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The Natural starring Robert Redford: Based on the Book by Bernard Malamud

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Happy Fourth of July!

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Robert Redford sets off some sparks in The Natural. My kind of fireworks!

Fourth of July fireworks Robert Redford The Natural

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To Sir With Love starring Sydney Poitier: #SaturdayMatinee

“A story as fresh as the girls in their minis ... and as cool as their teacher had to be.” That tag line’s impossibly heavy-handed now, but Sydney Poitier was, and remains, the epitome of cool.

Poitier was the first black man I fell in love with. Black boys and men were a rarity when I was growing up in Canada in the sixties. In middle school in Niagara Falls, George Bell was the only black boy on campus, period, an outsider. It was 1967 and I was 13 when I saw Sydney Poitier in the now classic To Sir with Love. Everything about the drama called out to me.

The tough London kids, girls with their white lipstick and cool clothes, the boys with their wild bravado. And this calm, classy man with the velvety voice, determined not to lose his temper, determined to break through. Like Judy Geeson as Pamela, I wanted to dance with Sir. Like Lulu as Babs, I wanted to send him my love in a song. Never mind the seething racial tensions, I was consumed with the unconscious seething sexual tension…

Robert Redford & Meryl Streep in 'Out of Africa': Best Picture 1986

All the movies we’ve never seenIt’s Oscar season. Time for all the heavyweights to come out and play. Today’s Saturday Matinee features the Academy Award winner for Best Picture thirty years ago this year. Starring my all time fave Robert Redford and the oft-nominated Meryl Streep. Out of Africa counts as one of her 19 20 Oscar nominations! Poor Bobby, he’s only been nominated the one time for his work as an actor. That was for The Sting and he lost.

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Based in part on Karen Blixen’s memoir Out of Africa published under the pseudonym Isak Dineson, the film tells the story of a Danish plantation owner (Streep) in Kenya, unhappily tethered in a marriage of convenience, who falls in love with a free-spirited big game hunter (Redford).

It’s been thirty years since the film was released in theaters. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, Out of Africa won seven of them including Best Picture. I must have see the movie when it first came out but my memory is vague at best. I can see t…

The Man with The Golden Arm: Based on the book by Nelson Algren

I read The Man with the Golden Arm way back in a college English class. American Literature: Post World War II. Something like that. The novel was written by Nelson Algren, born on this day (March 28, 1909) in 1949, won the National Book Award in 1950 and was made into a film starring Francis Albert Sinatra in 1955.

The main character, Frankie the man with the golden arm is an army vet “with a monkey on his bank’’. He's an addict, a dealer in illegal card games, a wannabe drummer tricked into marriage to the wrong woman. Set in Chicago, on its poverty-ridden streets, revealing a dark underbelly of America in a way unlike the way I was used to seeing our country, I was deeply moved. At the time I was still very much enamored of the British writers ala Dickens or at least the American writers who crossed the pond and gave us their view of the continent, ala Henry James. This ugly America was for my sheltered eyes, a whole new bag.
‘Frankie Machine had seen some bad ones in his twenty-…

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