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Black Sam has seen a party of ruffians burying what might have been a treasure. Webber talks Sam into taking him to the site, but they are scared off by the sudden appearance of the mysterious buccaneer. At the end of the story, Webber finds that his worthless land is the real treasure, in that it will fetch a handsome price once it is parceled out in city lots.
Irving saw Columbus as a quixotic figure: After returning to America in , Irving continued to write narratives and tales based on voyages or island life. While the ship is being towed to Boston for refitting, the ghosts of its murdered crew bedevil their living replacements. After refitting, the unlucky ship is sent on a trading mission to South America.
During the voyage south, the phantom crew is again seen on the decks and in the rigging. While the ship is riding at anchor off a South American port, and the captain and crew are ashore, a fierce tropical storm comes up. Despite the efforts of the phantom crew, the ship is driven onto the rocks and breaks up. Among the most famous of these were the voyages of the Tonquin and the Beaver.
Unsure of the status of the settlement at Astoria, Astor ordered Captain Sowle to proceed cautiously. After arriving in the Sandwich Islands without incident, the Beaver sailed for Astoria, anchoring off Cape Disappointment on 9 May , safely outside the treacherous bar at the mouth of the Columbia River. While Andy is at cowboy camp, Woody regarded as a valuable collectible is kidnapped by greedy toy collector Al of Al's Toy Barn.
He soon discovers that he was once a legend in the 60's, on a TV show called Woody's Roundup , complete with the usual wide array of merchandising tie-ins. He also realizes that he's the final missing piece in the collector's Woody's Roundup set, with fellow toys Cowgirl Jessie voice by Joan Cusack , prospector Stinky Pete voice by Kelsey Grammer , and Woody's faithful horse Bullseye.
The Third Greatest Films - Summaries - Part 8
Woody faces the choice of living forever with them in a museum display in Tokyo, or leaving and returning to Andy, thereby dooming his newfound friends to be sent back into abandonment and storage, and facing his own dilemma that he won't last another year as Andy's favored toy. Academy Award Nominations The Usual Suspects Starring: Bryan Singer A convoluted, darkly comedic film noir, Bryan Singer's intriguing film his second feature film is set in a police interrogation room with slow-witted, chatty con-man Roger "Verbal" Kint Spacey in a breakthrough role who has been offered immunity, if he talks and provides testimony.
He attempts to convince his captor, tough U. Customs Special Agent federal investigator Dave Kujan Palminteri about the enigmatic existence of Keyser Soze, a semi-mythical "devil", and almost supernatural Hungarian crime lord and mastermind. Legend has it, according to Kint, that Soze was so willfully cold-blooded that when his family was threatened with rape and held hostage by Hungarian rivals, he killed his own family and then their captors and the rest of the mob - and "nobody's ever seen him since.
Verbal insists that he and his gang dealt with Soze only through his legal representative, Kobayashi Postlethwaite , who pressured them by threatening to kill Keaton's lawyer girlfriend Edie Finneran Amis and castrate McManus' young nephew.
The weaselly, limping, club-footed Kint, a survivor of the explosion at the harbor, confesses truths, half-truths, double-crosses, and lies. His recounting, aided by the contents of a bulletin board in the interrogation office, forces the viewer to deduce what is real and what is fictional in the stories he tells, and who Soze really is. The non-linear, puzzling film is sometimes a bit too self-consciously twisted, clever, and predictable, but still a great crime thriller.
Way Out West Starring: Horne One of the best Laurel and Hardy comedy films, and their only western spoof, with numerous slapstick antics and typical gags. Again, they reprise their most familiar roles - Stanley, the thin, meek simpleton, and Ollie, the fat, pompous one.
The two arrive in the wild western town of Brushwood Gulch, searching for Mary Roberts Lawrence , the orphaned daughter of their recently-deceased prospector partner. In Mickey Finn's Palace saloon run by a larcenous and unscrupulous innkeeper Finlayson and his brassy showgirl partner Lola Lynne , they mistakenly let it slip that they have a deed to a gold mine for Mary. Finn substitutes Lola for Mary, his demure kitchen maid, to acquire the valuable deed for himself. When the pair meet the real Mary and realize she is being victimized and exploited by the other two crooked con-artists, they attempt to get the deed back.
The film contains many memorable scenes and bits by the comedic twosome, such as the scene of Stan and Ollie's discussion about the deed to the gold mine - delivered to the wrong woman "That's the first mistake we've made since that guy sold us the Brooklyn Bridge" , their soft-shoe dance routine while singing "The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia," the scene of Stan being wrestled and tortured -- by tickling -- to give up the gold mine deed, Stan biting - chewing - and gulping pieces of his hat after losing a bet "now you're taking me illiterally" , Stan lighting his finger like a cigarette lighter, and the rope-pulley sequences with Ollie and then a mule.
