by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Depending on how you reckon
the various dates, The Mummy’s Curse is either the fourth or the fifth in Universal’s Mummy cycle and either the last or the next-to-last. The
issues are whether you count the one Mummy film made while the Laemmle family was still in control — the original The
Mummy from 1932, directed by
Karl Freund, written by John L. Balderston and starring Boris Karloff and Zita
Johann, and a masterpiece that has grown on me over the years (David Skal in
his book The Monster Show dismissed The Mummy as a rehash of Dracula but to me, despite the similarities, it’s a far finer film, thanks
mainly to the far more subtle performances Karloff and Johann give in the leads
compared to their Dracula counterparts, Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler; also a far more literate
script and more subtle, flexible direction) and also whether you count the 1955
spoof Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, a surprisingly good film for their last credit for Universal. The main
“New Universal” (the usual designation for the period between 1937, when the
Laemmles lost control, and 1946, when the then-owners absorbed Sam Spiegel’s
International Pictures and the company became Universal-International) Mummy cycle began in 1940 with The Mummy’s Hand, the film that set the ground rules for the cycle.
The mummy’s name was Kharis, and he had been condemned to death in ancient
Egypt for falling in love with Princess Ananka, third daughter of Pharoah
Amenhotep, but a cult in ancient Egypt called either Arkhan or Arkham,
depending on how each actor pronounced it, kept Kharis alive but in suspended
animation as a living mummy via a fluid extracted from a tea brewed from tana leaves. A tea brewed from four tana leaves (though in The Mummy’s Curse that number was reduced to three) would keep
Kharis in suspended animation, while a tea brewed from nine leaves would wake
him up and give him the power to move. Not that he ever moves that far — or
that fast: Kharis walks ver-r-r-r-ry slowly and has only one good arm (it swings around on its axis while
his other one is held over his chest, as if it’s broken and in a sling), and
though he’s supposed to be a lethal engine of destruction aimed at anyone who
was involved in the discovery of Ananka’s tomb and the retrieval of her mummy,
his only means of murder seems to be strangling people by cuffing them over
their throats with his one good arm.
The Mummy was the only one of Universal’s
monster character who was never combined with the others — Frankenstein’s
Monster, Dracula and the Wolf-Man — in one of the omnibus films Universal
started making in the mid-1940’s after Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man was a success in 1943 and they rushed out House
of Frankenstein and House of Dracula — apparently because the makeup took so long that
including the Mummy in one of those movies would have blown the budget. It had
taken Jack P. Pierce seven hours to make Boris Karloff up as the full-figure
Mummy in the opening scenes of the 1932 version, and even though Karloff spent
most of that film in the assumed identity of Arab mystic “Ardath Bey” snd only
his wizened face suggested living mummy-dom, that makeup took four hours. By the time of the 1940’s
Mummy movies Pierce was using masks and other shortcuts he’d previously
eschewed — indeed, by 1955 (with Pierce long gone from Universal) the
sloppiness of the Mummy costuming (merely a full-body suit embroidered and
stitched to suggest mummy-dom) itself became a gag in the film, as the living
mummy is joined by two other characters who don mummy suits to impersonate him.
The Mummy’s Ghost was made in late 1943 and
released on July 7, 1944; The Mummy’s Curse was shot just a few months later and released on
December 22, 1944. Also, though Lon Chaney, Jr. stayed on as Kharis, Virginia
Christine replaced Ramsay Ames as Princess Ananka and the director and writers
were all different — Leslie Goodwins, a “B” director from RKO whose main
credits had been the movies featuring Wally Brown and Alan Carney, two old
vaudeville comedians RKO put together to create their own synthetic version of
Abbott and Costello, replaced the marvelously named but not conspicuously
talented Reginald LeBorg, and a new writing committee — Leon Abrams and Dwight
V. Babcock (story), Bernard Schubert (screenplay) and an uncredited Oliver
Drake and Ted Richmond — replaced the one on Ghost (Griffin Jay, Henry Sucher and Brenda Weisberg).
