?

 

“The Road to Hong Kong”. It was the first “road” film in a decade from Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, but all the ones before it had starred them with Dorothy Lamour, who could play all kinds of exotic women (she wore costumes well), so that she was bound to be just right for wherever that “road” might lead the duo: Singapore, Morocco, Zanzibar, Bali. The plots of the “road” movies were virtually identical: down on their luck and far from home, the two adventurers ran into Dottie, fell head over heels for her, and spent the rest of the movie trying to be “top dog” in her eyes.

I read that it was Bing who told the producers flat that he thought that Dorothy was no longer suitable for a role where the two leading lads had to fight over her hand. His feeling was that, while he and Bob — both just about to celebrate their sixtieth birthdays — still looked “appropriate” for their roles as two drifters always on the lookout for a beautiful woman, Dorothy — compared to those two, actually a spring chicken in her late forties — just wouldn’t be glamorous enough to hold up her end, and audiences simply wouldn’t buy it. So he argued for a new and — most importantly — young leading lady, and the producers signed up Joan Collins.

Of course, Crosby complete misread the audience expectations of the time (he misread his own virility, too; frankly, he — much more than Bob — came across as positively distasteful lusting after Joan, even if it was just in fun). Audiences wanted to see the three old troupers together again, doing what they had done half a dozen times already in a variety of exotic settings. As long as they were together, no one cared about a few crows’ feet or a spare tyre or three. And whether or not you were a Joan Collins fan, no one cared to see her shoved abruptly and for no good reason into the zany situations that had given Bing, Bob and Dottie the chance to do their old routines.

To add insult to injury, Dorothy was brought back in, mid-movie, to play herself as a guest star, with a few moments of screen time. Those few minutes were the only times audiences felt that they were really seeing a “road” movie. And, incidentally, Dottie looked just great and demonstrated a flair for a put-down gag line that Joan Collins couldn’t have even dreamed of. The guest-star “concession” must have really hurt her feelings, and made at least one cinemagoer feel almost hostile towards the whole project (I was somewhat mollified, later, to read that Bob Hope had argued with Bing on this point and had demanded a fair go for their old partner… without his intervention, she may not have been allowed to appear at all).

“Road to Hong Kong” was the worst of the “road” movies, and, not unexpectedly, the last. That mean-spirited casting decision effectively robbed it of the goodwill that it may otherwise have carried with it from the forties all the way into the sixties and beyond.

Why aren't most Oscar-worthy movies blockbusters?

 

“Blockbuster” and “Oscar-winning movie” are not mutually exclusive, as has been proven in the past, ever since 1939, when “Gone With the Wind”, the blockbuster to beat all, won more Academy Awards than had ever been given, at that time, to a single motion picture. But perhaps a reason why blockbusters are under-represented in the list of best pictures may be that the Academy looks to reward innovation: advances in story-telling techniques, creative editing, innovative use of cameras and lighting. They like to reward movies that break new ground and point the way to the cinema of the future. In other words, they favour risk-takers.

Blockbusters cost many millions of dollars and have many stakeholders, and ensuring that all these people see a return on their investment is, of course, the number one priority. So they tend to play it safe; instead of taking risks, they tend to repeat what has worked in the past, and their only “innovation” is likely to be one of size: everything has to be bigger and faster and louder so that memories of the last blockbuster are obliterated in the blitzkrieg which will see queues at the box office. If there are innovations, they are likely to be technical ones: special effects just seem to get better every year, and a blockbuster can usually count on being recognised in that area, at least. And the audiences of today do seem to be singularly-impressed by this kind of innovation; I had several young cinemagoers tell me, a few years ago, that “Avatar” was definitely the greatest film of all time, and when I asked them why, the only thing they could come up with was “the special effects are just out of this world”. I’m sure they were, too, so I was too polite to comment, “But who cares?”

But special effects won’t produce a Best Picture; the Academy certainly wants to have its socks knocked off, but it would rather have that done by a powerful script, strong characterisations, great acting, and, most of all, a brand new approach to the medium which future filmmakers can emulate.

Movie voice-overs are often a lazy and ineffective method for getting exposition out of the way. However, some directors have handled it well. What are the best movies where voice-overs play an important role?

 

I would have to say “Sunset Boulevard”, if you are after a single-voice narrative for the whole movie. We have to tumble, right from the beginning, that the “hero” is a cynical and non-too-ethical person who would happily take advantage of a benefactor, and the crisp narration makes that clear by the tone of the voice as much as by the words said (if the part had been played by an actor who couldn’t get that tone just right, then Norma Desmond comes out looking like the villain, and that certainly isn’t what the film was trying to say).

