by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had a chance to run a movie and I picked out the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on Hercules Unchained, the second in the series of Italian Hercules movies from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. For some reason they did this one before they did Hercules, the 1958 film that initiated the cycle and first cast American actor (using the term loosely) Steve Reeves in the title role — maybe because this is even worse than its predecessor. Made mostly by the same people — director and co-screenwriter Pietro Francisci, who along with his writing partner Ennio De Concini pieced his story together from various mythological sources, including the Queen Omphale story as well as the sequels to the Oedipus myths, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Aeschylus’ The Seven Against Thebes. The writers got one story right: they staged the fight between Hercules and Antaeus the giant (played, in his last film appearance, by former heavyweight boxing champion Primo Carnera — whom Charles and I could recall having seen previously only in his bizarre appearance as himself in Mighty Joe Young) at least something like the way it was in the original myths: as the son of the earth goddess, Antaeus was rejuvenated and refreshed by his mom’s energy, so Hercules couldn’t defeat him until he realized this and held him up in mid-air, lifting him with one hand and punching him out with the other … though in the film Hercules gives him a wrestling-style spin and hurls him off the shore into the nearby ocean (different god, no jurisdiction).
What seemed most obviously different was the level of sexual content; Hercules Unchained (a really silly title because you never actually see him chained at any time during the film!) spends most of its time in the kingdom (or queendom) of Lydia, ruled by Queen Omphale (Sylvia Lopez), which is the location of the “Fountain of Forgetfulness,” which causes Hercules to forget all about his wife Iole (Sylva Koscina) back home in Thebes, along with King Oedipus (whom he’s encountered blind and living in a cave) and his sons Eteocles (Sergio Fantoni) and Polynices (Mimmo Palmara), who were supposed to take turns ruling Thebes and switch off at one-year intervals, only Eteocles double-crossed his brother and intends to keep the throne, while Polynices organized a resistance movement and threatened a civil war. In this version, Oedipus asks Hercules to become a shuttle diplomat and negotiate a truce between his two sons — only by the time he regains his memory the war has already happened and both Eteocles and Polynices have been killed. (Since this was intended as a “family film,” the script carefully omits the backstory — we see Oedipus blind but don’t get to find out that he put out his own eyes in shame when he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother, so Eteocles and Polynices have no idea that their mom was also their grandmom — nor do we get the aftermath of the war and the nasty business with Oedipus’ daughter Antigone that Sophocles wrote so movingly about.)
What director Francisci seemed to be more interested in this time than last was appealing to the straight male audience; the Gay hints he dropped in the first film are removed and instead he uses the “Fountain of Forgetfulness” gimmick (not all that different from the big plot twist in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung — which only highlights the vast gulf between Wagner and Francisci as artists!) mostly as an excuse to allow Steve Reeves to cavort with a hotter-looking actress than the one playing his wife (and if Sylvia Lopez hadn’t got leukemia and died after completing only one other film, she might have been able to give Brigitte Bardot a run for her money in the Euro-bimbo department) and to show a lot of other scantily clad actresses playing Omphale’s serving girls serving the men of Hercules’ crew in other ways. For all its silliness — and the surprising (well, not so surprising to anyone who’d seen the first Hercules in the cycle) dullness of the action scenes — this movie does take advantage of the greater sexual frankness of European films at the time, and while we don’t get any out-and-out soft-core porn there’s a refreshing honesty about what all these men want out of all these hot-looking women.
Alas, that’s about all that can be said for Hercules Unchained; otherwise the film is ludicrous, from the opening scene in which Hercules and Iole are shown riding around in a covered wagon (did the ancient Greeks really have such things or were these producers warming up for the spaghetti Westerns?) to the absurd casting of light-skinned, blond-haired Sergio Fantoni and swarthy, dark-haired Mimmi Palmara as brothers, from the bad English dubbing to the even worse reformatting to fit a CinemaScope image into a TV-screen shape (they didn’t even pan-and-scan this one: they just put up whatever was in the middle of the screen originally, which means we get a lot of shots of half-people), this is a pretty useless movie and the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew do what they can with it, including dressing Mike Nelson up to look like Steve Reeves (this was before he was the host, but he was the head writer and filled in when they needed a bit of on-air talent in addition to the “regulars”) and passing him off thereof in the interstital segments.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Memron (Crewless Productions, 2004)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I eventually watched last night was Memron, a 2004 spoof whose title and capital-“M” logo clearly marks it as a spoof of Enron, though interestingly, director and co-writer (with Robert Stark Hickey) Nancy Hower doesn’t make it a spoof of Enron itself, but the aftermath of the Enron collapse, with CEO Ken Clay (Michael McShane, a bulbously obese and repulsive screen presence who’s exactly right for the role even though it’s hard to imagine anything else he can play besides a fallen fat-cat CEO) serving six months of a 10-year sentence and basically playing a combination of baseball and golf in the prison exercise yard — he hits golf balls with a club, but his guards are forced to field them like baseballs — before he’s released and placed under house arrest. Most of the dramatis personae are the flotsam and jetsam of Memron who found themselves suddenly unemployed and bereft of their life savings when the company imploded — though Clay maintains a skeletal operation and sends his principal assistant, Justin Zimmerman (David Wiater), into the unemployed workers’ meetings as a spy.
