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Quincy M.E.: Who Speaks for the Children (1981)
Reminiscent of a real life case that took place here in Ontario
In this episode a man molests and kills a little girl and the police focus on her stepfather as the culprit after finding pictures of children at his home. The story itself closely resembles a real life case in which a little girl disappeared, in 1981 or thereabouts. Her body was found and the police eventually found her killer, a man who was not one of those who lust after children but rather had been inspired to do the deed after seeing a similar act on a home video.
The Changeling (1980)
I actually saw this film in the mid 2000s.
It was the weirdest thing l ever saw, bar none. I'm,frankly, worried that the story in the reboot might parallel that of two Japanese families whose children were accidentally switched at birth, with no one realizing it till it was too late. 0ne of the children became the head of the family business and the other, a taxi driver in Tokyo. The businessman didn't realize he wasn't the wealthy family's child till a DNA test excluded him. 0nly then was the taxi driver found and his true identity verified. It was only pure chance that the businessman had the talent and drive to succeed his Foster father after the old man's retirement from the company itself. The driver's biological parents both died before the mistake was uncovered, and he won a huge lawsuit against the hospital where they were bon. The businessman has endured tremendous emotional anguish and may even have lost the right to his Foster father's estate. So, l hope the reboot is different from the original film.
Another plot that could be used is that of a novel l read years ago about a senator who fakes the enire scholastic career of his mentally handicapped son because the boy is unable to learn in the same way we do. In the end the Senator ends up dead at the hands of his son. This plot still haunts me to this day, and l often fantasize about the son killing his fathereven though it is actually impossible: the truancy laws are so strict - at least here in Canada - that despite being excused from elementary phonics l still had to show up for legal reasons. I'd sit around a round table with six or seven other children and my female aide would lead us in song.
Racket Squad: Impatient Heir (1953)
This is one of the best Racket Squad eoisodes
In this episode, a young man set to inherit his grandfather's estate in five years is short of cash and agrees to sign an insurance policy allowing him to pay his debt by drawing on some of his grandfather's money. Unfortunately the man with whom he signed the insurance contact tries to kill him after adding a clause allowing him to benefit from the heir's death. All in all, a well- presented recreation of a true case.
The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1960)
The lnvisible Creature
What nobody here seems to realize is that not only are five of these episodes an adaptation of "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold," but also five of them don't even feature Pinocchio or Chirping Cricket at all! These five are based on the movie "Stanley" and feature a man with spectacles whose best friend is an invisible creature who can change shape and teleport him anywhere through his bedroom closet. Eight out of ten for including these bizarre episodes.
Another Page (1988)
Another Page - a truly great PBS series
Ironically, the episode l remember the most about might not actually be an episode of the series at all It is of course the special "Rubber Shoes," in which a guard named Luther Bentley mixes his heart medication with cold serum and collapses, then is rushed to the hospital, where he has to wear the titular footwear as he is treated for his conditions. I salute you, Wally Amos, for allowing this special to air as part of the run of this show!
Mannix: Race Against Time: Part 2 (1974)
This could well have been a leftover MAN FROM UNCLE script, because it's unlike all others in this series.
This two-piece teleplay involves Mannix taking a famous surgeon to a foreign country to implant a pacemaker in a rebel leader. Unfortunately, the fact that the only characters who have foreign accents are Cesare Danova's rebel leader and the lady doctor damages the credibility of the story severely enough for me to give it a reduced rating. I believe that "Race Against Time" was originally written as a MAN FROM UNCLE script, with John Colicos taking over the role intended for Bill McCallum.
Have Gun - Will Travel: Genesis (1962)
The Origin of Paladin
This is the origin story of Paladin, and it greatly resembles that of the Holyoke Comics character , the Deacon , related in Cat-Man Comics #1. In it, a young safecracker calls the police and tells them about the robbery his gang is committing. Found out, he is shot in the arm and left for dead, but hides out in a church, where he puts on the old clothes of a priest. Cornered by members of his gang , he captures them and leaves them tied up for the police "with the compliments of - THE DEACON." .
In the Days of Daniel Boone (1923)
l have some idea what the plot of this serial was like.
Having watched the trailer online, l have formed a theory as to what the plot of this 1923 serial was like. In one scene, Jack Mower's character is shown carrying an injured Daniel Boone away on foot; l surmise from this that either Daniel or his daughter Miranda - the serial's leading lady - asks him to impersonate Daniel and lead a wagon train through some rough country. During a stopover, the husband of Ruth Royce's character is killed, and Jack is accused of the crime (a surviving still shows her putting the tip of her index finger on Jack's admittedly impressive chest). He now must lead the wagon train to its destination and clear his name as well. From what l read and saw in the trailer, this was an impressive Pathé effort and possibly one of their very best silent serials.
