Fred MacMurray Tagged Articles at Cinematical
RvB's After Images: Remember The Night (1940)
Filed under: Classics », Comedy », Romance », Paramount », After Image »
Jette's very good column the other day called Remember the Night one of the seven Christmas movies you haven't ever seen. Jette caught it on TV once and hadn't watched it since. This 1940 romantic comedy is another one of those films that reminds you why you'd better not ditch your VHS player yet. If you want to see this (and, oh, you will want to see this, if you're a Preston Sturges fan), you have three options: one is to buy a grey-market DVD, something anyone with a search engine and a credit card can do. Another is to get one of the few VHS copies available off Amazon for $50 (excuse me, $49.99). The last, and cheapest, is to live in an urban area with a good specialty video store--such as Silver Screen in the Berkeley area suburb of El Cerrito.
If the last is the case, it's worth checking today to see if someone hasn't rented it out yet. Remember the Night is an unknown classic of the holiday, stressing romance, comedy and -- most important on Christmas -- hope and rebirth. The American cinema's most versatile actress, Barbara Stanwyck plays a character study for screenwriter Sturges' later The Lady Eve. Here she's a larcenous woman who turns out to be essentially no worse than the people around her.
Film Forum's Noir Fest: Pushover
Filed under: Thrillers », Noir », Mystery & Suspense », Other Festivals »
"Introducing Kim Novak." What else do you need to know? After a short stint as "Miss Deepfreeze," a spokeswoman-character for a refrigerator company, the 21-year old aspiring actress and future Vertigo ice goddess was snatched up by Harry Cohn and immediately plunked down in a starring role in 1954's Pushover. The film, which was screened last week as part of Film Forum's ongoing B-Noir festival, is best described as a re-imagining of the popular Double Indemnity story. In the original, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck conspired to defraud an insurance company. Their ace in the hole was that MacMurray was an insurance man himself, and thought he could game the system. In Pushover, MacMurray and Novak conspire to double-cross a thief who's just knocked over a bank. Their ace in the hole is that MacMurray is a bank robbery detective, and thinks he can game the system. Novak plays the bank robber's girlfriend, tucked away in a posh apartment and waiting patiently for her man to breeze back into town. MacMurray and his partner Rick (Phil Carey) watch her every move from a stakeout nest in a motel across the street. Rick is initially skeptical that the bank robber would take the chance of coming back into town with all that money, just to pick up his girlfriend. Then he raises his binoculars and looks across the way at Novak for the first time: "Yep, he'll show up."
Double Indemnity DVD Announced (At Last)
Filed under: Classics », Universal », Home Entertainment »
One reason why I bought a multiregion DVD
player last year was because Double Indemnity had been released
on DVD overseas, but was not available in this country. Universal was entangled in a DVD rights dispute over the 1944
noir classic, and no one could tell when the situation might be resolved. Last year, rumors surfaced that the
movie would be released as part of a Universal noir boxed set, but Double Indemnity remained disappointingly
absent.But the wait is finally drawing to a close: Universal has announced that a two-disc edition of the movie will be released on August 26. No news yet on extra features, but I don't care as long as the transfer is good. After all, it's not as though they can include audio commentary from writer/director Billy Wilder, co-screenwriter Raymond Chandler, or novelist James M. Cain. Sadly, none of the principals involved with the film are still alive. I suppose someone could interview Lawrence Kasdan, who reworked the story in 1981 as Body Heat, but I don't find the prospect appealing.
Review: The Shaggy Dog
Filed under: Comedy », New Releases », Disney », New in Theaters », Family Films », Remakes and Sequels »
There is a moment in Joe Dante's neato kitsch comedy, Matinee, when Cold War kids Gene (Simon Fenton) and Dennis (Jesse Lee) are sitting in a movie theater, bored silly by the zany (and entirely fictional) body-switching family comedy, The Shook-Up Shopping Cart (a double bill with the equally non-existent The Bashful Bobcat). It was Dante's way of simultaneously mocking and paying tribute to the low-concept filler that Disney made in between what are now the company's enduring classics, and it was a hilarious moment.
While Disney's remake of their 1959 mega-hit, The Shaggy Dog, is not loaded with hilarious moments, it is, as they say, what it is, even if it is that same sort of self-congratulatory jape. Tim Allen plays a dog-hating lawyer who by convenient magic becomes one, makes a fun enough show of it, rolling together nicely the parts played by Tommy Kirk in the original and Dean Jones in the 1976 sequel, The Shaggy D.A. Like My Three Sons star Fred MacMurray in the original, Allen is a Disney contract player, and while he may not be the fatherly comfort that the MacMurray was, he can certainly sell a movie in the same way. People know Tim Allen from Home Improvement; they know him as the voice of Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story movies; they know him from The Santa Clause, and that is all the selling/warning that most people need.
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Spielberg Backs Out of 'Harvey'
Discuss: Should Gay Actors Stay in the Closet?
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