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What You Don’t Know About Elvis the Movie Star, Part 1
Next month, TCM has scheduled an Elvis Presley Day as part of Summer Under the Stars. On August 16, which is the anniversary of Presley’s death and the high point of Elvis Presley Week in Memphis, TCM...
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Pleasures of the Pre-Code: Forbidden Hollywood Volumes 4 and 5
This astounding publicity shot of a screwfaced James Cagney reluctantly probing the shoulder of a coolly admiring Mary Brian should sell anyone on the value of Hard To Handle (1933), or of the two new...
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About That Impossible Anti-War Movie…
This past weekend my wife and I took in Paths of Glory at the AFI Silver Theater. I’d seen it a couple of times before but never on the big screen which is always a treat (though I’m getting right...
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Winning Isn’t Everything: A Sports Movie Symposium
Robert Redford & Camilla Sparv in DOWNHILL RACER (1969) This week millions of viewers will tune in to watch the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London so I thought it would be a...
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Crowned and Renowned: A Look Back at Crown International Pictures (Part 2)
This week the Movie Morlocks are proud to offer part two of David Konow and Chris Poggiali’s exhaustive look back at the films of Crown International Pictures, a portion of which appeared originally in...
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WWBD
I have some things I wish to say about the Batman shootings in Colorado. I write this at my own peril—the last time someone tried to discuss this on a TCM board, the conversation immediately descended...
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Desecration
“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.” ― Stephen King, Pet Sematary I have lived in...
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What You Don’t Know About Elvis the Movie Star, Part 2
As part of Summer Under the Stars, TCM has selected August 16 to showcase the movies of Elvis Presley. To prime viewers for the 14-film marathon, I offer the second in my two-part series about the...
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Something Tough: Body And Soul and Force Of Evil
“According to materials contained in the PCA [Production Code Administration] files in the AMPAS Library, PCA director Joseph I. Breen objected to ‘the completely anti-social basic theme of this story,...
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Ranking the Greats: Please Make it Stop
When I was a young cinephile I was enthralled by the Sight and Sound Poll, which releases its latest ten year ranking today. The first one I was aware of was the 1972 poll which had Citizen Kane at...
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Frankenstein Created Susan Denberg
Susan Denberg (aka Dietlinde Ortrun Zechner) was blond, beautiful and unapologetically curvaceous. A Polish-born Kim Novak with strong sex appeal and an endearing screen presence. Like Novak, Denberg...
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The Toshiro Mifune Blog-a-thon: Record of a Living Being (1955)
One of the features of Turner Classic Movies’ annual “Summer Under the Stars” event is an associated blog-a-thon here, which unites the far-flung Movie Morlocks in common cause for one week. We’ve...
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Blogathon 2012: Toshiro Mifune and the Strange Case of Stray Dog
A boilingly hot summer day, a crush of commuters, a moment of carelessness. With these universal ingredients, Akira Kurosawa set up a film that would mix the grim obsessions of film noir with a...
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Toshiro Mifune is………Sinbad?
The TCM Movie Morlocks blogathon tribute to Toshiro Mifune continues as I revisit THE LOST WORLD OF SINBAD, a film I first saw as a kid at the National Theatre in downtown Richmond, Virginia. Although...
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Toshiro Mifune in The Hidden Fortress
From 1948 to 1965, Toshiro Mifune made 16 films with Akira Kurosawa, constituting one of the most significant collaborations between an actor and a director in cinema history. Mifune was an instinctive...
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The Toshiro Mifune Blogathon: The Challenge (1982)
The collaboration between Toshiro Mifune and director Akira Kurosawa ended in 1965, following the release of Red Beard, their sixteenth and final film together. Having built up an international...
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When World War II Was Just Two: Hell in the Pacific
Apparently, there’s a Toshiro Mifune Blogathon going on here at The Morlocks (you may have noticed it’s the only thing anyone is writing about this week). Well, I’m here to run through the penultimate...
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Toshiro Mifune Conquers American TV
With apologies to all the film aficionados and experts frequently present here on Movie Morlocks, I don’t believe I’m going out on much of a limb in saying that many other people know or have heard of...
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Toshiro Mifune, Japan’s John Wayne
During Toshiro Mifune’s impressive career in front of the camera he was often referred to as the “John Wayne of Japan.” Like Wayne, Mifune was a powerful and commanding screen presence and one of his...
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Sci-fi Reloaded
When I was a kid, a grace period that lasted from, oh, 1968 (a point at which I became more or less fully cognizant) to, oh, 1978 (the year before I turned 18), science fiction meant flights of fancy...
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