BS: How the West was Won on Turner

Subject: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 11:25 AM

Wow, Turner is running on TV "how the west was won", what a great movie, haven't seen that one in years .. One of the best I think ...

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 11:56 AM

I have that movie on video, olddude and watch it every year or two. Two volumes and well laid out. A saga.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 05:14 PM

I caught a bit of this today; it was a very good print without the vertical joining lines. In the past they've used a three camera Cinerama print which was pretty annoying.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 05:52 PM

I didnt pick up on that John until you just mentioned it ... yes you are right ... cool ... gotta buy the dvd sometime, I loved it as a kid

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: robomatic
Date: 20 Dec 09 - 05:56 PM

We had the soundtrack LP. Wore the grooves out of it! I may have digitized it before it was ultimately unlistenable.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: jacqui.c
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 05:07 AM

A very memorable film for me - just thinking about it sets the music off in my head. Ear worm for the rest of the day!

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: GUEST,999
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 05:12 AM

Great price on it here.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: jacqui.c
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 05:15 AM

Just ordered it on Amazon.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Wesley S
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 01:26 PM

And how many directors were used on the movie? Four or five? I seem to remember that John Ford was one of them.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 02:42 PM

It's the one John Ford movie I despise. What a lot of silly claptrap.
Sorry DUde. I'd go down the basement but I'm already there. Actually I despise any movie with Debbie Reynolds in it but to pair her with Gregory Bushel...ah the humanity.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: open mike
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 03:31 PM

i think this was the first movie to show at the theater
in cinemascope...wide screen...

it was made in 1962
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_West_Was_Won_%28film%29

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 03:31 PM

Humph I finally 'saw' it.

I must say that I have never thought of that film as 'claptrap'. Have you watched it lately?

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 03:46 PM

SINS,
TO THE CELLAR WITH YOU WOMAN !!!

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: John on the Sunset Coast
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 03:52 PM

open mike--

CinamaScope theatrical movies were introduced about 1953. I believe
"The Robe" was the first one released.

CinemaScope was shown on a curved screen. It was a single camera system where the movie was filmed in a compressed mode, and then projected in an expanded mode, and the curve helped ameliorate distortion, and also gave a feeling of depth.

Cinerama, debuted several years later, was originally a three camera process, shown on an even more deeply curved screen to give a 3D depth illusion. The areas where the three projected images were seamed created vertical lines which detracted from the viewing experience. Eventually, as Cinerama moved from travelogue type films to narrative dramas it switched to a single lens system on that deeply curved screen.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 04:09 PM

Lonesome Dove is more to my taste. Minimal claptrap - none actually.
Stagecoach is another goodie.
LOL
Glad Ebbie isn't close enough to hit me.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 04:31 PM

lonesome dove is a masterpiece for sure

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 04:47 PM

Oh, Sins, I'd rather hug you than hit you. With such deluded ones, what else can one do? :)

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 04:58 PM

A true member of the Evil Sisterhood. I stand chastised



but I still abhor Debbie Reynolds. Have you ever tried to sit through The Unsinkable Molly Brown? After the 15th chorus of Belly Up To The Bar Boys, I was ready to drown her myself. those people on the Titanic didn't miss the lifeboats. They jumped off of them as she started catawalling.

Mind you - all my silliness keeps your thread at the top, dude.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 05:49 PM

I do agree with Molly Brown , I to wanted to tie a plastic bag over my head on that one. Ya got me there.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: katlaughing
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 05:49 PM

Loved her in Molly Brown, didn't really like her in anything else. And, shall have to join you in the cellar re' How the West Was Won...too many stereotypes for me to ever enjoy it, again. Hated Lonesome Dove what I saw of before I turned it off. Best and/or favs. include: Legends of the Fall, Dances with Wolves, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (used to be my nickname)and a few others. Of course, I was only 9 when HTWWW came out, so didn't see it until I was way older, so I may have had a more worldly view of it than all you old fogies who saw it when it came out. **BG**

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 05:55 PM

I don't see many movies so I cling to old favorites. See, I don't think of HTWWW as stereotypical - since it is a saga the scenes and participants and the times change markedly.

Question: How can you think of it as formulaic when it doesn't even *show* the death of Pa?

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: jacqui.c
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 06:06 PM

Jimmy Stewart was in it - that's good enough for me.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: catspaw49
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 07:03 PM

This movie is truly a best and worst of all things in a single movie. To defend it a bit, it really needs to be seen in the original Cinerama format at a Cinerama theater. It translates poorly otherwise, letterbox or not.

But it is filled with complete crap for plot and dialogue and has some of the worst acting by big name actors I can recall. Karl Malden should have been shot in the opening scenes! The litany of bad acting continues through to the very end.

