What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Harp]

Among others, Easy Rider makes my list. Except for the cemetery scene in New Orleans it has held up well against time.

Check out the cemetery scene at the end of The Thomas Crown Affair-Steverino/Faye Dunaway
version. Iconic for its continued effect on females, and, which in today's asinine political
correctness couldn't be shot as witness its 1999 remake featuring Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo.
Some classics should simply be left alone.

 

[Fading Fast]

^ Chuck Norris said McQueen told him when The Blob came out, he was so embarrassed
he kept inside his house for a whole week. I only recall its ending with the Arctic parachute
drop ''The End. Or is it?''

Gollygeewilokers but a guy needs to start somewhere.

I mentioned it in my comments, but he has absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about as his performance is by far the best one in the movie / he made the movie better than the script. That said, since he was just starting out, I could see him not being able to judge himself honestly and see what I just noted.

 

[Harp]

^ What has always drawn me to McQueen is his credibility, a remarkable innate trait
few actors birthright own and strive to possess. Richard Harris also had this quality,
but Steverino had it in spades; yet, perhaps inwardly doubted himself. His quip to Norris
might be indicative an inner angst known only to himself.

He also is the only guy who wore a plain deal coffin trench coat and made it a sartorial
statement beyond doubt. He definitely single handedly killed the traditional 1917 trench.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Aliens - 1990 Special Edition, Blue ray

 

[Edward]

Been years since I saw the Blob. It nade a biv impact, though. As I recall, there's an episode of M*A*S*H in which it's the movie of the week for the 4077th, the sort of oops that you'd never get away with on television now.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Right now listening to the isolated Aliens soundtrack on the Blue ray. Yes, a different experience, seeing the scenes with music only and I can highly recommend it!

 

[mcskeletor]

Mildly embarrassed to admit this, but I just finished watching the 1997 "classic" I Know What You Did Last Summer. Nostalgia factor was strong, but I think it held up ok all things considered.

 

[dimchick]

Currently visiting San Francisco on my way back from Yosemite - just finished watching The Rock… had to!

 

[Harp]

^ Go out and tour Alcatraz.

 

[mcskeletor]

Currently visiting San Francisco on my way back from Yosemite - just finished watching The Rock… had to!

That is such an entertaining film, love it. I also gotta shout out one of my all-time favorites, Escape from Alcatraz. If you've never had the pleasure, do yourself a favor and dust that old classic off.

 

[lina]

Saw Pawil Pawlikowski’s Fatherland the other day. Really well done. A slow burn, but fantastic actors and filming.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Train (1964) with Burt Lancaster, Jeanne Moreau, and Paul Scofield


The Train is loosely based on a true WWII story, with an emphasis on "loosely" for the details, but at a very high level, it's somewhat accurate. Still, it's best to just watch it as a movie, know there's some truth in there somewhere, and enjoy Hollywood going to town on it.

Burt Lancaster plays a laconic French trainyard worker whom the Germans use to, well, keep the trains running, while, covertly, he's in the resistance. In French lore, practically every Frenchman/woman was in the resistance – it's amazing the Germans held France for so long.

At the opening, the Allies are, at most, days away from liberating Paris, so the Germans are trying to steal all they can before hopping on the last train out with hundreds of famous French paintings that one art-obsessed German colonel, played by Paul Scofield, wants.

When Lancaster is given an order to stop the train and he learns what's on it – art – he now ponders a real-world trolley car problem, but there are only lives on one side and artwork on the other. Of course, France's "national treasure" is worth lives, but whose?

That's what makes these problems so fascinating. At a high level, we understand that protecting treasures like Renoirs and Van Goghs at the cost of lives makes sense, but bring it down to the specific: Who wants to die for a painting?

That is the question Lancaster – explicitly and implicitly – never stops asking. Would you give your life to save the Mona Lisa? Maybe in the heat of the moment, you'd put your life on the line, but what about right now: your life ends this second or the Mona Lisa is burned?

How many people sitting on their sofa with their spouse, binge-watching something, would give up their lives at that second so that the Mona Lisa isn't burned? An angry Lancaster tries to comply without costing lives, but Germany's WWII-era leaderships have made French lives cheap, so it's a tall order.