Rocky Marciano (1999)
There was a PUBLIC DEFENDER episode about Rocky Marciano
There was an episode of PUBLIC DEFENDER about Rocky Marciano called "The Prize Fighter." The victim in this episode is a young boxer by the name of Dave Davis who has gone undefeated so far in his professional career but is framed as a drug pusher after defeating a syndicate fighter by the gangster who has bought out his contract. Because he is depicted as undefeated, he must actually be Rocky. Bart Allen, the lead character, is portrayed by the late Reed Hadley, the star of the serial ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION from 1939. Hadley, the only actor to play the actual Zorro character in a serial, was also the lead actor on the RED RYDER radio program.
Partners in Crime (1983)
I always enjoyed this series
I remember watching this series when I was about 10-11 years old with my parents every Friday night at 9:00 on MYSTERY. Ever since that time, whenever I think of Tommy and Tuppence, I think of Francesca Annis and her male actor friend, as I truly loved this series and all of the lush period detail. The only downside was the effect the series had on my late mother, possibly more profound than I believed when she was still alive. Every time we were together in the family care and she saw a period automobile, she would cry: "Oo, look, Anthony! A Tommy and Tuppence car!" Despite this, PARTNERS IN CRIME has remained amongst my favorites of the original MYSTERY! TV series.
The Man Who Never Was (1966)
The title is something of a misnomer
This series involves the adventures of a spy named Peter Murphy who is found out and forced to assume the identity of a millionaire playboy named Mark Wainwright who has been mistaken for him and shot dead. Each episode is 30 minutes long; only the first is on Youtube - put there by LansingFan1 - and from what I could tell, the values were all excellent; having Dana Wynters as the female lead was a wonderful idea; her last appearance was as Robert Ironside's wife Katherine in THE RETURN OF IRONSIDE, a character written to replace that of the Commissioner in the original series. The main problem is that the title is a misnomer, as the premise of the series is the exact opposite of the classic movie of the same name: the dead man, Mark Wainwright, is still legally alive.
The Floorwalker (1916)
I have actually seen outtakes from this film in UNSEEN CHAPLIN.
I have actually seen outtakes from this film in the TV miniseries UNSEEN CHAPLIN, and separately as a boy. It is one of the Tramp's finest performances, bar none, and features my favourite situation, a case of mistaken identity. The Tramp enters a huge department store and is mistaken for the title character, who is his exact double except for the fact that he is taller than him - and I'd like to know how Chaplin managed that! Eventually, of course, everything is straightened out, and the thieving floorwalker is arrested. One of the few times where Chaplin portrayed a villain, this is among the best of the short comedies he directed over the years.
Captain Kangaroo (1955)
I remember this show very vividly
I haven't seen this show for many years, but I remember it vividly. My favourite skit was the Captain's and the Town Clown's retelling of Jack in the Beanstalk, with the silent Clown in charge of the sound effects. As I recall, there were different bits of dialogue for each of the characters ("Hello, my name is Jack!" for Jack, which the clown repeats throughout Captain Kangaroo's retelling of the story, and "Fee Fi Fo Fum" for the giant, and something like "Hello, who's there?" for the Giant's wife and Jack's mother)which appear to come out of the three cups on the table that the clown is using. As usual with the Town Clown, everything went wrong at the end, probably because Keeshan and the shows producers realized that Jack would never say "Hello, my name is Jack!" to his own mother.
3-2-1 Contact (1980)
I loved the Bloodhound Gang
The best part about the show 3-2-1 CONTACT was the part featuring the Bloodhound Gang - Vicki, Richardo and Skip - who always solved cases using science with the aid of their mentor, the mysterious James Bloodhound, the owner of the Bloodhound Detective Agency where they worked. I loved the antics of Richardo in particular, as he wanted to be a magician and loved performing magic tricks. Last year, I looked up the show at this site and discovered the actor playing Richardo was dead and that I had outlived him by more than twenty years! My favourite episode was the one featuring Sally Starfire, an actress who was supposedly haunting her mansion, whose contents were being itemized by her brothers; the gang was called in by Sally's niece and were able to clock her "husband" - Texas Worthington Beauregarde III - as having walked a long distance even though he was supposed to have broken his leg and required a wheelchair to move. Tex is revealed to be Sally, who is in fact alive. This bizarre turn of events, meant to explain the photograph of the ghost taken earlier by Sally's brother, was probably a replacement for the original ending which was scrapped before the actual production of the story began (because Tex and Sally are portrayed by the same person), because Sally's death is carefully described by Tex in the first or second part of the story and her escape from death is never explained properly to the viewer.
