If I Were a Conventional Blogger

So yesterday's installment of the Thursday Morning Picks blogathon was on "the woods"; wanting to be different I decided to turn the theme on its head by going for people named Wood or Woods. (I suppose I could have used Woody Strode or Woody Allen instead.) Of course, the theme was supposed to be about the forest, and if I had done it that way, I would have had to do some thinking.

That's because the first movie I would have thought of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is one that I already used when the subject was Shakespeare. As you may recall, the characters in the movie are all going through the forest on the way to a wedding when the fairy Puck (Mickey Rooney) puts spells on all of them and makes them fall in love with the wrong people.

I think I would also have used Ring of Fire, a reasonably good drama about a cop (David Janssen) who gets carjacked by thieves on the run, who force him to take them through the forest to their escape. Except that the forest is ridiculously dry, which means there's a risk of forest fire, which unsurprisingly happens. Unfortunately, the print TCM shows is panned and scanned. Sydney Pollack is getting the heebie-jeebies in heaven right now.

And for a third movie? It's been ages since I've seen God's Country and the Woman, one of the earliest three-strip Technicolor movies and possibly the very first to make extensive use of external scenes. I believe this is the movie that Warner Bros. wanted to cast Bette Davis in and she, being sick of the idiotic (in her view) programmers they were giving her, decamped to the UK and sued.