“All About Eve” has several narrators, all picking up the narration when they are particularly important to the scene. And it works brilliantly; even if you couldn’t see the picture on the screen, the narration would sweep you along into one of the most absorbing stories about Broadway that has ever been put on screen.

I didn’t realise until I had just finished writing those two paragraphs that both those films were released in the same year: 1950. That was quite a year for movies!

Has a movie ever ruined the careers of promising actors and actresses?

 

How about “Valley of the Dolls”? It had a bunch of promising young actors and actresses playing out the various roles in Jacqueline Sussan’s tell-all, including a recent Academy Award winner, Patty Duke, who, up till then, had chosen wisely. It even had one of Hollywood’s most-loved veterans, Susan Hayward, who, up until then, had spent two full decades choosing wisely (admittedly, she was a last-minute “ring-in” for the original choice for her featured role, and probably knew from the start she had little to gain from the part). The remaining cast list consisted of promising almost-newcomers: Barbara Parkins, Paul Burke, Tony Scotti, and, of course, Sharon Tate, who really shouldn’t be included in this discussion, since she only outlived the bad reviews by a couple of years.

I suppose Patty Duke, who was poised to become one of Hollywood’s A-list stars until she got sucked into this one, had the most to lose; she was never again taken quite as seriously as an actress after her amateurish performance in “Dolls” (not entirely her fault; in an interview later she mentioned that the director was “the meanest son-of-a-bitch I ever met in my life”), and made scarcely a half-dozen movies in the next twenty years (among them such classics as “The Swarm” and “Willy/Milly”). But, that was, perhaps, better than Tony Scotti, who left acting altogether. Barbara Parkins was 20th-Century Fox’s big hope for their new glamour queen, but after she failed to make an impression in this one, she quickly dipped to playing in programmers such as “Asylum” and “Snatched” (perhaps they played on a double bill with some of Paul Burke’s distinguished follow-ups, such as “Psychic Killer”), and posing nude for “Playboy”.

Susan Hayward — who was, for reasons inexplicable, dubbed for her one song (perhaps because, in the rush, no one thought to write a song that might have suited her range; the somewhat-ambitious one used had been written for Judy Garland, who had been cast in the role, but was fired after giving a phone interview in which she laughed off the whole project — referring to it as “my dirty movie”— and called the book “unreadable”; Judy had never made a bad movie, so this was, for her, a lucky escape two years before her death) — was the only one treated kindly, because her appearance was seen as one of magnanimity, to help out old colleagues. But her next movie was five years in coming.

No one — except, maybe, the producers, who knew what the public wanted to see, even if the critics lined up to throw brickbats — got much out of “Valley of the Dolls”.

Who is your favorite actor who you have met in person?

 

My favourite actor is James Mason, and I never did get to see him in person, even though he came to Sydney (Australia) and chose to stay in an area quite close to my home; in fact, for weeks he drove within a hundred metres of my home twice every day to get to and from work! But I never knew that till afterwards.

I did get to meet Charlton Heston, however. I was half of a pair of star-crazy teenagers who waited at the main door of a Sydney TV studio to get his autograph after he appeared in a talk-show. After the autograph (we were the only two “hounds” there), he went off with his entourage, and we started the long late-night walk back to the nearest railway station. Ten minutes later, a chauffeur-driven car pulled up alongside us as we walked; Mr Heston had recognised us from the earlier encounter, and offered us a lift, sitting with him in the rear seat. We travelled with him all the way back to his hotel in the centre of the city, chatting about his movies and his co-stars (he had just made “Ben-Hur” — not yet released — and was very proud of it; he was less-enamoured of “The Ten Commandments”, which he simply laughed off, but he did speak fondly of Anne Baxter — ‘Annie’ — who was his co-star in both that and a subsequent movie).

We couldn’t have been more impressed with Mr Heston; we hadn’t even reached the age where we could have driven a car, and he must have thought we were the most gauche of his fans. Yet he treated us as equals, never gave a hint of condescension in his manner, and, when he finally left the car, instructed his driver to take us both right back to our homes, not just to a transport hub (we subsequently relieved the less-than-thrilled driver of that chore, and he repaid us by recounting stories of some of the other stars he had driven around, one or two of whom who were far less-down-to-earth and less considerate than Charlton Heston).

Why did it seem so natural that Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr played the roles in the 1939 Wizard of Oz so that no one could play them better?

 

I guess the first answer is that they played them so well.

