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"Gilligan's Island" only aired for three seasons on CBS, but it became a rerun sensation when it hit syndication after getting canceled in 1967. Kids in the market for a relentlessly silly sitcom to watch after school while they were neglecting their homework and chores couldn't do better than this aggressively formulaic show about seven castaways shipwrecked on an uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Just about every episode revolved around the characters' inevitably thwarted attempts to return to civilization, and this familiarity bred nary a hint of contempt.

The key reason the show never got old for its undemanding target audience was the cast. Bob Denver (Gilligan), Alan Hale Jr. (Skipper), Jim Backus (Thurston Howe), Natalie Schafer (Lovie Howe), Russell Johnson (Professor Roy Hinkley), Dawn Wells (Mary Ann), and Tina Louise (Ginger) formed a perfectly balanced ensemble that understood precisely what was expected of them. You couldn't imagine anyone else playing these roles.

Actors don't get to choose how they break out. Obviously, given the dearth of opportunities, they're lucky to call themselves "working actors" in the first place. And when you're just starting out, the last thing you should do is refuse work -- unless there's something better and fully guaranteed on the horizon.

Consider the case of Tina Louise. Born in 1934, the beautiful young woman had a multitude of fashion modeling offers in the 1950s, but what she really wanted to do was act. Louise studied under the influential acting teacher Sanford Meisner in Manhattan, and she began booking Broadway gigs in 1952 starting with a role in the Bette Davis-led revue "Two's Company." She co-starred in the hit 1956 musical adaptation of "Li'l Abner" as Appassionata Von Climax, and made a splashy film debut in Anthony Mann's comedy "God's Little Acre." The latter earned her a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer,...

Prior to "Gilligan's Island" in 1964, Tina Louise was already a long-working actress. Indeed, Louise worked her first modeling gig at the age of two, appearing in an ad campaign for her father's candy store. In high school, she started studying acting, and landed her first professional gig in 1956, appearing in an episode of the TV series "Studio One." She made her feature film debut in Anthony Mann's celebrated drama "God's Little Acre," in which Louise played Griselda, the wife of a character played by Jack Lord. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance. 

Louise went on to star in other high-profile film projects, including Michael Curtiz's "The Hangman," and the 1960 Italian historical epic "The Siege of Syracuse," in which she played three different roles. Louise also played the poet Sappho in a film called "The Warrior Empress." In 1964, she appeared in a film called "For Those Who Think Young,...

TV trivia fanatics will happily point out that the first-season theme song to Sherwood Schwartz's seminal sitcom "Gilligan's Island" is different from the theme heard in later seasons. The song is the same -- it's the usual, earworm sea shanty that everyone can sing from memory -- but the final listing of the show's dramatis personae is different. In the later seasons, the theme song listed Gilligan (Bob Denver), the Skipper too (Alan Hale), the Millionaire (Jim Backus) and his wife (Natalie Shafer), the movie star (Tina Louise), the professor (Russell Watson) and Mary Ann (Dawn Wells), there on Gilligan's isle.

In the first season, however, the professor and Mary-Ann were introduced merely as "And the rest." Watson and Wells didn't have credits and photos like everyone else. This was a little baffling, as all seven characters were of equal value to the series; no one was a supporting player.

"Gilligan's Island" wasn't the most sophisticated television series ever to beam into our living rooms. For three seasons between 1964 and 1967 (and over decades of syndication thereafter), viewers turned in to watch seven castaways stranded on an uncharted island somewhere far off the coast of Hawaii attempt and inevitably fail to find their way back to civilization. In just about every case, their endeavors were bungled by Gilligan (Bob Denver), an energetic young shipmate with a heart of gold and a headful of rocks.

The show never deviated from this stupidly simple setup (despite the network's initial efforts), but it was so good-naturedly silly and energetically performed that you excused the rigid repetition. Kids loved the broadly visual gags, while parents could appreciate the ensemble chemistry generated between old pros like Jim Backus, Alan Hale, Jr. and Natalie Schafer.

Ensemble dynamics are tricky things. When casting a sitcom this formulaic, creators...

Sherwood Schwartz's 1963 sitcom "Gilligan's Island" was a high-concept series that, thanks to the gods of syndication, remained in the public consciousness for decades after it went off the air. The show's impeccable theme song, written by Schwartz and George Wyle, may be the best theme in television history, as it handily explains the premise using a hummable sea shanty: five tourists boarded the S.S. Minnow -- manned by Captain Jonas Grumby (Alan Hale) and his first mate Gilligan (Bob Denver) -- for a three-hour tour off the coast of Honolulu. When the tiny ship hit some bad weather, the seven characters landed on a desert island, stranded. The series followed their merry attempts to survive. 

