Passages

[artfilmfan]

Peter Green

Very sad news. I love the music of his Fleetwood Mac. R.I.P.

I love Fleetwood Mac in all of its incarnations (at least before Buckingham left the first time around), and while I've always had a preference for Green's era, for no particular reason I went on a huge kick these past 6 months and listened to those early records endlessly. I got a copy of the original mono mix of their first album, as well as their first 45's - absolutely wonderful. Even their disappointing second album has its share of gems ("Love That Burns" in particular, one of their finest moments). And I love the Chicago jam sessions at Chess - never organized into a proper album, it's the type of thing I loved playing over and over in the background, as if we were in the same office building and they were recording next door.

Amazingly, there's an enormous wealth of live recordings from that brief window of time when Danny Kirwan (possibly Fleetwood Mac's greatest guitarist ever) played side-by-side with Green. I've only heard a few, but they've been pretty amazing so far. It's too bad Green didn't stick around much longer - with Kirwan, they reached what IMHO was their absolute peak, with Then Play On and "Oh Well."

Check out the Shrine ‘69 CD if you have not. It’s great. And the Underway section of the Rattlesnake Shake performance at the Boston Tea Party (either Vol. 1 or 2) is sublime.

[Dylan]

John Saxon

[L.A.]

There was a tribute concert for Peter Green at the London Palladium on February 25th, really wish I could have attended. Eight days before there was a tribute held for Ginger Baker at the Hammersmith Apollo where I was.

[colinr0380]

John Saxon

Along with his characters in the original Black Christmas and the father of the main character in A Nightmare on Elm Street (both policemen! As is his character in Blood Beach), he's in David Cronenberg's non-horror film Fast Company

Saxon had an amazing run of roles in 70s and 80s Italian cinema. especially as the publisher on the wrong end of an advance in Argento's Tenebrae, Umberto Lenzi's The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist, A Special Cop In Action, The Scorpion With Two Tails, and his big starring role as the Vietnam vet returning to the States grappling with a taste for cannibalism in Cannibal Apocalypse. Plus, um, other titles such as The Bees! (which looks much more fun than the same year's The Swarm, which it is obviously cashing in on!). He's also the baddie in Roger Corman produced Star Wars-alike Battle Beyond The Stars!

I would quite like to check out Beyond Evil at some point! And I am quite curious about that Indian set jewel thief film Shalimar in which he stars with Rex Harrison(?!?!)

[Thornycroft]

Not to mention his roles in Bava's proto-giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Enter the Dragon! He must have tried his hand at almost every genre over the course of his career. Always a welcome and engaging presence even in nonsense like Hellmaster.

[kubelkind]

C.P.Lee, who, amongst many other things, wrote a very fine book on the films of Bob Dylan
https://www.beyondthejoke.co.uk/content ... p-lee-dies

[domino harvey]

Discussion of Olivia de Havilland moved here

[Feego]

Benny Mardones

[okcmaxk]

Benny Mardones

How to nullify any kind of alternative meaning to a song in 4 incriminating minutes (feat. androgynous William Fichtner)

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Benny Mardones

How to nullify any kind of alternative meaning to a song in 4 incriminating minutes (feat. androgynous William Fichtner)

Up there with Gary Puckett’s “Young Girl” as evidence for a criminal trial.

[Aunt Peg]

Sonia Darrin (from The Big Sleep): https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... 96-1304982

[flyonthewall2983]

There was a tribute concert for Peter Green at the London Palladium on February 25th, really wish I could have attended. Eight days before there was a tribute held for Ginger Baker at the Hammersmith Apollo where I was.

They recorded/filmed the Green tribute for a release Eagle Rock was set to do for later this year. Whether or not that's changed since Covid who knows, but I would think Green's death would add some poignancy to it if it comes out soon.

Peter Green: Man of the World is a really good documentary (on Amazon Prime) on his time recording with John Mayall and subsequently Fleetwood Mac, with a lot of the people he played with interviewed as well as him. It's of course a great triumph on his part that he came down from his mental illness enough to get back to playing music and be more functioning, but he's not the best interview subject when it at least comes to complete coherency that people like his former manager, producer and bandmates are able to.