The second answer is, while there may have, in fact, been a Straw Man, a Tin Man and a Cowardly Lion in L Frank Baum’s series of “Oz” books, they were unlikely to have been anything like the characters in the movie. The screenplay was, at least in part, built around the talent, and not the other way around. No one could have played the Cowardly Lion better than Bert Lahr played it, because the script and the songs were written with him already committed to the project. No one could have sung “Over the Rainbow” as well as Judy Garland sang it, because she came first: the song was written for her by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg (and, believe it or not, almost ripped up by those same two composers when MGM’s money-men announced that they were going to ensure the movie’s box-office success by letting Garland go and replacing her with the Number One box-office child star, Shirley Temple; fortunately for Judy — unfortunately for Shirley — Temple’s home studio wouldn’t lend her out, and Judy and the song were saved, and, as you point out, couldn’t have been bettered).

MGM, as everyone said, had “more stars than there were in Heaven”; that means that they also had more talent than any of the other studios, and they could always buy in more if they needed it. They were, therefore, able to assemble “the best in the world” (Mickey Rooney’s appraisal of Judy Garland) for “The Wizard of Oz”, and to ensure that the directors (several came and went) and scriptwriters used this talent for optimum benefit to everyone concerned.

Which actor/actress has never disappointed you?

 

Anne Baxter. She was an Academy Award winner for one of her first movies, and was so beautiful that she ought to have been an ‘A’ list star, but she came along at a time when she had a great deal of stiff competition (this was the forties and fifties, the Golden Era for glamorous stars), and, consequently, some of the roles offered to her were for films that were, to put it frankly, beneath her (“Bedevilled”, “The Come-On”, “One Desire”, “Three Violent People”). That scenario happened to all the other talented beauties from that era also, and it wasn’t unusual to see them walk through some of their “lesser” pictures with scarcely-veiled contempt for the script and production values.

But not Anne Baxter. She tackled every role in every film as if it was the most important part she had ever been offered. She gave 110% every time I saw her on screen, and she single-handedly turned some of those movies into an exceptional evening at the cinema (“Chase a Crooked Shadow” being a prime example). And when she got a good part in an ‘A’ movie, such as the title role in my all-time favourite film, “All About Eve”, she could stand up proudly with the top actresses (Bette Davis) and the best script-writers (Joseph L Mankiewicz). Bette Davis must have been impressed by Anne, also: many years later, Miss Davis finally succumbed to the lure of the starring role in a big-budget TV series, “Hotel”; when she had to withdraw, citing ill-health, she insisted that Anne Baxter be called in to replace her.

A critic who knew the movies — and movie-making philosophy — of Cecil B de Mille, said that of all the top stars who took part in de Mille’s mammoth blockbuster, “The Ten Commandments”, Anne was the one who really understood exactly the kind of performance de Mille wanted, and gave it to him in every scene, improving the picture no end.

In interviews, she was refreshingly down-to-earth, and in person she was every bit as lovely (and gracious!) as she looked on-screen. Anne Baxter was one of the Hollywood actresses who really deserved the title of “star”.

What are some subtle details that made movie twists obvious?

 

I’m too obtuse, most of the time, to notice subtle details in the plot of a “whodunit” that might help me to solve the mystery in the first reel; I am always one of the ones who never saw the writer’s denouement coming. Especially Agatha Christie!

However, I have learnt one way -- nothing to do with the screenplay but everything to do with the casting --that often helps in forecasting that surprise ending. And that is, simply, if the movie features a major star who seems to be stuck in a somewhat-irrelevant role, put your money on him/her as the villain at the fadeout.

I think I learned this in 1954, with Nunnally Johnson’s entertaining murder mystery, “Black Widow”. It had a host of suspects, all involved heavily with the victim, and all played excellently by character actors of the calibre of Van Heflin and George Raft. It also boasted a major star in what appeared to be a totally-inconsequential role: Ginger Rogers popping in and out every now and then with nothing to do except “be” Ginger Rogers, elegantly costumed and coiffured, making inane comments about “the theatah” and demonstrating absolutely no connection with either the victim or with any of the plot twists that kept throwing you from one suspect to the other. Why on Earth would a major star like Rogers take a role of so little consequence — a built-up bit-part — that it could have been left out of the movie altogether to no loss to the workings of the plot?

Well, you guessed it; of course, being only a kid at the time, I DIDN’T guess it. But I learned fast, and Miss Rogers taught me a valuable lesson which I have used successfully a hundred times since then: big stars want a role that gives them a big scene, and what better place to have a big scene than in the final denouement of a murder mystery, when you are suddenly revealed as the “who” in “whodunit”?

