Maybe it was a B-flick, but Dana Wynter was one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen.
Posted on 04/18/2021 6:52:44 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Don Siegel died thirty years ago - April 20th 1991- and millions of folks who care not a jot or tittle about the names of movie directors surely know at least one Siegel scene. Here is Clint Eastwood five decades ago in Dirty Harry, with one of the most quoted lines of cinematic dialogue of the last half-century:
Such a scene would be unthinkable today - if only because a contemporary audience wouldn't be rooting for the cop. The whole thing would be caught on a hundred cellphones, and the punk would be George Floyd and the policeman discharging the empty Magnum into him would be Dirty Derek Chauvin, and in the next scene he'd be fired from the force and charged with attempted homicide, etc. Even more than other popular media, movies operate on very Leninist who/whom principles.
Don Siegel went back a long way - so far back that his curriculium vitae includes this:
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Maybe it was a B-flick, but Dana Wynter was one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen.
From the beginning of this Virus I thought about this movie. We’re living it now. That movie scared me when I was a kid but now I see the parallels with today’s events.
Disagree with Steyn on this issue. Audiences crave well written scripts that reflect honest life stories. “Woke” movies are essentially boring propaganda however well they are crafted or even acted. They inevitably fail before audiences. They impress only the amen chorus of those that control the Academy awards and other nonsensical award shows.
The public needs and craves clearly unwoke movie producers, writers and directors. Who will be the next great film makers? People who do not stifle and self censor themselves by fearing to offend, will be successful.
In Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a remake of Siegel’s own 1956 film, Siegel appears as a taxi driver.
Siegel also has a cameo role as a bartender in Eastwood’s “Play Misty for Me,” as well as in Eastman’s “Dirty Harry.”
The Dirty Hairy scene is an all time classic and who could have pulled it off as well as Clint! But there is an inacuracy in the quote. The 44 Magnum is a powerful cartridge, typically with a 240 grain bullet travelling up to around 1500 fps as it leaves the muzzle. But as can be seen in this artsy ballistic gel video it would likely make someones eyes pop out as the shock wave turned their brain to mush but it seems highly unlikely that their head would leave their body.
I got all the Dirty Harry movies as soon as they were put on DVD and every once in a while I pop one in just to laugh at the memory of the good old days.
So many really great movies of yesteryear could never be made today and we are ALL the worse for it. Among those are perhaps 2 of the funniest movies ever made, Blazing Saddles and History of the World (Part 1), both produced by Mel Brooks. A couple of his other movies were excellent as well such as The Producers and Space Balls.
In a fairly recent interview Brooks said the PC movement has destroyed comedy in film making as well as in Night Clubs something echoed by Jerry Seinfeld recently.
Agree,
I’ve got a DVD collection
of All the un wokeness
I could find!
.
“Invasion of the
Body Snatchers”
is not in it.
.
“Young Frankenstein”
IS!
My high school teacher had a bit part in the last Dirty Harry movie. None of us knew it but he moonlighted as an actor. He’s the Chinese chef waving a cleaver in one scene. It was quite surprising to be sitting in the movie theater and see my typing teacher pop out on the big screen yelling in Chinese. Ha ha.
It always amazed me, as a elementary or Jr high student, when I’d see one of my teachers doing something “human” outside of school. Like them shopping at Wal-Mart, or bringing a boyfriend to a school function. I guess they actually had lives outside of school. LOL. And I married a teacher!
Good stories require conflict and usually resolution and in order to involve the audience the story has to grant each side of the conflict at least a semblance of humanity or honor and passion. Woke offerings seem to not be able to grant humanity to the other side. I think one of the most thought-provoking movies I watched was “The Train” starring Burt Lancaster which had a black-and-white conflict but with complicated, human protagonist and antagonist.
The plot and characterizations were almost entirely conveyed through well-written and convincingly performed dialog.
It could not be done in today's Hollywood, what with multi-camera/rapid scene cuts trying to piece brief phrases from alleged "stars" with debatable talent into a dialog to support fights with computer generated foes.
I agree to a point. The anti govt/ military films made about A’stan and Iraq bombed even with high end stars. But an unending torrent of such films
without any intellectual competition has an effect.
It would definitely ruin someone’s day.
I remember when that movie came out and laughed at all the liberal critics who said it was an allegory to the HUAC "Red Scare" investigations and Joe McCarthy. Siegel joked that the pods represented movie industry executives.
Later on, that same crowd oohed and ahhed over Roger Corman's "tight" directing of "Night of the Living Dead" being done in only two reels. Corman's reply was "We couldn't afford a third reel."
From IMDB: Don Siegel later claimed that during filming he crept into Dana Wynter's house and slipped a pod under her bed, causing her to become hysterical when she found it. "That is a bit far-out," Wynter replied when she heard Siegel's account. "Actually, he left it on my doorstep. He had a girlfriend who lived next door to me . . . and he would pass my cottage all the time. And one night he just left it on the doorstep!"
In the 1978 remake, the scene opens with Kevin McCarthy running through the traffic trying to warn everyone - which was the ending scene in the original. A nice tip 'o the derby.
I disagree. To me, and probably to many who saw it at teh time, the artichoke people represented Communism. And interestingly enough, the man trying to warn of the threat they imposed was played by an actor named McCarthy.
However, I prefer the book, which had a happy ending, over the movie.
Back in 1980, Saturday Night Live aired an episode based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The artichoke humanoids appeared among a group of liberals and soon turned them all into Reaganite conservatives.
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