The workers themselves are in a seminar called “Where’s Your Parachute?” (a quite wicked play on the book title What Color Is Your Parachute?, the book that purports to help you treat unemployment as an empowering experience) that’s held in a grade-school classroom and is a humiliating experience for all parties concerned. When the workshop leader challenges them to explain in plain English just what they did in their former jobs at Memron, they’re unable to do so without lapsing into human-resources jobspeak! Among the fired are Bruce Corning (Jeff Hayenga), a disgusting go-getter type with a penchant for turning his hand into a model of Puff, the Magic Dragon that sickens everyone he does it for, adults and children alike; Shelley Johansson (Mary Pat Gleason), heavy-set middle-aged woman who’s Corning’s principal victim; Tamara (Susan Saunders), basket case with a penchant for getting into weird scrapes with the law; Janet Kelso (Shirley Prestia), rail-thin, of indeterminate age and closed-in crabbiness; and the closest thing this movie has to a truly pathetic figure, Jim Westerfield (Chris Wells), who’s sleeping in his car because he can’t afford to maintain a home for both himself and his mother (Pat Crawford Brown), and who in what little he has of a private life gets bossed around not only by mom but also by his layabout brother Donald (Joey Slotnick). Jim also lusts after the Memron office slut, Brenda Wright (a marvelous performance by Evie Peck) but can’t bring himself to ask her for a date even though just about every other male in the movie (including, in the film’s most bittersweet sequence, Jim’s hated brother Donald) is able to get into her pants just by looking at her.
Memron is a film largely hamstrung by its budget limitations — director Hower called her production company “Crewless Productions,” and though imdb.com actually does list some crew members for the film it does have the look of a sole filmmaker with a video camera following her actors around and getting the scenes down as best she can. Still, she gets some great gags — notably out of ex-CEO Clay’s predicament when (after making telephonic assignations with her lover in Italian, her native language but one he doesn’t understand a word of) his trophy wife Vangelia (Claire Forlani) walks out on him and he tries to chase her but can’t because every time he steps off the sidewalk outside his house, the beeper of his house-arrest ankle bracelet goes off and alerts the cops. Hower and Hickey also come up with a great spoof of capitalism run rampant when the ex-Memronites come up with a new business idea — bottling and selling air — and there are some great scenes of them trying to collect the stuff at various beaches, then attempting to figure out a way to bottle it as well as working out an ad campaign to get people to pay for air instead of getting it free (the slogan they come up with is “Air … It’s the Next Big Thing”), trying to run the business out of Jim’s mother’s garage (no one else was willing to rent to them and even Jim’s mom won’t let them into her house, not even to use the bathroom!) and ultimately seeing their idea get stolen by Ken Clay and Justin Zimmerman, who use it to revivify Memron and get back on top again while their ex-employees are once again left in the dust.
Memron is less a spoof of Enron than of capitalism in generally and specifically the “unemployment industry” vividly exposed by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bait and Switch (at times the film seems almost a deliberate spoof of her book, even though it came first!), and with the economy totally melting down these days some aspects of Memron seem both more funny and more grim than they probably did in 2004, when the shady and downright illegal business practices of Enron seemed like just the sins of a handful of companies instead of the capitalist system as a whole — and the fact that Hower and Hickey chose to advertise their film with the tag line “The Trickle-Down Has Trickled Out” seems to indicate that their satirical agenda encompassed more than just one bad company!
The film Charles and I eventually watched last night was Memron, a 2004 spoof whose title and capital-“M” logo clearly marks it as a spoof of Enron, though interestingly, director and co-writer (with Robert Stark Hickey) Nancy Hower doesn’t make it a spoof of Enron itself, but the aftermath of the Enron collapse, with CEO Ken Clay (Michael McShane, a bulbously obese and repulsive screen presence who’s exactly right for the role even though it’s hard to imagine anything else he can play besides a fallen fat-cat CEO) serving six months of a 10-year sentence and basically playing a combination of baseball and golf in the prison exercise yard — he hits golf balls with a club, but his guards are forced to field them like baseballs — before he’s released and placed under house arrest. Most of the dramatis personae are the flotsam and jetsam of Memron who found themselves suddenly unemployed and bereft of their life savings when the company imploded — though Clay maintains a skeletal operation and sends his principal assistant, Justin Zimmerman (David Wiater), into the unemployed workers’ meetings as a spy.
The workers themselves are in a seminar called “Where’s Your Parachute?” (a quite wicked play on the book title What Color Is Your Parachute?, the book that purports to help you treat unemployment as an empowering experience) that’s held in a grade-school classroom and is a humiliating experience for all parties concerned. When the workshop leader challenges them to explain in plain English just what they did in their former jobs at Memron, they’re unable to do so without lapsing into human-resources jobspeak! Among the fired are Bruce Corning (Jeff Hayenga), a disgusting go-getter type with a penchant for turning his hand into a model of Puff, the Magic Dragon that sickens everyone he does it for, adults and children alike; Shelley Johansson (Mary Pat Gleason), heavy-set middle-aged woman who’s Corning’s principal victim; Tamara (Susan Saunders), basket case with a penchant for getting into weird scrapes with the law; Janet Kelso (Shirley Prestia), rail-thin, of indeterminate age and closed-in crabbiness; and the closest thing this movie has to a truly pathetic figure, Jim Westerfield (Chris Wells), who’s sleeping in his car because he can’t afford to maintain a home for both himself and his mother (Pat Crawford Brown), and who in what little he has of a private life gets bossed around not only by mom but also by his layabout brother Donald (Joey Slotnick). Jim also lusts after the Memron office slut, Brenda Wright (a marvelous performance by Evie Peck) but can’t bring himself to ask her for a date even though just about every other male in the movie (including, in the film’s most bittersweet sequence, Jim’s hated brother Donald) is able to get into her pants just by looking at her.
