The movie isn't exactly a comedy

In the latest of the musical biopics that I wanted to make certain I watched before it expired from my DVR, it's time for Funny Girl. It's finally coming up again on TCM, tomorrow, March 24, at 5:15 PM, as part of another day of musical biopics, so now's the time to put up this post.

Funny Girl is story of the earlier years of stage actress and singer Fanny Brice, played here by Barbara Streisand. As the movie opens, it's a bit before World War I, and although the second half of the movie covers events that are in Brice's real life after the war, I don't think the war itself is ever mentioned. Fanny was born to a Jewish immigrant family in New York, although the only family member we see is her mom, played by Kay Meford. Mom runs a pub/restaurant and plays poker with lady friends, while all the neighborhood cares about Fanny because that's the way this sort of neighborhood is.

Fanny, after the roadshow opening music, shows up at the New Amsterdam Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, where she hopes to get a job as a chorus girl in the follies run by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon). But she's going to have to make her way up the ladder first, which includes doing a vaudeville act on roller skates, even though she can't really skate. However, she can sing, and the combination of singing that appeals to the audience combined with the comedic value of not being able to skate, makes her a hit. In the audience is Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes backstage and is so charmed by Fanny that he negotiates a salary increase for her right on the spot even though he has no real job in any theatrical production company.

Eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies does come calling, putting Fanny in a musical finale that will have her dressed as a bride while singing to a bunch of men. Fanny isn't comfortable with the number, so she changes things by having the costume altered to imply that the bride is already pregnant. Once again, Nicky is in the audience. It turns out that he's a professional gambler, but he's so taken by Fanny that when he goes to her mom's place after the show, he lets the old ladies beat him at very low-stakes poker. Fanny and Nicky run into each other again in Maryland when he's buying a race horse that he eventually loses betting on a race. He has to go back to the ungentlemanly routine of playing the cruise ship trade, playing cards against the rich gentlement to earn more than his passage. Nicky wants Fanny to pursue her dream, but she loves him so much that she gets on the boat and accompanies him to Europe.

In the next scene, they've just gotten married, although in real life that didn't happen until 1918 so puts a major hole in the timeline considering World War I was raging. (The real life Fanny and Nicky were romantically involved for several years but couldn't get married until Nicky's divorce from a previous marriage went through.) Fanny is a big star, and the house they buy could just as easily have been purchased by either of them. But things start to go south for Nicky when his gambling stops paying off, and he starts racking up debt to everyone in town save Fanny, who is totally oblivious to it all. One of the people to whom Nicky is in debt offers a chance to pay it off by taking part in a "bond deal" that's clearly fraudulent, while Fanny secretly tries to use her husband's name to help open a new high-class casino with Nicky as promoter. Nicky figures out what's going on, doesn't want to be beholden to Fanny in that way, and goes for the bond deal, which is going to land him in prison eventually.

The movie ends when Nicky gets out of prison, which was in December 1925 in real life, although the movie seems to imply it's earlier. The movie doesn't mention the less-than-happy ending of Fanny and Nicky's marriage crumbling, although at least Fanny would go on to have a fairly successful third act playing a character named Baby Snooks on radio before her untimely death at the age of 59.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the well-known musical talents of Barbra Streisand, the material is something that I think would have worked better as a non-musical, or limiting musical numbers to scenes from when Fanny was on stage. Yeah, I know this would mean ditching a song like "People" which Streisand sings just after the evening with Nicky at her mom's place, and that people went to the movie to see the songs from the Broadway show from which this is adapted. But keeping the songs from the musical turns this into an overlong slog lasting right around 150 minutes, which is a good half hour too long, I think.

Streisand, of course, does well, even though I'm not the biggest fan of her style of singing. She tied in the Best Actress Oscar race that year with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, and was deserving of that Oscar win. But for me that wasn't quite enough to make Funny Girl as worth watching as some of the other musical biopics out there.

Lawrence of Arabia

It may be a surprise, but one of those movies that I never sat down to watch all in one go, largely because of the length, is Lawrence of Arabia. Partly for that reason and partly because of my reluctance to do posts on extremely well known movies, I've never done a full-length post on it here. But to rectify that, the last time it showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in advance of the next showing. That next showing is tomorrow, February 21, at 11:30 AM as part of a day devoted to epics.

Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, and as the movie opens, he's riding his motorcycle to his death in England in the mid-1930s. His was a well known name, so a lot of people gather for the funeral, and a couple, such as reporter Jackson Bentley (Arthur Kennedy), basically intimate that Lawrence was an SOB, but our SOB. Since Lawrence is dead, we're obviously going to get a flashback to when he was alive.

The scene shifts to 1916/1917, which is smack dab in the middle of World War I. Britain is one of the Allies while the Ottoman Empire are one of the opposing Central Powers. The Ottomans are Turks, but a fair amount of the territory they govern is Arab, such as the Hejaz which is now a province on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) is one of the potentates who is leading an Arab revolt against the Turks, and the British realize supporting the Arabs is a good way to destabilize the Ottoman Empire. They've already got an advisor there in Col. Brighton (Anthony Quayle), but aren't certain of what the situation is really like, so they want to send a second man in Lawrence, an army lieutenant (ultimately promoted to colonel) who speaks Arabic and has good knowledge of the region, to get more information.

Lawrence is supposed to meet Faisal, but first meets Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will take Lawrence to where Faisal is. However, along the way, Ali and his men run into Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn), who is from a different tribe from Ali. Sadly, the two tribes have a blood feud that threatens to derail the whole uprising until Lawrence puts it to rest by carrying out an execution himself. Worse, he finds that he doesn't dislike killing people. In any case, the result of this is that many of the Arabs act like they've got a lot of respect for Lawrence.

Lawrence's plan is that the Arabs should attack the port city of Aqaba, now at the southern tip of Jordan. Of course, the port is well defended, but only from the sea, since on the other sides lies a desert that's thought to be impassable. Except that Lawrence figures they can cross it and surprise the Ottomans that way, which works. It brings Lawrence more glory, but to go any further he's going to have to get more help from the British back in Cairo.

The British seem none too pleased that Lawrence looks as though he's going native, as it were, and supporting the Arab desire for total independence which would clash with what the British and French have decided should be done with the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans. The Arabs, for their part, are looking to get to Damascus, while General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) of the British will be going to Jerusalem as that area even during the 1910s had a substantial Jewish population. (Not every Jew had left in the various diasporas, while Zionism had begun with some European Jews already moving to the region, which south of Beirut had a fairly sparse population.)

Lawrence keeps attacking, but there's some question of whether he's getting too big. Also, there's the question of whether the Arabs are going to be able to govern anything modern if they do take Damascus. The leaders of the revolt are tribal and suited to desert warfare, but Damascus is a fairly modern city. They could easily use western engineers, but that might keep them from being truly independent.

It's easy to see why Lawrence of Arabia won so many Oscars. The acting is quite good, as is the cinematography and other parts of the production design. Maurice Jarre's musical score is also memorable. However, I'd have to say that Lawrence of Arabia is another of those movies where, while it's very good, I'm not certain I agree with it ending up near the top on lists of all-time great movies. The movie runs over three and a half hours plus the intro/entr'acte/exit music; the print TCM ran is 227 minutes. And frankly, in the last hour or so the movie really loses steam. Some historians take serious issue with some of the ways history is presented here. Certain of the characters are composites (such as the diplomat played by Claude Rains), a movie which is often necessary when trying to distill a story like this down to a reasonable length, but apparently some of the timeline is wrong and the movie glosses over Lawrence's knowledge of the region before the war.

That time Blake Edwards made a Bond movie

Tomorrow (August 4) on TCM, Summer Under the Stars is honoring Julie Andrews. One of her films that I'd been wanting to see for a while shows up: The Tamarind Seed, at 12:45 PM. So I looked to see if I could watch it on one of the FAST streaming services, and both the Roku Channel and TubiTV had it, albeit with some commercial breaks.

The opening titles looked like they could be straight out of a James Bond movie, and sure enough, the titles were done by Maurice Binder. Not only that, but the score is by John Barry. Anyhow, after the opening credits, which clearly show the faces of the film's two stars: Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif, we get to the action, such as it is, with shots Judith Farrow (that's Julie Andrews) walking on a beach in Barbados and looking pensive. These are intercut with shots of a car going over a cliff, as well as Judith cutting off a relationship with her boyfriend Paterson, who is in fact married.

