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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 265

Monday, December 21st, 2020

Today’s video is a Christmas present for Lawrence, so I’m bending the rules a bit and embedding a work of fiction.

“The Tanks Are Coming”, a 1951 film:

During the second-half of 1944, various Allied units stationed in Belgium attempt to smash their way through the tough German defenses at the Siegfried Line. If successful, the way to Germany is wide-open. One of these units is the American 3rd Armored Division. The film’s story concerns a particular five-tank platoon, commanded by Lt. Rawson, the best platoon in Captain Bob Horner’s Company C. During an ambush, the lead tank, California Jane, commanded by Master Sgt. Joe Davis, is seriously damaged by a German Panther tank. Davis is severely wounded and his driver is killed.

One IMDB reviewer describes the story as pedestrian, but praises the integration of actual combat footage. I post, you decide. (Noted: Samuel Fuller wrote the story, though the actual screenplay was credited to Robert Hardy Andrews.)

Bonus: From 1950, “They Were Not Divided”.

Two Welshguard armoured officers blitz through Europe.
This movie shows real footage of tank operations in the ETO after D-Day and the live action is true to the tactics used. And we see why the Sherman was nicknamed by the British as “The Ronson”.
WWII British Tank Regiments Advance From France into Germany. This movie begins in a World War II training depot of a Welshguards armored regiment where recruits from many walks of life learn to survive the strict discipline and training together before going into battle in tanks.

Posted in Christmas, History, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 19, 2020.

Saturday, December 19th, 2020

Catching up on some from the past few days, just for the historical record:

Barbara Windsor, British actress (“EastEnders”, some “Carry On” films).

Jeremy Bulloch. He appeared in several Bond films, and did quite a bit of TV as well as movies. He was perhaps best known as “Boba Fett” in a couple of the “Star Wars” movies.

Ann Reinking. Lawrence put up a brief tribute to her in his Linkswarm yesterday, and I can’t add much to it. “All That Jazz” probably would not make my top ten movie list, but it would be very close to the top of the second tier. And Ms. Reinking is just absolutely luminous in it: heck, everyone involved in that movie is at the peak of their game.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 13, 2020.

Sunday, December 13th, 2020

Oh, wow. I opened up a post so I could update some obits from the past couple of days, and the first thing I saw was: John le Carré. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one: they promise a longer one soon, and I may update with some personal thoughts when that posts.

In the meantime, Charley Pride.

A bridge-builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987.
Singles like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” — among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart — featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements.
At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of “Kiss an Angel” on his 1999 album, “Under the Influence.”

…

Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers.
“No person of color had ever done what he has done,” Mr. Rucker said in “Charley Pride: I’m Just Me,” a 2019 “American Masters” documentary on PBS.
Mr. Pride himself was more self-effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. “We’re not colorblind yet,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”.

NYT obit for Ben Bova.

Tommy Lister. Apparently, he was most famous as “Deebo” in “Friday” (which we watched last night: while he’s good in it, the movie itself is not good), but he had a long list of other credits.

Norman Abramson. You may never have heard of him, but he was one of the developers of ALOHAnet.

The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet.
“The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated,” said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”

…

Some of the data-networking techniques developed by Professor Abramson and his Hawaii team proved valuable not only in wireless communications but also in wired networks. One heir to his work was Robert Metcalfe, who in 1973 was a young computer scientist working at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research laboratory that had become a fount of personal computer innovations.
Mr. Metcalfe was working on how to enable personal computers to share data over wired office networks. He had read a 1970 paper, written by Professor Abramson, describing ALOHAnet’s method for transmitting and resending data over a network.
“Norm kindly invited me to spend a month with him at the University of Hawaii to study ALOHAnet,” Mr. Metcalfe recalled in an email.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet office networking. Later, Mr. Metcalfe founded an Ethernet company, 3Com, which thrived as the personal computer industry grew.

I’ve been holding on to this one for a few days: William Aronwald. He was a prosecutor in the 1970s, working on organized crime cases around New York. He went into private practice later on. But that’s not the reason his obit is noteworthy.

