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Post by RiP, IMDb on May 2, 2018 3:11:15 GMT
Hey, that’s funny, RiP, IMDb , I was thinking of that one the other day. That was the guy’s username, “Rainybear”? I hope he did find that western… Now that was one of those very long-running ones too… Long, BUT...still NOT anywhere NEAR as long as my vocoder one.
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 0:23:55 GMT
Hey, anyone here have a Twitter account and want to send a message to Michael Caine? I’d do it myself, but I’ve got my old aversion to social media; I know that’s a silly reason. Caine probably wouldn’t respond, but it’s worth a shot at this point… Oh, yippee. I have two insoluble mysteries of my own and a few more from other people! I think I should get out of this ‘movie-quest’ game and go on to something less exhausting, like race-car driving or extreme dirt biking. Anyone?
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Post by jervistetch on May 3, 2018 2:38:49 GMT
I'm not on any social media, Salzmank. Sorry. The rules of the Witness Protection Program prohibit it.
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Post by BATouttaheck on May 3, 2018 2:44:15 GMT
I'm not on any social media, Nalkarj. Sorry. The rules of the Witness Protection Program prohibit it. I can vouch for that. 'Tis too true and it's a dumb rule because everyone ELSE gets to tweet and twitter and face-book and do all that other fun stuff and the explain-ations about why not doin' it are awkward and usually un-convincing. <pout!>
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 3:01:57 GMT
Nor I, BATouttaheck and jervistetch, which is why I was asking. It’s a big stretch, but I was just wonderin’… Anyhoo, thanks, fellas. Still hunting after this, a bit like hunting Carroll’s Snark!
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Post by BATouttaheck on May 3, 2018 3:06:49 GMT
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Post by BATouttaheck on May 3, 2018 3:08:42 GMT
and then there's also
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 19:38:35 GMT
I found two books in the library: Anthony Shaffer’s memoir ( So What Did You Expect?, 2001) and Kenneth Geist’s analysis of Mankiewicz’s career ( Pictures Will Talk, 1983). So What Did You Expect? has to be the most unenlightening book I’ve ever read: it didn’t tell me anything about the Sleuth singer, yes, but it also didn’t tell me anything about anything. Shaffer’s name-dropping—Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, Sidney Lumet, Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine—doesn’t even come across as very entertaining, as he doesn’t reveal a single thing about any of these people. Sorry—it just comes across as something Shaffer wrote for a little extra cash. Pictures Will Talk is better in every way, though I only glanced through it. For our purposes in hunting down the singer, there were a few promising points Geist raised: 1. It doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to find anything out about our man by way of producer Morton Gottlieb. According to Geist, he had nothing to do with the movie and only got a producer’s credit because he’d been the producer of the stage play. Producorial duties were in fact split between the executive producer, Edgar J. Scherick, and the production manager, Frank Ernst. 2. “Mankiewicz had especially devised a long dissolve sequence of all the mechanical dolls in motion, accompanied by three Cole Porter songs, to convey the stage play’s intermission break without bringing the film to a halt” (p. 388). We talked about this—the intermission that Scherick added and Mankiewicz protested, as jervistetch and I discussed—on p. 10 of this thread, but this is the first reference I’ve seen that Mankiewicz especially devised this sequence himself. I think the singer stuff is Mankiewicz’s idea, rather than Shaffer’s or Scherick’s. 3. Geist quotes from a Mankiewicz interview, in which Mankiewicz discusses our scene. He’s talking particularly of the automata, but he goes into the scene in general…and then gets cut off. Does anyone know where the interview is from? Geist doesn’t provide a source. (ETA: If anyone wants to look at Pictures Will Talk for himself, it’s available on OpenLibrary, I just learned.) 4. Mankiewicz says several times that he wants to play his own directorial game on the audience, in addition to the game inherent in Shaffer’s script. It may not have anything to do with us, but it would fit nicely if Mankiewicz et al. determined on purpose to hide the identity of the singer. 5. Does anyone know of a baritone named Robert Merrill? He played Marcello in an English-language production of La bohème that Mankiewicz directed—but he started as a crooner and also did musical theatre, including Porter. I don’t exactly have the opportunity to listen to anything he sang (some of it’s on YouTube) at the moment, but it’s interesting. He died in 2004.
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 19:59:28 GMT
Wow, that was a wall of text, yet I still have another thing to add. (Sorry.) I hadn’t realized it before, but John Addison also wrote the music for Mankiewicz’s other mystery-thriller, The Honey Pot. Probably nothing, but it may be another jumping-off point.
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 20:30:02 GMT
It’s not Merrill. Oh, well.
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Post by jervistetch on May 3, 2018 20:54:51 GMT
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 21:03:04 GMT
Thanks, jervistetch . I have not in fact seen that interview, but I’ll check it out when I get home. I took a look at Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews on Google Books, but I wasn’t able to read the actual book, and so far I’m unable to see anything about Sleuth.