Staying at the same resort on Barbados in a bungalow next to Judith's is one Feodor Sverdlov (that's Omar Sharif, as if you couldn't tell). He's ostensibly on vacation here, but he's Soviet, and this is the 1970s, so you wonder whether that's actually the truth. And, as it turns out, he'd have a good non-vacation reason for being in Barbados in a bungalow next to Judith's. Judith works in the Home office with Ferguson, who would be a valuable source of information for the Soviets. Sverdlov, for his part, is a military attaché to General Golitsyn (Oscar Homolka) in the Soviet embassy in Paris. Judith would be a good target for someone like Sverdlov to try to "flip".

Now, the logical thing here would be for Judith to run screaming from a Soviet attaché, thinking that of course he's not there for any personal reason. But instead, the two decide to start having a relationship that each is going to insist is nothing but that, although of course everybody else would have good reason to insist is a major security risk. Indeed, when Judith gets back to London, she's met by spymaster Jack Loder (Anthony Quayle) and his assistant MacLeod. The spy agency already knows about the lengthy meetings between Judith and Sverdlov, and they tell her what to do in the cast that Sverdlov does try to flip her.

Sverdlov does eventually wind up trying to do it, although with a twist. He wants to keep seeing Judith, so he tells her that he's going to act like he's trying to get her to spy for the Soviets, since that's what everybody is expecting him to do. It also gives him an excuse to keep seeing her. But Sverdlov is beginning to get disillusioned. When he returned from Barbaros, he discovered that his personal assistant had been replaced and the one he had sent back to Moscow with an excuse of "exhaustion", which Sverdlov suspects really means that the previous assistant had been arrested and will implicate Sverdlov.

Back on the British side, Loder learns that MacLeod is having an affair with Mrs. Stephenson (Sylvia Syms), wife of a diplomat (Dan O'Herlihy). Somehow, something in this love triangle is resulting in information that really ought to be confidential winding up with the Soviets.

All of the plot strands in The Tamarind Seed eventually come together, but this isn't really like a Bond movie in that the Bond movies were better known for their action and gadgetry and whatnot. The Tamarind Seed is a lot closer to the dark and moody John le Carré-style spy movies from the late 1960s.

I think I've suggested before -- at least, I've certainly argued it having blogged about a couple of those more "serious" spy films like The Looking Glass War -- that this isn't my favorite genre, since the films tend to be too moody for their own good. Indeed, while I was watching The Tamarind Seed, I didn't think just about the Bond movies, but about another surprising comparison: Woody Allen's Interiors. If you haven't seen Interiors it's the film Allen made as an homage to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, and the Bergmanesque nature of the film really shows. By the same token, The Tamarand Seed at times really feels like an homage to those "straight" 1960s spy films.

Having said that, I think The Tamarind Seed does what it does quite well, with Andrews and Sharif both giving good performances. It's just that, like a lot of movies in the genre, The Tamarind Seed takes it's own sweet time getting where it's going. If you like the serious spy genre, then you'll definitely like The Tamarind Seed.

Le casse

I was looking through TubiTV's list of on-demand movies that are about to leave the platform at the end of the month, and one that I saw that looked interesting was The Burglars. So, I made a point of watching it now while I still could, and moving up the post on it so that the rest of you could have the chance to watch it too if you want.

The movie opens up with some lovely shots of Athens, and somebody doing surveillance on something, but exactly who and what aren't so important to the rest of the movie. After the credits, the movie switches to nighttime Athens, and a 1970-vintage nondescript European sedan of the sort that looks like a wonder it was able to stay together. The driver and his three passengers drive off to some place that's in one of the leafy, well-to-do suburban districts. Since the movie is called The Burglars, you know that there's going to be some burgling, so....

Two of the passengers: Ralph (Robert Hossein) and Renzi (Renato Salvatori) get out of the car and ring the doorbell, waylaying the man who opens the door. They then make their way to a safe located inside the house, and proceed to set about using sophisticated (for 1970, at least) electronics to crack the safe and remove a case full of emeralds, which is supposedly valued at $1 million. Meanwhile, the driver, Azad (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and the female passenger, Hélène (Nicole Calfan) remain outside as guards and to send signals if it's OK to proceed with the robbery.