Did Judy Garland enjoy working with Gene Kelly?

 

You don’t need to do much research into the career of Judy Garland to find out about her battles with studio executives who wanted her to be a typical glamour girl, bullying directors who kept pushing her to work more and more for THEIR glory, studio “doctors” who pushed her to take pills to keep her slim, calm her down, and pep her up…. and, of course, husbands and “benefactors” who used her to line their own pockets while sometimes she didn’t have enough money to rent a room for the night. But I don’t think you will find so much as one instance where Judy didn’t get along with her co-stars.

Judy Garland, herself as talented as God ever made anyone, worshipped talent. It was as simple as that. MGM was her dream job, because it allowed her to mix with, learn from, and further the careers of, the top show business talent of America. On her very first day there — the day of her audition — she ran into Roger Edens, who stayed with her from 1936 to sometime after her Carnegie Hall concerts in 1961. Within weeks of her signing with MGM, Edens had introduced her to Arthur Freed, who was to build “The Freed Unit” around her (his first film as assistant producer was “The Wizard of Oz”), and Kay Thompson, who was with Judy for the rest of her life (and, after Judy’s death in 1969, with her daughter, Liza). She had already met Mickey Rooney (he had had seen her when she was still Frances Gumm), who had told her that she was “the best in the world” and who was her lifelong friend, being the first guest (as she demanded) in her 1963 TV series, and her champion for years and years after her death (he always said that he could give courses on the subject of Judy Garland, the love of his life).

When Judy found a talent that could match hers, she wouldn’t let it go. All her old friends at MGM guested on her TV series in the 1960s… Rooney, Sinatra, Ray Bolger, June Allyson, Lena Horne, Jane Powell…. and Gene Kelly (although his guest spot, alongside Nat ‘King’ Cole, was never completed nor aired, because of a sudden change of producers and a close down while it was still being filmed).

Judy and Gene adored each other. Gene Kelly’s widow is currently touring the world with a tribute show to her late husband, and she makes that point very clearly. Judy met Gene before he ever went to Hollywood…. while he was on Broadway in “Pal Joey”…. and was so impressed with him that she went back to Hollywood and “talked him up” to Louis B Mayer, insisting that the cast list of her forthcoming movie, “For Me and My Gal”, be changed so that Gene could be her leading man. He had never made a movie before that one, and, as he admitted, while he was “a natural” on-stage, he didn’t know a thing about how to play to the camera. But Judy coached him and guided him, and made sure that the set-ups favoured him equally, and he scored a real triumph…..for which he always gave credit to his first Hollywood friend and mentor.

So, yes, Judy Garland enjoyed working with Kelly, and he with her. When he found that he could “carry” a picture, and had acquired some of the same clout at MGM that Judy had when she talked the studio into bringing him west, he was always trying to work out movies in which he and his buddy, Frank Sinatra, could make with Judy. “Anchors Aweigh”, “Easter Parade” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” were all projects designed for the three of them together, although not one ever came together in the way he intended.

“The Pirate” did, however, pair Judy and Gene again, and, right at the end of her MGM career, “Summer Stock”. This last movie was an unusual one for both of them, because it was an old-fashioned “let’s put on a show in a barn” musical which looked like it belonged back in her days with Mickey Rooney (in fact, I’ve heard that the script was originally written for Mickey and Judy, and had been lying around for years). Moreover, it was made, not by their accustomed producer, Arthur Freed, but by Joe Pasternak, the producer of “quickie” MGM B-musicals starring its second-tier stars, such as Jane Powell, Bobby Van, and Xavier Cugat. Judy had been sent to Pasternak to make it because he could ensure it was done cheaply; Judy had been sick and off-work for some time, and had cost the studio a lot of money when she had to drop out of the big-budget “Annie Get Your Gun”. She needed to work, and, as Louis B Mayer said to Pasternak, they owed her this movie, even if she wasn’t at her best, because of all the millions of dollars she had made for the studio in the past. So Pasternak was to take as long as was needed to bring it in, and to hell with the budget.

And that’s when Kelly stepped in. He took leave of absence from the Freed unit (with Arthur Freed’s approval) and requested that he be allowed to take the lead opposite his old mentor in “Summer Stock”. If she needed careful handling and frequent encouragement, she could have asked for no one more eager to oblige; he was with her even when he wasn’t in the scene, metaphorically holding her hand when she started to falter, and working out dance numbers for the two that showed she was still “top of the heap” (he didn’t, of course, have to help with the singing!).

