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Gregory Peck in Court

By the way, we watched the Hitchcock courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947), starring Gregory Peck, last night. We’d taped it off BBC2 on Monday afternoon.

It couldn’t be called the best work from either Hitch or Peck (some of the melodrama is rather overacted), but it has a strong cast and was worth seeing again. Mr. Peck was 30 years old at the time and wears a few dashes of grey in his hair for added maturity! Although he’s supposed to be English, he doesn’t try to fake the accent, which somehow works in his favour. The actual courtroom scenes are the best moments (Charles Laughton is terrific as the judge). Trivia: it was the Hollywood debut for both Alida Valli and Louis Jourdan.
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Just a Job, Honest

I’ve just finished reading Doug Warren’s official James Cagney biography. After the Orson one, I was in a biog mood (actually, a mood to read more on Orson, but that’ll have to wait), and mom recommended this, which she’d read and enjoyed some time ago.

I’m not a big Cagney fan, really. I think he was a great personality and a fine actor, but many of the films he appeared in were not to my taste. (Reading this book, ironically, I find they often weren’t to Cagney’s taste either.) With Cagney being a rather private person, and this book being authorised, it’s a pretty slim volume, and eschews a lot of in-depth probing… but there’s still some interesting insight.
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Touch of Evil (1958)

Well, Big Entry time! I started writing a few lines about the film we watched last night… and quickly found I could either say, ‘It’s great! A must-see!’ or I could do the full review thing. So I put my journalist hat on. Be warned! I could’ve written twice as much, but I forcibly contained it within reasonable limits for a blog entry.

Classic Movie Review!

Orson Welles was originally hired simply as an actor on 1958’s Touch of Evil. It was his co-star, Charlton Heston, who urged Universal to hire him also as director. Welles jumped at the chance—he hadn’t directed in Hollywood since Macbeth (1948). Sadly, his relationship with the studio deteriorated rapidly, and what he thought would be his big-studio ‘comeback’ turned out to be the end of the road.

Touch of Evil 1958 Poster
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I Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Hot Weather

Yesterday was Shopping Day™, and I went into Birmingham. The weather continues to displease me. First thing in the morning, it’s chilly; by noon, it’s blisteringly hot; by late afternoon, a cold wind has been added to the mix. I don’t know, maybe this inconsistency is what Global Warming is about. All I know for sure is, it’s incredibly annoying. Particularly the blisteringly hot bit… but then, I’m no Summer Fan.

Anyhow, I bought a video: Touch of Evil. Oh no! Another Orson Welles film! (I bought The Third Man last month.) Yeah, well, I’m a fan, and since I’m not buying books at the moment—I’m still slogging through The Stand at present, with about 260 pages to go—I’m spending what little spare cash I have elsewhere. As with The Third Man, it’s been at least a decade since I saw this one. We’ll probably watch it tonight, so maybe I’ll comment further tonight or tomorrow.
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The Third Man (1949)

Blogging the midnight oil! I remembered there was, after all, something worth commenting on from last week, and so, I present…

Classic Movie Mini-Review!

Last Thursday night, we watched The Third Man (1949). I hadn’t seen it in about ten years. I spotted the video for £3.99 (in Virgin) and snapped it up. Well, what a movie! Orson Welles—need I say more? Yes. Welles has no creative role here; the story is Graham Greene’s and the direction is Carol Reed’s (Ollie Reed’s uncle). The setting is post-War Vienna, both beautiful and yet still ravaged by the conflict. The story is about the black market, an apparently dead racketeer and a ‘third man’… to say any more would be a spoiler. The emphasis is totally on atmosphere.

The Third Man 1949 Poster
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Reg Dwight Vamps It Up!

Ah. So Elton John is making Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat into a Broadway musical. Almost nothing Mr. Dwight does these days sparks my interest, but this sounds particularly dreadful. At least he isn’t taking the lead role himself. That would require an extra five or six vertical inches, major liposuction and weight-training, plus a different species of cranium-hugging beastie. (Then again, the vertical discrepancy didn’t stand in Tom Cruise’s way…)
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Hogwarts Revisited

It was great news to hear that Ali Ismail Abbas has been flown to Kuwait and is receiving proper medical care. On a more cynical note, how good it was of Mr. Blair to condescend to ‘comment’ on the situation. But I’m not going to have another war rant…

Monday, I went to buy the video of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. A bit of extra money came our way, and since this counts as extravagance in our current impoverished state, what the hell! We watched it Monday night.

I thought the first HP movie was just okay. This one was a huge improvement, although as each of the books is longer than the last, there was much more condensing. Arguably, the plots also get better, so perhaps a stronger plot suffers less from omission. It was fast-moving and slick. The younger cast were much more polished. Robbie Coltrane was his usual awesome self. The FX were much better, in particular Dobby the house elf… I thought they might mess him up, but he was a wonderful CGI creation, furnished with a wide range of extremely realistic and endearing mannerisms.

Hogwarts Revisited
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