This blog was begun Monday night, March 9th :
This afternoon I went to Target and bought an HDMI cable and was pleasantly surprised when I plugged it in back at Pearl's. It fit the ports in both my new Blu-Ray player and Pearl's TV. My happiness was short-lived, however, when I tried but failed to access an auxiliary channel on which to watch a dvd. Pearl has Spectrum Cable, and the remote has been programmed to run everything through the cable box. You know how on and old dvd or vhs setup, you'd just go to channel 3 on your tv set and play your machine through that? You can't do that with this Spectrum remote. I have no idea how it works to operate a device, in this case my Blu-Ray player, so even though I've got the player successfully connected to the tv set, I still can't watch dvds as of this moment.
In my dismay, I was pondering what led to this development and I came to the conclusion that - if they tried very hard, expended every effort, consulted every expert and brainstormed for weeks with the goal of making things even more difficult than they already are for consumers of these devices - they'd be hard pressed to achieve that goal , and in fact I think they'd fail miserably. And I concluded that this was because they'd already devoted an effort on the level of the Manhattan Project to make usage of electronic gadgets as absolutely confounding as possible.
It's no joke, and if you think I'm kidding, consider the simplicity of the original TV set.
You plugged it into the wall socket, then you turned it on and started watching shows.
Nowdays, you've gotta have a PhD in computer programming to run a Blu-Ray player through a tv set that's been set up by the Spectrum Cable Company. Now that's what I call progress!
I know, I know......it's super easy for y'all, so go ahead and laugh, haha. Fortunately for me, though I hate this stuff, I am diligent and will figure it out. When I say I'm a non-technophile what I mean is that technology bores me to tears. I have no more interest in "5G" than I have in last night's mashed potatoes.....(however, now that you mention it I am getting a bit hungry).
Fortunately for me, TCM came through in a big way once again. Tonight at 9pm they showed a tremendous disaster film, nerve wracking from start to finish, called "The Last Voyage"(1960), starring Robert Stack, George Sanders, Woody Strode, Dorothy Malone and Edmond O'Brien. It was a precursor to classics like "The Poseidon Adventure" and "Titanic", but for the life of me, after watching "Last Voyage" I can't understand why I've never heard of it before. It's extremely well done, on par with either of the aforementioned films, and though the story is less grandiose in it's tragic romanticism than the other two, it more than makes up for it in sheer realism.
You feel like you're going down with the ship in this one, believe me.
"The Last Voyage" starts off from Frame One with the message that there's a fire in the ship's boiler room. The Captain, an arrogant autocrat played by George Sanders, heads below deck to check it out. Flames are indeed raging, but the crew are hosing the room down. Their chief assures Captain Sanders that the fire should be contained within a few minutes. No problem therefore, so Sanders goes back up to the main deck, where many of the passengers are enjoying their dinner. In the ballroom, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are engaged in some after dinner dancing. They are married and deeply in love, which is likely a clue that they're about to be tested to the limits of their endurance as the fire gets out of control. This is a disaster movie, after all. You didn't think the crew was actually gonna put it out, did you?
Captain Sanders is monitoring the situation and decides against informing the passengers, a decision his First Mate is vehemently against. But sir"! he begins, before the Captain cuts him off.
"It will cause chaos", Sanders predicts. "People will jump overboard and die, and probably for no reason. The fire can be contained before it reaches the engine room. We will not cause a panic on my watch".
"But Sir, can't we at least....", pleads the First Mate before being interrupted a second time.
Sanders : "Are you questioning my authority"?
Yeah, he's a real jerk, and as the fire does indeed reach the engine room, a fuel tank explodes. Holy smokes and great jumpin' jiminy! Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are back in their cabin when this happens. They have a little girl (played by an excellent child actress named Tammy Marihugh) who is put in peril when the explosion blows the bottom out of their room. She is left with merely a sliver of floor to sit on, with the exposed machinery of the ship looming several decks below. The explosion has opened up a giant hole amidships (man, I was just waiting to use that word), killing several crewmen, but worse for Robert Stack it has also caused a steel beam to fall on his wife, trapping her. So in addition to the pressing need to get his daughter off the ledge, Stack also has to find Several Strong Men to help him lift the beam from Malone.
Good thing Woody Strode is on hand. Strode was an African-American star who'd previously been a football player and decathlete at UCLA. He's tall and has the physique of an Olympic champion, which you can clearly see because he has his shirt off. Well, he was working down in the boiler room. It gets hot down there, but anyway, Woody is just the man to help Stack free his wife. Try as they might, however, they just can't budge the beam, not even when they enlist a couple of Regular Joes to boost the heave-ho.
"It's not gonna work"!, Strode informs Stack. "We're gonna need an acetylene torch to cut through it"! And the ship does have one. The only trouble is that the torch is located down in the machine shop near the engine room, which is now filling with water. Captain Sanders' desire to keep the passengers in the dark is now a moot point as word begins to spread about the explosion. The Chief Engineer (Edmond O'Brien) tries explaining that - in addition to being on fire - the ship is also sinking, but all Sanders wants to know is "how long have we got"? Luckily it's a slow leak, for the moment anyway, so we've got at least an hour (i.e. the length of the remainder of the movie). "But if the bulkhead blows, that's it - she's going under"!, says O'Brien.
But even with this potentiality, Sanders still refuses to order the passengers to the life boats. Chief Engineer O'Brien, who lost his Dad on the Titanic, wants to kill him and tells him so, but Sanders merely looks on with contempt. It's his bloody ship and he's gonna bring it back to port come Hell or High Water (which is in fact coming).
I'm telling you, folks : this is one of the best disaster movies I've ever seen. Director Andrew L. Stone used a real luxury liner to film on, one that was about to be sold for scrap. He apparently thought that gave him carte blanche to wreck it, which the ship's owners were none too happy about, but boy did it add to the realism of the story. I mean, in long shots from the water, it really does look like the ship is sinking, and it doesn't look like they were using a model. Ditto the explosion scene, and the ship filling with water. It all appears to be the Real Deal, and I read on IMDB that the actors had quite a few physical challenges during the filming.
"The Last Voyage" deserves to be much more well known than it is, so if you haven't seen it please do so as soon as humanly possible. I am giving it Two Huge Thumbs Up and will be on the lookout for more movies from director Stone, who like his film is criminally unheralded. ////
That's all I have for the moment. It's now Tuesday night and I am writing from Pearl's. I've gotta attend to some job-related chores, but I'll be back in a little while to begin another blog. See you at the Usual Time!
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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