Memron is a film largely hamstrung by its budget limitations — director Hower called her production company “Crewless Productions,” and though imdb.com actually does list some crew members for the film it does have the look of a sole filmmaker with a video camera following her actors around and getting the scenes down as best she can. Still, she gets some great gags — notably out of ex-CEO Clay’s predicament when (after making telephonic assignations with her lover in Italian, her native language but one he doesn’t understand a word of) his trophy wife Vangelia (Claire Forlani) walks out on him and he tries to chase her but can’t because every time he steps off the sidewalk outside his house, the beeper of his house-arrest ankle bracelet goes off and alerts the cops. Hower and Hickey also come up with a great spoof of capitalism run rampant when the ex-Memronites come up with a new business idea — bottling and selling air — and there are some great scenes of them trying to collect the stuff at various beaches, then attempting to figure out a way to bottle it as well as working out an ad campaign to get people to pay for air instead of getting it free (the slogan they come up with is “Air … It’s the Next Big Thing”), trying to run the business out of Jim’s mother’s garage (no one else was willing to rent to them and even Jim’s mom won’t let them into her house, not even to use the bathroom!) and ultimately seeing their idea get stolen by Ken Clay and Justin Zimmerman, who use it to revivify Memron and get back on top again while their ex-employees are once again left in the dust.
Memron is less a spoof of Enron than of capitalism in generally and specifically the “unemployment industry” vividly exposed by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bait and Switch (at times the film seems almost a deliberate spoof of her book, even though it came first!), and with the economy totally melting down these days some aspects of Memron seem both more funny and more grim than they probably did in 2004, when the shady and downright illegal business practices of Enron seemed like just the sins of a handful of companies instead of the capitalist system as a whole — and the fact that Hower and Hickey chose to advertise their film with the tag line “The Trickle-Down Has Trickled Out” seems to indicate that their satirical agenda encompassed more than just one bad company!
Parole, Inc. (Eagle-Lion, Equity, Orbit, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Parole, Inc. turned out to be a modest but interesting little movie, coming from the dregs of PRC right after it had been taken over by J. Arthur Rank, renamed “Eagle-Lion” (to reflect the transatlantic U.S.-British nature of the company) and aimed for more prestigious films. The production credits are almost as multifarious as those on a modern movie (where it seems that anyone who put money into a movie gets a production-company credit and a marvelously ambiguous computer-generated logo to flash on the screen): the opening credit identifies it as an Equity production (“This movie is going to be foreclosed on,” I joked), the copyright notice is to Pathé Industries and the closing credit is to Orbit Productions. The cast is a pretty good one for a second-tier studio: Michael O’Shea (one of the many James Cagney wanna-bes that got shafted by the refusal of the original Cagney to give up these bad-ass roles as he aged) as the hero, Evelyn Ankers and Turhan Bey reunited from Universal as the principal villains, and Lyle Talbot (considerably bulkier than he was either at Warners in the 1930’s or in his Ed Wood appearances in the 1950’s) as a police commissioner.
There’s one of those long, interminable crawling forewords that makes this look more like a 1935 movie than one from 1948 (though the huge, bulbous, tank-like cars the people were driving give away its real vintage) to the effect that some states have such lax parole systems that conviction of a crime is little more than “a minor inconvenience,” while in states where the laws are “more inflexible” crooks attempt to get their colleagues paroled via bribery. The film then fades in on a carefully unnamed state whose parole board has been paid off big-time to let off certain major crooks specified by a syndicate, and police agent Richard Hendricks (Michael O’Shea) is assigned to go undercover and pose as a recent parolee from another state (assuming the identity of a crook who fled the country) whose confederate in a bank robbery is about to be paroled in that state if Carson — to use the alias Hendricks assumes (though the person he’s impersonating is actually named Murdock) to infiltrate the gang that is selling dirty paroles.
He traces a recent parolee, Harry Palmer (Charles Bradstreet), to the Pastime, “a combination gin mill and cheap café” (as Hendricks explains in his voice-over narration into a Dictaphone — apparently screenwriters Sherman L. Lowe and Royal K. Cole had seen Double Indemnity — which he delivers from a hospital room where he’s trussed up in bandages à la The Invisible Man) owned by Jo-Jo Dumont (Evelyn Ankers), who’s agreed to hire him as a “driver” because his wife Glenda (Virginia Lee) already works for her as a waitress. We suspect she really wants him around for criminal purposes, and of course we’re right. Carson attempts to get himself into the good graces of the gang so he can trace the gang to Dumont’s superior, who turns out to be corrupt attorney Barney Rodescu (Turhan Bey — an Egyptian-American actor playing a Romanian … right), and it all ends up in a confrontation at a farm to which Carson’s “friend” Monty Cooper (Charles Jordan) was supposed to be paroled.
Since Monty would immediately “out” Carson as a government agent if they ever met — they were supposed to have committed a crime together but in fact they’ve never seen each other (one would have thought the police might have offered Carson a reduced sentence for posing as a corrupt parolee and going along with the plot, but no-o-o-o-o) — the cops arrange for police from other states who want Carson for crimes he committed elsewhere to re-arrest him as soon as he’s released, but the extradition paperwork isn’t completed in time and so Cooper arrives at the farm, outs Carson, and the gang tortures him before the police finally arrive to say the day. Both archive.org and imdb.com list this as a film noir, which it isn’t — director Alfred Zeisler and cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton shoot it straightforwardly without a hint of chiaroscuro or noir atmosphere, and the story is full of good good guys and bad bad guys without a hint of ambiguity (Turhan Bey’s character is courtly enough one could imagine him as a pleasant dinner guest, but that’s about all you can say for him).
It’s also one of those silly movies in which the crooks are careful and cautious about some things and reckless and stupid in others — as when one gang member shoots Harry Palmer to keep him from spilling the beans, and later attacks and tries to kill Glenda as well (only to be busted by a well-time visit from the cops); one wonders how he’s going to explain all these bodies lying around, especially since he makes no attempt to dispose of Harry’s corpse, nor does he (as I should have thought he would, under the circumstances) try to fake a setup that will make Harry’s death look like an accident. Nonetheless, Parole, Inc. has enough fresh “spins” on the old clichés that it’s reasonably entertaining, and it’s quite well acted for a “B” — Virginia Lee rather overdoes the scene in which one of the thugs is menacing her, but otherwise hers is a quite compelling characterization even though the film would have had more nuance if she’d been shown falling for the cop à la The Big Heat.
