Sunday, January 15, 2012
MLB Trade Rumors: Bartolo Colon Agrees to Sign With Unknown Team
(www.mlbtraderumors.com)
posted on January 15, 2012 at 02:52 PM by The District Attorney to angels, arizona, astros, athletics, blue jays, braves, brewers, cardinals, cubs, dodgers, expos, giants, indians, mariners, mets, miami, nationals, orioles, padres, phillies, pirates, rangers, rays, red sox, reds, rockies, royals, rumors, teams, tigers, twins, white sox, yankees
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33 comment(s)
Bartolo Colon has agreed to a deal with an unknown club reports Bob Nightengale of USA Today (on Twitter). The right-hander wouldn’t divulge the team because he has not yet passed his physical.
Pretty sure it’s either the All-Stars or the Champs.
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< 1 2 3The Red Sox' national fan base isn't as old as those of some of the teams you mention, but it does exist, has existed for at least one generation, and in my mind is largely a function of the large number of people with disposable income and less than strong bonds to their hometown team (and/or only a NL history) who went to college in Boston or New England and then relocated elsewhere.
A lot of New Englanders (like my parents) also relocated to other cities. I've run into a lot of New Englanders of my parents' age at Red Sox games who relocated in the 80s.
Don't worry, Morty. I fully recognize that taste in movies consists 90% of what sort of genres you like (film noir, B-movies and pre-code get there for me) or don't (historical drama, hagiographies, any animation other than Donald Duck); and what actors either rub you the right way (Bogart, Cagney, Robert Taylor, Lancaster, Mitchum, Montgomery, Conte, Harlow, Crawford, Bette and Judy Davis, and of course the indisputably greatest actor of them all, Stanwyck) or the wrong way (Spencer Tracy, St. Peck, Brando, and yeah, I agree with you about Shearer). It's nothing but a matter of purely individual taste, and I'm only glad I'm married to a woman who shares mine.
And BTW the whole screwball genre is highly overrated. Of course there are some great exceptions, but after having immersed myself in hundreds of them over the past year while recording over 900 movies off TCM and FCM, I'm pretty much convinced that without Stanwyck, Hepburn/Grant, or Lombard, or the great Sturges ensemble, your chances of finding a gem are pretty few and far between. The code occasionally forced Hollywood to use its creativity in some sublimely subtle ways, but mostly all it did was remove all the rough edges from the vast majority of movies outside of film noir. And you can take all those Astaire / Ginger Rogers musicals and stuff them all in a sack. Give me those trash talking pre-code dames any day.(/rant)
I don't doubt that there is really a national fanbase, just doubt it's to the degree that ESPN portrays it. as to the number of fans posting here, well to be honest the Red Sox are one of the smarter organizations out there and have a philosophy that fits in well on this website, and it's no surprise to see a higher than normal percentage of smart fans posting for them. I also think that the Royals and A's are both probably overrepresented on this site for similar/different reasons, relative to their fanbase. Philly fans are rabid fans and they have a very strong fanbase but their numbers on here as far as posters goes doesn't reflect their fan base (in my opinion).
heck I grew up with the Red Sox as my second favorite AL team (thanks to Carlton Fisk---nobody beat the A's and Joe Rudi though from the AL for my love---only batting helmets I ever had as a kid were the Cardinals and Red Sox)
at least you agree that the ESPN love affair is relatively recent(in the big scheme of things) I remember national exposure for teams being about the Yankees, all the teams with the best record, and any great individual(Fernandomania) storylines, the rivalries were always treated as second tiered national news stories until September, and rivalries were allowed to fluctuate based upon a couple of seasons, the Yankees/Royals rivalry was bigger at a point in time than the Red Sox rivalry, the Cards/Mets was bigger than the Cubs rivalry(the dislike to the fans was still there, but it was lower in importance than the new rivalry) etc. ESPN now treats the rivalry as the only rivalry in the country and the only one that matters and that everyone in the country cares about it more than the rest of the other great storylines out there, which is utterly ridiculous. Again nobody but the fans of those two teams care about the rivalry, it's just another game, and if I get stuck watching a Red Sox/Yankee game instead of seeing a Strasburg/Ubaldo/Greinke start or miss a chance to see Prince Fielder/McCutchen/Ichiro or whoever you think is famous enough to bring a fan to the game, then I'm going to complain.
I know the ratings are great for the Yankee/Red Sox games, but that is mostly a product of the large East Coast market, not because of the nationwide appeal of this rivalry.
