Just Sick of Trying to Find Stuff
That's basically two weekends in a row I spent trying to shuffle through records trying to find stuff. I have started to reorganize things so that they are easier to find, but again I have run out of weekend with the job half done. Many things on my docket went undone.
I did get to see "Major Dundee" (1965) just now, a movie I've wanted to see for 21 years. It's really not as bad
as Peckinpah-o-philes make it out to be. The studio may have removed thirty minutes from its running time, but even at two hours it seems long. My wife hated it, particularly the soundtrack music, which is a mixture of Mitch Miller, primitive synth stings, and big Hollywood transition music. I thought it was good - Charlton Heston was better in this than he was in The Ten Commandments. And it touches on so many of the regular Peckinpah themes - redemption sought by arrogant guys while in the process of making stupid and costly decisions etc.
The fight scenes were great - down and dirty, very brutal, giving you an insider's sense of hand to hand combat, how hard it is. No one in a Sam Peckinpah movie ever dies easy.
The Uncle Dave Radio show is changing - Mali is going onto other pursuits, and Keith Larsen has nearly finished his WCBN training. I will be on this Thursday for the first two hours and Keith will take over the last hour in fulfillment of requirements needed to be an on air host at 'CBN.
Friday we got together to watch an amazing documentary about TV shows during the Third Reich. No kidding! The Germans had TV on a limited basis from 1935 to 1944, mostly shown in TV parlors, but at least 500 or so private sets were sold by 1940. To improve their transmission quality there was film at least somewhere in the broadcast chain, and about 280 rolls of TV films from the Third Reich still exist. The stuff ranges from jaw dropping historical stuff, like a breezy interview with Albert Speer about his future architechtural plans, to the most pathetic things you've ever seen - a show from late in the war about how being a amputee is not such a bad thing after all. Comes off like a Monty Python sketch.
Incidentally, I found it interesting that the Germans brought the film into the system right after they started, just to be able to send out a better looking TV picture. In America we just tolerated the lousy picture until it was upgraded to something decent looking, and that wasn't until the middle 1950s.
Uncle Dave Lewis