oldgringo2001's channel

My favorite part of this one is the first sequence, showing how some of those old-time special effects were actually done. Actually a lot of the effects in the first Star Wars movie were done the same way: filming through paintings on glass.

@Irmarambaran No, it is not the same boat, it is actually a motor yacht built in 1902. The boat used in Death on the Nile is a side wheel riverboat. The one used in the 2004 David Suchet version is actually named "Sudan." The "Karnak" which appeared in the 1978 film is actually up for sale now.

Interesting film, but the narration has problems. For instance, the Boeing Clipper, the Model 314, was really a development of the the 294, or XB-15. The Model 299, which became the B-17, was basically a downsized 294 with the same engines and, therefore, better performance.

@324wilson The good old days, with no internet, no antibiotics, and no nonsense about female orgasms. I'm guessing you're a guy?

I made two deployments on the old Coral Sea in 1979-1980 and 1981-82. As I remember, both times we picked up our first Bear somewhere around Midway, the middle of the Pacific.

When the Brit says to Parliament that China has "always had one Emperor and one language" it's a load of crap. China has been divided many times, including the time Confucius was alive. And the Chinese speak many languages, a fact which the government took full advantage of when they brought in C...

@eric5906 More fun than a party rally at Nuremburg. I see brown shirts making a comeback.

Oh, joy, yet another deservedly forgotten British "Best Picture." The sun never sets on Anglophilia in the Motion Picture Academy.

I didn't even know this movie was in color. I saw it almost fifty years ago on a black-and-white TV, in Idaho. The station had this movie in its "vault" and showed it because there was literally nothing else to put on after the network feed shut down. It was on the last night of national mourning...

The book by Ernest Gann is non-fiction, basically a memoir about his career as a pilot starting out in the 1930s. Back in those days, the co-pilot was the one who had to load and unload the luggage and clean out the toilet! If they were carrying mail, the pilot was required to be armed with a pis...

@snakes3425 Actually there was a mini-series which covered the whole voyage made some time in the nineties, I think. I remember Alan Bates in it, playing a schoolteacher in Second Class.

Actually Lightoller expected to be the First Officer for the voyage, but Captain Turner insisted on bringing along his protoge Murdock, bumping Lightoller down to Second and bumping out the intended Second Officer. That man believed enough in the efficacy of binoculars that he bought a set for th...

"Dinner with the Wideners" should be understood by anyone who went to Harvard. The Widener library there is a memorial to the father and son who went down with the ship.

@Shawalt Actually it would have mattered. Titanic sank slowly and on an even keel; there was enough time to load many more lifeboats.

@SpokaneGirl85

The fish living far down are adopted to the pressure. But if they are brought to the surface too quickly, the gas in their swim bladders expands and explodes. This is one reason why studying them is hard; we still don't know much about life in the deeps, and we find surprises all ...

Why are documentaries being replaced by reality TV?

1) Reality TV is cheaper to make

2) Reality TV attracts a bigger audience: morons.

I like this movie as a drama, but it's not very truthful. The Lusitania's captain didn't have any intelligence about U-20 and wasn't particularly worried about U-boats. He thought the ship was too fast, even with a quarter of her fire-rooms shut down to save coal (and money to pay stokers.)

BTW,...

That said, this is one hell of a story, one of my all-time favorites.

I remember Larry. The first version was text-only. Other sexy RPGs of the day were Spellcasting 101 and Leather Goddesses of Phobos (scratch 'n sniff!)

Growing up in Idaho, I saw a lot of ghost towns, and a lot more towns where half the buildings were abandoned. That's exactly what Detroit is now, and for exactly the same reason: The local industry shut down, and it's never coming back. Nothing's going to change that

101 still sucks, but it used to be really dangerous: Back in the sixties, they "widened" it from three lanes to four by just repainting the lines between lanes. Everybody called it the Bloody Bayshore. Anyone with brains takes 280 instead. There's an incredible stretch of 280 with nothing but par...

David Niven was rightly proud of this one. A Sandhurst graduate, he was on active duty when he made it. No wonder he plays the part of a British officer so well. His father was an officer, too--killed in World War I.

I saw this turkey in 1971 when I was in boot camp in San Diego. It was a free show, on base. It was shortly after a bunch of us got our eyebrows singed off in firefighting drill. Maybe the Navy didn't think we'd suffered enough.

I remember William Bendix in this show from when I was a small child, but I had no idea Art Carney had also played Riley.

The giant bomber was the B-15; only one was built. Boeing used the same wing and engines on the B-314 clippers which finally began Transatlatlantic airline flights in 1939.

The "70-ton" French tank pictured was actually the Char B1, which weighed 28 tons--actually more than any of the German tanks in service in 1939, but less than the Sherman of 1942. It had a couple of pretty good guns, but it was slow and had a much shorter range than the German tanks. A lot of th...

I saw this movie on PBS quite awhile ago. I've forgotten whether that version had subtitles or dubbing. I do remember it was good. And it has one of the final performances of no less than Toshiro Mifune, who plays one of the storytellers who went from plantation to plantation in those days.

Probably the last of the yellowface movies meant to be taken seriously: All the important Chinese parts are played by white actors except the little half-Chinese girl. A generation earlier, she would have probably been played by Shirley Temple--who did play a Chinese girl in one of her movies. If...

Olivier's performance is so over-the-top in this one I think he may have been cheesing it up deliberately. This was one of the last Cinerama movies, btw; that's why, like 3D movies, there are so many shots of things coming right at the audience. Otherwise, it is a movie that was old-fashioned whe...

Actually, Cary Grant was very much a lower-class mixed breed, and lucky because of it. If you want to see what "well-bred" English are really like, take another look at Prince Charles and his second wife.

Cary Grant said that the character he played in this movie was the closest he ever got to the real him. The upper-class elegance was all an act; the real Archibald Leach was a cockney from the East End of London.

Imagine if the USA had annexed all of Mexico--which is what all the European governments expected to happen; we might be complaining about all those immigrants who refuse to learn Spanish.

I remember seeing this plane at NAS Patuxunt River, MD., in 1975. It was just junked, sitting out in the open.

The scene of the battleship exploding at Pearl Harbor is actually a recreation using models, part of a film done by John Ford for the US Navy in 1942. It was so convincing, it's been used in countless movies since then.

Anyone remember Microsoft Barney? In a few years, you'll see these dolls appearing as computer accessories, with personality simulations. How hard can it be to write a simulation for Paris Hilton?