After a friend and mentor of Lancaster's is executed on the spot for small-ball sabotage, without even a show trial, and right in front of Lancaster, he wants revenge on Scofield, the man who callously ordered the execution. Lancaster now wants to stop the train to punish Scofield.

You're never quite sure of Lancaster's motivation as he seems to switch around a bit during the movie, but you know he doesn't like Germans and he specifically doesn't like Scofield. So he puts into place an incredibly elaborate plan of deception to stop the train.

At one point during all the obfuscations, Lancaster is put under soft house arrest in a hotel where the proprietress, played by Jeanne Moreau, is a Frenchwoman angry at the world, but still, there's a decency under her hard shell. She owns every scene she's in.

She doesn't care if Lancaster starves, but she brings him some food anyway. When he disappears for hours to sabotage the Germans and they come looking for him, she blandly covers for him, but again, she doesn't care. You'll want to marry her before the picture's over.

Eventually, as had to happen by Hollywood scriptwriter rules, Lancaster and Scofield effectively go mano a mano with the train as the arena. It comes down to a series of trolley-car-like decisions, with Lancaster's morality showing much better than Scofield's.

Director John Frankenheimer shot in beautiful black and white and on location in France. The movie also doubles as a visual documentary of steam trains: monstrous metal beasts that, owing to their huffing and puffing sounds and the steam they give off, look alive.

Frankenheimer understood that his movie, titled The Train, needed to really show the train in all its glory, so watch for the scenes of the men running it – quite a complicated affair – or even of the men just repairing the train or the tracks, which is cool too. It is all railfan heaven.

Also watch for the gut-wrenching scene near the end (no spoilers coming) that, as noted, graphically displays the moral dilemma of people versus art, with, once again, Lancaster choosing people and then looking for another way to stop the train.

While Moreau owns her scenes, this is Lancaster's movie and the big actor shows why he was a star. Firmly masculine, he looks equal to the massive steam engine he drives. Frank Sinatra made a WWII movie about a train, too, but he rides on it; Lancaster wills his forward.

Frankenheimer never shows you much of the Allies' advance: his story is about the retreat and what the Germans are trying, at the last minute, to steal from the French. The tension here is in that odd wartime interregnum when the occupation is nearly, but not yet completely, over.

That makes every death a greater tragedy, as each one is so pointless now. The Germans can continue killing – they seem to like it, especially in their pique over losing a war they had been winning handily – but nothing will change.

And Lancaster? He grows and expands in The Train, but his morality doesn't change: life matters, even one anonymous life, more than art. You may disagree, but then again, are you ready to die this second – right this second – for the Mona Lisa?

Hopefully, when the dust settles, Lancaster will go back to Moreau's hotel and see if the spark was indicative of something real. Plus, she looks so adorable in her French print cotton dresses, he should go back just to see her in one again.

 

[Harp]

^ A gal pal of mine absolutely adores Burt Lancaster. Ruth is the widow of a physicist who
hair's breadth lost the Nobel Prize-I only told this by others-and her first intimate comment
after our introduction was ''Burt Lancaster is my guy.'' And she patted her heart sighing.
She's a Sabra, native born Israeli, and those gals do not kid around.
For Xmas I got her a From Here to Eternity cd with Burt and Deborah Kerr locked torrid surf swept embrace.

 

[Zombie_61]

Been years since I saw the Blob. It nade a biv impact, though. As I recall, there's an episode of M*A*S*H in which it's the movie of the week for the 4077th, the sort of oops that you'd never get away with on television now.

Well, it was only a five year goof (i.e., The Blob was completed five years after the Korean War ended) and they probably figured no one would pay much attention to that anyway, especially considering M*A*S*H's version of that war lasted 11 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Edward]

Well, it was only a five year goof (i.e., The Blob was completed five years after the Korean War ended) and they probably figured no one would pay much attention to that anyway, especially considering M*A*S*H's version of that war lasted 11 years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yip. Pre-web it's the sort of thing nobody really noticed.