The fact that all the writers were different
may explain why the transition between Ghost and Curse contains one of the most outrageous and hilarious plot inconsistencies ever between a series film and its immediate sequel. The
Mummy’s Ghost took place in New England
and ended with Kharis drowning himself and Ananka in a cranberry bog; somehow,
in the time between the two films, their bodies migrated over 1,000 miles under the United States (perhaps through the water
table, Charles suggested) to end up in a Louisiana bayou. Also, the films’
sense of time is almost as bizarre as their sense of space: as one “trivia”
contributor to imdb.com put it, “The Mummy (1932) was set in 1932, the year of its release.
The first sequel, The Mummy’s
Hand (1940) is also
chronologically coherent, set in 1940. The Mummy’s
Tomb (1942) takes place 30
years following the events of Hand, with The Mummy’s
Ghost (1944) approximately two
years after that. We learn that this movie is set an additional 25 years after Ghost, meaning that the events take place around 1997.”
And yet all the physical accoutrements
of the Mummy films are contemporary to the mid-1940’s: there is no attempt to show visually any of these dramatic
leaps into the future. What’s more, even though the events of Ghost took place in New England, the Louisiana natives
in Curse (a typical Hollywood mélange of Anglo whites, Cajuns and Blacks — dumb Blacks,
of course, this being the 1940’s) are fully familiar with the curse surrounding
the mummy and the mysterious deaths caused by the legendary creature dwelling
in their swamp — so much so that when the film begins they’re in open rebellion
against the crew from the U.S. government there to drain the swamp so they can
reclaim the land, irrigate it and provide the locals more and better farmland.
(Gee, back in 1944 the federal government still had an infrastructure program!)
They’re convinced that draining the swamp will only release the murderous mummy
to start preying on them again.
The swamp doesn’t get drained but Kharis comes
to life anyway, courtesy of an anthropological team from the Scripps Museum
(the same name as the one in Ghost — are we supposed to assume there’s a nationwide chain of them?) led by
Dr. James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and featuring a pair of anodyne young leads and
an undercover agent from the cult of Arkhan (or is it Arkham?), an Egyptian
named Dr. Ilzor Zandaab (Peter Coe, whose presence is interesting if only
because years later Edward D. Wood, Jr. tried — and failed — to get funding for
a biopic of Bela Lugosi in which Coe would have played him), who’s recruited a
local named Ragheb (Martin Kosleck, wasted here — he was a quite good character
villain whose best films are his two playing Joseph Goebbels and House of
Horrors, in which he’s a homicidal
artist who befriends Rondo Hatton and sends Hatton out to kill for him) as his
sidekick. Kharis rises from the swamp and so does Ananka, who’s played by a
different actress, Virginia Christine, than the one who played her in Ghost (Ramsay Ames) — and according to imdb.com
Christine’s biggest fear while she was making the film was the liquor she could
smell on Chaney’s breath. Chaney was already descending into the alcoholism
that marred his later career (in his Tales of Tomorrow TV appearance as Frankenstein’s Monster he was
drunk for the first 15 minutes of the live telecast and barely pulled himself
together for the second installment) and the possibility that he might fall
down and injure her. She was relieved when director Goodwins called Chaney out
of the shot and had a stunt double replace him instead.
The Mummy’s Curse showed that the people making the horror films at
Universal were beginning to look at the big grosses of Val Lewton’s “B” horror
films from RKO, which used shadows and sound effects to scare their audiences
and made artful use of music — but at the same time they were stuck with their
own formula of parading big, ugly monsters across the screen. So they tried to
copy some of Lewton’s effects — including the swamp setting and the use of a
singer as a key character (Ann Codee as “Tante Berthe,” who both owns a bar in
the neighborhood and is its principal entertainer), who opens the show with a
ribald (as ribald as the Production Code would allow, anyway) song called “Hey,
You!” (by Frank Orth and Oliver Drake) and is later the Mummy’s first victim.
What they didn’t copy was the chilling
scene in Lewton’s (and Robert Wise’s) The Body Snatcher in which the street singer we’ve been hearing all
through the film is murdered off-screen, with her demise indicated merely by
the sudden silencing of her voice. In this film Kharis politely lets Tante
Berthe finish her song before knocking her off. The Mummy’s Curse is a series of similar misfires indicating that
the people behind the cameras had gone to the proverbial well once too often
with this formula; it’s not a bad movie but it’s a surprisingly dull one, and
Kharis himself by then was a singularly unfrightening monster, looking less
like a revenge-minded killer from 3,000 years ago than an accident victim who
insisted on leaving the hospital against medical advice.
