7 responses so far ↓

• 1 Marty Casella // Jun 16, 2008 at 12:34 pm

  John -

  Great website. Can’t wait until I have a few hours to read through the whole thing!

  Congrats.

  Marty

• 2 tom from harlem // Jun 16, 2008 at 8:38 pm

  I was watching the fury the other night (amc — by the way, what happened to this station?! so much repeating of mediocre quasi recent stuff — late night has more interesting stuff — 200 stations on cable and only amc, tcm, and sundance play movies that are out of the ordinary) — anyway, feel asleep before the end … but for a Bish film .. it was fun .. and isn’t douglas good…..

  also saw… machine gun mcCain … it was like casino with star treck 60′s camera work — so unpolished, unlike Scorsese — more real in a different way.

  all for now

• 3 Clark Nelson // Jun 18, 2008 at 7:08 am

  I was watching My Fair Lady the other night, and was surprised to see a much younger Jeremy Brett (aka Sherlock Holmes) playing Freddy Eynesford-Hill. He has a couple of the big songs, of course, and since I don’t recall ever hearing about him as much of a tonsil artist, I have to ask: Was he dubbed in, a la Marnie Nixon, or does the guy really have a voice?

• 4 John DiLeo // Jun 20, 2008 at 10:26 am

  Hi Clark,

  Jeremy Brett’s singing voice in MY FAIR LADY is dubbed by Bill Shirley. Don’t you find Brett’s character, Freddy, something of a stalker? After all, he is camped out on Eliza’s street for what appears to be days on end, just waiting to pounce. True, he’s unthreatening, so handsome and well-dressed and armed with nothing more than countless verses of “On the Street Where You Live.”

  Though I love Lerner and Loewe’s material, I’m not a fan of this film version. It’s so lacking in spontaneity and pacing, coming off as a “preserved” museum piece. I don’t blame Audrey or Rex. The fault lies primarily in George Cukor’s lumbering, overly reverential direction. This is a rare misstep in a brilliant director’s career. Ironically, it was for this film that Cukor won his sole Oscar. And the movie beat DR. STRANGELOVE for Best Picture! Ah, the Academy.

• 5 John DiLeo // Jun 20, 2008 at 12:28 pm

  Hey Tom from Harlem,

  For further reading on THE FURY and other works by director Brian De Palma, seek out the reviews of Pauline Kael, De Palma’s great champion in the 70s and 80s. She especially loved CARRIE, BLOW OUT, and CASUALTIES OF WAR, and took De Palma seriously at a time when few others did.

  And Kirk Douglas is still going strong despite his debilitating stroke. He was on TV this week as one of the hosts of the latest AFI countdown program. With Richard Widmark and Glenn Ford recently gone, there are almost no male stars left from his era. Van Johnson is another of those remaining.

• 6 Clark Nelson // Jun 20, 2008 at 1:30 pm

  You’re right about Freddy coming across as a stalker. The other thing I noticed was that the area railings around the front of the house had heart-shaped medallions set into the wrought iron. The set designer clearly got carried away on that one. Were the street sets modeled after the original theater sets, since the whole movie is clearly shot indoors, or did they come up with that sanitized version of Edwardian London on their own?

• 7 John DiLeo // Jun 21, 2008 at 9:47 pm

  The theatre sets were designed by Oliver Smith, while the movie sets were done by Gene Allen, George James Hopkins, and Cecil Beaton, though clearly the movie tried to recreate the stage show as much as possible. (I bet Beaton was responsible for those heart-shaped medallions!) You hit on the biggest problem with the film’s look, the fact that we are never OUTSIDE! Not at the Ascot, not in Covent Garden, not on the street where you live. Soundstages are fine but only when they aren’t so OBVIOUSLY soundstages. This movie can’t breathe!

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