One more thing: you'd think the bad guys would figure out eventually that the Hornet's odd-looking gun only fires sleeping gas, but they kept acting as though they were looking down the barrel of a revolver. "Don't shoot! I'll talk!" Sure, nobody wants to get gassed, but I'm not sure why armed gangsters would surrender so readily whenever the Hornet got the drop on them. What would really happen: Hornet: "Stop where you are! And drop your guns!" Racketeer: "Or what? You'll put me to sleep for a few minutes? We've got real bullets! Plug him, boys!"
Maybe they were afraid their cohorts would steal their wallets while they slept, or steal their pants or cut their hair in an embarrassing way.
I did the exact same thing. I only missed the last ten minutes of the last one, but I was pretty pissed at myself. Awesome. Thank you. I hope so. That was very disappointing. I really liked the actress and she gave off a great aura of competence, but never did much of anything. On a related note, The Circus of Dr Lao has arrived, but it will be at least a few days before I can get to it. To use British-level understatement, it's a bit of a bad week in RJ-land.
Here's Anne Nagel's IMDb filmography, if anyone is interested enough to track down some of her other work. Be warned, though: the biography page is pretty sad reading.
Here are the genre movies for the month... only a few outside Tarzan due to the Summer Under the Stars format. Friday 8/3 Johnny Weissmuller 6:00 AM Tarzan and the Mermaids (’48) 7:30 AM Tarzan and the Huntress (’47) 9:00 AM Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (’46) 10:15 AM Tarzan and the Amazons (’45) 11:45 AM Tarzan’s Desert Mystery (’43) 1:00 PM Tarzan Triumphs (’43) 2:30 PM Tarzan’s New York Adventure (’42) 3:45 PM Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (’41) 5:15 PM Tarzan Finds a Son! (’39) 6:45 PM Tarzan: Silver Screen King of the Jungle (’04) 8:00 PM Tarzan, the Ape Man (’32) 10:00 PM Tarzan and His Mate (’34) 12:00 AM Tarzan Escapes (’36) 1:45 AM Jungle Jim (’48) 3:00 AM The Lost Tribe (’49) 4:30 AM Pygmy Island (’50) Sunday 8/5 Claude Rains 6:45 PM The Wolf Man (’41) 8:00 PM The Invisible Man (’33) 2:15 AM The Adventures of Robin Hood (’38) Friday 8/10 Lionel Barrymore 7:15 AM The Devil Doll (’36) Saturday 8/11 James Mason 5:30 PM Journey to the Center of the Earth (’59) Friday 8/31 James Caan 8:00 PM Rollerball (’75) ...and as a side note, they're doing Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman back to back on the 28th and 29th. I'm gonna need smelling salts.
Glad they're showing Rollerball again. I missed it a few weeks ago. I thought I'd have to wait a year for it to come around again. And I love Ava Gardener, so I'll have to see what's on schedule there too.
I'm curious how The Adventures of Robin Hood qualifies as SF/fantasy. I know there are some interpretations of the Robin Hood legend with supernatural elements, but I'm pretty sure the Errol Flynn version isn't one of them. Is it just that Robin Hood was sort of a prototype superhero (and the person Robin, the Boy Wonder, was named for), and superheroes are counted as genre fiction? Or is it just "It's not really SF/fantasy but it might interest the same audience so I'll mention it here"?
I watched A Thousand and One Nights off the DVR last night. It'd be a bog standard dated Aladdin movie except for the comedic elements. It has Phil Silvers as comic relief as a streetwise hustler who was born "1200 years early". He makes lots of anachronistic wisecracks (I never knew groovy was in use in the 40s) and has fancy Persian or whatever spectacles. The genie is a cute sassy redhead named Babs(!). In fact, you wonder why Aladdin is so smitten with the princess between Babs and the princess's knockout handmaiden. The comedy keeps this fun and watchable.
^ Sounds good. I'll have to make a note of that one so I could catch it next time. Looks like Evelyn Keyes, who played Babs just died in 2008.
Odd that they are showing the Tarzan movies in almost reverse order. A couple of the early ones are a bit racey (mainly in the area of Jane's lack of costume), being made before the Hays code was enforced..
I could argue that both its version of the sociopolitical situation and the arrow-splitting scene [as Mythbusters proved] are fantasy but you're right lol. Got overly enthusiastic.
There's a nice little interview with Maureen O'Sullivan that they show occasionally between movies where she talks about that and how she thought it was no big deal. I'm sure they'll show it today. In fact, they had a documentary one time about the pre-code era where they interviewed a bunch of actresses in their later years. It was great to see these older women reminisce about what they were able to get away with back in the day. You kind of expect people that age to be a bit prudish, but it was definitely not the case.
Heck, by that standard, you'd have to throw in any action movie that shows cars exploding on impact, cars surviving big jumps and being able to keep driving, gunshot victims being thrown backward, people being blown forward by explosions and being unharmed, EMTs giving up on CPR after 30 seconds or using defibrillators to restart a stopped heart, etc.
^^^You say it as though it would be a bad thing to label such movies as fantasies. People tell themselves that they know it's just a movie, but the cumulative effect can be devastating to a person's grip on reality, despite their conscious intent. This seems to be particularly true for kids who've absorbed thousands of hours. Perhaps a truth in moviemaking should require the Twilight Zone theme to play during these scenes?