The Nude Bomb (1980)
THE NUDE BOMB is the first theatrical GET SMART film.
The first version of the TV show GET SMART to be released to theaters, THE NUDE BOMB was made in 1980, and its parachuting and airplane scenes were combined for the new GET SMART movie. Don Adams returns as that indefatigable secret agent, Maxwell Smart, and this time his mission is to save the world from a spoof of the atomic bomb, the Nude Bomb. It is no wonder that this element of the plot made viewers uncomfortable when this movie appeared in theaters all those years ago, and this may have resulted in the movie being panned and becoming only a modest success. The camaraderie between the Chief and Max is missing here, but I feel that that could not be helped, since Ed Platt, the original Chief of CONTROL, had already died and (SPOILER!) the Chief is revealed here to be an impostor, a recently cloned double agent who is reporting Max's every move to KAOS HQ. There is a wonderful chase scene through the old Universal Studios back-lot involving the Jaws and Battlestar Galactica (correct me if I'm wrong) areas, neither of which are around anymore (at least, to my knowledge). The wonderful gadgetry and beautiful anamorphic widescreen photography (this was originally intended as a TV movie) help overcome the somewhat meandering plot, and the character of Agent Twenty-Two also adds character to the movie (I wonder why Agent Ninety-Nine wasn't brought back). All in all, a most satisfying mystery movie with a most satisfying ending.
The Dark Knight (2008)
I watched the movie to honor Heath Ledger
I have just returned from watching THE DARK KNIGHT, which is in the last week of a six-week engagement at the Coliseum near where I live. I purposely watched the movie to honor Heath Ledger, which I said I would do in an earlier post that seems to have been rejected - the first posting ever made about this movie, in fact. Ledger was a talented man who would have made many more movies if he had lived. The movie was totally bizarre, but the plot was well-structured and Heath gave a convincing performance as the mad Clown of Crime, a scarred madman who is hired by Gotham City's mobsters to destroy the Batman and bring down Harvey Dent, the city's visible public crusader.
Grandma's Boy (1922)
The grandfather's suit is a very clever running gag.
One of the most clever visual running gags used in silent film comedy has to be in this movie, when Grandma gets Grandpa's suit out of mothballs for her grandson Harold and he wears it for the rest of the movie, even during the climactic fight scenes! When we first see him visit his sweetheart wearing his grandfather's suit, the butler comes to the door in an identical garment, giving the viewer additional laughs as well as a look as what the people in service were wearing at the time. (Harold is wearing his grandfather's suit because his own suit has shrunken to child size after he was pushed down the well by his rival at the start of the movie, but by the movie's end, he finds the strength to fight back and push him down that same well!)
Bingo Crosbyana (1936)
Warner Brothers had a defense against Bing Crosby.
This cartoon from 1936 shows Warner Brothers animation in its original prime. The title character, Bingo Crosbyana (it should have been Bingo Crosbyan0, but that doesn't matter), is introduced a few minutes into the short, and he proves to be a fly with a sombrero and a voice that sounds very much like that of Bing Crosby. When a spider attacks, he panics and jumps in a jam jar until the other male flies rout the spider and drop him into fly paper. When he climbs out of the jam jar, the other flies catapult him into a coffee cup! Bing Crosby apparently sued the studio for "basing a cowardly character on his voice and image," and I can easily guess what Warner Brothers's defense would have been: the male flies were all based on one animation chart, and the ladies on another. Bingo Crosbyana's appearance was based on the chart for the male flies, so technically he is not a caricature. And, as for the voice and the sombrero, Bingo Crosbyana is a parody of a Latin lover such as Rudolph Valentino, down to the sombrero and guitar. And the message he sky-writes precedes the one in THE WIZARD OF OZ by about three years.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Robin Hood is a wow
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD - one of two motion pictures with a more lengthy than usual preproduction period from the late thirties - is, as has often been stated, the best Robin Hood movie of all time. So what if it is missing the scenes that explain King Richard's return? It has the right cast - even though the voice of Eugene Palette as Friar Tuck is unsuited for such a period picture - and a cracking good story. There are even cameos for the original silver screen Robin Hood and Maid Marian - Robert Frazer and Barbara Tennant - as the parents from whom the beautiful blonde girl is stolen by the Normans in the scenes where Robin Hood's men fight their brutality (The original silver screen Friar Tuck, Guy Oliver, had already died of cancer by the time this movie was finally made).