Parole, Inc. turned out to be a modest but interesting little movie, coming from the dregs of PRC right after it had been taken over by J. Arthur Rank, renamed “Eagle-Lion” (to reflect the transatlantic U.S.-British nature of the company) and aimed for more prestigious films. The production credits are almost as multifarious as those on a modern movie (where it seems that anyone who put money into a movie gets a production-company credit and a marvelously ambiguous computer-generated logo to flash on the screen): the opening credit identifies it as an Equity production (“This movie is going to be foreclosed on,” I joked), the copyright notice is to Pathé Industries and the closing credit is to Orbit Productions. The cast is a pretty good one for a second-tier studio: Michael O’Shea (one of the many James Cagney wanna-bes that got shafted by the refusal of the original Cagney to give up these bad-ass roles as he aged) as the hero, Evelyn Ankers and Turhan Bey reunited from Universal as the principal villains, and Lyle Talbot (considerably bulkier than he was either at Warners in the 1930’s or in his Ed Wood appearances in the 1950’s) as a police commissioner.
There’s one of those long, interminable crawling forewords that makes this look more like a 1935 movie than one from 1948 (though the huge, bulbous, tank-like cars the people were driving give away its real vintage) to the effect that some states have such lax parole systems that conviction of a crime is little more than “a minor inconvenience,” while in states where the laws are “more inflexible” crooks attempt to get their colleagues paroled via bribery. The film then fades in on a carefully unnamed state whose parole board has been paid off big-time to let off certain major crooks specified by a syndicate, and police agent Richard Hendricks (Michael O’Shea) is assigned to go undercover and pose as a recent parolee from another state (assuming the identity of a crook who fled the country) whose confederate in a bank robbery is about to be paroled in that state if Carson — to use the alias Hendricks assumes (though the person he’s impersonating is actually named Murdock) to infiltrate the gang that is selling dirty paroles.
He traces a recent parolee, Harry Palmer (Charles Bradstreet), to the Pastime, “a combination gin mill and cheap café” (as Hendricks explains in his voice-over narration into a Dictaphone — apparently screenwriters Sherman L. Lowe and Royal K. Cole had seen Double Indemnity — which he delivers from a hospital room where he’s trussed up in bandages à la The Invisible Man) owned by Jo-Jo Dumont (Evelyn Ankers), who’s agreed to hire him as a “driver” because his wife Glenda (Virginia Lee) already works for her as a waitress. We suspect she really wants him around for criminal purposes, and of course we’re right. Carson attempts to get himself into the good graces of the gang so he can trace the gang to Dumont’s superior, who turns out to be corrupt attorney Barney Rodescu (Turhan Bey — an Egyptian-American actor playing a Romanian … right), and it all ends up in a confrontation at a farm to which Carson’s “friend” Monty Cooper (Charles Jordan) was supposed to be paroled.
Since Monty would immediately “out” Carson as a government agent if they ever met — they were supposed to have committed a crime together but in fact they’ve never seen each other (one would have thought the police might have offered Carson a reduced sentence for posing as a corrupt parolee and going along with the plot, but no-o-o-o-o) — the cops arrange for police from other states who want Carson for crimes he committed elsewhere to re-arrest him as soon as he’s released, but the extradition paperwork isn’t completed in time and so Cooper arrives at the farm, outs Carson, and the gang tortures him before the police finally arrive to say the day. Both archive.org and imdb.com list this as a film noir, which it isn’t — director Alfred Zeisler and cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton shoot it straightforwardly without a hint of chiaroscuro or noir atmosphere, and the story is full of good good guys and bad bad guys without a hint of ambiguity (Turhan Bey’s character is courtly enough one could imagine him as a pleasant dinner guest, but that’s about all you can say for him).
It’s also one of those silly movies in which the crooks are careful and cautious about some things and reckless and stupid in others — as when one gang member shoots Harry Palmer to keep him from spilling the beans, and later attacks and tries to kill Glenda as well (only to be busted by a well-time visit from the cops); one wonders how he’s going to explain all these bodies lying around, especially since he makes no attempt to dispose of Harry’s corpse, nor does he (as I should have thought he would, under the circumstances) try to fake a setup that will make Harry’s death look like an accident. Nonetheless, Parole, Inc. has enough fresh “spins” on the old clichés that it’s reasonably entertaining, and it’s quite well acted for a “B” — Virginia Lee rather overdoes the scene in which one of the thugs is menacing her, but otherwise hers is a quite compelling characterization even though the film would have had more nuance if she’d been shown falling for the cop à la The Big Heat.
Private Buckaroo (Universal, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I ran the 1942 film Private Buckaroo to dub the songs off its soundtrack (there were no fewer than 14 of them!) and had fun seeing it again even though it’s a pretty pointless movie — well, the point was to crowd in a lot of great swing music by Harry James and the Andrews Sisters, along with a nice title song sung by Dick Foran in much the same vein as his introduction of “I’ll Remember April” (also a Raye/De Paul song) in the Abbott and Costello comedy Ride ’Em, Cowboy. The plot — there is a plot — deals with radio crooner Lon Prentice (Dick Foran), who’s desperate to get into the Army despite his one flat foot, and eventually does so — while Harry James (who in real life was 4-F) is drafted and there’s a lot of “comic” byplay about James’ inability to blow bugle calls. (There’s also a lot of wince-inducing references to James as “the world’s greatest trumpet player,” which he wasn’t; in 1942 the world’s greatest living trumpet player was Louis Armstrong.)