And, thanks to that friendship and Gene’s support, “Summer Stock” turned out to be one of the most joyous of all the MGM classic musicals. Its the one where Judy introduced “Get Happy”, which everyone remembers as one of the best numbers she ever put together. Without his encouragement, that may never have happened.

Yes, Judy and Gene loved working with each other, and they were always there for each other when things were tough…. which, for Judy, was not infrequently. They were more than just working colleagues; they were genuine friends.

What film made you notice an actor was better/had more range than you originally thought?

 

If I can choose two, I’d plump for Robert Walker and Michael Caine. Both of them were well into their careers (in fact, Walker was near the end of his) and had “played safe” with their parts, keeping well within the limits of what audiences expected of them (and would pay to see)…..until they were offered ”that” part.

For Walker, it was the homosexual psychopath in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”. It couldn’t have been less like the “aw-shucks-Ma’am” roles which he had played for most of his career, and he grasped the opportunity with both hands… and Hitch gave him all the leeway he required (so much so that some of his lines were cut by the censors for the American release, and, unless you lived in Britain or Australia, you didn’t see the full extent of his brilliance until the DVD came out. Maybe it was those missing lines that cost him the Oscar that year).

Michael Caine was, so his early parts suggested, a good-looking young Englishman who would have like to be a rebel but was held in check — just — by the rules of his society. Fairly simple to play, and, very likely, not far from the real MIchael Caine! So when he took one of the two roles in a two-hander called “Sleuth”, and the person he was put up against was none other than Sir Laurence Olivier in a part that was tailor-made for him, no one had any doubt that Caine would be so far out of his depth that Olivier would be the only one worth going to see the movie for (except that Caine was sexier). The surprise was that Caine’s performance was easily the equal of Olivier’s, and, since he had the advantage of carrying the “OMG-it can’t be!” ending on his shoulders, if only he was good enough to pull it off (and he was!), many critics opined that he almost stole the movie from under Olivier’s nose. The pity was that he never really got another role quite like it; if you haven’t seen the movie, chase it up, because it is essential viewing for anyone interested in the long and distinguished careers of Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier (and it’s great fun, too!)

What is a great example of a movie director doing a studio movie as “one for you, one for me”?

 

I could only imagine this is what Otto Preminger said, if only to himself, when he signed on to “River of No Return”, a Marilyn Monroe western whose most memorable moment was a marauding Indian, tomahawk in hand, climbing onto Monroe’s getaway raft, approaching her menacingly, and then ripping the front out of her blouse! (I can’t remember what he did with his tomahawk… actually, I think someone instantly shot him before he could do any more tearing).

It was that kind of movie, right from the opening scene (Robert Mitchum, so far into the wilderness that you can’t see a single trace of human habitation, including his homestead (even in CinemaScope) chopping down a tree for no discernible reason… I think he just walks away when it’s done), and it was hard to see a single movie in the past or present career of Preminger that might have suggested to someone that he would be the right person to helm this movie.

He had, however, just finished, for the same studio, one of the best films he had ever made — “Carmen Jones” — and was able, with that kind of credential, to go on to making “big” all-star movies like “Porgy and Bess”. So perhaps a deal was done whereby he paid back Fox for their far-sightedness in giving an operatic musical to a director who had made his name in film noir. Or maybe he just wanted a holiday in the wilds of Canada!

Is making a confusing film, leaving things unexplained the easiest way to get good reviews and make money?

 

I can’t see that it’s a ticket to making a fortune, because audiences often don’t enjoy being left at the fade-out with little idea of what has just gone on, and why. They may, of course, pay to go and see it again, which is a “win” for the production team….. but they could just as easily tell their friends that it’s all too hard to be bothered with. Word-of-mouth is still a good way to promote a movie… or to kill it stone dead!

“Really confusing” may, however, garner the movie some good reviews, especially from reviewers who are fairly new at the game and are unsure of themselves, or established reviewers who would rather die than come right out and make fools of themselves because they didn’t understand what they were reviewing! Their simplest strategy is just to pull out some meaningless phrase which makes them sound like they are way ahead of both writer and director of the movie, and the plebeians who read their reviews. I recall overhearing one of these phrases once, coming out of a movie which I didn’t understand at all, and eagerly eavesdropping for a helpful word or two from one of the other people who had just seen it. What I got, from someone spouting forth confidently to his “clique”, was, “The transcendental values were well-realised”. I worried about that all night until I finally decided that I knew what it meant: it wasn’t just me who found the whole thing too hard!

What movie plots make no sense?

