Curious to what you thought of it.Originally Posted by ronmac
Curious to what you thought of it.
I decided to watch something else. I was too tired to stay up for the whole thing. Next time.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Thinking about White Heat, Cagney may have been the best of the bad guys. He wasn't big and he wasn't the kind of guy to get someone else to do his dirty work. Eddie Robinson was dangerous and feared no one. You could see it as far back as Little Caesar. The third best bad guy is a TV personality. Bruce Gordon could take you out just with a single look. He played Frank Nitty in the Untouchables back in the 1960's. That guy was vicious. Bogart, to my mind, wasn't all that tough. I think maybe he had too many good guy roles to make me think otherwise but still, he could slap you around abit. With all the talk about George Raft, I think he was kind of soft compared to the others. He wasn't very tall and seemed like the kind of guy you could talk your way around. Who did I leave out?
The older I get, the better I was.
Paul Muni.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
I'd put Edward G Robinson & Humphrey Bogart ahead of Cagney; but then, I would never go out of my way to see a Cagney movie. The thing about Robinson was when he was "calm" he could be sooo menacing like in Key Largo. And like the others, Bogey started out as a bad guy. Petrified Forest (my favorite early gangster movie), Angels With Dirty Faces (with the Dead End Kids), and High Sierra were all good movies with Bogey as a gangster. And as a gangster, I liked George Raft better than Cagney, even tho Raft wasn't half the actor Cagney was.
Lawrence Tierney. Sterling Hayden. Elisha Cook Jr. Robert Mitchum.Who did I leave out?
Good call. Ironically, I thought one of Muni's best roles was as the guy falsely convicted in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, where he ends up as a criminal.
“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.” – Philip Marlowe
How could I forget Edward G Robinson? I'd take him over Cagney any day.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Good call? That's a great call. What I liked about Paul is the fact that he had a lot of range in his acting. Maybe more than the others. He was in everything for a time.
The older I get, the better I was.
Hal, I could possible go along with you on Eddie but not Bogart. Even in High Sierra and AWDF, he was a gangster with a heart. Edward and James rarely showed that side. Edward did in Double Indemnity though. I'm sure there are a few others but overall, heartless. I'll still hang on to my guy, Bruce Gordon. A gangsters gangster.
The older I get, the better I was.
Good George Raft scene:
On the fear scale, Edward and James might be pretty even but I just get the sense that James would enjoy cutting off your breathing privileges himself.
The older I get, the better I was.
Am I mistaken or was this voted the all time funniest film? Thought I heard this recently.
The older I get, the better I was.
Bogart played many lethal baddies in the 30's when he was second tier to Robinson and Cagney. This dynamic culminated in '39 with Cagney in The Roaring Twenties ,maybe his last nasty with no redemptive quality roles. In those years he had as much menace as anyone out there.
E Cook Jr, aside from his Wilma in The Maltese Falcon tended to play a bad guy way down the food chain in over his head. Hayden was more a professional , just practicing the left handed form of human endeavor. Mitchum was usually a good guy.
John Garfield played some good bad roles. Lee Van Cleef had a long run of hoodlum rolls. Harry Morgan of Mash too. Both really meanacing in their day.
I agree , Raft was soft.
Yeah, but EGR would rub that stogie right in your eye and watch you writhe in agony as he stepped over you.
One of my favorite EGR films is "Larceny Inc."
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Yes, but it has a couple of violent scenes. Here's the other:
Bogey is no saint in 'In A Lonely Place' either.
Elisha Cook Jr., was one of the best character actors. Your right, in the Falcon he was a pure bad guy but overall I've always thought of him as a guy who wanted something more but always fell in with the wrong group of fellas. In The Big Sleep, with B&B, he thought he was going to marry Agnes, a woman who didn't know he was alive. The first time I saw him was in Shane. And all he did in House On Haunted Hill, was scare the crap out of everyone, me included. Not sure if you could put him in the bad guy category. Hard to believe that Morgan was ever a bad guy. Liked him in The Ox Bow Incident. LVC would work. I mean a guy on The Andy Griffith Show who was stealing women's purses at a carnival must be a real bad dude. Garfield, of course, was a ladies man.
The older I get, the better I was.
The older I get, the better I was.
I love that movie.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
Contenders that come immediately to mind:
The Third Man
Citizen Kane
Tokyo Story
Pickpocket
We've all seen movies like this. But what is it about this particular shop worn idea that works? Amazing in it's simplicity.
The older I get, the better I was.
The first two are legend movies but I've not seen the last two. Can you comment Facelift without giving them away?
The older I get, the better I was.
Tokyo Story is a quintessential Ozu film, exhibiting many examples of his technical innovations (static shots, excellent framing, low cameras) as well as his characteristic narrative style. Most like most Ozu films, this one concerns family dynamics. There is nothing to spoil, as the story ancillary to how the film is an expression of humanity.
Pickpocket is a loose adaptation of Crime and Punishment. The amoral main character is quite literally, a pickpocket. The film is a voyeuristic, stylized commentary on society and its rules. I'm not as huge a fan of the French New Wave as other people who are into film, but I think that Bresson - a director whose work coincided with that movement but who is not generally considered part of it - did some excellent and innovative work in his own right. I could have easily subbed in his other great film, A Man Escaped, which is about the French resistance in WWII.
I find the French resistance an interesting subject. It was prominent of course in the films, The Longest Day and The Great Escape. Even though France was occupied there were those who refused to give in and at great peril and danger to themselves.
The older I get, the better I was.
The screaming is what makes it for me. Just when you thought the brunette was a great screamer, Vincent Price's wife's wailing takes it to a whole new level.
It does have all the cliches, but the movie never really gets in its own way.
"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only. If you got to load or unload go to the White Zone!"
If you are interested in the French resistance, then I can't recommend enough the Jean-Pierre Melville film 'Army of Shadows' from 1969. It's in color, though.
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