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BS: How the West was Won on Turner

20 Dec 09 - 11:25 AM (#2792799)
Subject: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

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 ...


20 Dec 09 - 11:56 AM (#2792821)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie

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


20 Dec 09 - 05:14 PM (#2793104)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: John on the Sunset Coast

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.


20 Dec 09 - 05:52 PM (#2793125)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

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


20 Dec 09 - 05:56 PM (#2793131)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: robomatic

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


21 Dec 09 - 05:07 AM (#2793411)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: jacqui.c

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!


21 Dec 09 - 05:12 AM (#2793414)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: GUEST,999

Great price on it here.


21 Dec 09 - 05:15 AM (#2793416)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: jacqui.c

Just ordered it on Amazon.


21 Dec 09 - 01:26 PM (#2793676)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Wesley S

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


21 Dec 09 - 02:42 PM (#2793730)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL

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.


21 Dec 09 - 03:31 PM (#2793762)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: open mike

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


21 Dec 09 - 03:31 PM (#2793764)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie

Humph I finally 'saw' it.

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


21 Dec 09 - 03:46 PM (#2793779)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

SINS,
TO THE CELLAR WITH YOU WOMAN !!!


21 Dec 09 - 03:52 PM (#2793785)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: John on the Sunset Coast

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.


21 Dec 09 - 04:09 PM (#2793800)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL

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.


21 Dec 09 - 04:31 PM (#2793815)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

lonesome dove is a masterpiece for sure


21 Dec 09 - 04:47 PM (#2793822)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie

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


21 Dec 09 - 04:58 PM (#2793832)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL

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.


21 Dec 09 - 05:49 PM (#2793871)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

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


21 Dec 09 - 05:49 PM (#2793872)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: katlaughing

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**


21 Dec 09 - 05:55 PM (#2793878)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Ebbie

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?


21 Dec 09 - 06:06 PM (#2793892)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: jacqui.c

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


21 Dec 09 - 07:03 PM (#2793920)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: catspaw49

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


21 Dec 09 - 07:03 PM (#2793921)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

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


22 Dec 09 - 01:25 PM (#2794408)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Wesley S

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?


22 Dec 09 - 01:30 PM (#2794413)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Art Thieme

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


22 Dec 09 - 01:33 PM (#2794416)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Wesley S

Red River
Stagecoach
Hombre
The Searchers

Them were fine ones too....


22 Dec 09 - 02:31 PM (#2794452)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Bonnie Shaljean

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.


22 Dec 09 - 02:52 PM (#2794466)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: olddude

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


22 Dec 09 - 03:55 PM (#2794509)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: SINSULL

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


22 Dec 09 - 04:43 PM (#2794557)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: katlaughing

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.


22 Dec 09 - 05:24 PM (#2794585)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Art Thieme

Dan,
I do understand.

Red River was like that for me. Pure magic.

Art


22 Dec 09 - 06:20 PM (#2794616)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Peter T.

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.


22 Dec 09 - 08:52 PM (#2794715)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: robomatic

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.


22 Dec 09 - 09:59 PM (#2794747)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: katlaughing

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

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


23 Dec 09 - 04:19 AM (#2794848)
Subject: RE: BS: How the West was Won on Turner
From: Bonnie Shaljean

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