by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The three movies I went to see last night at the special
movie potluck in Golden Hill (the proprietor of the Mars and Vintage Sci-Fi
movie screenings also occasionally throws his venue open to a sort of movie
potluck in which the audience members are invited to bring DVD’s and a sort of
consensus process decides which ones will be screened, though at yesterday’s
event the proprietor brought his wife and, not surprisingly, she did most of
the picks) reminded me of Dwight MacDonald’s essay “Good Bad Movies, Bad Good
Movies and The Pawnbroker.” Two of the
films on the program were examples of Good Bad Movies — films that are lousy by
any normal aesthetic standard but achieve entertainment value from sheer
campiness — while one was a Bad Good Movie, a film that attempts serious drama and commentary on the human condition
but is so wretchedly made it’s just boring. The first Good Bad Movie was The
Brass Bottle, a Universal release 1964
starring Tony Randall as Harold Ventimore, a young American who’s just come back
from Paris and a failed attempt to make it as a painter (we see some quite dull
abstractions hanging on the walls of his home — surprisingly large and
well-appointed for someone whom the script by Oscar Brodney, based on a novel
by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, tells us is struggling financially). He’s taken a job
as an architect with a firm headed by William Beever (Philip Ober) but so far
hasn’t actually designed anything that got built — though the two model ranch
homes we see on his desk make it seem like he’s as mediocre as an architect as
he was as a fine artist. Harold is also a collector of antiquities — or at
least the vaguely antique-looking
junk he can afford — and on one of his shopping trips he brings home a large
brass bottle. Harold breaks the seal of the bottle and releases Fakrash (Burl
Ives, whose casting here is even weirder than his role of Santa Claus in the
puppet-animated Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer), one of the Blue Jinn genie who was sealed in that
bottle 3,000 years previously by none other than King Solomon himself — or
“Sulieman,” to use the Arabic form of his name, as Fakrash does — who,
according to Fakrash himself, “I had a kinswoman of such surpassing beauty that
King Suleiman took her as wife 1,001. And it came to pass, that a certain judge
of east, son of Ramus, informed the King that she was my beloved and not my
kinswoman. … The Great Suleiman... was angered and commanded that I be
imprisoned in that bottle and cast into the sea, there to abide the day of
doom!”
Needless to say, Fakrash is so grateful to Harold for freeing him from
that damned bottle that he offers to serve Harold in any way he can and grant
his every wish. When Harold wishes that he could get a job assignment that
would prove once and for all he’s a skilled architect, Fakrash infiltrates the
mind of super-developer Samuel Wackerbath (Farley Baer) and convinces him to
hire Harold to design his entire huge planned city. When two cops threaten
Harold with arrest if he keeps disturbing the peace of his quiet suburban
Universal-back-lot neighborhood, Fakrash, like Valentine Michael Smith in
Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, offers to make them disappear — and Harold has to
convince Fakrash that in this day and age that sort of thing is called “murder”
and is very, very illegal. The Glass Bottle is one of a number of stories in the early 1960’s
dealing with people who are gifted with some supernatural character intervening
in their lives but don’t want
their paranormal help — one imdb.com reviewer headlined his review, “Tony Randall gets the greatest gift in the world …
yet inexplicably doesn’t want it!” — including
the 1962 film Zotz! as well as a couple
of TV series, Bewitched and I
Dream of Jeanie — the latter of which has a
direct connection to this movie because Barbara Eden is in The Glass
Bottle as Harold’s girlfriend, Sylvia
Kenton, even though here she’s just a normal human and not a genie herself.
There are some genuinely clever gags in The Brass Bottle, including one in which Farkash lowers himself into
Harold’s car (a 1958 Chevrolet Bel-Air Impala convertible, red with a white
top, that practically becomes a character itself) while he’s in the middle of
the road, and Tony Randall turns out to be a surprisingly good physical
comedian. No, he’s not Buster Keaton — and with the memory of the Organ
Pavilion showing of Keaton’s 1924 comedy masterpiece Sherlock, Jr. the night before all too fresh it would have been
easy to come down hard on Randall and wish Keaton would have made a film on
this premise in the 1920’s — but he’s quite agile and nimble with his body.
Aside from that, The Brass Bottle
is a pretty predictable movie, lurching towards the expected happy ending in
which the genie leaves Harold to his own devices after re-pairing him with
Sylvia — but it’s got some great moments, notably the scene in which Farkash
turns Harold’s living room into something that looks like (and probably was!) a
set from an old Maria Montez “Arabian Nights” movie and serves Sylvia’s
disapproving parents (Edward Andrews and Ann Doran) a meal whose opening course
(and the only one we see) is lamb’s eyes cooked in honey (did Fakrash later go
into business on his own as a caterer and do the Indiana Jones movies?); a
marvelous scene in which Fakrash supplies Harold with a houri from his own time, Blue Jinn Tezra (Kamala Devi),
who when she hears that the law in the modern-day U.S. is that a man can have
only one wife, says, “Verily! It took us 3,000 years, but we have prevailed. I
shall find this changed world most pleasing”; a scene in which a police chase
of Harold is blocked by a line of elephants that marches across the street
(this was probably one of the first films to have a certification on the
closing credits that no animals were harmed during its making); and a climax at
a Congressional hearing in which Harold, who thanks to Fakrash’s ministrations
on behalf is being prosecuted by virtually every law-enforcement agency in the
U.S., confronts the Congressmembers and ultimately proves to them that Fakrash
is a bona fide genie. The
Brass Bottle is a genuinely funny film, the
sort of unpretentious entertainment Hollywood seemed quite a bit more adept at
then than now — I didn’t see it when it was new but I saw enough others like it
I can appreciate it for what it is even though the great comedians of the
silent and early-sound eras make me laugh even harder!
