Only two left after these: how are you enjoying them so far? If you’ve missed the previous episodes, here are one and two, here are three and four, and here are five and six.
Month: November 2012
UK TV
Review: Overseas Press Club – Exclusive! (1957)
Starring: Phyllis Calvert, Richard O’Sullivan, Peter Wyngarde, Robert Raglan, Peter Arne et al
Price: £19.99 (Amazon price: £13.99; Network price: £12.24)
Released: October 22nd 2012
So here’s the sales spiel:
A woman comes forward as one of several claimants to the Romanov fortune. Is she really the Grand Duchess Tatiana, daughter of the last Czar of Russia?
A pint-sized parachutist proves too tough for the USAF; he is a ten-year-old Polish orphan, wearing a sergeant’s uniform and found as a stowaway on a British cargo ship.
In post-war Naples, a young priest, Father Maggiore Borrelli, lives and works among the scugnizzi – wild street gangs of abandoned children and teenagers.
April, 1945: a war correspondent arrives in Munich in search of a world scoop. Instead, in Hitler’s home, he finds and reveals one of the war’s strangest exploits…
Just a few of the accounts brought to life in this anthology of thirteen individual dramas based on the adventures of famous foreign correspondents – witnesses to some of the most extraordinary stories of the twentieth century. First screened in 1957 and unseen for over fifty years, Overseas Press Club – Exclusive! features performances by, among many others, Phyllis Calvert, Richard O’Sullivan, Peter Wyngarde, Robert Raglan and Peter Arne.
Sounds desperately exciting, doesn’t it? Certainly, it did to me – tales of journalists doing derring do things. Yey!
Wrong. Unfortunately, that’s not what Overseas Press Club – Exclusive! is about at all.
Continue reading “Review: Overseas Press Club – Exclusive! (1957)”
Sitting Tennant
Friday’s Sitting Tennant (week 45, 2012) + November’s winners
See here we are at the end of the penultimate month of Sitting Tennant. Not long to go until we have to wave goodbye to David en repose, tear-stained hankies in hand. Still, if David can keep smiling, so can we.
However, the penultimate monthly winners of 2012 are Toby and Hebbie who will be immortalised on the leaders’ board forever. A big well done to Toby but also to Hebbie, who keeps winning despite not having sent in any new pictures since January. I’ve 38 left from her, too.
Good luck next month, everyone, for the final ever month of Sitting Tennant! Keep sending those pictures in!
- Toby, Hebbie: 25
- Janice, Sister Chastity: 15
- Rullsenberg: 10
Sitting Board of Winners 2012
January
Hebbie, Sister Chastity
February
Sister Chastity
March
Sister Chastity
April
Sister Chastity, Shilohforever
May
Hebbie, Sister Chastity
June
Hebbie, Sister Chastity
July
Hebbie
August/September
Toby, Sister Chastity
October
Hebbie, Sister Chastity
November
Hebbie, Toby
Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below or email me and if it’s judged suitable and doesn’t obviously infringe copyright, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. Don’t forget to include your name in the filename so I don’t get mixed up about who sent it to me.
The best pic in the stash each week will appear on Tuesday and get ten points; the runners up will appear on Friday (one per person who sends one in) and get five points.
Each month, I’ll name the best picture provider and then at the end of the year, the overall champion will be announced for 2012!
Film
It’s Hammer Time!: Stolen Face (1952)
Everyone who loves film – particularly dissecting film – loves Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 movie Vertigo. It’s inescapable, everywhere, a Freudian treasure trove that allows any film student with a modicum of psychological training to draw conclusion after conclusion about its meaning, its subtext, the director, man’s relationship with woman, the nature of death and obsession, and more.
Vertigo‘s plot concerns police officer James Stewart and his romance with the very blonde Kim Novak, whom he eventually sees fall to her death from a clock tower. When he sees a brunette a few months later who looks a whole lot like her, he woos this doppelgängerin and eventually begins to try to make her over to become his deceased lover.
I won’t spoil the rest of it for you, because this is It’s Hammer Time!, not Movies You Should Watch. But the reason I mention it is that six years before Vertigo was released, Hammer and director Terence Fisher came up with Stolen Face. In it, plastic surgeon Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) falls in love with a gifted, beautiful and very blonde concert pianist Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott). They meet and a romance soon develops. However, Alice is already engaged to be married and, afraid to tell Ritter, runs away.
She later calls him to tell him she is marrying David (André Morell). Meanwhile, Ritter has a new patient, Lily Conover (Mary Mackenzie), a female convict whose face is disfigured. Ritter believes he can change her criminal ways by making her look like Alice.
All very Vertigo-ish… and I won’t tell you how this one ends either. But’s it’s today’s movie, so enjoy!