“No sense?” Surely an obvious one is “The Game”, in which Michael Douglas signs up with a strange company that takes over his entire life, just for his “entertainment”, putting him in all sorts of dangerous situations (how about locked inside a runaway car that plummets into San Francisco bay and leaving it to him to figure out how to get out?), many of which must have occurred spontaneously, since they depend entirely on him finding himself in unplanned places escaping from previous situations which it had organised. His life completely falls to pieces (familiar territory for MIchael Douglas!); wherever he turns, there is another situation waiting for him, until, totally beaten, he finally jumps off the top of a skyscraper… only to be saved by a safety-cushion (that must have been some cushion… it’s about forty storeys!) pre-positioned by “the company”, because they knew (of course) in advance that this was going to happen… even the exact spot where he would launch himself (since it’s the only cushion they positioned).

The film is well-enough crafted to keep you watching for its full running-time, and you wait eagerly for a plausible explanation for these bizarre events (and how they are going to fix the incredible amounts of damage done to cars, buildings, and public property along the way). But the end just tells you that the company who organises these happenings is always on top of every situation…. wherever you choose to go (or where fate takes you), whomever you happen to run into, whatever action you might take, they are always quietly in the background, pulling the strings so that you always play by their rules, without even knowing that you’re playing or that there are “rules”.

Even if you were ingenuous enough to swallow the ending when it is presented to you, while everyone in the cast is patting everyone else on the back and telling each other what a great time they have all had (in a rather-obvious ploy by the writers to convince you that YOU have had a great time, too), after you turn off and think back over the last two hours, you will quickly see that this is a script that absolutely feeds on loose ends and coincidences… structuring coherently is such a chore, isn’t it?

 

What does it mean when a movie has bad screenplay (sorry if this question seems stupid but I'm kind of new to movies and I've been watching alot of cinema recently and would like to know)?

 

Your question is not at all “stupid”, although it’s not all that easy to answer, either, because terms like “good” and “bad” are relative, and, in the long run, no more than a matter of personal taste.

So this answer won’t be definitive, but is just offered to start the ball rolling.

To me, a GOOD screenplay is one that makes me think about the characters and the situations, gives me new insights into how people think and act, and provides me with something to talk about when the movie is over. If I walk out of a movie and there isn’t one character or one issue that I want to think about, and discuss with other moviegoers…. in other words, if the movie has just disappeared from my memory except for, perhaps, an individual performance, or an individual shot, or some well-chosen background music (elements that have nothing to do what is being said or how the subject is being treated), then, for me, that is very likely because it was a bad screenplay. It wasn’t worth making into a movie.

I got so tired of seeing movies like this, that, around a decade and a half ago, I absolutely stopped going to the movies unless someone I knew and trusted told me that there was something I simply HAD to go and see (even then, sometimes they “bombed out”; what in the world my eager movielover friend found to recommend in “The Revenant”, for instance, I will never know). But, most of the time, the advice has been good, and I am glad that I went to see “Good Night and Good Luck”, “The King’s Speech”, “Into the Woods”, “Locke”, “Predestination”, and “The Paper”, to name half a dozen that immediately come to mind. At least, I can remember what happened in all of those movies, and in some cases I can remember what someone said, word for word. Maybe that distinguishes them from all those ones which don’t have anything to offer in the way of a screenplay, and instead substitute CGI and knock-your-socks-off visuals.

Which year was the best year of multiple movies made by the same movie studio?

 

I would be hard-pressed to narrow this down to a single year, but when your question popped up, I immediately thought of Columbia Studios and the first four or five years of the 1950s.

Columbia never quite made it as one of the “majors”, possibly because it was ruled with an iron hand by one man (Harry Cohn) who had very firm ideas on what he wanted — entertainment, not innovation, and preferably brought it under budget and definitely under two hours — which frequently alienated the innovative directors and limited their freedom of expression (which was often reflected in the Academy Awards won by Columbia, considerably fewer than its rivals, such as Warner Bros and 20th-Century Fox).

However, for a few years there, Columbia was suddenly winning all of its share and more. Maybe it all started with “The Lady from Shanghai” in 1947, during the shooting of which Cohn at least tolerated (barely) a genuine innovator, Orson Welles (who, in turn, tolerated — just barely — Harry Cohn, because they shared a common interest: Harry Cohn’s biggest box-office draw was Welles’s new wife). Because, as was common in those days, the film was taken out of Welles’s hands and cut mercilessly, there were no Oscars for Welles and Cohn on that collaboration (and Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles soon split up), but perhaps Cohn had had a taste of what Columbia could achieve with the right creative team. A year later, Broderick Crawford picked up the Best Actor Award for Columbia’s “All the King’s Men”; the following year, Judy Holliday’s was the performance the Academy favoured, over both Bette Davis in “All About Eve” and Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”, for Columbia’s “Born Yesterday”. Then, it seems, the floodgates opened.