On March 20, 1987, his father, George M. Aronwald, was shot and killed in a laundry in Queens. The senior Aronwald’s death was kind of a puzzle: he was 78, worked as a hearing officer for the Parking Violations Bureau, and shared an office listing with his son. Why would anyone want to kill him? Turns out…

…Mr. Cacace, acting on the orders of an imprisoned crime boss, Carmine Persico, had arranged to have William Aronwald killed, according to news accounts.
The reasons were vague — Mr. Persico was said to have thought Mr. Aronwald had “been disrespectful,” as one article put it. Mr. Aronwald later speculated that he had been targeted in retaliation for his testimony in one of the trials of the mobster John Gotti.
In any case, a prosecutor said later, the hit men, brothers named Vincent and Eddie Carini, were shown a piece of paper with only the name “Aronwald” on it. They killed the wrong Aronwald. And that wasn’t all, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported:
“After the botched assignment, Mr. Cacace had his hit men killed, prosecutors said. Then, they added, he had the hit men who had killed the hit men killed.”

“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 8, 2020.

Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

(Edited: fixed link.)

NYT obit. I can’t do justice to the man. I’m not sure who can.

Fred Akers. Statesman. ESPN.

Natalie Desselle-Reid, actress. She was 53.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 4, 2020.

Friday, December 4th, 2020

Warren Berlinger, prolific TV and movie actor.

He was in a lot of stuff: “Cannonball Run”, multiple appearances on “Happy Days”, “The Shaggy D.A.”, “Operation Petticoat”, and the list goes on.

Hamish MacInnes, mountain climber. I note this for two reasons:

1) Not making fun of his name, but if “Hamish MacInnes” isn’t the most Scottish name imaginable, it’s in the top ten.

2) Not only was he a climber, he was also one of the pioneers of mountain rescue:

As inventive as he was adventurous, Mr. MacInnes built a car from scratch when he was 17. He later used radar to search for bodies in the snow and, in 1961, founded the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team. He also trained dogs to help search for avalanche victims. His friends called him “the fox of Glencoe” for his cunning in finding lost climbers.
Perhaps his most famous invention was the first all-steel ice ax. It was a significant improvement on the wooden-handled ax, which snapped under pressure.
He also developed a foldable lightweight mountain rescue stretcher that is still in use today and an avalanche information service. His “International Mountain Rescue Handbook” (1972) became the go-to manual for rescue teams all over the world.
All told, his inventions and services saved countless lives.
“No one man has done more to help put in place the network of emergency response efforts designed to keep climbers from harm’s way,” The Scotsman newspaper wrote after Mr. MacInnes’s death.

Scary story:

When he was 84, he was found unconscious in front of his house. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was deemed demented and held against his will for 15 months. During that time, he was sedated and put in a straitjacket, his weight plummeted, and his memory vanished. He made several attempts to escape; at one point he scaled the outside wall of the hospital, only to end up on the roof with nowhere to go.
Doctors eventually discovered that he had been suffering from a chronic urinary tract infection that produced dementia-like symptoms.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 30, 2020.

Monday, November 30th, 2020

Dave Prowse, former British heavyweight lifting champion.

In Britain, he became more widely known when he got the part of the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero who promoted road safety. He appeared as the character in a government television campaign and also toured schools to encourage children to stop, look and listen before crossing the street.

He also did a little bit of acting.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Jery Hewitt. Mr. Hewitt was a prolific stunt coordinator. Among his work: 14 of the Coen Brothers films, every episode of “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, and 22 seasons of “Law and Order: SVU”.

In 1977, he helped mountain climber George Willig scale the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Two years later, he landed his first feature film role as the leader of the Baseball Furies gang in the 1979 cult classic The Warriors.
Once described as “the thinking man’s stunt coordinator,” his hundreds of other coordinating credits include School of Rock, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Sopranos, Reign Over Me, The Manchurian Candidate, Tower Heist, The Birdcage and Angels in America. He also performed stunts on numerous other films, including Independence Day, Scent of a Woman, Ghostbusters II and Coyote Ugly.

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Obit watch: November 27, 2020.

Friday, November 27th, 2020

Geoffrey Palmer. He did a lot of film and TV work: his most famous role may have been Lionel Hardcastle in “As Time Goes By”, which shows up on PBS a lot.

Daria Nicolodi, Italian horror actress and co-author of the screenplay for the 1977 “Suspiria”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

This is a noteworthy Twitter thread:

“Law is the manifest will of the people, the conscious rule of the community. And when the mechanics of law enforcement break down, they must be re-established.”

Posted in Movies, TV | Comments Closed

Now that we are in the Christmas season…

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

…I can post this.

There’s a new Lame Excuse Books catalog out. Books from Lame Excuse Books make fine presents for the SF and/or fantasy fan in your circle of family and friends.

I feel like I got an early Christmas present this year. Maybe. I haven’t decided if I’m going to go see this in a theater, or wait for the home video release.