[Apperson]

Herman Cain from COVID-19

[domino harvey]

One of his last tweets was hyping the no mask rule at the Tulsa rally. Basically a more fatal version of

[fdm]

Jacqueline Scott

[MichaelB]

Producer/director Sydney Lotterby, who from the mid-1960s played a major creative role on an impressive array of high-profile British comedy series - As Time Goes By, Broaden Your Mind, Brush Strokes, Butterflies, Ever Decreasing Circles, Last of the Summer Wine, The Liver Birds, May to December, Open All Hours, Porridge (and the sequel Going Straight), Ripping Yarns, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Sykes and A..., Up Pompeii, Yes, Minister (and Yes, Prime Minister). Even the most curmudgeonly assessor would agree that there are at least three all-time classics amongst that lot, and many would be a fair bit more generous.

He was also the inspiration for At Last the 1948 Show's The Four Sydney Lotterbies sketch, although I gather that the only connection with the real Lotterby is that John Cleese thought that the name was intrinsically amusing.

[JSC]

Even the most curmudgeonly assessor would agree that there are at least three all-time classics amongst that lot, and many would be a fair bit more generous.

Seconded. Sometimes it felt as if any comedy series in Britain in the last fifty years had either Gareth Gwenlan or Sydney Lotterby's name somewhere in the end credits.

[domino harvey]

Alan Parker discussion moved here

[mfunk9786]

Wilford Brimley

[Adam]

Terry Cannon, founder of Pasadena (later Los Angeles) Filmforum, and also founder of the Baseball Reliquary. First one to give Barbara Hammer a paid screening outside the lesbian community of the Bay Area, along with many other things. Just a wonderful human being.

An oral history with Terry:
https://www.alternativeprojections.com/ ... ry-cannon/

An article by him about the early years of Filmforum:
https://www.alternativeprojections.com/ ... 1975-1983/

http://www.baseballreliquary.org/

https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/baseba ... ies-at-67/

https://www.armoryarts.org/exhibitions/2019/arledge/

[colinr0380]

Wilford Brimley

Very sad to hear. He's great in the 1982 version of The Thing as the character who figures out the implications of the infection (in a scene very like the one of speaking with Mother in Alien and later like the scene in The Fly remake) and destroys the link to the outside world, then gets dragged to a shack outside and isolated there. Then when the characters check on him later after everything has only gotten worse we get that both funny and chilling scene of Blair calmly saying "you can let me back in" with the noose hanging in the foreground of the shot!

Or as Red Letter Media put it "Wilford Brimley is the smartest character in the movie"!

[hearthesilence]

Wilford Brimley

Very sad to hear. He's great in the 1982 version of The Thing as the character who figures out the implications of the infection (in a scene very like the one of speaking with Mother in Alien and later like the scene in The Fly remake) and destroys the link to the outside world, then gets dragged to a shack outside and isolated there. Then when the characters check on him later after everything has only gotten worse we get that both funny and chilling scene of Blair calmly saying "you can let me back in" with the noose hanging in the foreground of the shot!

Or as Red Letter Media put it "Wilford Brimley is the smartest character in the movie"!

When I was a child, I remember him primarily from Quaker oatmeal and diabetes commercials, both of which seemed ubiquitous in memory. It looks like most people remember him that way in the U.S. judging by the news reports. I don't think I saw him act until I caught The China Syndrome on TV (which apparently was his first film appearance), but it was quite a surprise when I was introduced to his more malicious characters via Sydney Pollack's The Firm - the secondary cast in that film was uniformly excellent, but Brimley in particular made quite a chilling impression.

[colinr0380]

I think the thing that I saw him the most in from TV screenings as a kid was probably his roles as part of the ensemble cast of the two Cocoon films.

[Feego]

Sonia Darrin, memorable (and uncredited) as the rude bookstore clerk who spars with Bogart in The Big Sleep before he goes across the street to Dorothy Malone's more accommodating bookstore.

[GaryC]

I can't see any online obituaries at the moment which aren't in Italian, but actor Gianrico Tedeschi died on 27 July at the age of 100.