Movies

[Screwball]

Burt Lancaster is best remembered as Moonlight Graham. 🙂 

[CMRivdogs]

4 hours ago, chasfh said:

OK, I am going to throw this out there as a potentially fun thought exercise. This comes off a conversation I had with a couple buddies of mine and we talked about it for at least an hour running, it was so interesting to contemplate. Maybe we have some fun with this here—maybe it goes nowhere. Let's see.

I believe most of us are big fans of the movie A Few Good Men. One of the all-time great courtroom scenes of all time, but really, just a terrific story all the way through, written and performed terrifically when it came out in 1992.

Now: imagine A Few Good Men is going to be filmed not in 1992, but in 1962.

Who are the actors you cast for it?

 

No argument on Paul Newman in the Kaffee roll

You might consider Lee J Cobb for Jessup. Not as charismatic as Nicholson. But he already made a mark in 12 Angry Men and could definately handle the "You cant handle the truth' speech effectively.

The Demi Moore role might have worked well with Natalie Wood. The Lt Kendrick part could go to George Peppard Peppard looked like an officer and could play arrogance well

Give the Kevin Bacon roll to Robert Redford, 

Also keep in mind 1962 was not 1982. There would probably be different pacing and more focus on the trial itself

[Screwball]

They guy that could have played Cruise was in the 82 movie. Donald Sutherland. He would have been 27. I think he was underrated. 

[romad1]

9 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

No argument on Paul Newman in the Kaffee roll

You might consider Lee J Cobb for Jessup. Not as charismatic as Nicholson. But he already made a mark in 12 Angry Men and could definately handle the "You cant handle the truth' speech effectively.

The Demi Moore role might have worked well with Natalie Wood. The Lt Kendrick part could go to George Peppard Peppard looked like an officer and could play arrogance well

Give the Kevin Bacon roll to Robert Redford, 

Also keep in mind 1962 was not 1982. There would probably be different pacing and more focus on the trial itself

JESUS ****ING CHRIST the GODDAMN CAINE MUTINY EXISTS

[romad1]

The weirdest part of the 1980s to me is how over-validated "Back to the Future" is.  

It wasn't that big a deal when it came out. 

[chasfh]

11 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

That works. If you ever get a chance to see Robards in 'Long Days Journey into Night' with Hepburn, Richardson and Montgomery Clift you'd see him do a brasher persona pretty well. If the movie had actually been made in '62 Tony Curtis would absolutely have been up for Caffee. Would have been a different movie, but it's what Hollywood likely would have made!

I hadn’t thought of Tony Curtis, but I agree he would have been on the call list.

[chasfh]

11 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Burt could do Jessup, heck Burt could do Caffee. Burt was pretty good.

I don’t think Lancaster could do Kaffee because the character is a brash young hotshot lawyer coasting on his father’s name, and Lancaster is almost 50 years old in 1962. Too old, too authoritative for a boy-to-man arc.

Lancaster as Jessep is a legitimately good fit. Cold and controlled, could be physically intimidating, could convey the quality of absolute righteousness, had the star power. He’s on the short list, I think.

Rethinking the Tony Curtis for Kaffee idea on the fly here: Cruise brings a kind of upper middle class Harvard energy to the role of, again, a hotshot pretty boy coasting on his dad’s name. Tony Curtis is definitely a pretty boy, but he’s also a brash, Bronx-accented, indeterminately-ethnic working-class guy fighting for everything he’s got. I think you’d have to lose the WASP-y nepo baby angle to shoehorn him into the Kaffee role. is that OK for the story? If not—if we must keep that angle—then Newman is just right for it. He has the genetics, the charm, the ability to be both cocky and vulnerable, and the dramatic chops for the transformation the story calls for.

[chasfh]

10 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

No argument on Paul Newman in the Kaffee roll

You might consider Lee J Cobb for Jessup. Not as charismatic as Nicholson. But he already made a mark in 12 Angry Men and could definately handle the "You cant handle the truth' speech effectively.

The Demi Moore role might have worked well with Natalie Wood. The Lt Kendrick part could go to George Peppard Peppard looked like an officer and could play arrogance well

Give the Kevin Bacon roll to Robert Redford, 

Also keep in mind 1962 was not 1982. There would probably be different pacing and more focus on the trial itself

Cobb would totally nail “you can’t handle the truth!” Can he do the smarmy charm we see in the Gitmo scene? That’s the only part that gives me pause. I was weighing both Robert Mitchum and George C. Scott for the role as well. I think Mitchum can do the Gitmo scene really well, but I am unsure about whether he can do the courtroom scene effectively, so I’ve been leaning toward Scott, but I don’t have a firm conviction on the role yet.

Natalie Wood is a great actress and definitely easy on the eyes, although she was also only 23 in 1962, coming off of West Side Story in which she played a vulnerable and emotional teenager. Galloway needs to project professional competence, military bearing, and controlled determination. She’s fighting to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world, so she can’t be too emotional or vulnerable. She needs to seem buttoned-up and authoritative first and foremost, with passion showing through strategically.

Given that, I like Shirley MacLaine for Galloway. She was 28 that year, had more of that no-nonsense, “I’m here to do a job” quality while still coming off as warm and determined. Warmth is the part where I feel Demi Moore lacks just a bit in 1992, so I think if you could port 1962 Shirley to 1992 to play that role instead of Demi, she would actually be better at it.

[ewsieg]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

The weirdest part of the 1980s to me is how over-validated "Back to the Future" is.  

It wasn't that big a deal when it came out. 

Not sure if I'm following you correctly, but it was a huge hit.  Maybe it shouldn't be talked like some other movies mentioned in the last 2/3 pages here, but it still had an extremely fun and unique story.  If anything I feel I could argue it was under validated because the fact that kids loved it so much I could see some people writing it off as a kids comedy.  

[oblong]

I love BTTF.  Probably a 'You had to be there' thing but it's quintissential 80's and Spielberg.  I love that it's very obviously a movie set.  You got the integration with music and Huey Lewis.  I have a list of "perfect" movies and it's on there, along with Jaws.  Part of the criteria is accessibility.  I get that violence and sex might turn off people so it consists of movies you could pretty much show in any setting and it will work.

 

[romad1]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

I love BTTF.  Probably a 'You had to be there' thing but it's quintissential 80's and Spielberg.  I love that it's very obviously a movie set.  You got the integration with music and Huey Lewis.  I have a list of "perfect" movies and it's on there, along with Jaws.  Part of the criteria is accessibility.  I get that violence and sex might turn off people so it consists of movies you could pretty much show in any setting and it will work.

 

I think an 80s movie that perfectly captured the 80s for me was Repo Man.  But try to explain that to a kid under 30. 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by romad1

[romad1]

I was pushed a youtube video from Ralph Machio's "Crossroads" where he guitar battles Steve Vai to thwart the devil at the end.   And i realized how much Ralph Machio had to do to battle evil in 1980s movies through pluck and skill.