On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 8:23 PM Kevin M. <drunkbastar...@gmail.com> wrote:
The Beatles movies were on par with the Elvis movies, but the Beatles wisely seem disinclined to recirculate those theatrical train wrecks. Sinatra had some bad movies, too, but as the examples you referenced illustrate, either he or his handlers tried to put him in films with some gravitas. That said, “4 for Texas” starring Sinatra, Dean Martin, a Bond girl, AND the Three Stooges is, in this writer’s humble opinion, so bad it is good. A Hard Day's Night is exactly the type of movie one would want Elvis to make. The producers got Dick Lester to direct and he wasn't beholden to any Hollywood tropes. He put together a documentary style movie that got to show The Beatles having fun and being cheeky and self-deprecating. And he got the requisite amount of musical numbers in. Help didn't reach those heights. I'm trying to imagine an Elvis version of Yellow Submarine and um... As a mental exercise I've been trying to think of what would have happened if a good director of the Elvis era movies had made a movie with him. Someone like Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, or John Frankenheimer. First, I think Tom Parker, or whoever handled these things in Elvis's management, would have sent back the script and said "no way." If they did manage to get it to the shooting stage the director would probably get rid of Elvis within a week for not being up to the material. Hollywood wanted cheap and easy Elvis movies and that's what they put together for him. > The Fleming Bond novels were pulp fiction. They functioned well as mens’ > adventure stories when they were written though they have comic book > characters and plotting. The Goldfinger story in the book is exceptionally > stupid. Getting a good movie out of it is always going to be difficult and > they built the franchise by concentrating on gadgets and special effects. > > Whatever you think of Dr. No, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert) Bond > takes out the stronghold by turning off the coolant to the nuclear reactor > core, causing a meltdown. Of course in the movie it just causes a > conventional explosion and not the apocalyptic effect of a molten reactor > core entering the Caribbean Sea. > Considering how little money was spent on those early Bond films, we should be grateful any explosion was featured at all. Sean Connery had to pay for his own hairpieces back then. The more I think of Bond, both in the novels and the movies, the less I like him. I'll grant there's a limit to how much we can judge characters from another era by today's standards but Bond is drawn to appeal to adolescent boys. He embodies the worst of white attitudes at the end of the colonial era and he is an out-and-out misogynist. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiFjoHxwP94D__hT%2BZ53tzyT8yP3Hp6N8mhvGMv6NFL-xA%40mail.gmail.com.
