The Silver Screen Oasis

Wow! There's one I've never even heard of. TOWARD THE UNKNOWN?

As per the request of Western Guy (Stone Wallace), here is the picture of James Garner that the actor autographed when he met Stone. This is a pretty cool memory and memento, friend! Thanks for sharing it here. Maybe it was just acting, but the man definitely appeared to have a twinkle in his eyes.

Just one slight correction, Moira. My acting class as such was not with me when I met Mr. Garner. It was a model/talent convention and my partner in our agency brought along her top models while I had come with about five of my former Media Acting graduating class.

I should mention that Jack Lemmon was also present and he also signed a picture for my class.

Great guys!

Thanks Moira and Stone for sharing more about James Garner here ...

My sincere pleasure, Erik!

And my thanks to Moira for posting.

Here's a vintage link of two great guys. Enjoy:

Stone, thanks for posting that clip with James Garner and Carole Lombard's biggest fan, George Raft!

I loved the generous comments that Jim Garner made about Audrey Hepburn. If anyone has seen younger pictures of Mrs. Lois Garner, she bears quite a passing resemblance to Ms. Hepburn.

Both men seemed so soft-spoken and gentle, it was a pleasure to see that kind of unforced naturalism. Or, as Mr. Raft would say, "God rest their souls in peace..."

Can't wait to visit "tidy house" either.

Moira, I just want to address your observation of George's use of "God rest his/her soul in peace." George's best friend during his days of Hollywood stardom was Mack Gray. His nephew, Robert Davidson, was a great help to me in the writing of my Raft bio. He'd mentioned to me that George would virtually always use that remark when talking about someone who had passed. So it kinda knocked me a bit when all these years later I watch that clip and actually hear George speak those words.

Both men were true and total gentlemen. Unlike so many of the so-called "stars" of today. Loud, punkish and obnoxious.

My only complaint was watching George smoke those cancer tubes. I know James was a cigarette smoker, too, and knowing of the health issues both were to face in years to come, you can't help but to shake your head.

Wish I was under 50, Anne . . . but seven years over the half-century mark.

I definitely know what you're saying about smoking back in the day. Heck, you almost looked out of place if you weren't puffing on a cigarette. The old movies were filled with tobacco smoke and many had a romantic ambiance attached to the habit (the classic scene in "Now Voyager" being a perfect example). Was watching a rerun of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson recently and he and his guests were all sucking on cigs. Chain-smoking, in fact. And look how poor Johnny, Dean and Sammy ended up.

Just sad because Raft suffered from asthma throughout much of his adult life (his mother succumbed to it) and to know that towards the end of his life George could barely breathe on his own . . . well, it makes clips like that difficult to watch. You wish you could reach into the tube, grab the guy and shake some smarts into him. Garner, too, only he managed to hold back his craving during that interview.

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i thoroughly enjoyed watching Cash McMall today on TCM's tribute to Jim Garner. Such a shame he and Natalie never had the opportunity to work together again. To me they seemed to exude a great chemistry. My only complaint was the showing of Toward the Unknown because Garner had such a small part. I wish they had used something like The Castaway Cowboy instead. That is a sweet movie where Jim is shipwrecked and ends up helping a widow train Hawaiian surfers to work a cattle ranch because the island never got any beef and he devised a way to get them exported to help her with her farm. I guess it's a pretty rarely seen movie, but definitely would have been worth showing today.
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We are barely dealing with losing James Garner when word came late this evening that actor James Shigeta has died.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

James Shigeta, a top Asian-American actor of the early 1960s who starred in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song, died Monday in Los Angeles, publicist Jeffrey Leavitt announced. He was 81.

The handsome Hawaiian, who later appeared as the ill-fated chief executive of the Nakatomi corporation in the Bruce Willis action film Die Hard (1988), had a great two-year run in Hollywood starting in the late 1950s.

Shigeta made his feature debut in Sam Fuller’s Los Angeles-set noir The Crimson Kimono (1959), playing a young detective, and followed that by portraying a young Chinese man in the American Old West who battles a freight line operator (Jack Lord) over a woman in James Clavell’s Walk Like a Dragon (1960).

Shigeta then starred with Glenn Ford and Donald O’Connor as American Navy men billeted in a Tokyo geisha house in director George Marshall’s Cry for Happy (1961). And in Bridge to the Sun, he portrayed a Japanese diplomat who is married to an American (Carroll Baker) at the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In Flower Drum Song (1961), set in San Francisco and directed by Henry Koster, Shigeta plays Wang Ta, who’s dazzled by a showgirl (Nancy Kwan) before he realizes an immigrant from China (Miyoshi Umeki) is really the one for him. A natural baritone, Shigeta did all his singing in the film.

The Golden Globes in 1960 named him (along with Barry Coe, Troy Donahue and George Hamilton) as “most promising male newcomer.”
Shigeta later had recurring roles on the 1969-72 CBS drama Medical Center and appeared on episodes of Ben Casey, Lord’s Hawaii Five-O, Ellery Queen, Little House on the Prairie, Fantasy Island, T.J. Hooker, The Love Boat, Magnum, P.I., Simon & Simon, Jake and the Fatman and Murder, She Wrote.

His film résumé includes Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966) with Elvis Presley, Nobody’s Perfect (1968), Lost Horizon (1973), Midway (1976), Cage (1989) and the animated Mulan (1998).

Born in Honolulu of Japanese ancestry on June 17, 1933, Shigeta moved to New York and studied at New York University, then joined the U.S. Marine Corps and fought during the Korean War.

He relocated to Japan and became a star on radio and television in that country, then returned to the U.S. to sing on The Dinah Shore Show in 1959. Also that year, he starred with Shirley MacLaine in a production of Holiday in Japan in Las Vegas.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/j ... ard-721851

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Lz:

Your first line says it all. I am still dealing with the loss of James Garner as if he were a personal friend, now another of my teen age heart throbs is gone. I was blown out of the water the first time I saw him in Bridge to the Sun and envied Carrol Baker for months until I saw Flower Drum Song. Unfortunately the Japanese had not yet emerged onto American screens, so to see such a handsome guy was a shock. Let's face it, in 1960 Pearl Harbor was still a sore spot, but he certainly wiped away any doubts I might have had, and nearly 30 years later in Die Hard, he still looked pretty darn good. We've lost a fine character actor.

Res in Peace, Mr. Shigeta
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James Shigeta in Midway as Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo




One of my favorite roles that he did in this epic-laden WW2 Movie - The Battle of Midway (1976) that took place in June (4h to 7th) of 1942.

I also loved him in the Rockford Files too ... he did one show with James Garner.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0688010/?re ... lmg_act_42

I remember that show vividly and that's one of the better shows in 1978 that Mr. Garner did in the Rockford Files.