One Got Fat (1963)
I enjoyed this little film
ONE GOT FAT is a short film narrated by Edward Everett Horton - who portrayed Fred Astaire's sidekick in THE GAY Divorcée - and probably written by my favourite childhood author, Richard Scarry. It features a group of ten friends who go out one day to a park for a picnic. Each of the monkeys rides dangerously and gets knocked out of the picture one by one, breaking the law of the time (as a boy, I never had to register either of my bicycles). Only one of the ten friends makes it to the picnic site; the short is based on the childhood game "Ten Little Monkeys/Ten Little Indians." And he turns out not to be a monkey at all, but a normal human boy. Despite the low budget, the masks are astounding and the sound effects accurate. The bicycle safety tips are still accurate, except for one - the idea of licensing your bike. In none of the bicycle safety films I have seen as a child was this issue discussed, and it did not appear in either of the books I have read on the subject(perhaps because a bike was not considered to be a motor vehicle); this movie loses two points for being dated.
Kismet (1955)
This is a much better version of KISMET than the VHS
Apparently some of the disgust a handful of readers have been feeling about this movie is due to the fact that they have the old VHS version. The new DVD version restores the original theatrical ratio, and the result is simply stunning: the movie is much clearer that it was in the full screen form, and restores the more lavish numbers to their full glory - there are more extras in there than anyone who has seen the original VHS version realizes; it's not a very small cast at all! True, the original finale is replaced by Howard Keel's version of "The Sands Of Time," the song that opened and closed the original Broadway musical, but that hardly matters. I have seen scenes from the VHS version on GOOGLE Video, and they are faded and grainy, while the DVD version is bright and colorful - you MUST watch it.
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921)
How the process was done
I have a very good idea how the double exposures were created: Mary Pickford must have been photographed with her body covered in a black body stocking for both of her roles, and then two doubles - one of which may have been Mary's sister Charlotte - were photographed in costume. Then the footage of Mary's head was composited into the scene on the bodies of both doubles. No wonder it took hours to photograph the double exposures: the optical printer as we know it today had not yet been invented, and it had to be done by hand, which took longer than it would have done today with a digital compositor. Therefore, it would have taken a full working day to get the scenes shot and to get them to composite properly together.
Scrooge (1951)
There appears to be a missing scene at the end of this movie.
There is a missing scene at the end of this movie, which the story has been partially leading us to, in which Alistair Sim's Ebenezer Scrooge once again meets one of the men who has been collecting money for the poor and who appear in the scene set in Scrooge's office at the start of the picture. It appears to have been deleted and replaced by the one in which Bob Cratchit and his family appear and Tiny Tim realizes that Scrooge is the one who has sent them the turkey. The scene with the Cratchits is a let-down compared to the scene with Alistair Sim that had just come before. I realize Harold Minter's studio did not have much money following the Second World War, but surely they could have included the scene that I have described above!
Star Trek: Whom Gods Destroy (1969)
"Lord" Garth of Izar in the comics
Garth of Izar was revealed as the villain who stabbed Captain Kirk in the fifty-fifth issue of DC Comics's original STAR TREK series. Yet in that issue, he is depicted as an old man with a wrinkled face and a bald head wearing a green leotard and does not resemble Steve Inhat at all - this was due to issues surrounding the use of Mr. Inhat's image in the comic; he had died fourteen years earlier, in 1971. Garth had passed himself off as Ensign Bloemker and then as Sean Finnegan, Kirk's old nemesis from his Academy days, in order to kill him, but he ended up failing miserably, due to Mr. Spock's interference. This last of the regular stories from that series was one of the best as well, yet it is sad that the artist could not use Steve Inhat's image when he drew the evil Garth of Izar for the comic.
Down Argentine Way (1940)
John Taintor Foote should have been given story credit
This movie is a remake of the classic Western KENTUCKY (1938) and so John Taintor Foote should have been given at least a story credit, as the plot is based on the plot of that movie, even with the back story of the conflict deleted and the dialog altered. Don Ameche, standing in for Desi Arnaz, gives a creditable performance as the son of the Argentine stable owner who refuses to enter his horse Furioso in a race for money. J. Carrol Naish turns in a magnificent performance as the old Argentine stable hand who has raised Furioso from a small colt by hand and therefore knows him better than anyone else. Naturally, Furioso wins the race despite the introduction of a substitute jockey at the story's end and everybody turns out to be very, very happy.