patricia

He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle. Ring Lardner .................................. Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it. Maurice Chevalier .................................. Platonic love is love from the neck up. Thyra Samter Winslow ................................... People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. Douglas Yates .................................... I never loved another person the way I loved myself. Mae West

Terribly sad. We tend to think of our favourite performers as indestructable. Although most people seem to have other favourite Smith tracks, my introduction to Smith was "Walk On The Wild Side". His blew Elmer Bernstein's right out of the water. After that, I drank in everything he recorded. I keep forgetting that Jimmy is SEVENTY-EIGHT years old!!!! This is not to say, God knows, that I think he's lived long enough, but it's very depressing that he can't be with us forever.

As an unbiased observer, I gotta go with Ben Franklin. Poor Richard's Almanack" and the kite thing, as well as his constant prosthelizing must have driven his wife nuts. Ben was up for anything.

THANK YOU, SIDEWINDER, for my very favourite Idle/Cleese bit. I used to have that, and several others on a record.

Read the label on the cheese in the market. If it says "cheese food", it's so adulterated and processed that it isn't even called "cheese". Avoid it, as you would the PLAGUE. Cheese is bought at a cheese shop, or a good deli. Period.

He was a class act. RIP Harold Ashby.

Apparantly 68% of all Inventive Inquisitors, such as myself, are meat-eaters and would order steak in a restaurant. I'm a life-long vegetarian, so I guess I'm already in a subgroup. I think that the meat-eating Inventive Inquisitors are skewing the catagory. Just as I suspected, it's a conspiracy.

Isn't "intellectually challenged" the correct expression? I'm not as kind as you are. I was going to say "retarded", but stopped short.

I wrote an IQ test, almost exactly like this one, about a week ago, [i had dropped off my resume and it was part of the interview]. Now I'm worried that I'll be eligible for a government grant for the intellectually handicapped.

No such thing as bad Billie. She always laid her heart out there and that is why she is still listened to, even in her "down" years. Good for you!!

There are two available. "Fabulous" and "Dressed To Kill" Izzard is one of the funniest stand-ups I've ever seen. His humour is quite often based on fact, particularly British History, unvarnished, and skewed a little. Brilliant!!

Love Shelley Berman. [the "convention" bit is a favourite] George Carlin is hilarious and very insightful. [love his bit on "stuff"] My current favourite is David Sedaris. "Naked", "Holiday On Ice", "Me Talk Pretty One Day", "Barrel Fever". All of his books are also available as books on tape, on which he reads his own material. Nobody else could do the narrative as well as he does it. My favourite Sedaris bits: Santaland Diaries Dinah the Christmas Whore True Detective The City of Light In The Dark Me Talk Pretty One Day [sedaris learning how to speak French, while living in Paris] Brutal.

Forgive me for not mentioning Jackie Wilson and Brooke Benton. Benton particularly. I'm still looking for the album on which he does a great version of "Walk on the Wild Side" that rivals both Elmer Bernstein's and Jimmy Smith's. Add that to "Lie To Me" and there you go. I didn't put Ray Charles on my list and should be flogged.

It's interesting that we all have favourite scenes in Hitchcock films. I know I do. I mentioned the bedroom scene in "Rebecca" and didn't mention the shower scene in "Psycho", because that's the only one that even non-Hitchcock devotees know, even if they've never seen others. However, there have been other admirers of Hitchcock's work [brian de Palma, for one] who have paid homage to that one scene in their subsequent films. I know that I never see a shower scene, in a thriller, without thinking of "Psycho".

AND it's got Tallulah Bankhead, very enjoyable as the career woman/reporter. Very much a WWII film, but entertaining as such. Sort of a filmed one-act play as well, but better than Rope IMHO. I have both of them, so I'll have to watch them again. So far, "Rope" is my favourite, but I haven't seen "Strangers on a Train" for awhile.

Those of you who love "Fargo", as I do, may remember the scene in the Radisson Hotel, where Steve Buschemi's character has hired a lady of the evening. He's making small talk, asks if she enjoys her work, then opines that any hotel lounge which has a class act like Feliciano, [who could be seen, playing in the background] was a first rate place. It was hilarious at the time, but hey, he wasn't wrong.

Etta James, Al Greene [forget the Righteous Bros. version of "Unchained Melody], Marvin Gaye, Johnnie Ray [not everything, Lord knows, but his "High Drama, The Real Johnnie Ray" has a kick-ass version of "Lotos Blossom" and other tracks, which will knock your socks off.] and Odetta [Yes, Odetta]

The dark version of this Belgian chocolate is like dying and going directly to heaven. I have two in my refrigerator, as I type this.

OK.

"I Confess" was quite a departure for Montgomery Clift, who, IMO, was better known as a tortured leading man, than a tortured priest. This film was rough-going for me, I think because of the dark, dreary atmostphere, which created a kind of claustrophobia, which, I guess, was the point. Strange film. Ralphie Boy, may I ask what the criteria were for leaving this film out of your Top 10 list??

I will throw all caution to the wind and pick "54", for reasons which are my own.

I too have heard more about the "one shot" technique in the filming of "Rope" than the finished film itself. I think that does it an injustice, aside from being an interesting bit of trivia, at least to non-film-makers. To me, the only thing important about any film is whether I become involved in the plot and care about the plot and the characters. If I don't, the technique, no matter how ground-breaking, means nothing to me. "Rope" had all the earmarks of a well-told story and that's why I like it. After all, that's the primary function of film, to tell the story.

What about "Rope"? I was totally shocked, the first time I saw it, to see Jimmy Stewart as a smarmy villian. Marvelous casting against type and totally effective. We're so used to seeing Stewart, as he got older, as the "aw shucks" good guy, that this role was a total revelation to me, at the time.

Another vote, from me, for "Straight, No Chaser". Some interesting and funny stuff, but the music is the star, as it should be. I first heard Monk, in the early sixties, on his "Misterioso" LP, but was into other music at the time and didn't really appreciate it. I rediscovered him, just a few years ago and have become a collector of his music. "Japanese Folksong" is amazingly addictive.

"Rebecca" is, by far, my favourite Hitchcock film. Judith Anderson and Nigel Bruce were perfect supporting characters to Olivier and Joan Fontaine. My favourite scene is the one in Rebecca's perfectly preserved bedroom. The line, "Why don't you jump?" haunted me, long after I saw the film. My second favourite is "Frenzy", even though many Hitchcock fans tell me it's their least favourite. Barry Foster is, IMO, one of the creepiest villians in Hitchcock films. My sentimental favourite is "The Trouble With Harry", because it was the first of Hitchcock's films I saw, as a child. It was funny, as well as very clever.