My dad's family left the Boston area in the late 1940s. He raised me as a Red Sox fan in New York, and I'm raising my youngest son as a Red Sox fan in Indiana (the eldest boy, sadly, couldn't give a damn about baseball or sports in general).
It doesn't really make these teams special. It's a hell of a lot easier for a team like the Red Sox, Cards, Cubs, etc. to have national fan bases. No one's grandfather grew up a Rays fan.
Death on the Diamond (1934). Open the link, look at the all-star cast of character actors, and then click on "Read full synopsis." A brief excerpt:
Death on the Diamond blows every other cheesy Hollywood baseball flick out of the water. Forget your stupidly sentimental Field of Dreams and your ####### literary stretches. This is the Reefer Madness of baseball movies, with three murders, an aborted scheme by the mob to take over the St. Louis Cardinals (filmed in part in Sportsman's Park), and with perhaps the greatest character actor of all time in one of the leading roles. Of course I can only be referring to the mighty Nat Pendleton, recognizable from The Thin Man and an infinite number of other movies. Nat Pendleton alone makes any film worth watching.
Seriously, do not miss this movie. I give you an Ali-level guarantee you'll thank me once you've seen it. You might even anoint me the Official Movie Critic of BTF.
That seems so unenterprising (and a trifle convenient) a critical standard. Rather than just take that as a given, and whistle nonchalantly as we hurry past that graveyard, what might be more interesting is to delve into the basis of taste, both as it is created in individuals and as it manifests itself variously across the human spectrum.
Well, to begin, that’s a few, all right. I guess you could say that without Shakespeare and few others what’s good about Elizabethan/Jacobean poetry? Or if you exclude Mays, Mantle, and Snider, the centerfielders of the ‘50’s weren’t particularly memorable. However, without entering into a Life of Brian “What has Rome Ever Done For Us” set-to, there are a lot of other comedies besides the ones of those there that you mention. Many. That is one of the rewards of dealing with classics—time has done a lot of your critical work. It’s winnowed the wheat from the chaff. Just as you don’t have to read all that Elizabethan/Jacobean junk, you don’t have to see the comedies that fizzled.
Seems to me, though, there’s a lot more excellence in comedy in general and screwball in particular in the thirties and forties than in just about any other genre. Besides those immortals you mention, there’s Robert Montgomery, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Libeled Lady, Irene Dunne (sans Grant, like in Theodora Goes Wild), Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka, Melyvn Douglas and Merle Oberon in That Uncertain Feeling, Boyer and Jones in Cluny Brown,Don Ameche and Tierney in Heaven Can Wait, Ameche and Fonda in The Magnificent Dope, Jean Arthur (Easy Livingand More the Merrier), Miriam Hopkins (Wise Girl, Design For Living), Joel McCrea (Woman Chases Man, The Richest Girl in the World, He Married His Wife), Colbert and Gable in you know what, as well as Colbert w/Ameche in the wonderful Midnight, Colbert and MacMurray, MacMurray and Rosalind Russell, MacMurray in Murder He Said. Harlow (Bombshell) with the incomparable Lee Tracy, Lee Tracy (Blessed Event—very wonderful period piece), Margaret Sullavan (The Good Fairy, The Moon’s Our Home, The Shop @ the Corner), Fredric March (The Royal Family of Broadway), Barrymore (Twentieth Century), The original Front Page, Little Miss Marker, Lubitsch, Leisen, Edw. G. Robertson (The Little Giant, A Slight Case of Murder, Larceny Inc., and Ford’s fine foray into screwball, The Whole Town’s Talking). Cagney did a number of jaunty takeoffs on his tough guy image that are a lot of fun.
Tons of B-Movie lighthearted fare that is still enjoyable: Gene Raymond in Love On A Bet, a forgotten little B-movie gem. Cross Country Romance is good, too, not to mention a number of movies he and Ann Sothern made together. Capra’s best comedies are a mixture of screwball/romantic comedy and drama, but It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, and Lady For a Day certainly make heavy use of screwball elements.
Even Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Foreign Correspondent (as are the later To Catch a Thief and NBNW) has just as much screwball as it does mystery-suspense. They are brilliant hybrids.