Saturday, December 14, 2019
Friday, December 13, 2019
Midsomer Murders: “Master Class” (Bentley Productions, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was a 2010 two-part episode of the British commercial TV show Midsomer Murders, a series based on British police detectives in a fictional county in rural England. This episode was called “Master Class” and made very interesting viewing since I’ve just read Moscow Nights, Nigel Cliff’s combined biography of Van Cliburn and history of the Cold War as refracted through his career — which began, at least in terms of international fame, with his victory in the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow that was largely considered a U.S. counter-strike to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, in 1957. “Master Class” is also about a piano competition, this one headed by a world-famous pianist, Sir Michael Fielding (James Fox), who lives in semiretirement in Midsomer County and runs a yearly competition for teenage pianists. The top three finalists get to spend a week at Fielding’s estate as he coaches them, and then he selects one of the three to sponsor for a virtually certain international career. The opening is a rather grim scene in which Fielding’s middle-aged daughters Miriam (Sylvestra le Touzel) and Constance (Frances Barber) are handling the preliminary auditions and finding the pianists hopelessly awful (though at least part of the awfulness we hear can be attributed to the rather jangly and dubiously tuned piano the producers used for the pre-recordings) until they hear a bit from Zoe Stock (Lydia Wilson) — though the actors tend to pronounce her last name “Stork.”
Zoe is a brilliantly talented pianist but one who’s afflicted with odd allergies, including a tendency to start bleeding uncontrollably from her nose at moments of stress. Despite this, she’s invited to join the list of potential finalists and come to the Fielding estate, where in addition to the Fieldings she meets the other contestants, Orlando Guest (a young man of almost unearthly beauty named Matthew James Thomas who came to the U.S. to star in the ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) and Francesca Sharpe (Katherine Press). Francesca has a classic S.O.B. stage dad, Simon (Michael Maloney), who’s obviously pushing her into a career she doesn’t necessarily want; the Stock parents seem like ordinary middle-class people who like their daughter but doesn’t think music is that great a career choice — at virtually every traumatic moment for her they try to get her to get in their car and let them drive her home — and Orlando has a still quite attractive mom, Penelope (Nadia Cameron-Blakely), who’s not above seducing Sir Michael Fielding (while he plays, of all things, a piano transcription of the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) if that’ll help him get a leg up in the competition. Zoe has a traumatic response when she sees the creek outside the Fielding estate; she imagines she sees a young woman leap off the bridge over the creek, fall in the water and drown. Later this turns out to be an hallucinatory flashback and the woman was her mother; she committed suicide by leaping into the creek and Zoe witnessed it, but was only a baby.
The local priest, Rev. Gregory (Clifford Rose), and his nun, Sister Agnes (Elizabeth Bell) — I was trying to figure out what denomination this was; I’d have assumed Church of England except I don’t think it has nuns — took baby Zoe and placed her for adoption with the Stocks, though when Zoe returned to the town Gregory sent off a pair of DNA samples, some hair of hers as a baby and saliva from her taking the communion cup (and breaking out into a rash because she’s allergic to alcohol) — but the murders start happening before the cops learn why he ordered a DNA test on two samples or what the results were. We’re also sent a couple of red herrings, one in the form of Benedict Marsh (Richard Fleeshman, who’s nowhere near as drop-dead gorgeous as Matthew James Thomas but is cute enough I wouldn’t have minded seeing the two do a Gay porn film together), who just missed the cut of three for Sir Michael Fielding’s master class and who’s crashed the community and is holding out there in case something happens to one of the other contestants; and Orlando’s sexual escapades with both Zoe and Francesca, who of course get ferociously jealous once each finds out that Orlando has had the other. The action starts when Zoe and Father Gregory are nearly killed by a pile of bricks being dropped from the roof of the church (it’s being remodeled) — we know it’s not an accident because we saw the person who pushed the bricks off the roof receive a cell phone call immediately before, though we only see hands, nothing by which we can identify the assailant — but it’s not until part two that someone, Orlando, actually dies: he’s found hanging from a branch of the tree supporting the treehouse where he had trysts with his fellow contestants, and the medical examiner finds he was struck with a blunt instrument before he was hung and therefore it was murder, not suicide. (I joked to Charles that in a Lifetime movie the cutest guy in the dramatis personae is almost always the murderer; in a British mystery he’s almost always the first victim.)