But flipping back again, it has some very memorable lines as well, one of which I used when I met Karen. After our twenty minutes together I had decided she was the woman I was going to marry and when we left each other at the end of the evening, I told her, "I think I went to see the varmint for the last time." I think it was her first insight into the fact I'm fuckin' nuts but to her credit she said yes to marriage on our next date.

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 21 Dec 09 - 07:03 PM

KAT   - CELLAR! ARE YOU DAFT GIRL!!!!! LOL

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Wesley S
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 01:25 PM

Kat - I have always thought of you to be someone with unparrelled good taste. After all we are friends. But you've destroyed all of my good notions about you with one simple sentence.

"Hated Lonesome Dove what I saw of before I turned it off."

It's perhaps one of the very finest westerns ever filmed. How quickly did you turn it off? Ten - perhaps twelve minutes after it started? You must reconsider your stand on this issue. Invest four hours in the story and then get back to me.

Hated Lonesome Dove but loved Dances With Wolves?

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Art Thieme
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 01:30 PM

Hollywood eye candy with stars who were, themselves, cliches and picked precisely because they were that. It was impossible to take seriously. Couldn't watch it.

Lonesome Are The Brave---Lonesome Dove--them were fine ones.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Wesley S
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 01:33 PM

Red River
Stagecoach
Hombre
The Searchers

Them were fine ones too....

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 02:31 PM

I first saw it in the old Cinerama theatre in San Francisco when I was a kid, and didn't mind the rather cardbord-y plot because there was just so much to look at and listen to - in addition to the famous cinematography it had Alfred Newman (uncle of Randy) 's stirring musical score, with all those great old songs, which I bought the LP of and played the grooves off. Maybe it was partly my young age, but I got completely caught up in its world of the past (the presence of Gregory Peck didn't do any harm either). (OK, so I wasn't that young...)

Apparently the terror on the cast's face during the river-rafting scene was real. Carroll Baker's costume got caught (or nearly got caught, can't remember exactly) in whatever machinery was used to create that roller-coastering effect, and she almost got dragged in and held underwater by it. I gather the actors weren't warned in advance just how tricky a ride it was going to be.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 02:52 PM

I like probably because I still look at it as a little kid when I first saw it in the theatre and it amazed me. But for me , it is a great film cause of that reason mostly I think. Sure there are finer Westerns but this is the first one I really got to see in such a big production way with great music... so most likely that is why I love the movie. Now lonesome dove, watched it so many times I can repeat each line ... still think it is amazing but HTWWW has a place in my heart

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 03:55 PM

Wheere did my post go?????
I repeat:
Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven is another gem.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: katlaughing
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 04:43 PM

Oh well, I am a bad girl, aren't I?**BG** Coming out of the cellar long enough to show Wesley I look like the same kat he's always known...fair, open-minded...yeah, just for you...I will give it a go another time...beyond the first half hour, but if I still don't like it, that's it!:-) I hope netflix has it available in the watch instantly thing.

Sins, agree on Unforgiven. Also another incredible gem, imo, is The Ox-bow Incident. Ya wanna talk REAL and working their craft...the acting, story, everything is incredible and classic.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Art Thieme
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 05:24 PM

Dan,
I do understand.

Red River was like that for me. Pure magic.

Art

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Peter T.
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 06:20 PM

Really, such a terrible clunky movie. Everyone in it moves like frozen molasses.

Lonesome Dove was pretty wonderful.

Dances With Wolves was a great film as a film, it has some of the most beautiful scenes in it, and quite breathtaking moments (the scariness of the young indian warriors is something really new in films, after 60 years of supposedly scary indians) that really capture some of the spaciousness of the way of life of the Plains Indians. Of course, the whole love plot is completely ridiculous, a noble savage wet dream.

I'm still a sucker for Rio Bravo. Another absurd Western (Angie Dickinson setting back the cause of women another hundred years).



Peter T.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: robomatic
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 08:52 PM

Talk about formulaic: Dance With Wolves wears out the peaceful native Americans theme almost to the copper buttons, (except for the part where the braves off the muleskinner).

You want something with some meat on its bones and a lot of native language, watch "Black Robe" which is "Dances" minus the treacle.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: katlaughing
Date: 22 Dec 09 - 09:59 PM

True, but still well-done cinematically, etc. Agree on Black Robe, too.

Also, for a modern, well done Native American movie try Smoke Signals.

Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 23 Dec 09 - 04:19 AM

Anybody remember Soldier Blue? Apparently the uncut version is available on DVD now. And, of course, Little Big Man.