"Gilligan's Island" ran for 98 episodes, ending its initial run in 1967, but reruns continued to air well into the 1990s. Yes, there was a time when "Gilligan's Island" was a reliable TV staple, occupying...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Kino Lorber has released director King Vidor's sultry swamp-based drama "Ruby Gentry" on Blu-ray. The film is the kind of steamy, swamp-based drama that could best be described as "God's Little Acre" by way of Tennessee Williams. The 1952 production would seem to derive from some paperback novel but, in fact, was written directly for the screen. Jennifer Jones plays the titular character, a sultry young woman who had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the tracks in the otherwise posh little community of Braddock, North Carolina. Ruby's "career" is working the hard scrabble life of a deckhand on her father's fishing vessel. She's a seasoned hunter and can wield a rifle with precision, necessary ingredients if you grow up on the edge of a swamp. At home, she has to contend with the sexism of low expectations by her blue collar parents...

Rex Ingram in 'The Thief of Bagdad' 1940 with tiny Sabu. Actor Rex Ingram movies on TCM: Early black film performer in 'Cabin in the Sky,' 'Anna Lucasta' It's somewhat unusual for two well-known film celebrities, whether past or present, to share the same name.* One such rarity is – or rather, are – the two movie people known as Rex Ingram;† one an Irish-born white director, the other an Illinois-born black actor. Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” continues today, Aug. 11, '15, with a day dedicated to the latter. Right now, TCM is showing Cabin in the Sky (1943), an all-black musical adaptation of the Faust tale that is notable as the first full-fledged feature film directed by another Illinois-born movie person, Vincente Minnelli. Also worth mentioning, the movie marked Lena Horne's first important appearance in a mainstream motion picture.§ A financial disappointment on the...

Before digging into early-to-mid August's disc highlights, I'd like to set the Way Back Machine to two weeks ago and point out some eclectic late-July gems we missed, such as Twilight Time's exquisite Blu-ray edition of Walter Hill's 1978 neo-noir "The Driver," Olive Films' unexpected release of Anthony Mann's 1958 brazen, quasi-hicksploitation melodrama "God's Little Acre," and the Warner Archive re-release of 1998's eccentrically funny "Zero Effect," starring Ben Stiller and Bill Pullman as a socially stunted private investigator. From Europe, Raro Video lived up to their name with a rare trilogy of gritty moralist thrillers in "Fernando di Leo: The Italian Crime Collection (Volume 2)," Music Box Films stressed us out with the terrifically icy German thriller "The Silence," and sci-fi didn't get more provocative than the erotic Lithuanian curiosity "Vanishing Waves" (which Artsploitation lovingly packaged as a two-dvd set that includes director Kristina Buozyte's feature debut "The.

The 55-year-old Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr has announced that The Turin Horse will be his final film. The statement is in keeping with the austerity, solemnity and high seriousness of his work. The movie begins with an unseen narrator telling us, over a black screen, that in 1889 Friedrich Nietzsche went suddenly insane after throwing his arms around an abused horse in Turin. "Mother, I'm stupid," he said and never recovered. The narrator's statement ends: "Of the horse we know nothing."

This is followed by a starkly monochrome film in six chapters of life on a remote, impoverished farm occupied by an elderly man (bearded like an Old Testament prophet and called Ohlsdorfer by the intermittent narrator), his pretty, unnamed daughter and their spavined horse, for whom, unlike the British Black Beauty, the American Seabiscuit and Bresson's Christ-like donkey Balthazar, they don't appear to have a name. The dialogue is sparse,...

By Tom Lisanti

On Sunday night March 14, TCM is showing a Tina Louise tribute. It is surprising but wonderful that TCM is recognizing the extremely talented redhead who had a very interesting and prolific movie career. First up at 8Pm is Tina in her Golden Globe award winning movie debut as sexy farm nymph Griselda in God's Little Acre (1958) from the novel by Erskine Caldwell. This is followed by the Beach Party knockoff For Those Who Think Young (1964) starring James Darren and Pamela Tiffin standing in for Frankie and Annette with Tina as a sexy singing stripper who moonlights as a math tutor. Also starring is Bob Denver before he and Tina got stranded on Gilligan's Island.

When I asked Pamela Tiffin about Tina, she exclaimed (in my book Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema), “Tina Louise was one of the most beautiful females I’ve ever seen in my life.