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Robert Aldrich A great psychological thriller, black comedy, and over-the-top camp classic is this great trashy melodrama - with the bizarre and sole pairing of two legendary -- and rival -- screen legends in a gothic, macabre, Grand Guignol horror film. A grotesque Baby Jane Hudson Davis at 54 years of age , a former vaudeville child star, and paralyzed invalid sister Blanche Crawford from a mysterious, career-ending car accident for which alcoholic Jane was blamed but never charged , also a former movie star, live together in a gloomy, crumbling mansion in Los Angeles.
Pasty white-faced Jane, whose career faded long ago, is now a deranged alcoholic, and vengefully bitter and jealous toward her confined, wheelchair-bound sister secluded in an upstairs bedroom. Enmity worsens when a local TV network airs a marathon tribute to Blanche Hudson movies, and Jane learns that Blanche is planning to sell the mansion and put her in a sanitarium.
There are many stunning scenes and excessive performances, particularly Jane's relentless tormenting of Blanche by serving an ex-pet and roasted rat for "din-din," Jane garishly dressed up as a little girl as she is being coached by impoverished pianist and musical director Edwin Flagg Buono in his film debut for an improbable comeback as she croaks, "I've Written a Letter to Daddy. When Harry Met Sally Rob Reiner This witty and likeable, lightweight, old-fashioned romantic comedy was intended to answer the sexual politics question, "Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?
The engaging, episodic film keenly observes romance, relationships between males and females, friendship and sex. Two long-time acquaintances, often pessimistic, fast-talking and controlling Harry Burns Crystal and bubbly Sally Albright Ryan grapple with this question over a year period beginning in the spring of as students when they share a drive to New York from Chicago , as their relationship grows and matures.
Their love is not "at first sight" but takes years to develop as the reluctant two often bump into each other and reconnect. The leads' best friends, Marie Fisher and Jess Kirby , help Harry's and Sally's friendship to evolve, and actually fall in love and get married themselves. The summer of 's 'sleeper' film has a number of startling resemblances to Woody Allen's witty, urban romance Annie Hall The film's ending parallels Allen's Manhattan However, the two films also differed: Who Framed Roger Rabbit Starring: The film is a delightful spoof of the hard-boiled Sam Spade films and reminiscent of Chinatown , complete with a sultry, femme fatale humanoid Toon named Jessica Rabbit Turner, uncredited, with singing voice by Amy Irving, Amblin Entertainment executive producer Steven Spielberg's wife at the time , and a case involving alleged marital infidelity "pattycake" , murder, a missing will, blackmail, and a conspiracy hatched by evil, Toon-hating Judge Doom Lloyd of Cloverleaf Industries.
Framed for the murder, zany Maroon Cartoon Studios actor Roger Rabbit Fleischer , a stuttering, disaster-prone 'Toon,' solicits help from reluctant, hard-boiled, boozing private eye Eddie Valiant Hoskins to clear his name.
Irving, Washington
Valiant is still grief-stricken over the death of brother Ted by a falling cartoon piano, but is financially - and emotionally - supported by girlfriend Dolores Cassidy , as he solves the case. Earlier efforts to combine humans and ink-and-paint cartoon characters side-by-side in a film Disney's S ong of the South and Mary Poppins , for example are considered primitive next to this film, which used computers to precisely repeat camera movements and calculate shading, to allow them to cast shadows and have complex lighting.
The Wind Starring: Victor Sjostrom Swedish director Victor Sjostrom's visually poetic, melodramatic silent western film, from Frances Marion's adapted screenplay based on the novel by Dorothy Scarborough. This is the dust bowl tale of a vulnerable young woman's plight in an alien and fearful environment of ever-present sexual advances and the wind. One of the film's titles announces, "Man, puny but irresistible, encroaching forever on Nature's Fortresses. Beverly's suspicious, hardened pioneer wife Cora Cumming becomes intensely jealous of the young, pretty, and demure Eastern lady.
The delicate Letty is immediately courted for marriage by two ranch cowboys: Also, an amoral, smooth-talking, flirtatious, already-married salesman from Fort Worth named Roddy Wirt Love who first met her on the train journey, arrives in town and wants her to be his mistress. Desperate because she has received an ultimatum to leave Cora's household when regarded as a sexual threat, Letty accepts a marriage proposal from Lige, but rebuffs consummation of her marriage with him on their wedding night.
When Roddy finds the still-virginal Letty alone and half-crazy in her isolated cabin due to the constantly howling, remorseless wind, he attempts a brutal attack and rape. He insists on taking her away with him, but she resiliently resists and shoots him dead, in self-defense, and guiltily attempts to bury his body in the uncooperative, shifting sand.
She wanders, blindly, into the middle of the sandstorm and disappears - to presumably die, in the film's original ending. MGM reshot the film's downbeat ending to change the film's mood. In the edited version, Letty reconciles with Lige - she confesses the killing to him and how the sand has justly covered up the corpse. She also reaffirms her love and they lovingly embrace in the doorway of their cabin. The film was a box-office failure, due to the advent of the "talkies" a year before, but its indelible images yet remain.
John Arnold's impressive cinematography was taken under difficult circumstances - the temperature during the shoot in the Mojave Desert was often F in the shade. This was his final American film.