And that’s not even getting into how the British put their spin on screwball: The Divorce of Lady X in the ‘30’s is very good (Olivier gives every indication he could have hung with the best of them—Grant, Stewart, Gable, Montgomery, Powell), Michael Powell utilizes screwball elements in Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going. Then there are those great English comedies starting in the late forties, a lot with Guinness, or Sellers, Price, Terry-Thomas, Ian Carmichael.
Sad, sad. I’ll gladly take them. The ones of the ‘30’s are brilliant screwball even without the dance and music. And the dance and music just makes them absolutely ####### unique. It’s beyond me how anyone can resist the best of Astaire/Rogers. They’re the movie Alan Turing test. If you don’t like Astaire/Rogers, you ain’t human. Rogers, too, made some comedies, B ones in the early/mid-thirties, bigger more prestigious ones later.
I won’t broach whether W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers fit, and a whole bunch of lesser lights. It’s wild comedy, though.
I’ll let the Tracy/Hepburn enterprises pass, as they are a trifle doctrinaire, but parts of all are chirce, and most all of Woman of the Year is.
If it weren’t for comedy, I don’t think I’d give much of a #### about movies. Movies consciously taking themselves intellectually seriously are tiresome for the most part.
That seems so unenterprising (and a trifle convenient) a critical standard. Rather than just take that as a given, and whistle nonchalantly as we hurry past that graveyard, what might be more interesting is to delve into the basis of taste, both as it is created in individuals and as it manifests itself variously across the human spectrum.
That's not the worst of suggestions, but in the end it's going to lead you right back to where you began. I can be fairly easily persuaded (for instance) of Marlon Brando's greatness as an actor, but that doesn't eliminate the visceral disgust I have for his entire persona, which unfortunately inhibits me from fully appreciating his talent. And whatever flaws (for instance) Joan Crawford may have as an actress (not to mention as a human being), there's scarcely a film of hers up through Sudden Fear that I don't thoroughly enjoy, in great part because of her presence. And that's why I used "taste" rather than "greatness" in what I wrote above.
How to account for that taste, and how I came to acquire it? You tell me. In order to discover why anyone has particular preferences in anything from movies to politicians to baseball teams, you'd often have to know far more about that person than could easily be summarized in a few paragraphs on a baseball forum.
Okay, once I start remembering the good ones and trying to come up with some sort of a balance sheet, I'll agree that I was way overstating the case, especially if you start overlapping the genres and including the pre-codes (which is where Harlow and Lee Tracy are mostly found) and Whodunits (the entire Thin Man series). When you let all the movies like that be admitted into the club, then it becomes a far more welcoming one.
But it still comes down to the sort of personal preferences I mentioned above. One small example: Sturges. I could watch The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty, and Easy Living a hundred times over and not get tired of any of them, and maybe 50 times for The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. And I liked Sullivan's Travels enough to want to see it twice. But The Miracle of Morgan's Creek or Hail The Conquering Hero? Bleechhh. And yet other than making some trite comment like "those last two are just too formulaic, whereas the first three fairly crackle," I'm not really sure how to "defend" that preference other than just saying YMMV. Although I can't even imagine any non-biographical movie with Edward Arnold that I wouldn't like, or any movie with Eddie Bracken that I would. Just one of those things.
That would be more of a point if I were trying to make a serious case for the superiority of my judgment in movies. But I'm not. I watch as many movies as I can, and I react to them, sometimes confirming my previous prejudices (still can't warm up to Citizen Kane) and sometimes not (after 3 or 4 tries, I finally stayed awake for the last half of The Wizard of Oz, and I loved it). I doubt if bringing Aristotle or Rotten Tomatoes into my internal conversation is going to change my reactions all that much.
How can you not mention The Trouble with Harry here? Not to mention the much later Family Plot.
That's true. (Sorry, but I left out a lot--I gotta eat.) I think Family Plot, although not great Hitchcock, is unfairly maligned. It's a nice little comedy. The Trouble With Harry I view more as black-humor/gallows-humor comedy, a la Kind Hearts and Coronets, that was becoming popular at the time, but point well-taken. As Bob Dernier Espoir observes, elements of screwball can subtly infiltrate other genres and forms. This happens even with minor or rejected forms—they can be made better use of if only used in this way....
