Thursday, January 21, 2021

Thursday, 21 January 2021—DAY SEVEN

 



Welcome back.  It's a cockeyed Thursday, so welcome to the last Wednesday edition of BOOKMAN'S MOVIE SCREENSHOT GAME.  Today's game should open your synapses a bit.

Here are the titles of yesterday's movies.


1.

Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

(Full title not necessary)

2.

Cleopatra (1963)

3.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

4.

An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

5.

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

6.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

7.

When Harry Met Sally … (1989)

8.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

9.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

10.

Best in Show (2000)


Congratulations to catbert and Fred for correctly identifying all ten of yesterday's movies.




Here are today's buffer images.



Suzanne Pleshette (on the ground), Rod Taylor, and Alfred Hitchcock on location in Bodega, California, filming The Birds (1963)














Ann Savage and Tom Neal in Detour (1945)






All right, are you ready to play?  Then let's play!  Good luck and have fun!







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Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Wednesday, 20 January 2021—DAY SIX

 


Hello movie fans.  If it's Wednesday, it must be Tuesday.  Welcome to our second Tuesday edition of Bookman's Movie Screenshot Game.  For those joining us for the first time, the game is simple.  Below, there are ten screenshots, each from a different film.  Identify each of the ten with its correct title.  Post your responses in the "Comments" section below or in the appropriate thread at FPN.  Expect today's lineup to be somewhat more challenging than yesterday's.


And speaking of yesterday, here are the correct titles:

1.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

2.

Ghostbusters (1984)

3.

The Graduate (1967)

4.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

5.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

6.

Rear Window (1954)

7.

Witness (1985)

8.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

9.

The Sting (1973)

10.

Elmer Gantry (1960)


Congratulations to catbert, Ruth, and Paul for correctly identifying all ten of yesterday's movies.


[Continued from yesterday]

For Hedy Lamarr's first American film, Louis B. Mayer at M.G.M. lent her to independent film producer Walter Wanger who cast her as the female lead in his movie Algiers (1938), with romantic sensation Charles Boyer.  The movie was a sensation.  And the Hollywood press instantly dubbed Lamarr "the most beautiful woman in the world."  (She and Boyer reprised their roles in a 1941 Lux Radio Theatre production of Algiers.)

Algiers was the inspiration for Casablanca (1942).  In fact, Warner Brothers offered Lamarr the role of Ilsa Lund.  Lamarr turned it down.  She was also offered the role of Paula Alquist in Gaslight.  She turned that role down too.  Both roles went to Ingrid Bergman.

Nevertheless, Lamarr was a busy actor after Algiers.  She worked with the top male stars at M.G.M.—Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, William Powell, and Robert Taylor.  Her roles for M.G.M., and later RKO—and the films' advertising—took advantage of her beauty and sensuality from head to toe in movies like Lady of the Tropics (1939); Tortilla Flat (1942); Crossroads (1942); White Cargo (1942); The Heavenly Body (1944); Dishonored Lady; the blockbuster Samson and Delilah (1949), with Lamarr as Delilah, her favorite role, under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille; A Lady Without a Passport (1950); and Loves of Three Queens (1954).

It turned out, however, that perhaps her greatest talent came through her hobby—inventing.  She invented an improved traffic light and a tablet that dissolved in soda water to make a soft drink.  While dating Howard Hughes, the movie mogul and aviation pioneer was struck by her inventiveness and put his aviation engineers and lab at her disposal.

Early in WWII, the allies discovered that their navies' radio-controlled torpedoes were easily jammed by the Germans.  Lamarr decided to invent something that would make allied torpedoes undetectable using what's known as frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology.  And she did, with the help of her friend, George Antheil, a pianist and composer.  (A miniature player-piano mechanism was required to perfect the design.)

The invention was patented in 1942 and presented to the Department of the Navy.  But the U.S. Navy was unreceptive to outside inventions during wartime, and it did not adopt the technology until 1957.  By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the technology was being used on Navy ships.