David Fincher has a new movie coming out. Apparently it will be released to Netflix on December 4th, but there is a theatrical run already at the Alamo Drafthouses in Austin.

I think Fincher is an interesting director. But: he has scientifically designed this movie to get me to put money on the table for it.

Director David Fincher’s MANK is a journey into the black-and-white era of Hollywood through the eyes of alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, played with droll, boozy, intense wit by Gary Oldman. The film follows the former journalist as he races to finish the screenplay for the landmark 1941 film CITIZEN KANE – leading to a battle with wunderkind director Orson Welles over the screenwriting credit.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Endorsements, Movies | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 224

Monday, November 9th, 2020

I’m thinking there’s a theme I want to work with this week.

From the “Dark Docs” channel, “Alive and Free – Or Dead”, a short documentary about Dieter Dengler.

He was one of two survivors, the other being Phisit Intharathat, out of seven prisoners of war (POWs) who escaped from a Pathet Lao prison camp in Laos. He was rescued after 23 days on the run following six months of torture and imprisonment and was the first captured U.S. airman to escape enemy captivity during the Vietnam war.

Lawrence and I have a fair amount of Herzog on our giant movie list, including “Little Dieter Needs To Fly”. I did not know this until today, but there’s a huge Herzog blu-ray box set (affiliate link) from Shout Factory that tempts me greatly.

Bonus: from the “Wings Over Vietnam” series, “The Jolly Greens”, about the guys who rescued pilots who were downed over Vietnam.

Posted in History, Movies | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 6, 2020.

Friday, November 6th, 2020

Elsa Raven.

She was the real estate agent in “The Amityville Horror” and “Clocktower Lady” in “Back to the Future”. She also did a bunch of TV: no “Mannix”, but “Quincy, M.E.”, “The A-Team”, “Wiseguy”, and one of the “Rockford Files” movies, among other credits.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 219

Wednesday, November 4th, 2020

I had a long day and a late night yesterday. I had videos queued up for Tuesday and I have stuff queued up for the Thursday holiday, but I didn’t manage to get anything enqueued for today.

So here’s two longish things, one of which bends the rules a little bit:

“Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story” from the BBC in 2013.

Bonus video: this is my rule bending one, as it is actually a noir movie, not non-fiction. Lawrence mentioned this last night, and I thought I’d throw it up here since I don’t see that he’s blogged about it. This is also kind of a bookmark for me: I might watch this once I’ve caught up on sleep.

“Inner Sanctum”, from 1948. It’s only 62 minutes long.

A man fleeing the police after having committed a murder hides out in a boarding house in a small town.

In addition to this being a somewhat well-regarded noir film, it also features the great SF/fantasy writer Fritz Leiber as “Dr. Valonius”. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but are curious about Leiber, “Dr. Valonius” shows up almost immediately. (Edit: I was misinformed: the Fritz Leiber in “Inner Sanctum” is actually the writer’s father, not the writer.)

Posted in Bookmarks, History, Movies, Music | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 31, 2020.

Saturday, October 31st, 2020

Sean Connery. Man, I love that photo. Borepatch. Variety. THR.

I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been better said by other people. Borepatch beat me on “The Wind and the Lion“. “The Untouchables”. “The Man Who Would Be King”.

And “Zardoz“.

Edited to add: “15 Sean Connery Movies to Stream” from the NYT. Which includes a couple of Bond films, a couple of movies I mentioned above, “The Hunt For Red October”, some other interesting stuff…

…and “The Rock” and “Zardoz”.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 211

Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

We’ve had war. We’ve had pestilence. We’ve had death. I don’t want to do famine.

How about something kind of fun, and relatively short? “The Railrodder” from the National Film Board of Canada. This popped up in my recs at random, and I think it’s kind of historically interesting: it was one of the last films Buster Keaton ever made, and his very last silent film appearance. (This is from 1965, and is in color.)

I spent some time trying to find Keaton’s Canadian safety video, but it didn’t turn up. So for bonus material: “Buster Keaton Rides Again” a longer video about the making of “The Railrodder”. Sort of. There’s more to it than that. It is also more than twice as long as the “The Railrodder”, but it has great footage of Keaton at work.

Posted in History, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 22nd, 2020.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

It is going to be one of those two obit watches days, for reasons.

Marge Champion, of Marge and Gower Champion fame. She was 101.