They get the emeralds and all live happily ever after. Yeah, right. This is a heist movie, so you know that something is going to go wrong with the heist. Or, in this case, two things. The first is that a police car shows up in the neighborhood. Since the crap car parked outside the house is severely out of place, our cop, Abel Zacharia (Omar Sharif), has good reason to suspect that something might be wrong. He gets out and questions Azad, but eventually leaves. The bigger problem comes the next day. Ralph's plan had been to pay big bucks to the captain of a freight ship to ferry the four thieves out of the country, so the four make their way to the port of Pireaus in order to get on that boat and board it. However, when the ship reached port, the captain knew that he was going to have to put in for some unscheduled repairs to make the ship seaworthy again.

Even worse is that Zacharia shows up at the port, watching the burglars from a safe distance, before getting in a car chase with Azad. At this point, Zacharia knows there's something more going on, so he decides to use the lovely model Lena (Dyan Cannon) to get at Azad. Azad is trying to stay clear of the cops so that he can eventually get back to Hélène, who is biding her time at a resort on one of the Greek islands. Zacharia is trying to get proof that these people really did commit the crime, but there's also more going on with Zacharia and his unorthodox methods than he's letting on....

I was wondering as I was watching The Burglars how much of the movie was dubbed in post-production. What I didn't realize until looking up the movie afterwords is that, as with Hollywood in the early days of talking pictures, there were actually two versions of the movie made, one in English and one in French. It's also based on a novel from the early 1950s that Hollywood had already filmed in the late 50s, also titled The Burglars and starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield. I haven't seen that version; I don't know if it's available anywhere.

As for this version of The Burglars, at least it's lovely to look at. Athens, even in the off-season, is beautiful, with the Greek islands (IMDb says Corfu was used for the island resort) being even more beautiful. It's just a shame that the plot couldn't have been executed better. The opening heist and the car chase each go on much too long, while we're not really given enough context to make the characters' motivations (especially Zacharia) comprehensible. In the end, The Burglars is a passable exemplar of the glossy heist films of the 1960s and 1970s, and OK enough to pass the time with. But it feels like there could have been so much more here.

If you go to Tubi's website for the week and a half or so that the movie is still available and do a search, you can find it and watch for yourself. I didn't include a direct link mostly because it's presumably going to go dead soon.

C'era una volta

Some time back TCM had a day of interesting love story movies, which gave me the chance to record a couple more movies I hadn't seen before. Among them was More Than a Miracle.

After a 1960s MOR song by Roger Williams with choir, we finally, mercifully get to the action of the story. Omar Sharif plays Prince Rodrigo, the prince of somewhere in Spain. He's busy breaking a horse, which rather irritates his mommy, the Queen (Dolores del Rio), who would rather he do his princely duties and get married and start producing more heirs to the throne. Rodrigo doesn't seem to care, so he rides off with the horse until it throws him.

After searching for the horse, Rodrigo comes upon a monastery where there's a flying monk (not played by Sally Field) named Giuseppe sees Rodrigo in torn clothing from the fall, so he (and nobody else) seems to know that he's a Spanish prince. Giuseppe gives him some magic flour and tells him to make seven dumplings from it and eat them, before giving Rodrigo a donkey to get back home.

On the way home, Rodrigo finds his horse, which is now being used by a peasant woman Isabella (Mrs. Carlo Ponti, Ponti having been the producer; of course, Ponti's wife was Sophia Loren) to carry the harvest. Isabella understandably doesn't want to surrender the horse and doesn't like this insistent man who keeps begging her to make those seven dumplings. Finally, just to get rid of him, she does, but she eats one of them herself.

The end result of all this falderal is that Rodrigo and Isabella wind up falling in love with each other, but it's going to take them a long time to get back together and wind up in love in the last reel. Isabella enlists the help of some witches, but later some of Rodrigo's men stick her in a barrel where she's supposed to stay for five days with only bread and water, except that the barrel starts rolling all the way to the sea. Don't ask, I don't think it's supposed to make sense.