The plot gimmick is that Prentice complains about the Army’s rules and regulations, and as a result lieutenant Howard Mason (Richard Davies) decides to exempt him from having to do anything he doesn’t want to do — figuring (rightly) that this will piss off the other men so much that eventually Prentice will want to pull his fair share of duty and become a good soldier just to gain the respect of his peers. Meanwhile, Prentice is also romancing Mason’s sister Joyce (Jennifer Holt). The plot goes through more twists and turns than one would think possible in a 69-minute musical with at least eight songs, some of them generated by the eight-year-old sister of the leading lady, who’s got to be one of the most consummate child bitches ever put on the screen by anybody. Also involved in this bizarre movie is Donald O’Connor (as one of a pair of dead-end teenagers who lie about their age to enlist).
The best part of Private Buckaroo is the music; the second-best part is the comic relief, which is actually a good deal more entertaining than the plot it’s supposed to be relieving: sergeant “Muggsy” Shavel (Shemp Howard, during that period of his career when he still got to make great movies with first-class comics like W. C. Fields, Olsen and Johnson and Abbott and Costello, before the illness of his younger brother Curly forced him into the Three Stooges as Curly’s replacement) and entertainer Lancelot Pringle McBiff (Joe E. Lewis — the real one, who frankly comes off much more like Bert Lahr than Frank Sinatra!) are romantic rivals for the affections of well-proportioned but big-nosed comedienne Bonnie-Belle Schlopkiss (Mary Wickes).
At the end there’s a fascinating sequence showing the Andrews Sisters singing suitably patriotic songs with titles like “Johnny, Get Your Gun Again” and “We’ve Got a Job to Do” amidst a lot of stock footage showing combat and also war production — when I showed this film to Charles right after I bought the videotape he watched this sequence and said, “Wow! Universal was doing socialist realism!” It’s a decent movie, effectively directed by Edward Cline (even though it doesn’t contain any of the demented slapstick that was what ex-Keystone Kop Cline did best as a director) from an O.K. script by Edward James and Edmond Kelso based on a story by Paul Gerard Smith — and the music is a lot of fun for any swing buff (and there’s a lot more of it than in some of James’s more lavish “A” vehicles for major studios!).
This morning I ran the 1942 film Private Buckaroo to dub the songs off its soundtrack (there were no fewer than 14 of them!) and had fun seeing it again even though it’s a pretty pointless movie — well, the point was to crowd in a lot of great swing music by Harry James and the Andrews Sisters, along with a nice title song sung by Dick Foran in much the same vein as his introduction of “I’ll Remember April” (also a Raye/De Paul song) in the Abbott and Costello comedy Ride ’Em, Cowboy. The plot — there is a plot — deals with radio crooner Lon Prentice (Dick Foran), who’s desperate to get into the Army despite his one flat foot, and eventually does so — while Harry James (who in real life was 4-F) is drafted and there’s a lot of “comic” byplay about James’ inability to blow bugle calls. (There’s also a lot of wince-inducing references to James as “the world’s greatest trumpet player,” which he wasn’t; in 1942 the world’s greatest living trumpet player was Louis Armstrong.)
The plot gimmick is that Prentice complains about the Army’s rules and regulations, and as a result lieutenant Howard Mason (Richard Davies) decides to exempt him from having to do anything he doesn’t want to do — figuring (rightly) that this will piss off the other men so much that eventually Prentice will want to pull his fair share of duty and become a good soldier just to gain the respect of his peers. Meanwhile, Prentice is also romancing Mason’s sister Joyce (Jennifer Holt). The plot goes through more twists and turns than one would think possible in a 69-minute musical with at least eight songs, some of them generated by the eight-year-old sister of the leading lady, who’s got to be one of the most consummate child bitches ever put on the screen by anybody. Also involved in this bizarre movie is Donald O’Connor (as one of a pair of dead-end teenagers who lie about their age to enlist).
The best part of Private Buckaroo is the music; the second-best part is the comic relief, which is actually a good deal more entertaining than the plot it’s supposed to be relieving: sergeant “Muggsy” Shavel (Shemp Howard, during that period of his career when he still got to make great movies with first-class comics like W. C. Fields, Olsen and Johnson and Abbott and Costello, before the illness of his younger brother Curly forced him into the Three Stooges as Curly’s replacement) and entertainer Lancelot Pringle McBiff (Joe E. Lewis — the real one, who frankly comes off much more like Bert Lahr than Frank Sinatra!) are romantic rivals for the affections of well-proportioned but big-nosed comedienne Bonnie-Belle Schlopkiss (Mary Wickes).
At the end there’s a fascinating sequence showing the Andrews Sisters singing suitably patriotic songs with titles like “Johnny, Get Your Gun Again” and “We’ve Got a Job to Do” amidst a lot of stock footage showing combat and also war production — when I showed this film to Charles right after I bought the videotape he watched this sequence and said, “Wow! Universal was doing socialist realism!” It’s a decent movie, effectively directed by Edward Cline (even though it doesn’t contain any of the demented slapstick that was what ex-Keystone Kop Cline did best as a director) from an O.K. script by Edward James and Edmond Kelso based on a story by Paul Gerard Smith — and the music is a lot of fun for any swing buff (and there’s a lot more of it than in some of James’s more lavish “A” vehicles for major studios!).
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Jalor Productions, 1964)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I made the mistake of trying to sit with Charles through another movie, a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 incarnation of the film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I had no idea this movie would actually turn out to be worse than its reputation: directed by Nicholas Webster from a script by Paul L. Jacobson and Glenville Mareth, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians turns out to be a “children’s movie” that any self-respecting child within hailing distance of normal intelligence would have walked out on. The sets look like they were built in a high-school shop class, the costumes as if the filmmakers made their “Martian” attire out of converted pajamas, and the story so perfectly achieves a consistent level of uninspired banality that it contains no entertainment value whatsoever. It also doesn’t help that John Call, playing Santa (the only cast member anyone ever heard of again was Pia Zadora, here in her pre-pubescent years playing one of the Martian kids), sounds like he was drunk out of his gourd through the entire shoot, or that the actress playing his wife looks like a Mrs. Butterworth syrup bottle come to life and is about as animated.