Ms. Champion was a child of Hollywood, the daughter of a dance coach who taught her ballet, tap and the twirls, kicks and glorious sweeps of the ballroom. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl as a girl and as a teenager was a model for three Walt Disney animated features, her graceful moves transposed to the heroine of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), to the Blue Fairy that gave life to the puppet in “Pinocchio” (1940) and to the hippo ballerinas tripping lightly in tutus for “Dance of the Hours” in “Fantasia” (1940).
But her career came to little until 1947, when she and Gower Champion, a childhood friend, became partners both professionally and personally. In the next few years, they were pivotal in a transition from the escapist musicals of the Depression to an exuberant new age of postwar television, successors to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first dance team to achieve national popularity through television.
The Champions did not possess the sheer magic of Astaire and Rogers or rival their stardom in Hollywood. But as television began to permeate American homes in 1949, they joined the weekly “Admiral Broadway Revue,” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, on the Dumont and NBC networks, and delivered something new: narrative dances that sparkled with pantomime, satire, parody and touches of nostalgia.

…

As their audiences grew into the millions, Hollywood beckoned. The Champions played themselves in “Mr. Music” (1950), a light comedy with Bing Crosby about a sidetracked songwriter. In “Show Boat” (1951), with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, the Champions were members of the onboard troupe of entertainers and sang as well as danced. In “Lovely to Look At” (1952), a remake of “Roberta” also with Keel and Grayson, the Champions sang and danced a memorable number, “I Won’t Dance.” In their first roles with top billing, they played married dancers loosely based on themselves in “Everything I Have Is Yours” (1952).
The Champions radiated the vitality of young America, looking even in middle age like a couple of fresh-scrubbed teenagers. They were extraordinarily handsome — she a petite brunette with the blushing cheeks and sincere brown eyes of the girl next door; he a tall, slender letterman with a crew cut and a dreamboat face. They were in constant motion, swirling, dipping, leaping. John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune called them “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography and infinitely meticulous in execution.”

Father John Vakulskas. No, you probably never heard of him. He was an ordained Catholic priest and spent 45 years in the Sioux City Diocese.

But his major ministry was to carnival workers.

Father Vakulskas was all of 25 and an assistant pastor in Le Mars, Iowa, when he received a call from a carnival owner’s wife. Her husband was seriously ill, and her frantic first impulse was to call a priest for help — because in the days before 911, as Father Vakulskas learned, few hospitals would send help for a carnival worker.
Father Vakulskas prevailed upon a doctor in town to visit the man, as Mr. Hanschen, of the Showmen’s League, noted in a speech in 2016, when Father Vakulskas was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame. The diagnosis was exhaustion, ptomaine poisoning and double pneumonia. (It had been a cold and rainy summer, and the man had been working around the clock.) The doctor ordered bed rest, the man recovered, and the couple proposed that Father Vakulskas begin a ministry for carnival people.
On his retirement in 2014 from the Sioux City Diocese, Father Vakulskas moved to Florida and served six parishes there.

…

Often clad in robes emblazoned with circus insignia, he baptized babies in fonts sometimes improvised from buckets or tubs, officiated at marriages and heard confessions from Catholics who were, in carnival parlance, copping a plea.
You didn’t have to be Catholic, though, to be welcomed by the man everyone learned to call Father John, a big, burly priest who embraced those of all faiths and of no faith at all. His work began mostly after midnight, when the crowds had left the midway, the lights had been dimmed and the growl of generators ruffled the silence.
“I’m just a common priest,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “It might sound schmaltzy, but I love families and the good times. But I’m there for the sorrows, too. To be accepted on the carnival fairground is a good indication that God is representative.”

…

Pope John Paul II — one of three popes to honor his work — appointed Father Vakulskas International Coordinator of Carnival Ministries in 1993.

And by the way:

He wrote his own obituary, and in it he noted that he was a licensed, instrument-rated airline pilot and an amateur radio operator, and that his passions included sailing, snow skiing, water skiing and cheering for the Chicago Cubs.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Religion, Theatre | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: October 19, 2020.

Monday, October 19th, 2020

Rhonda Fleming.

She had a heck of a career, going from “Out of the Past” to “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” to “The Nude Bomb” and “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”. Never did a “Mannix”, but she did do some Western series, “Police Woman”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Search”.

(“Search” is apparently available from Amazon as a slightly pricey DVD set. I think it’s print-on-demand, but can’t tell from the listing. I may have to pick this up: on the one hand, it isn’t like we don’t already have enough TV series to watch on Saturday nights. But on the other hand, “Search” only had 23 episodes.)

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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