To put a close on August (a month that ended up being about performers performing), I'm getting into the doin's about Howard Hawks' amusing musical starring those mega-watters Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Well, pseudo-musical. Hawks was one of the best directors of rom-coms...and THAT material in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is at least close to his typical level. The elaborately excellent costumes, the Technicolor and the "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" number just aren't what he was best at, but even that good stuff works well too. The dual love story is snappy amidst all kinds of hoopla about diamond-digging, especially over a tiara. So jump on a boat while you cavort with a bunch of hunky guys and sing about your favourite mineral as I break it all down in this 758th edition of Have You Ever Seen.

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The 757th episode is all about performers. First, Disney's hit about a flying elephant who gets loaded and sees pink elephants is the focus. Dumbo's print on Disney Plus is beautiful. The voicework is also good, plus it's charming, sweet, and (controversial black crows aside) the mother-loves-child story is eternal. Next up was the silent comedy, Show People. Director King Vidor and star Marion Davies were a good team on more than 1 project back then, yet neither has previously been discussed on Have You Ever Seen. Just as in reality, Davies is good at being light and fun in this engrossing comedy, although her character masquerades as a serious actress. There are cameos by many big stars, including Chaplin and 4 actors on my AFI Old-Timey Actors list. So touch trunks with your mom at the circus and also fall for both of your co-stars as I talk about the thrill of performing in this talk about Dumbo and Show People.

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This is the 11th time a Coen Brothers film has been discussed on Have You Ever Seen, although this black comedy is slyer than many of the others. There's also a lot of violence and horror in Barton Fink. It's covering a lot of ground. John Turturro plays the title character, a Broadway playwright who's hired to write a wrestling picture in 1941 Hollywood. After dealing with writer's block for what seems like weeks on end, his script gets meta...and things get weird. John Goodman plays a complicated character with a lot of wit and devilishness while John Mahoney, Judy Davis, Jon Polito and Steve Buscemi contribute their quirks to this one too. Joel & Ethan have Barton talking a lot about the common man in this very uncommon dramedy. T'is a theme. So take your head-box to the beach and contemplate your dark future in California as I fill out close to an hour of talk time in this 756th episode with a look into Barton Fink.

Well, Actually: in the "So I Got Thinkin'" about some of the summer's big releases, Milly Alcock was misidentified Milly "Adcock."

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The 755th episode of Have You Ever Seen is a doubleheader of oldies with very little in common. First, it's Jules Dassin's tough and uncompromising prison-break drama, Brute Force. It was brutally violent for 1947 audiences, as Burt Lancaster, Charles Bickford and friends team up to bust out...partly to escape Hume Cronyn's vicious captain of the guards. It's one of the great jailbird flicks, even if it's been surpassed by the likes of Cool Hand Luke and Shawshank in the 8 decades since. Then I touched on Michael Cimino's infamous Heaven's Gate...although that review is more of a defence of a movie that took a lot of heat for ending the "Director's Era" of the 1970s. Hey, Cimino made a good-looking western with a terrific cast (Kristofferson, Walken, Hurt, Bridges, Huppert)...and now the movies made by the "he ended the party" scapegoat is viewed much more favourably. So dedicate about 42 minutes to my 2-pack about the Brute and Gate.

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A holiday Monday is a good time to cover a classic: the action/sci-fi/horror that is Aliens. James Cameron's blockbuster was his follow-up to his action/sci-fi/horror hit The Terminator. This might have been a horrible experience for the director and his production team, but everybody involved came up with one of the greatest sequels of all time. Humans battle xenomorphs and the result was many iconic moments and lines of dialogue...and there's a sympathetic feminist at the centre. Sigourney Weaver's best-known character works so well off the likes of Biehn, Henn, Reiser, Henriksen, Paxton and Goldstein...and, of course, those slimy aliens. So get away from her you something or other and cue up that incredible escape music as this 754th edition of Have You Ever Seen talks about the awesome 40-year-old flick we call Aliens.

Well, Actually: I forgot to mention the trivia question for next week's show about Brute Force (and Heaven's Gate). It's just that Burt Lancaster is a convict in Brute Force, but he's also a convict in a more-famous prison movie. Which one?