The plot? It seems there’s a civil war on Mars between the people who like the fact that Martian children are dead-serious miniature versions of Martian adults and the faction that wants to teach them to play and have fun, and for which purpose they abduct Santa Claus from earth -— only, as the title suggests, he turns the tables on them. It’s the sort of movie whose credits list a “custume designer” where they obviously meant “costume designer,” and one can only hope that aside from Ms. Zadora all the unfortunate actors trapped in this movie eventually found honest work doing something else. The most (unwittingly) entertaining sequence in the film was a stock shot of U.S. Air Force bombers undergoing air-to-air refueling — the very same stock footage that was used in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. Imagine: one of the best movies of all time and one of the worst movies of all time using the same stock shots!
I made the mistake of trying to sit with Charles through another movie, a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 incarnation of the film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I had no idea this movie would actually turn out to be worse than its reputation: directed by Nicholas Webster from a script by Paul L. Jacobson and Glenville Mareth, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians turns out to be a “children’s movie” that any self-respecting child within hailing distance of normal intelligence would have walked out on. The sets look like they were built in a high-school shop class, the costumes as if the filmmakers made their “Martian” attire out of converted pajamas, and the story so perfectly achieves a consistent level of uninspired banality that it contains no entertainment value whatsoever. It also doesn’t help that John Call, playing Santa (the only cast member anyone ever heard of again was Pia Zadora, here in her pre-pubescent years playing one of the Martian kids), sounds like he was drunk out of his gourd through the entire shoot, or that the actress playing his wife looks like a Mrs. Butterworth syrup bottle come to life and is about as animated.
The plot? It seems there’s a civil war on Mars between the people who like the fact that Martian children are dead-serious miniature versions of Martian adults and the faction that wants to teach them to play and have fun, and for which purpose they abduct Santa Claus from earth -— only, as the title suggests, he turns the tables on them. It’s the sort of movie whose credits list a “custume designer” where they obviously meant “costume designer,” and one can only hope that aside from Ms. Zadora all the unfortunate actors trapped in this movie eventually found honest work doing something else. The most (unwittingly) entertaining sequence in the film was a stock shot of U.S. Air Force bombers undergoing air-to-air refueling — the very same stock footage that was used in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. Imagine: one of the best movies of all time and one of the worst movies of all time using the same stock shots!
Saturday, December 13, 2008
And Now for Something Completely Different (Playboy/Columbia, 1971)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out, largely because I felt Charles wanted a comedy (and, having been up since 5 a.m. and being a bit weary, so did I!) was And Now for Something Completely Different, the 1971 British film that marked the big-screen debut of Monty Python and was originally intended to “break” the great comedy team in the U.S. I remember seeing the trailer for this film quite often at the Cento Cedar Cinema, the marvelous revival house in San Francisco where I saw quite a few interesting films for the first time, and being totally confused by it — the routines being excerpted in the trailer were obviously supposed to be funny but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how or why. Later, in 1975, KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco, started regular showings of the Monty Python TV episodes — and from the moment I saw the first one, particularly the sketch “It’s A. Tree” (billed as a talk show hosted by the eminent arts authority, Arthur Tree, and turning out to be literally hosted by a tree, with such guests as a piece of wood, a patch of creosote and a lump of laminated plastic), I was falling over with laughter and I was hooked.
This movie was actually produced by Playboy Enterprises’ short-lived film division for release by Columbia (the second Monty Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was also a Columbia release; Life of Brian came out from Warners’ and The Meaning of Life from Universal) and was a flop in the U.S. but did well in Britain, where audiences remembered the sketches (or most of them) from the TV show. (The show was filmed between the first and second seasons of the TV series and some of the sketches in it, notably the Hungarian-English phrase book sequence, had already been written but not yet videotaped for TV.) The film is basically a greatest-hits DVD for Pythonmaniacs (many of whom have noticed that the versions of some of the sketches seen here were not identical to the ones on TV — there were a few abridgments and some rewrites): such hilarious routines as “How Not to Be Seen,” “Military Fairies” (there was a glitch on the DVD when we watched this one but I suspect the disc just had dirt on it at that point), “The Killer Cars,” “Hell’s Grannies,” “Hungarian Phrasebook,” “Ex-Parrot,” “Lumberjack,” “Mountaineering” (in which Eric Idle interviews for a mountaineering expedition with a team leader who literally sees double — he’s convinced there are two Eric Idles and two peaks to Mount Kilimanjaro, which there aren’t, and says that the purpose of this year’s expedition is to find whatever traces remains of last year’s expedition, which disappeared without a trace while trying to build a bridge between the two peaks), “The Restaurant” (in which the management of a fancy restaurant are progressively reduced to sniveling tears and utter craziness by the discovery of a dirt stain on a fork) and “Upper-Class Twit of the Year,” appropriately used as a finale — all artfully bridged by Terry Gilliam’s famous animated sequences — are all here.
Back in the 1970’s I didn’t realize (even though I’d grown up on the Beyond the Fringe album, the pre-Python troupe that loosed Dudley Moore on the world) that Monty Python was at the end of a long line of British zaniness that had begun in the 1950’s with the Goon Squad (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe) and continued through Flanders and Swann (whose album At the Drop of Another Hat is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard — it holds up better than Songs for Swingin’ Sellers even though Flanders and Swann hardly achieved the worldwide fame of Peter Sellers) and the other comedy groups George Martin produced for records before he discovered the Beatles. Still, this material is incredibly funny and reaches the heights of anything-for-a-laugh zaniness that was my original attraction to Monty Python in the first place: the idea that they would dare anything at all, as long as they thought it would be funny (and they were usually right, at least until they made The Meaning of Life, all too much of which crossed the bounds from hilarious to tasteless). Holy Grail and Life of Brian are the Pythons’ movie masterpieces, but And Now for Something Completely Different is nice to have and it’s particularly valuable to have so many of the great Monty Python routines in one place.