Maybe the elements of screwball (or name your genre) have even become so universal and ubiquitous we don't connect the new manifestations with their antecedents. I would just add this note on that, though, and that is that perhaps some of these elements were never unique to screwball (again, name your poison) to begin with--indeed, I think many pre-date the rise of screwball in movies and are just common to comedy or, in a larger perspective, to any works of dramatic/narrative art--heh, Wilde and Shaw seem screwball to me (especially The Importance of being Earnest and, oh, say, Pygmalion—My Fair Lady is screwball, Astaire and Rogers could have done this—the tone maybe would have been somewhat different), as do Mark Twain and P.G. Wodehouse, the very popular humorists Benchley and Thurber, not to mention George S. Kaufman and partners, Ben Hecht, too; the list goes on. Many of those guys (and gals, like Dorothy Parker) ended up writing for the movies. This is just to say that screwball didn't just spring from Zeus's forehead; it was being done, just not in movies—until, voila, it was done in movies. Screwball has become an all-encompassing term, and as Jolly Old pointed out, I'm as guilty as anyone in using it too broadly (although I think did specify when I did). Hey, life's short.
Screwball is just zanier than "normal" romantic comedy, the plots often more absurd, more quirky, depend more on the trivial. They move faster, and they give the woman's role a bite, a tartness, and they often put the male at embarrassing disadvantage. They surprise us with their take on genders (and not just sex genders). They’re more about the battle of the sexes, and it’s all about maintaining a nice balancing trick—a difficult and deliciously thrilling (because there’s danger) balancing feat. In tone, screwball also seems to me a lot like the college japery stuff of the time, which of course was an influence on the writers who influenced the main media comic organs like The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post, etc.
Similar traits appearing in different species of art may just be examples of contingent and/or convergent evolution, and of course sometimes conscious or unconscious “exaptation” might be indicated. To carry the evolutionary comparison to the end, emergence in different form for different use can happen. The thing about “taste” and “critical standards” is that they can not be complete subjective—we’d have to be totally different from one another for that to be an informed standard, and standards have to do with commonality. With community. What meets those standards, and whether they are well met, well, that is the question.
Agree wholeheartedly on Arnold and disagree wholeheartedly with Morgan's Creek, and a lesser extent, Hail. I've only been turned on to Sturges for about the last 5 years. Maybe the 5th time I see Morgan's Creek, I won't enjoy it so much.
One not mentioned yet, "Ball of Fire". Cooper could do screwball, at least once. Of course Stanwyck gives him just a bit of help. :)
"Kane's" reputation is such that it can intimidate people who have never seen it, and many are left with a "is that all there is" reaction. I've always said the best way to approach "Kane" is to imagine yourself in 1941, with a mental film inventory comprised of only movies made to that time, and watch what Welles does from that perspective. It's revolutionary, the cinematic equivalent of Stravinsky in 1913. Viewing "Kane" strictly through 2010 eyes, the film loses much of its power, though it can still be enjoyed.
And finally, "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" is brilliant in its subversiveness, roughly a decade after the Production Code was strictly enforced. Plus it contains a performance by Betty Hutton that probably puts her comic skills to best use -- her brassiness could otherwise be irritating when left unchecked.
I had the same feeling as Jolly Old when I first saw Miracle at Morgan's Creek. Neither Bracken nor Hutton are high up on my list of favorite actors of the golden age, and I kind of wish Sturges had used someone with more star presence as Norval. But the more times I've seen the more he's grown on me. That's the point--Norval has no star presence, and Bracken is really note perfect. Sturges needed someone young and ordinary looking (a dork) to play the schnook. Morgan's Creek is screwball at limit of zaniness. It just don't get any wilder (emotionally as well as action-wise). And Hutton is really likable, vulnerable, yet funny. She (and Bracken) have a lot of help. Demarest was never better and his role is pretty big, and I don't know of a better, funnier, more attractive teen in a comedy than Lynn.
Cooper is also good in Mr. Deeds and Design for Living, not to mention the tragi-comedy, Meet John Doe (with Stanwyck again who is again great). I use to think, though, that almost all the Cooper comedies would have been better if James Stewart would have had the role. I've come to modify that view.
EDIT: Oops, posted before I saw TerpNats on Cooper. Nice observations.
I believe the A's volunteered for that role.
Most hated teams:
1) Yankees (for 1996)
2) Yankees (for 1999)
3) Yankees (for 1998)
4) Yankees (for Alex F-in Rodriguez)
5) The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in Orange County of California somewhere near a planet called Mars
That sounds perfectly reasonable, but it still leaves enormous gaps. Just to take one particular question, what might be the "objective" difference between one person's "sweetly sentimental" and another person's "sappy", when applied either to romantic drama or romantic comedy? What "objective" guideline tells us the critical distinction between the rare Hollywood film that makes a serious political point with laserlike focus (Richard Widmark's Time Limit may be the best example of this) and one that just hits us over the head with the reigning Hollywood sentiment of the moment?