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Robert Donat & Madeleine Carroll were due for a reviewin' on Have You Ever Seen, so episode #753 has them starring in a Hitchcock movie. Ol' Al has come up a lot on this channel...and The 39 Steps isn't even in his Top 10 best movies. This fun thriller was one of his best movies made in England, sure, but his resume is filled with plenty of better stuff. In this one (where the title itself is Hitch's "McGuffin"), Donat pulls off repeatedly impressive escapes, even though he's an ordinary and innocent man falsely accused. That's a regular Hitchcock trope...and the end result is highly entertaining. Then I talked Ann Sheridan in Norman Foster's Woman On The Run. She's a cool customer who has to outfox the cops and also a curious reporter (Dennis O'Keefe) to find her husband, who fled after witnessing a murder. Sheridan is a big name I've never reviewed either...and this not-so-famous flick ended up being a solid bit of entertainment too.

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John Travolta, Nancy Allen and director Brian De Palma teamed up to make the brilliant horror flick Carrie in 1976, but the team was nearly at their best 5 years later in this one about movie-makers. The show-offy De Palma, who mostly made thrillers, loved his characters to be all kinds of shades of gray. Mission possible here. Blow Out's set-ups & pay-offs are excellent...and the ending is operatic, symbolic and powerful. That perfect scream is heartbreaking. This violent tragedy is well-crafted, with inspirations from Antonioni's Blow-Up and the incident at Chappaquiddick. So go get some sound effects for the foley department as this 752nd episode of Have You Ever Seen examines the suspense/conspiracy thriller Blow Out.

Well, Actually: at around the 44-minute mark, it should have been The Black Dahlia "was at the end of a pretty poor (box office) run" in 2006, not Femme Fatale. That was released in 2002.

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Will Ferrell's popularity peaked right around 20 years ago, but he was about as huge as comedy stars got in 2006. In Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, he isn't goofing around...although maybe that was to his fans' discontent. And he's not in tragedy or a comedy, but a dramedy...and the man who had always gone big proved he could also play quiet, nerdy and sad. Emma Thompson is a famous author writing & narrating everything he does...and it upends his life. Falling for the woman he's auditing--the Maggie Gyllenhaal character--upends it too. Stranger Than Fiction also has Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah and Tony Hale doing good work in a pretty great movie. So, taxman, strap on your trusty wristwatch as I dig into a touching filmic experience in this 751st edition of Have You Ever Seen.

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The French Foreign Legion called the 3 Geste boys and they trekked off to Africa to end up in William Wellman's tense adventure flick. It's an action-war film that ends with a long, but well-paced siege inside a fort. Gary Cooper is miscast as the title character (he's too old and too American), but he has pretty good chemistry with Ray Milland and Robert Preston, who play his brothers. Susan Hayward is briefly in this too, although Brian Donlevy steals the movie as a jerk sergeant...and got an Oscar nomination for it. There's also a movie-long mystery here after someone steals their benefactor's expensive sapphire. But who...and why?! So tune in for episode #750 as white bros go on assignment in Africa and play war with the locals in Beau Geste.

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Let's go back to December 2016 when John Lee Hancock's The Founder and Martin Scorsese's Silence were positioned as Oscar contenders. Neither won a gold trophy, but Hancock made the better movie. The Founder is a big-business biopic about Ray Kroc sharking Dick & Mac McDonald out of their own fast-food creation, then franchising McDonald's worldwide. The product isn't so good now, but the film about it is very entertaining, especially Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch's chemistry as the McDonald's brothers. Then I reviewed Silence, although that section is really an evaluation of the noted gangster maestro's religious passion projects...and how Marty is just not at his best when his movies are explicitly about faith. So get drive-though as you swallow this 749th episode where I preach about The Founder & Silence.

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June started on this podcast with a fast-cutting musical in Moulin Rouge. Now I end the month talking about an old-school Technicolor song-and-dancer...and it was an award-winning mega-smash. The King And I is Walter Lang's crowning achievement as a director and the King is the part Yul Brynner played thousands of times onstage. He won an Oscar for playing this hardheaded chauvinist on celluloid opposite Deborah Kerr's Anna, the headstrong English widow hired to teach his many kids. The culture clash leads to a curious "love" story where they barely touch each other until that...well, let's say head-scratching climax. Not a fan of that ending! The lavish production is entirely set-bound, but this is still quite an experience. So settle in for my 748th episode as I investigate the et ceteras in The King And I.

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