The film I picked out, largely because I felt Charles wanted a comedy (and, having been up since 5 a.m. and being a bit weary, so did I!) was And Now for Something Completely Different, the 1971 British film that marked the big-screen debut of Monty Python and was originally intended to “break” the great comedy team in the U.S. I remember seeing the trailer for this film quite often at the Cento Cedar Cinema, the marvelous revival house in San Francisco where I saw quite a few interesting films for the first time, and being totally confused by it — the routines being excerpted in the trailer were obviously supposed to be funny but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how or why. Later, in 1975, KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco, started regular showings of the Monty Python TV episodes — and from the moment I saw the first one, particularly the sketch “It’s A. Tree” (billed as a talk show hosted by the eminent arts authority, Arthur Tree, and turning out to be literally hosted by a tree, with such guests as a piece of wood, a patch of creosote and a lump of laminated plastic), I was falling over with laughter and I was hooked.
This movie was actually produced by Playboy Enterprises’ short-lived film division for release by Columbia (the second Monty Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was also a Columbia release; Life of Brian came out from Warners’ and The Meaning of Life from Universal) and was a flop in the U.S. but did well in Britain, where audiences remembered the sketches (or most of them) from the TV show. (The show was filmed between the first and second seasons of the TV series and some of the sketches in it, notably the Hungarian-English phrase book sequence, had already been written but not yet videotaped for TV.) The film is basically a greatest-hits DVD for Pythonmaniacs (many of whom have noticed that the versions of some of the sketches seen here were not identical to the ones on TV — there were a few abridgments and some rewrites): such hilarious routines as “How Not to Be Seen,” “Military Fairies” (there was a glitch on the DVD when we watched this one but I suspect the disc just had dirt on it at that point), “The Killer Cars,” “Hell’s Grannies,” “Hungarian Phrasebook,” “Ex-Parrot,” “Lumberjack,” “Mountaineering” (in which Eric Idle interviews for a mountaineering expedition with a team leader who literally sees double — he’s convinced there are two Eric Idles and two peaks to Mount Kilimanjaro, which there aren’t, and says that the purpose of this year’s expedition is to find whatever traces remains of last year’s expedition, which disappeared without a trace while trying to build a bridge between the two peaks), “The Restaurant” (in which the management of a fancy restaurant are progressively reduced to sniveling tears and utter craziness by the discovery of a dirt stain on a fork) and “Upper-Class Twit of the Year,” appropriately used as a finale — all artfully bridged by Terry Gilliam’s famous animated sequences — are all here.
Back in the 1970’s I didn’t realize (even though I’d grown up on the Beyond the Fringe album, the pre-Python troupe that loosed Dudley Moore on the world) that Monty Python was at the end of a long line of British zaniness that had begun in the 1950’s with the Goon Squad (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe) and continued through Flanders and Swann (whose album At the Drop of Another Hat is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard — it holds up better than Songs for Swingin’ Sellers even though Flanders and Swann hardly achieved the worldwide fame of Peter Sellers) and the other comedy groups George Martin produced for records before he discovered the Beatles. Still, this material is incredibly funny and reaches the heights of anything-for-a-laugh zaniness that was my original attraction to Monty Python in the first place: the idea that they would dare anything at all, as long as they thought it would be funny (and they were usually right, at least until they made The Meaning of Life, all too much of which crossed the bounds from hilarious to tasteless). Holy Grail and Life of Brian are the Pythons’ movie masterpieces, but And Now for Something Completely Different is nice to have and it’s particularly valuable to have so many of the great Monty Python routines in one place.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Christmas Classics on Early TV: “The Christmas Carol," “Miracle on 34th Street”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran him a couple of quirky Christmas shows he’d downloaded from archive.org: a 1949 kinescoped live version of A Christmas Carol (for some reason retitled The Christmas Carol even though Charles Dickens himself, as well as all his other adapters that I know of, used the indefinite article) and a 1955 (though misidentified on the archive.org site as also from 1949) hour-long TV version of Miracle on 34th Street. The Christmas Carol was produced by Mike Stokey and Bernard Ebert (which makes it sound like a film-review show from Chicago) and written and directed by Arthur Pierson. It begins with a narrator, Vincent Price, reading from a large picture-storybook edition of the classic Dickens tale, and periodically (where the original commercial breaks were spotted) the scene returns to Price in his armchair with his book giving us the next tidbit of exposition needed to follow the story.
It’s a good adaptation even though it’s hamstrung by the limited time available — it was squeezed into a half-hour time slot and, less commercials, they only had about 25 minutes to tell their story. Pierson did a good job of condensing the Dickens story into the limited time available — though other people (including whoever wrote the script for Ronald Colman’s performance on Decca records) have done it better — and there’s one pretty astonishing special effect for live TV: Marley’s ghost enters the scene by walking through a closed door (actually a piece of paper with the image of the door superimposed over it) and into the set representing Scrooge’s room. Charles was annoyed by the identification of the central character as “Ebeneezer” (he lamented the fact that it had five “e”’s and I pointed out that that was only one more than Dickens had used) but otherwise it was quite good for the limited budget, facilities and running time, getting the basics of the story in even though it wasn’t a great adaptation: Taylor Holmes’ Scrooge didn’t have the authority of the truly great portrayals (including Alastair Sim and Jim Backus, who voiced the character superbly on Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol) and the ghosts were appealing (and George James as Christmas Present was clean-shaven and considerably hunkier than what we usually get!), while the Cratchits included the child Jill St. John (under her real name, Jill Oppenheim) as Missie and a refreshingly un-milked Bobby Hyatt as Tiny Tim.