Ultimately Rodrigo is going to be married off whether he likes it or not, and Mom has selected seven princesses as candidates, each having some political advantage. Poor Rodrigo isn't even going to get to pick, as the bride will be whichever princess wins an odd homemaking contest of washing a large stack of dishes as quickly as possible while breaking as few of them as possible. Aren't these princesses going to have servants? Isabella worms her way into the contest, and looks like she's going to win, but....

As you can tell from the snark in the preceding paragraphs, I had a lot of problems with More Than a Miracle. Now, the fact that magic and witches are involved could, I suppose, be used as an explanation for why the plot doesn't make much sense, jumping from point to point. But I don't think it's a good enough explanation. The movie is also quite slow, taking way too long to get to the conclusion even though it only runs 103 minutes.

The other problem might be guessed from my title for the blog post. More Than a Miracle was an Italian-French production that MGM somehow got the rights to distribute in the US. But it was originally filmed in Italian, with the American title release More Than a Miracle being dubbed into English, and not too well. I'd guess that Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif did their own voices with Ponti intending from the start for the movie to be dubbed for American audiences. But the rest of the cast is badly dubbed, especially the main witch and a group of ragamuffins who sound much older than they look. It's highly intrusive.

More Than a Miracle, having been distributed in the US by MGM, did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The Rolls-Royce of color

Anthology movies have a lot going for them, both in terms of watching and in terms of doing a blog post on. If you don't like one of the stories, you don't have to wait too long before the next one comes up, and when writing about it, it's pretty easy to give a brief synopsis of each segment and come close to a full-length post. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch The Yellow-Rolls Royce.

As you can probably guess from the opening paragraph, the movie features several stories involving... a yellow Rolls-Royce. Three stories, in fact, with the car being a 1931 Rolls-Royce according to IMDb and the stories set not too long after the car would have been made.

First up, we're in Britain. Rex Harrison plays Lord Frinton, a British aristocrat who is a higher-up in the British Foreign Office as well as an owner of racehorses who is intent on winning the upcoming Gold Cup. He's married to Lady Frinton (Jeanne Moreau), and they recently celebrated their anniversary, which he forgot, so he buys her the Rolls-Royce to make up for it. What he doesn't realize is that she's been carrying on with Fane (Edmund Purdom), an underling of his at the Foreign Office. So when he finds out, he gets rid of the car which is how we get the second story.

Somehow the car makes its way to Italy, where American gangster Paolo (George C. Scott) is visiting with his chorus girl girlfriend Mae (Shirley MacLaine) and his driver Joey (Art Carney). Mae sees the car and likes it, so Paolo buys it for her. They meet a photographer in Florence, Stefano (Alain Delon). When Paolo has to go back to the States to take part in a gangland shooting, Mae looks up Stefano again and starts a brief affair with him, one that she knows she's going to have to give up when Paolo returns.

She gives up the car too, which somehow winds up in the possession of Gerda (Ingrid Bergman), who married an American businessman who died some time back, leaving her fabulously wealthy. She's in Trieste in early 1941, which if you'll remember from Diplomatic Courier, was right on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia. Gerda is planning to visit the new Yugoslav king in Belgrade, but this being 1941, Yugoslavia is about to be attacked in World War II. Gerda winds up taking the mysterious Devich (Omar Sharif) across the border, where he is raising a group of freedom fighters. He eventually enlists Gerda and the Rolls-Royce to collect all of them.

Personally, I more or less liked the movie, but I found that all of the stories had something not quite right about them. I think it's down to who was cast in various roles. Jeanne Moreau was nondescript as the British wife, a role that probably should have gone to a British actress. In the second segment, Scott overacts terribly while Alain Delon is not right as an Italian. Finally, I wasn't particularly a fan of Sharif in the last segment, while Bergman is made to act like Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in the climax of Idiot's Delight.

Still, each segment just about works, and there's a lot of fabulous scenery in the last two segments that bumps up the movie a bit. Italy looks gorgeous in widescreen and color, too. The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a pleasant enough movie that never quite rises to greatness, but never sinks either.

For those who like their Nazis to have impeccable British accents

Another movie I recently watched off my DVR that's available on DVD is The Night of the Generals.