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Post by Doghouse6 on May 3, 2018 21:03:21 GMT
It’s not Merrill. Oh, well. I remember Merrill from regular appearances with Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan in the '60s, and his mention sounded like an unlikely possibility, although some singers can exhibit astonishing flexibility (Russell Watson, for instance). I'm surprised this didn't occur to me before, but the late John Addison's participation, irrespective of the film having been produced in England, suggests that the music was recorded there as well; as you know, the one often has nothing to do with the other, but Addison did work in the UK until the '80s, when he relocated to the US and began working in television. I bring it up because, along the lines of performers' guilds like AFTRA and Actors Equity, there must certainly be UK counterparts, if you're inclined to go to those lengths. Too bad none of us has a job to offer him. That might bring him out of the woodwork.
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Post by Nalkarj on May 3, 2018 23:19:41 GMT
Thanks, Doghouse6 . I probably should have checked the clips of Merrill before posting anything about him, but it seemed too intriguing a lead not to mention. I have reached out to two UK actors’ unions; neither one responded, unfortunately. Hey, you know what, though—I can go ahead and write a musical based on this ( BATouttaheck wanted me to write a book) and then get the guy to sing Porter for that! Sure to bring him out. I also thought of something I hadn’t before: in So What Did You Expect?, Shaffer spends a whole chapter talking about film music. (There are pretty much zero insights—but that seems his wont in that book.) If the Sleuth guy had been a ‘singer specially for the film, don’t you think he would have mentioned him? (Unless, of course, he had nothing at all to do with that scene, either in writing or anything else.) Similarly, in Pictures Will Talk, Geist mentions the Porter songs often, though with no mention of the singer, of course. Perhaps it never occurred to him (this ‘mystery’ is not, of course, important in the scheme of things, or even central to Sleuth), but I would have thought Mankiewicz would have mentioned something (“so we found John Q. Smith doing theatre in the West End at the time there and asked him if he could sing for the movie…”). I still think it is a ‘70s singer specially for the movie, but the lack of even a cursory mention seems curious.
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Post by Doghouse6 on May 4, 2018 22:06:51 GMT
I have reached out to two UK actors’ unions; neither one responded, unfortunately. Hey, you know what, though—I can go ahead and write a musical based on this ( BATouttaheck wanted me to write a book) and then get the guy to sing Porter for that! Sure to bring him out. I should have guessed you'd already have touched that base (or did you mention it before and I simply forgot?). Your idea of a musical reminds me of a film from the early '90s, Hear My Song, that was one of the earliest of that wave of British films of the decade about underdogs triumphing ( The Full Monty, Waking Ned Devine, Billy Madison, et al), and concerns a nightclub owner's (Adrian Dunbar) efforts to locate a long-missing but much-revered Irish tenor (a surprisingly cast but quite effective Ned Beatty) who'd dropped out of sight decades before. David McCallum plays the indefatigable investigator who's been after him for tax evasion. Rather charming film as I recall. I can only hope our Sleuth singer isn't in hiding for similar reasons.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on May 6, 2018 14:27:20 GMT
5. Does anyone know of a baritone named Robert Merrill? He played Marcello in an English-language production of La bohème that Mankiewicz directed—but he started as a crooner and also did musical theatre, including Porter. I don’t exactly have the opportunity to listen to anything he sang (some of it’s on YouTube) at the moment, but it’s interesting. He died in 2004. Yes. Merrill was one of the premiere American opera singers of the golden age and one of the first male pop-crossover stars. He made a lot of excellent Puccini and Verdi recordings, and was a staple of the Metropolitan Opera for many years. His recording of La Boheme with Bjorling, de los Angeles, and Beecham is a classic. Here he is making the infamously difficult Largo al Factotum look easy:
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Post by BATouttaheck on May 7, 2018 3:15:07 GMT
cOLUMBO WAS SINGING IN TONIGHT'S EPISODE. hE IS DEFINATELY not THE "SLEUTH SINGER" !
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Post by BATouttaheck on Jul 16, 2018 12:21:20 GMT
Bumping this puppy to the top so that the one person who can answer it can see it and we can get this one marked SOLVED after an eternity of waiting and searching and begging and all that crying can be stopped ! PLEASE we need an end to the agony of not knowing …
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Post by Nalkarj on Jul 31, 2018 16:50:25 GMT
For some reason I thought I saw a notification of a new post here... Oh boohoo. ^^^Now that I’m apparently just bumping this after all, BATouttaheck, I’ve got to say that I love the wide-eyed bairn above!
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Post by BATouttaheck on Jul 31, 2018 16:56:28 GMT
NalkarjThat wide-eyed bairn is an old photo of jelly man I found on the Web-thingy. Such a cute babe back then was he.
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