Miracle on 34th Street (1955) was considerably better, partly because it was shot on film — when we saw the principals observing the real Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade it was clearly a process shot rather than some stopgap cooked up in a live TV studio — and partly because it was the work of a major studio: 20th Century-Fox, which had produced the original 1947 film (written and directed by George Seaton based on a story by Valentine Davies), hired writer John Monks, Jr. to boil down the story to a 46-minute time slot, not counting commercials (less than half the 96-minute running time of the movie) and threw some great people into the project on both ends of the camera: MacDonald Carey in the John Payne role, Teresa Wright in the Maureen O’Hara role, Thomas Mitchell stepping into Edmund Gwenn’s red suit as Santa Claus and the marvelous Hans Conried playing Shellhammer, Doris Walker’s (Wright) direct supervisor at Macy’s (who in the 1947 film was played by a nondescript character actor named Philip Tonge) and some of the usual Fox people in the technical jobs: Lyle Wheeler as co-art director, Ben Nye and Stanley Orr doing makeup and Charles Le Maire as one of the costumers.
The director was Robert Stevenson, no doubt warming up for his later assignments at Disney (including Mary Poppins) but still an excellent director and easily in Seaton’s league in terms of getting this story told and evoking the tears without going all-out in jerking them. MacDonald Carey doesn’t have the romantic panache John Payne brought to the role of Gaily (which sounds really weird on the soundtrack!), the attorney who successfully defends Kris Kringle (Mitchell) from a charge of insanity because he believes himself to be Santa Claus, and Sandy Descher as the daughter is good and shows welcome restraint but doesn’t quite grab the part the way Natalie Wood did in the film. Still, this is a quite appealing movie and, despite the condensation, tells basically the same story as the original and makes all the same points — and both Wright and Mitchell are every bit as good as their 1947 counterparts, O’Hara and Gwenn. This was a quite nice production, and I wonder how many other interesting TV remakes of their film hits are moldering in the 20th Century-Fox vaults!
I ran him a couple of quirky Christmas shows he’d downloaded from archive.org: a 1949 kinescoped live version of A Christmas Carol (for some reason retitled The Christmas Carol even though Charles Dickens himself, as well as all his other adapters that I know of, used the indefinite article) and a 1955 (though misidentified on the archive.org site as also from 1949) hour-long TV version of Miracle on 34th Street. The Christmas Carol was produced by Mike Stokey and Bernard Ebert (which makes it sound like a film-review show from Chicago) and written and directed by Arthur Pierson. It begins with a narrator, Vincent Price, reading from a large picture-storybook edition of the classic Dickens tale, and periodically (where the original commercial breaks were spotted) the scene returns to Price in his armchair with his book giving us the next tidbit of exposition needed to follow the story.
It’s a good adaptation even though it’s hamstrung by the limited time available — it was squeezed into a half-hour time slot and, less commercials, they only had about 25 minutes to tell their story. Pierson did a good job of condensing the Dickens story into the limited time available — though other people (including whoever wrote the script for Ronald Colman’s performance on Decca records) have done it better — and there’s one pretty astonishing special effect for live TV: Marley’s ghost enters the scene by walking through a closed door (actually a piece of paper with the image of the door superimposed over it) and into the set representing Scrooge’s room. Charles was annoyed by the identification of the central character as “Ebeneezer” (he lamented the fact that it had five “e”’s and I pointed out that that was only one more than Dickens had used) but otherwise it was quite good for the limited budget, facilities and running time, getting the basics of the story in even though it wasn’t a great adaptation: Taylor Holmes’ Scrooge didn’t have the authority of the truly great portrayals (including Alastair Sim and Jim Backus, who voiced the character superbly on Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol) and the ghosts were appealing (and George James as Christmas Present was clean-shaven and considerably hunkier than what we usually get!), while the Cratchits included the child Jill St. John (under her real name, Jill Oppenheim) as Missie and a refreshingly un-milked Bobby Hyatt as Tiny Tim.
Miracle on 34th Street (1955) was considerably better, partly because it was shot on film — when we saw the principals observing the real Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade it was clearly a process shot rather than some stopgap cooked up in a live TV studio — and partly because it was the work of a major studio: 20th Century-Fox, which had produced the original 1947 film (written and directed by George Seaton based on a story by Valentine Davies), hired writer John Monks, Jr. to boil down the story to a 46-minute time slot, not counting commercials (less than half the 96-minute running time of the movie) and threw some great people into the project on both ends of the camera: MacDonald Carey in the John Payne role, Teresa Wright in the Maureen O’Hara role, Thomas Mitchell stepping into Edmund Gwenn’s red suit as Santa Claus and the marvelous Hans Conried playing Shellhammer, Doris Walker’s (Wright) direct supervisor at Macy’s (who in the 1947 film was played by a nondescript character actor named Philip Tonge) and some of the usual Fox people in the technical jobs: Lyle Wheeler as co-art director, Ben Nye and Stanley Orr doing makeup and Charles Le Maire as one of the costumers.
The director was Robert Stevenson, no doubt warming up for his later assignments at Disney (including Mary Poppins) but still an excellent director and easily in Seaton’s league in terms of getting this story told and evoking the tears without going all-out in jerking them. MacDonald Carey doesn’t have the romantic panache John Payne brought to the role of Gaily (which sounds really weird on the soundtrack!), the attorney who successfully defends Kris Kringle (Mitchell) from a charge of insanity because he believes himself to be Santa Claus, and Sandy Descher as the daughter is good and shows welcome restraint but doesn’t quite grab the part the way Natalie Wood did in the film. Still, this is a quite appealing movie and, despite the condensation, tells basically the same story as the original and makes all the same points — and both Wright and Mitchell are every bit as good as their 1947 counterparts, O’Hara and Gwenn. This was a quite nice production, and I wonder how many other interesting TV remakes of their film hits are moldering in the 20th Century-Fox vaults!
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