And bringing it back to Sturges, I don't think I'm ducking the question by wondering just how anything but personal taste can explain why Easy Living and The Great McGinty leave me weak with laughter, while The Miracle of Morgan's Creek just seems like Sturges throwing the kitchen sink at a dubious scenario. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that the comic talents and the overall personae of Edward Arnold and Brian Donleavy resonate with me on a level that Eddie Bracken just never will---while fully realizing that other considerations will weigh more heavily with others. Morty does his usual good job of making the case for Morgan's Creek, but it still doesn't work for me---and of course Arnold's opening tirade in Easy Living where he throws the coat onto Jean Arthur's head was to me the perfect beginning to one of Sturges' three masterpieces. (I presume that we can all agree that The Lady Eve tops the list.)
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"Kane's" reputation is such that it can intimidate people who have never seen it, and many are left with a "is that all there is" reaction. I've always said the best way to approach "Kane" is to imagine yourself in 1941, with a mental film inventory comprised of only movies made to that time, and watch what Welles does from that perspective. It's revolutionary, the cinematic equivalent of Stravinsky in 1913. Viewing "Kane" strictly through 2010 eyes, the film loses much of its power, though it can still be enjoyed.
If there's one thing I do pride myself in, it's an ability not to judge movies from a current day perspective. And while I'm perfectly willing to grant Kane's greatness, it still leaves me cold.
And finally, "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" is brilliant in its subversiveness, roughly a decade after the Production Code was strictly enforced. Plus it contains a performance by Betty Hutton that probably puts her comic skills to best use -- her brassiness could otherwise be irritating when left unchecked.
I guess I just like the pre-code way of dealing with life's little miracles a lot better. And although I love to watch Betty Hutton in interviews, her particular brand of screen persona is just a bit too much. There were just way too many infinitely better female comic talents working back then for me not to instinctively compare her to them and have her come up short. But then I've only seen her in the grand total of three movies, so maybe I'm missing something.
Also One Hour With You and . If you only know of Jeanette MacDonald as the damsel in distress in the Nelson Eddy inanities, she is really hot in these movies—especially in , where she shows off her gams and some nice cleavage in lingerie, too. Very underappreciated Lubitsch but really quite droll and risque. I had these as well as his better known later stuff in mind when I said Lubitsch alone had ten movies better than The Women.
Still, Ford's How Green Was My Valley won the Oscar that year, deservedly so. It's the work of a great artist (at whose knee, so t speak, Welles learned everything) and you can see the difference. Ford feels for those people. His artistry is at the service of something besides itself. He may have been a prick as a person, but as a director he was pure poet. He couldn't help imbuing even the most outrageous trash with his sensibilities, with his all so very human touch, and HGWMYV is not trash. I really envy anyone who will see How Green Was My Valley for the first time. It truly is an experience. It so delicate and subtle. Sons leave home singing in the night as they trudge off. A daughter marries out of spite, a look of terror on her face. A daughter-in-law, her husband dead, is forced to fend for herself, an crazed look of imperishable grief on her face. The last few scenes (from where the boy is frantically searching for his father to the spoken epilogue consonant with the concluding montage) are as starkly moving as anything in cinema that I have ever seen.
BTW, I concur that Hutton is an acquired taste, but to me "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" is her most accessible performance. It's like "Gunsmoke" is the western for people who don't like westerns (more so the radio version, but to a lesser extent the TV series), because it focuses on character and community as much as it does action.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Granted that I'm not acquainted with most of Lubitsch's earlier movies**, two of his more famous ones, Ninotchka and and The Shop Around The Corner, are so impossibly predictable from start to finish that I can't see them as anything special. In fact The Shop Around the Corner is a particularly godawful work, with the sublimated romantic two-step that wears thin almost immediately, not to mention the wholly incongruous American accents throw into a Central European setting. How anyone could consider either of those two movies superior to the acidic dialogue in The Women is beyond me.
But then, it's as I said: Taste in movies is personal and subjective. One person's masterpiece can easily be another person's groaner.
**I'll concede that Trouble in Paradise is a great film, and Design For Living is pretty damn good as well. I only wish that his other early ones would show up more often.
