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Tuesday, July 15, 2003 |
The stuff that dreams are made of
The version of The Maltese Falcon that we know -- the one with Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greensgtreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr., scripted and directed by John Huston -- was really the third film made from Dashiell Hammett's book. The frist version was made in 1931, and according to comments on the IMDB page, is faithful to the novel; I haven't seen it. I also haven't seen, until now, the second version, under the title Satan Met a Lady, from 1936. I Tivoed it on TCM the other day and am watching it now. It's a strange affair; with a lot of gratuitous changes to the original: it's not in San Francisco. for example, and none of the names are the same, as are many of the characters themselve. (Also, and get this, instead of a falcon, they're looking for a trumpet -- hey at least it's not a viola, but then nobody looks for them.) In chunks, the dialog is right out of the book and Huston version (which has virtually all dialog from the book). As of now, as I'm about a third of the way through the movie, none of the changes are improvements over the original (a trumpet lacks all the mystery present in a jewel-encrusted statue of a falcon). A very strange thing, watching this twisted version of a great movie (though the source of many cliches).
10:42:15 PM Permalink
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Say what?. From Joe Conason's Journal in Salon: "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." George W. Bush uttered that amazing sentence yesterday to justify the war in Iraq, according to the Washington... [This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow]
And Bush talks about historical revisionism.
1:58:40 PM Permalink
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The Bush disaster in color. $455 billion projected for this year, $475 billion for next. And those numbers exclude the $4 billion/month expense of... [Daily Kos]
Can you imagine the howls of protest from the right if Clinton with Democratic House and Senate had run up deficits anywhere near these? Good thing we're being run by those fiscally responsible Republicans now.
1:55:21 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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