In the 1950s, Lamarr's film career went into a steep decline.  By the mid-60s she was impoverished and living as a recluse.  Her living condition was revealed in a Look magazine article, replete with a photo that showed her run-down Cadillac Eldorado, and on the driver's door were her initials made with Blue Chip Stamps.  When she died in 2000, she was penniless.

Spread spectrum technology found renewed interest in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  It is used in Bluetooth and was similar to the technologies used in early Wi-Fi.  Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil were inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.



Here are today's buffer images:




Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, and David Landau in Horse Feathers (1932)




Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, and Louis Calhern in Duck Soup (1933)





All right, everyone.  Are you ready to play?  Then let's play!  Good luck and have fun!









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Monday, January 18, 2021

Tuesday, 19 January 2021—DAY FIVE

 


Welcome back to BOOKMAN'S MOVIE SCREENSHOT GAME.  Today is the Monday game even though it's Tuesday, and that means today is another easy game to start the week.


ON THIS DAY IN MOVIE HISTORY, JANUARY 19, …




… actor and woman of many talents Hedy Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida, in 2000.

I.

American audiences gasped when she first appeared onscreen.  Only a small number of actors have been universally called "the most beautiful woman in the world."  Hedy Lamarr, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ava Gardner come to my mind.  In that order.

She was born Hedwig (nicknamed Hedy) Eva Marie Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, in 1914.  Kiesler studied under Max Reinhardt and played numerous roles on stage.  She also had a few small roles in films between 1930 and 1933, the year Adolf Hitler consolidated his dictatorship and announced the Third Reich in Germany.  In that year she earned her first starring role, in the notorious German film Ecstasy.  In one scene she appears with full frontal nudity, and in a different scene the camera focuses on her face as her character orgasms.  Hitler banned the film in Germany.  The Hays Code forbade its showing in the U.S.

After a typical stage performance in Vienna, Kiesler's male admirers would wait in queues that stretched out of her dressing room, down a corridor, and out onto the sidewalk.  One such admirer was particularly pushy, refusing to take no for an answer when he asked to take her on dates.  She eventually acquiesced and eventually came to appreciate the man.  But the man, arms merchant and munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, had ties to Mussolini and Hitler.  Mandl pressed Kiesler to marry him. She agreed, despite his ultimatum that she convert to Catholicism or there would be no marriage.  Kiesler's parents could not change her mind, and she married Mandl in 1934.

His controlling nature doomed the marriage, and in 1935 Kiesler diguised herself as a maid and fled Mandl, fled Austria, and went to Paris.

The year 1938 was momentous for Kiesler.  In London she met Louis B. Mayer who had gone there to scout talent.  After some hard bargaining on her part, (he offered $125 per week but eventually agreed to $500), she signed a multi-year contract with M.G.M.

Shortly afterward, at the behest of Mayer who worried about her name's association with the banned Ecstasy, she changed her surname from Kiesler to Lamarr.  And after the anchluss in Austria, Lamarr interrupted her work on her first American film, Algiers, with Charles Boyer, to return home and help her mother flee the Nazis.  [Part II tomorrow.]






Here are today's buffer images.




Carole Lombard




Elizabeth Taylor




All right, everyone.  Are you ready to play?  Then let's play!  Good luck and have fun!





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Friday, January 15, 2021

ANSWERS—14 January 2021—DAY FOUR

 


The first week is done.  Next week we start fresh with another easy Monday edition of BOOKMAN'S MOVIE SCREENSHOT GAME.

Here are the correct titles for yesterday's movies.


1.

Chinatown (1974)

2.

Becket (1964)

3.

North by Northwest (1959)

4.

Chicago (2002)

5.

The Social Network (2010)

6.

Young Frankenstein (1974)

7.

The Third Man (1949)

8.

Thelma & Louise (1991)

9.

Guarding Tess (1994)

10.

Apollo 13 (1995)


Congratulations to catbert and Fred for correctly identifying all 10 of yesterday's movies.




Screenshot of the Month: "L.A. Confidential" (1997)

Russell Crowe ("Officer Bud White") dangling  Ron Rifkin ("District Attorney Ellis Loew") out an L.A.P.D. upper  floor o...