William H. Burke, Jr.

I loved the gothic nature of this movie, the spooky old house and grounds, the long road over the ocean surrounding Eel March House, the beautiful 1913 Roll-Royce Silver Ghost, and the quaint English village. I thought Ciaran Hinds was very good as the local land owner and Daniel Radcliffe did a very nice job as the young lawyer Arthur Kipps trying to save his job by reading all the papers of a deceased woman and being haunted by a hateful ghost, who felt her son was wrongfully taken from her and allowed to die in the marsh by her selfish sister.

I've watched dozens and dozens of Gunsmoke episodes. My favorites are those with Elizabeth MacRae playing April, Festus's girlfriend. In season 8 episode 13 there was "Us Haggens" with Denver Pyle. In season 9 there was episode 18 "Once a Haggen" and episode 25, "Now that April is here". I started watching Gunsmoke in 1955 when I was 10 years old and watched it every Saturday night until I went away to college in 1964, but have caught a lot of the shows I've missed, such as the ones above with Elizabeth MacRae, on PLEX. One show I have never been able to locate was one where some bully was terrorizing Dodge because Matt was out of town, but when Matt came back he walked into the Long Branch and knocked the bully over the head with the butt of his gun and that was the end of it. Anybody out there know what year/episode it was? Pretty sure it was black & white so it had to be sometime in the first 10 seasons.

I thought it was a great story of American Airmen in a small English village during WWII. It involved romantic involvements of young Americans with local English Girls and showed the tremendous strain of being in the crew of B17 bombers flying missions over Germany. Many of the these planes didn't come back or individual airmen were badly wounded or killed. There were severeal different romances and love triangles going on between the Americans and the English girls (and a local doctor, Susannah York, and an Army Air Corps Major) living in the village. It was an excellent show with a fairly decent ending. 13 Episodes.

This movie is a vastly entertaining, interesting movie about the creation of a propaganda movie about the evacuation of English soldiers from Dunkirk. Gemma Arterton is superb as Catrin Cole, who is originally applying for a secretary's job but ends up helping write the screen play for this movie. There is a budding romance between Catrin and the lead writer, Sam Buckley. There are a lot of funny scenes and it gives people a much better understanding of the horrific bombings of London during the period of September, 1940 thru February, 1941.

Gemma Arterton is stunning in this, the perfect, definitive Tess. I read the book and this show is very faithful to Thomas Hardy's original book. I hated the ending, though. Didn't they have second degree murder in 19th Century English law? Tess's murder of Alec D'Urberville was not premeditated, but committed in the heat of the moment. I don't understand why she would have been hung for that. It made no sense and made the ending of the book very tough to take. In any case, Gemma Arterton has to be one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. I saw her in Their Finest, which was an excellent movie, but Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans and others not so much.

I thought that this was an excellent series from a historical perspective, and I learned several things I had thought I knew about but didn't. For instance, that Crazy Horse was murdered by the US Army in a fort when he had come to negototiate, that Custer was a complete moron and got 600 plus soldiers killed for no good reason at the Battle of LIttle Big Horn, that Billy the Kid was an orphan born in New York City (Billy McCarthy) who had come west with his mother who had soon died and he was murdered by Pat Garatt who was being paid by a wealthy landowner in New Mexico, that Wyatt Earp was actually considered a criminal at one point inspite of his taking on cowboy punks at the OK Corral in Tombstone with his brothers, and that Jesse James was a disgruntled confederate soldier who wanted revenge against the American government. The real criminals of this story were all money grubbers: Railroad Barons and Cattle Barons. The other people all got famous, including the Native Americans, fighting the interests of these greedy barons.

This was one of the most heart-breaking novels i have ever read. I couldn't help loving Tess for her beauty and natural goodness and simplicity, and I hated Alec D'Urbervilles for his lewd, deceitful treatment of Tess. I couldn't also help feeling disgust for the hypocrisy of Angel Clare, who felt his sin was perfectly OK, because he was a man getting pleasure from a common prostitute, but Tess's sin (?) consisting of being raped (while asleep) by that scum D'Urberville was for some reason in his little mind completely unforgiveable, which to me made him as guilty as Alec for Tess's fate. If Clare had forgiven Tess for being taken advantage of as a very young girl by a much older man, she would never have been subjected to the suffering she endured while he was off in Brazil, and she would never have been put in the position to want to kill D'Urberville. The one mystifying thing about this book is the legality of Tess being executed for killing D'Urberville. Wasn't that manslaughter or second degree murder, which didn't require a death penalty? Tess killed D'Urberville in a moment of extreme anger and rage. it was not premeditated at all, which I thought would be required for a first degree murder conviction, even in 1890's England. Her being hung just didn't make any sense. It was the most awful ending I have ever read.