What movie did YOU just FINISH watching?

The weekend, I finally finished viewing all the Vincente Minnelli movies with this dog: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). It was very long and very boring, saved only by its big musical sections, such as Come Back to Me. I love Barbra Streisand singing, but there should have been more of it--and less of a story--in this movie. 

IMO, Vincente Minnelli made some great movies: Cabin in the Sky (1943) -- The Clock (1945) -- The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) -- Tea and Sympathy (1956), but he also made some bad ones too.
I prefer his plot-driven movies to his musicals. But then, few can deny that Gigi (1958) with 9 Oscars and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) with 4 Oscars, are masterpieces. (I can't say the same thing for An American in Paris (1951) even though it won Won 6 Oscars.)

He did a couple remakes that I can think of: 
Kismet (1955), a musical based on Kismet (1944)
and 
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) based on the silent, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)--boy that was a mistake to remake THAT movie!!!!! 

The Unguarded Hour (1936) Sam Wood takes us on a great crime drama, with lots of twist and turns. What starts out looking like an early drama from the British upper-class society, ends up as a first-class crime drama in which an up-and-coming national prosecutor (Franchot Tone) appears to be guilty of the crime connected to the one he is prosecuting. The movie starts quickly when a blackmailer (Henry Daniell) crashes a party to inform Tone's new wife (Loretta Young) that he has some damaging letters that Tone had written to Daniell's wife. Young, trying to protect Tone's promising career, complies with Daniell's blackmail and, in the process, ends up as a possible witness to a possible murder, a murder that her husband is assigned to prosecute. But, there is more: the blackmail involves an affair Tone had had before he married Young. Roland Young and Lewis Stone play key roles in the overall plot.

(I rented this movie and then decided to buy so that I could re-play it a few more times. There is that much to it!)

   

Hot Spell (1958)  one of the movies I was searching for on another thread last week. I did find in on YouTube in fairly reasonable condition:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVK2EmEU7ag.

Until her Oscar win for Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), Shirley Booth was unknown to movie audiences, although she had been working on stage in a wide variety of roles since 1925: www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/shirley-booth-25899. After Come Back, Little Sheba, she made only three more feature films, with three of the four directed by Daniel Mann. After those four movies, she went into TV and is probably most remembered for her TV sitcom, Hazel. Through her characters, she usually came across as a simple, middle-aged wife who was quietly vulnerable to her husband and always yearning for something from the past when times were better. (She could convey all that through her voice and actions).

In Come Back, Little Sheba, this "yearning for the past" is symbolized by her dreams about her former little dog, Sheba. In Hot Spell, Alma Duval's (soul of the valley) "yearning for the past" is conveyed by wanting to return to New Paris, when her children were bright, young, and needful of her,  and her husband still loved her. But now Alma's husband no longer needs her, and her children (Earl Holliman, Shirley MacLaine, and Clint Kimbrough) are all grown up with problems and lives of their own.

It's hard to imagine two actors with such different characteristic styles than Shirley Booth's quivering restraint and Anthony Quinn's brutish id. But, therein lies the yin and yang of this family drama, ready to explode at any minute.

[Yet, there is an interlude of comedy in this movie when Booth's friend (Eileen Heckart) tries to teach how to become more like an unpredictable floozy, you know, the type of woman that is now attractive to Booth's husband, Quinn.] 

This movie seems like it might have been made from a stage play, or even a teleplay, but it was developed by James Poe from a novel by Lonnie Coleman. Shirley Booth and Shirley MacLaine immediately went on from this movie to make The Matchmaker (1958), the last feature film of Booth's short movie career. 

Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker has produced an interesting and fruitful run of hits: from Play (Ruth Gordon)--to movie (Shirley Booth)--to musical play (Carol Channing) to musical movie (Barbra Streisand).
 
      

But here is a bit of Shirley Booth trivia that I found interesting:
----Quote from IMDb
  
OK, so I started talking about a movie and got distracted into talking about Shirley Booth.

The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970) was  the last of William Wyler's movies. This completes my viewing collection of all of Wyler's movies from Counsellor-at-Law (1933) to this movie.

With all of its violence and revenge, this was a bit campy at times and not at all typical of Wyler's work in general. However, when all is said and done, it was still a very good movie. 

In my opinion, Wyler may have been the most "consistently" great directors of the classical movie period.
I say "consistently great" in that during his run of movies, he never had a real stinker in the bunch.
This cannot be said of any of the other great directors from the classical period, can it?

Among Wyler's most interesting movies are those that he borrowed from stage plays set in one location, with several overlapping stories:
Counsellor-at-Law (1933) from an Elmer Rice play
Dead End (1937) from a Sidney Kingsley play.
Detective Story (1951) from a Sidney Kingsley play.
The Desperate Hours (1955) from a Joseph Hayes novel and play.

Wyler did one remake of one of his own movies: The Children's Hour (1961) from These Three (1936).
He also dis a remake of Fred Niblo's silent epic, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) with Ben-Hur (1959).
Ben-Hur (1959) would hold the title of movies earning the most Oscars (11) until Titanic (1997)  and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) would go on to equaled it with 11 wins each.   

Two of my favorite Wyler movies are related to the effects of war on the home front: 
Mrs. Miniver (1942) with 6 Oscar and...
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with 7 Oscar wins.

His western-like films include some excellent movies:
The Westerner (1940) is a classical western satire with Walter Brennan winning an Oscar by playing Judge Roy Bean who is out smarted, at every turn, by cow poke, Cole Harden (Gary Cooper). This is one of many movies in which Brennan and Cooper will eventually co-star. 
The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), for whatever role he played in the direction, is  perhaps the funniest western Cooper ever played.
Friendly Persuasion (1956), while not strictly speaking is a western, is western-like. It was nominated for 6 Oscars (2 of them for Wyler's role in making the movie).
The Big Country (1958) is a big movie and in interesting story with a classical western family feud, with Oscar winner, Burl Ives and Charles Bickford as the two family patriarchs fighting over water writes.   

Wyler's Personal Oscar Totals: 13 Nominations with 3 wins (not including the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award).