--- She wasn’t always Walter Mitty’s mother.
--- I believe John Mills would have been the best General Gordon on film, but understand that a star of Heston's magnitude was necessary to carry the costs of Khartoum.
--- Having watched more than one hundred French films through Netflix last year I have developed a better appreciation of Jean-Paul Belmondo.
--- At Marylebone, near Baker Street, a half decade ago, a pleasant older man said to me that he thought the facial image of the Sherlock Holmes statue was odd looking -- and after pausing -- suggested that I resembled the statue.
--- In 1998, enjoying Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, and then listening to her post-film interviews, I was never more convinced of the legerdemain of screenwriters.
--- After watching Richard Chamberlain as Edmond Dantes again recently, my wife and I are certain that the Gerard Depardieu version of The Count of Monte Cristo is leagues ahead of all the others.
--- George Raft annoys me.
--- My knowledgeable film friends (and wife) despair when I tell them how much I admire Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.
--- My wife and I stumbled across Ed Harris’s Appaloosa recently and were pleasantly surprised.
-- Henry Ford told us “If I had asked my [early]customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'.”
Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.
I used to like Greenaway, but no more. I too dislike Raft, despite conscious attempts to warm to him. I am sure you are right about Gordon; I do feel for all that, though, that it is Heston's best work on screen, and a fuller performance than he seems capable of in just about any other movie...
ReplyDeleteMatthew.
ReplyDeleteI agree on Greenaway. His later films lost me. There was a clip of some of his seaside scenes at the National Maritime Museum in London when last I was there. And I like Heston, less when biblical. I read or heard him say somewhere that he and Paul Newman came up at the same time. And the movie gods ordained along the way that Newman would be basically the urban guy and Heston the epic person. Yes, Heston could be very good. As to Heston at Khartoum, I am too close to Gordon. I have always wanted to use the word “recuse”. But I lack the robes. Best. Gerald.