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boblipton wrote:Great news, Ed! Have they asked you to introduce them?

Bob

R Michael Pyle wrote:

boblipton wrote:Great news, Ed! Have they asked you to introduce them?

Bob

It would be great to see you introduce them! Congratulations!

boblipton wrote:Ducks and Drakes will get its TCM premiere at 12:30 AM (EST) on Monday, March 6. Set your timers!

Bob

drednm wrote:After two days of trying to upload video files to Turner's "new" upload site, I downloaded everything onto an external drive and mailed if off to Atlanta.

Jim Roots wrote:

drednm wrote:After two days of trying to upload video files to Turner's "new" upload site, I downloaded everything onto an external drive and mailed if off to Atlanta.

TCM was too cheap to mail you to Atlanta for a live interview?

Jim

azjazzman wrote:Not to hijack your thread, but why doesn't somebody do a Kickstarter project to hire Ben M. to do scores for THE PATENT LEATHER KID and LILAC TIME so that TCM can run those?

drednm wrote:

azjazzman wrote:Not to hijack your thread, but why doesn't somebody do a Kickstarter project to hire Ben M. to do scores for THE PATENT LEATHER KID and LILAC TIME so that TCM can run those?

Because they are not in the public domain.....

azjazzman wrote:

drednm wrote:

azjazzman wrote:Not to hijack your thread, but why doesn't somebody do a Kickstarter project to hire Ben M. to do scores for THE PATENT LEATHER KID and LILAC TIME so that TCM can run those?

Because they are not in the public domain.....

I realize that, but I'm not talking about a DVD release. WB owns the films, but surely they wouldn't object to a third party providing scores so that the films could be run on TCM.

boblipton wrote:The Bride's Play showed up on my DVR as showing on TCM on March 13 at midnight. Set your recorders!

Bebe Daniels was only 20 years old when she took the lead in the comedy Ducks and Drakes (1921) but she was already a show business veteran. The daughter of a stage actress mother and a theater manager father, she had made her stage debut at the age of four and her screen debut at eight, played Dorothy in a short 1910 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, and co-starred in over 150 comedy shorts for producer Hal Roach (most of them opposite Harold Lloyd) before she broke in to features films. After casting her in a small role in Male and Female (1919), Cecil B. DeMille signed her to Paramount pictures and gave her a substantial part of "the other woman" opposite Gloria Swanson in his sex comedy Why Change Your Wife? (1920). She was soon a movie star in her own right.

In Ducks and Drakes, one of Daniels's earliest roles as a leading lady, she's back in familiar comedy territory. She plays spoiled rich orphan Teddy Simpson, an incorrigible flirt and prankster who rebels against her fiancé Rob Winslow (Jack Holt) and her aunt (Mayme Kelso), who chose Rob to tame the wild girl, by using the telephone to play jokes on Rob's friends. Tired of her shenanigans, they team up to help him teach Teddy a lesson with an elaborate prank that she'll never forget. The title of the film is an archaic figure of speech that means to squander money or resources, ostensibly a reference to Teddy's reckless ways, but it also carries a hint of the battle of the sexes.

Rugged and stalwart Jack Holt got into the movies as a stunt man and was best known for rugged outdoor roles, especially westerns, but he was also a reliable leading man in both comedies and dramas. He's the father of actor Tim Holt, who followed in his footsteps and became a successful cowboy star in his own right, and Jennifer Holt, who also found a career in westerns.

Director Maurice Campbell had already directed Daniels in two features when he took the reigns of this production and he went on to become one of her most reliable collaborators, ultimately directing her in eight comedies. The original screenplay is by Elmer Harris, a prolific screenwriter from the golden age of Hollywood who made his name years later with his acclaimed Broadway play "Johnny Belinda," which was turned into an award-winning film in 1948.

"The whole thing is almost entirely Bebe Daniels, and she contrives to make herself wholly enjoyable from start to finish," wrote the pseudonymous reviewer in Film Daily, who described Daniels as "a first class purveyor of light and frolicsome entertainment." And film critic Bernard Sobel, writing for the New York Dramatic Mirror, praised Daniels as "an unusually good flapper, credulous and impulsive, warm-hearted and fatuous, quite unlike the sophisticated heroines she has impersonated in some of her other pictures."

Daniels's career soared in the 1920s. She went on to star opposite such leading men as William Powell, Ricardo Cortez, and Rudolph Valentino and made a successful transition to the sound era, starring in the first screen version of The Maltese Falcon (1931) as Miss Wonderly (the Mary Astor role in the 1941 version) and in the landmark backstage musical 42nd Street (1933) as the veteran stage star Dorothy Brock. She retired from the screen 1938 to move to England with her husband, actor Ben Lyon, and their children, but she didn't give up acting. She continued to perform on stage and starred in two hugely successful radio shows through the 1960s. Bebe Daniels passed away in 1971 in her adopted home of London, England.

Battra92 wrote:Unfortunately I was sick yesterday and forgot all about this. Hopefully my brother recorded it like I asked him to.

Thanks for posting the intro, though.