In 1953, “From Here to Eternity”, helmed by a director who could actually stand up to Cohn and get his own way (Fred Zinnemann), won no less than eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture of the Year, becoming one of the most-honoured films of all time. And, the very next year, Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” equalled the tally — also Best Film of the Year — and, suddenly, little “near-poverty-row” studio Columbia was the one to beat. None of the people involved in these movies actually got along with Harry Cohn (he died three years later; the Hollywood ‘wags’ noted that “the only reason so many people came to his funeral was that they wanted to make sure he was dead”)…..but he was canny enough to know they were his ticket to immortality.

What actor/actress was completely 100% wrong for the role?

 

David Lean was usually pretty good at casting “to type”, but, in “Ryan’s Daughter”, for some reason, he decided to go strictly against type for casting the shy, introverted, “beaten-by-the-world” Charles Shaughnessy, who suffers in silence, blaming himself for his shortcomings, while his wife has a scandalous affair with a younger man. The following dialogue, quoted from IMDb, will serve as an example of the kind of character Charles was, and why the part might have been very suitable for, say, Alec Guinness (who was often in Lean’s movies, anyway, playing everything from Arab kings to Indian intellectuals…. “Irish” would hardly have been a stretch for Sir Alec!)

Charles: [Rose has professed her love] Rose, you're mistaking a penny mirror for the sun - do you not see that?

Rosy Ryan : I see you always digging a low pit for yourself - when you should be standing on a heap of pride.

Charles : You coming in here and saying what you did just now is the only cause I've ever had for pride. “

So, who would be the most-unlikely actor you could think of to play poor, self-effacing. middle-aged Charles, prepared to put up with all sorts of humiliation because of his love for a young, willful girl, and accepting it as his lot? John Wayne, perhaps? Well, Lean didn’t go quite that far “out”, but certainly his choice must have been number 2 on the “least-likely” list: Robert Mitchum.

It is a tribute to Mitchum’s talent that we might easily have believed in the character he played…. if only we hadn’t seen him before in a dozen parts where he would have happily beaten both his wife and the young interloper into a bloody pulp.

 

Which other actors do successful actors tend to hold in high regard?

 

I don’t think there’s much doubt which performer they all look up to as having the most talent of anyone….and that’s been true from the mid-1930s right up to 2019.

Producers, directors, actors, singers, writers… they all said the same thing (and used much the same words). Here are just twenty celebrities over the last seventy years giving their opinion of Judy Garland; you could easily find twenty more.

Mickey Rooney: “The best in the world. You can have your Bette Davises, your Greta Garbos, or your Ginger Rogers. Admittedly, they're all good, but Judy's the best."

Lana Turner: “The very best”

Diahann Carroll: “If I am to name the performer I admire most, it would be Judy Garland”.

Jerry Parker: “Surely the greatest musical performer the movies have ever produced”.

Frank Sinatra: “She was the greatest. The rest of us will be forgotten, but never Judy”.

Tennessee Williams: "Everything they claim about her is true. Garland was an unbridled genius, and I saw it and I heard it, and I lived and I breathed the same air in the world at the same time as she did. Let's not forget her gifts and the giving of them. We have the work: watch it, study it, love it, use it, be changed by it.”

Meredith Ponedel: “The greatest of them all”.

Merv Griffin: “The greatest entertainer I’ve ever seen”.

Lucille Ball: “The greatest…. The greatest”.

Roger Edens: “She has more talent than anyone whoever came along”.

Bing Crosby: “I think she’s the greatest female talent in town. As a matter of fact, I think she’s the greatest talent, male or female. Sing, dance, act… that gal could do anything.”

Jonathan Ross: “The greatest all-round entertainer… ever.”

Jerry Herman: “The greatest entertainer of this century”.

Renee Zellweger: “She had this gift from the Heavens… one in a million years”.

Jack L Warner: “One of the greatest entertainers the world has ever known”.

Shani Wallis: “The greatest thing on two legs”.

Vicki Carr: "A lady who brought more music, more happiness to more people throughout this entire world than anybody has ever known."

Leo Guild: “Judged by the likes of Louis B Mayer and Jack L Warner to be the most talented actress in motion-picture history”.

Karie Bible: “She is without question the greatest entertainer who ever lived”.