And BTW the two clips in that link don't do the full movie justice, though just as in Wild Boys of the Road, there's a rather falsely positive ending.
To me, however, the best part of "The Shop Around The Corner" is Frank Morgan, a guy who's right up there with Walter Connolly as the top character actor of the era. He gave sparkle to just about any role he played.
Indeed, Stewart did play a German in a very fine movie sans accent. The Mortal Storm. If you can't get into the Xmas fairy tale that is The Shop Around the Corner without American actors all going around squawking with assumed voices, then too bad. If you can't suspend disbelief on so trivial a point, go read a book. Lubitsch's best pure romantic comedy perhaps, it has character, great story, great characters (and great subsidiary characters, which is a must for comedy). Stewart delivers his lines with the precision of a surgeon, and we would ruin this with some sort of fantasy Hungarian accent?
Stewart, or maybe it was Fonda, once said he didn't do, and wouldn't do, accents for a very simple reason: because he didn't want people in the audience being diverting with inevitable considerations about whether his accents good or not. They are supposed to be following a story and an emotional flow. Language is important and most all people don't perform as well in foreign languages, even they are just stock accents. I have never seen a major actor affect an accent and not spent too much time gauging how well he does it. Brando did accents a lot, none to his advantage as an actor. He'd have been much better off (and we) if he'd have stuck to trying to get at the emotional truth of his character. He didn't and the project was worse off.
There are exceptions, like Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo, but that is an American accent, one that Hoffman, I bet, was very familiar with. He also did one in Little Big Man, but that's all part of the fun, the story, the tall tale of that movie. And of course there's burlesque. Still, for serious acting (comedy or drama) for most "name players", accents are a big no-no.
That doesn't mean you can't play around with your speaking style, in terms of cadence, emphasis, etc. See Grant in Bringing Up Baby and in His Girl Friday. Whenever someone says Grant didn't act, he just played himself, I point out how different he is in those two movies, in terms of speaking and in body movment. David "Bone" and Walter Burns are at opposite ends of the pole. But he ain't doing accents.
Don't kill me, but I'm not a huge Stewart fan to begin with, although there are some notable exceptions, such as Wife vs Secretary, The Philadelphia Story, It's A Wonderful Life, Call Northside 777, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. There are at least two dozen American male actors I'd much rather watch, but again, it's simply personal preference. And the story line didn't do much for me in either the Garland or the Meg Ryan remakes. Too schmaltzy and too predictable.
To me, however, the best part of "The Shop Around The Corner" is Frank Morgan, a guy who's right up there with Walter Connolly as the top character actor of the era. He gave sparkle to just about any role he played.
Of course I could list a hundred great character actors from that era and never be able to rank them, but I won't argue that Connolly and Morgan would be right up there near the top. Connolly in Libeled Lady managed to steal the show from three of the heaviest hitters in comic history (Harlow, Powell and Loy), and Spencer Tracy (in one of his best performances) for good measure. That's about as good a one vs. four performance as I've ever seen, and both of those guys deliver time after time.
BTW that's another loose term: "Character actor," since that description fits actors who play secondary roles in A movies, those who play leads in B movies, and those who remain character actors even when they occasionally play leading roles in A movies. I think that the only common thread that unites them is that we remember them with great fondness, be they typecast "characters" (Franklin Pangborn), typecast villains (Ben Weldon), or simply just typecast as themselves (Nat Pendleton). IMO the presence of three or four character actors is a surer guarantee of a watchable movie than the presence of all but a handful of leading men or women.
But again, YMMV. We all love movies that others just can't get into for whatever reason, e.g. The Women or A Streetcar Named Desire.
Richard Conte
Robert Ryan
Glenn Ford
Burt Lancaster
Ray Milland
Robert Mitchum
Robert Montgomery
Tyrone Power
Robert Taylor
Richard Widmark
**not that most of them aren't well represented on that list
Is this intentional? Either way, it's great.
To me, that's what made the classic Hollywood era so good. Studios such as MGM, Paramount, Warners and RKO all had fairly deep rosters of stars, supporting players, directors and writers, and every studio had its own philosophy and approach. (They changed over the years, so Paramount in 1940 was substantially different than Paramount in 1930, and Warners in 1941 was a far cry from its '31 self.) Just as baseball changed with free agency, so did films when the Supreme Court Paramount decision in 1948, combined with suburbanization and the growth of television, spelled the deathknell of the studio system and gave acting and writing personnel greater "free agency" of a sort.
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