MGM’s 1930 film “The Rogue Song,” an adaptation of the Robert Bodansky-A. M. Willner operetta “Gypsy Love,” was the only sound-era production included on the American Film Institute’s 1980 list of the ten most wanted lost films. The inclusion of this title on the list was peculiar at many levels. For starters, its presence as the sole post-silent era entry, it inadvertently gave the wrong impression that few sound-era films were lost.
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Grappling with a broken bond with his teenage daughter, an aging fighter tries to break free from the confines of his hometown.
When a nurse takes a kid home for the weekend from the residence where works and he lives, she inadvertently changes the rest of his life.
Trigger warning: Child abuse and child neglect
A highly intelligent CIA operative takes matters into his own hands when governmental corruption inhibits him from achieving justice against his wife’s murderer in The Amateur.
When a CIA operative fails to secure a scientist and his experimental new technology, he teams up with the target’s daughter and takes on a new mission; Rescue the scientist and destroy his weapon so that the soviets who captured him can’t use it against the world.
A messy combination of spy plotlines merge together into one rather fun and entertaining conglomeration as we follow Elly Conway, a writer who winds up caught in a dangerous and humorous web of lies and espionage, in Argylle.
BOOTLEG FILES 904: “The Entertainer” (1976 television film starring Jack Lemmon and Ray Bolger).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
Earlier this week, I received an email from New York City’s Film Forum announcing an upcoming retrospective series honoring Jack Lemmon on his centennial. While I surmised that the usual round-up of Lemmon classics would be screened, I wondered if Film Forum was able to secure a print of his most elusive work – the 1976 made-for-television adaptation of John Osborne’s “The Entertainer.” Alas, “The Entertainer” is not on the Film Forum schedule.
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