Tony Bennett: “The greatest entertainer who has ever lived”.

At what age were your preferences for movie genres formed?

 

I was ten when, lured by a movie poster which showed Esther Williams swimming with Tom and Jerry, I decided to forego the usual Saturday afternoon kids’ show (a “B” western, three serials, and eight cartoons) and took the long walk to the cinema in the next suburb. The film was “Dangerous When Wet”, and the opening number was a whole farming family going for their morning dip, taking it in turns to carry a verse of Johnny Mercer’s bright little “I Got Out of Bed on the Right Side” (that’s the one in which Charlotte Greenwood sings about a rooster whose name is Brewster, “but he doesn’t crow like he used ter”).

I skipped all the way home after the movie singing that song, suddenly having entered a world where people could — and did — sing and dance down the street for the sheer joy of living.

I don’t think I’ve ever really left that world. Musicals have been my favourite genre ever since… even if they don’t have Tom and Jerry — or Brewster the Rooster — in them!

What movie has the most sentimental value for you and why?

 

“Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” (which was issued in the US under the mad title of “Season of Passion”) is the one that probably has the most sentimental value for me, but that has little to do with the content of the movie, and everything to do with time and circumstance. It was made in MY seventeenth year, too, and it was summer; and it was filmed in my home city, where I had just started my first full-time job in the offices of 20^th Century-Fox, less than a kilometre from Sydney Central Station, at which, I was delighted to see, on my way to work, a platform had been roped off for a location shooting (actually, it was the opening scene of the movie).

Inevitably, I forgot all about work for a while as I tried to get as close as possible to the focal point, so as to get a glimpse of the three stars waiting for their cue while the set was “dressed”: Anne Baxter, Ernest Borgnine, and John Mills (Angela Lansbury was in the film, also, but wasn’t part of this scene). And, equally-inevitably, the company had a uniformed security guard present, purely to ensure that people like me were hunted away.

Not to be thwarted from seeing my beloved Anne Baxter (a REAL movie star!) by a mere security guard, I ran to my workplace, borrowed a black briefcase (stamped, in silver, “Twentieth Century-Fox Studios”) and high-tailed it back to the set. Shooting still hadn’t started, so, holding up the briefcase to display the name, I walked confidently up to that same guard, said (without even looking at him… I was trying to look as if I was already late for a very important assignment through the gate) “20th-Century Fox”, and, to my amazement, was waved onto the set without so much as a word. In fact, the film had nothing to do with Fox; it was actually a United Artists picture (the security guard, fortunately, had not been hired for his knowledge of the movie business)!

So there I was, walking among a clutter of lights, folding chairs, and cables (and, of course, various personnel), and very nonchalantly trying to get as close as possible to the three stars without making my presence obvious. For a Sydney boy who had never even seen a movie set before, that, in itself, was quite an experience. And when they were ready to film the first take (Anne Baxter and another actress running along the platform waving and calling to John and Ernie, who were on the departing train), and I was right there, just far enough away as to be out of the shot, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

I managed to witness the whole of the first take before I got “sprung” by the director (Leslie Norman), who was canny enough to recognise a star-struck interloper when he saw one (I think I may have taken a step too far forward into the camera’s line of sight, and given myself away); my first time on a movie set, my first time ordered OFF a movie set….. and VERY bluntly. But, not in the least discouraged, for a few weeks I followed the stars to every public engagement they were booked into, managing to score autographs from three of them, as well as a short chat with Miss Baxter.

Seeing the movie over the years, just that opening shot sweeps me back to that sixteen-year-old who didn’t have a worry in the world — between school and college — and spent every day working in a movie office, going to movies, and talking about movies… and, for a brief period, rubbing shoulders with four Hollywood stars! A season of passion, indeed!

How did a show or film have a lasting effect on your personal life?

Choosing, quite casually, to see “A Star is Born” in 1955, just two weeks after my thirteenth birthday, gave me an idol for the rest of my life, forged my musical tastes from that moment until this, made at least two lifelong friends who shared my passion for the movie and its star, guided me towards my first two jobs, and ensured that every house I ever occupied for the next sixty-five years was always filled with music. And, of course, it eventually brought me here, to Quora.

Indirectly, all this almost-certainly had a follow-on effect to the next generation, and the one after that: three of my five children have carved out distinguished careers in music and the entertainment world, and all four of my grandchildren show a passion for (and outstanding abilities in) music and performing.

Back in 1955, movie tickets in Sydney, Australia, were around 15c. I consider that the Regent Theatre gave me good value for money that fateful day!