After some very brief exposition, we get sent to the real action of the movie, in Warsaw in December 1942. A man gets back to his apartment building, and as he's walking up the stairs he hears a blood-curdling scream coming from a top-floor apartment. He can hear the steps of a presumptive murderer coming down the stairs, and not wanting to have to face the murderer, he ducks into the lavatory. He looks out a small hole in the door, and sees only the murderer's pants, which are unmistakeably the color and fabric of a Nazi uniform, this being 1942 when the Nazis were busy occupying the country. Even more alarming, there's a red stripe running down the side of the pants, which means that it's the uniform of a Nazi general.

The murder victim was an agent for the Nazis, and was rather brutally hacked to pieces. So German intelligence is called in to investigate, in the form of Major Grau (Omar Sharif). Grau is that rarest of birds, a man who cares about the pursuit of the truth, and doesn't seem to care that if the murderer is a general then there are all sorts of political landmines in investigating the murder. Anyhow, the first thing to do is discreetly investigate the whereabouts of every Nazi general in Warsaw that night. There are three who don't have ironclad alibis: Kahlenberge (Donald Pleasance); Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray), who is usually referred to as just Gabler; and neat-freak Tanz (Peter O'Toole). Apparently the political muckety-mucks in Berlin don't want to deal with the fallout of having one of their generals being a murderer, so somebody kicks Grau upstairs, giving him a promotion and a transfer to Paris.

Fast forward to mid-July, 1944, in Paris. History buffs will know from the dates given that this is a few days before the failed assassination attempt on Hitler's life that resulted in Rommel's (Christopher Plummer in a needless cameo) suicide. Kahlenberge and Gabler are sympathetic to those generals who want to kill Hitler and negotiate an immediate surrender. Tanz gets transferred to Paris, much to the alarm of the other generals, since his presence is liable to scupper the assassination plot. For Grau, however, he's happy to have a chance to renew the investiation into that murder in Warsaw, which he does with the help of French police inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret). And then there's another murder, in the same exact fashion as the one in Warsaw....

The Night of the Generals is one of those movies that has an interesting idea, but one that the moviemakers decided to do too much with, with the result that it's too long, ponderous, and filled with plot twists that seem unnecessary. I haven't mentioned Tom Courtenay yet; he plays Gabler's adjutant who gets assigned to Tanz in Paris, and who is in love with Gabler's daughter Ulrike (Joanna Pettet). His presence in the first two-thirds of the movie comes together in a coda, but for the longest time you wonder what's the point in including this romance against the backdrop of a murder mystery.

I mentioned at the start that there's a brief exposition at the beginning, and that's also part of the problem. Well, not the actual beginning; a lot of movies have a plot device of starting at some point after much of the action in the movie and then telling the story in flashback. But The Night of the Generals makes the mistake of going back to the 1960s a couple of times in the Warsaw and Paris segments. The coda is also a problem in that we learn near the end of the Paris segment who the murderer is, if you didn't already know.

The acting isn't bad, except for the fact that it's very, very British. Granted, a lot of movies make the mistake of having the actors playing Nazis do bad German accents, and not being able to keep a consistent accent throughout. The Night of the Generals goes all the way to the other end, in that the characters are never anything but obviously British. My dad walked into the room halfway through and remarked that these characters aren't German at all.

The Night of the Generals is relatively entertaining despite its numerous flaws. The TCM shop lists it on a standalone DVD, as well as part of a couple of box sets.

Omar Sharif, 1932-2015

Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Omar Sharif, the Egyptian-born actor who starred in successful epics like Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, has died at the age of 83.

I have to admit that it's a bit difficult for me to write about Sharif, considering that I'm not a fan of his two biggest movies. I find both of them to drag on way too long. As I've said about Lawrence of Arabia, those desert shots only look spectacular because earlier directors didn't have ultra-wide screen technology at their disposal. I've also made my thoughts on Doctor Zhivago clear. So if I were going to recommend a movie with Omar Sharif in it, my first thought would be Juggernaut, even though Sharif isn't a main character.

TCM has a remembrance of Sharif, although at this time I don't believe they've announced a schedule change to show any of his movies.