Later Father Gregory is found bent over the altar, his throat slit from end to end, and Zoe’s adoptive parents, Terry (Ian Puleston-Davies) and Dawn (Janet Sibley), nearly die in a car crash after someone cuts their brake line. They recover enough to give Zoe the shocking news that she’s adopted (I had thought it might be that Terry was Zoe’s actual father and Zoe’s mom committed suicide when he wouldn’t leave his wife and marry her), but they don’t tell her who her real parents were because they themselves don’t know. Zoe eventually realizes that her mom was the mystery woman she saw commit suicide while Zoe was still a baby, and [spoiler alert!] in an ending writer Nicholas Martin obviously ripped off from Robert Towne’s script for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, it turns out her dad was Sir Michael Fielding. What’s more, Fielding wasn’t just a sick old dude who got his kicks from doing his kids; he’s also a crazy racist and a devotee of the eugenics theories of Sir Francis Galton, an early-20th century scientist who first established the science of fingerprint identification and also argued that the British gene pool was getting polluted by people from lesser races, and Fielding adopted that view and decided to do something about it by breeding himself and his daughters — and he’s just about to seduce and presumably impregnate Zoe (who’s both his daughter and his granddaughter — Molly, the girl who committed suicide 18 years earlier, was another of Fielding’s daughters) when the police drive up to his house and yell at Zoe to get out of there. “Master Class” is a bit of good clean kinky fun, well constructed and with hints of the Fieldings’ inbreeding (not only Zoe’s allergies and bleeding but also a bottle of medicine used to treat porphyria, the disease that drove King George III crazy) carefully dropped in Martin’s script, expertly directed by Renny Rye and gifted with that amazing talent pool of British actors.
Our “feature” was a 2010 two-part episode of the British commercial TV show Midsomer Murders, a series based on British police detectives in a fictional county in rural England. This episode was called “Master Class” and made very interesting viewing since I’ve just read Moscow Nights, Nigel Cliff’s combined biography of Van Cliburn and history of the Cold War as refracted through his career — which began, at least in terms of international fame, with his victory in the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow that was largely considered a U.S. counter-strike to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, in 1957. “Master Class” is also about a piano competition, this one headed by a world-famous pianist, Sir Michael Fielding (James Fox), who lives in semiretirement in Midsomer County and runs a yearly competition for teenage pianists. The top three finalists get to spend a week at Fielding’s estate as he coaches them, and then he selects one of the three to sponsor for a virtually certain international career. The opening is a rather grim scene in which Fielding’s middle-aged daughters Miriam (Sylvestra le Touzel) and Constance (Frances Barber) are handling the preliminary auditions and finding the pianists hopelessly awful (though at least part of the awfulness we hear can be attributed to the rather jangly and dubiously tuned piano the producers used for the pre-recordings) until they hear a bit from Zoe Stock (Lydia Wilson) — though the actors tend to pronounce her last name “Stork.”
Zoe is a brilliantly talented pianist but one who’s afflicted with odd allergies, including a tendency to start bleeding uncontrollably from her nose at moments of stress. Despite this, she’s invited to join the list of potential finalists and come to the Fielding estate, where in addition to the Fieldings she meets the other contestants, Orlando Guest (a young man of almost unearthly beauty named Matthew James Thomas who came to the U.S. to star in the ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) and Francesca Sharpe (Katherine Press). Francesca has a classic S.O.B. stage dad, Simon (Michael Maloney), who’s obviously pushing her into a career she doesn’t necessarily want; the Stock parents seem like ordinary middle-class people who like their daughter but doesn’t think music is that great a career choice — at virtually every traumatic moment for her they try to get her to get in their car and let them drive her home — and Orlando has a still quite attractive mom, Penelope (Nadia Cameron-Blakely), who’s not above seducing Sir Michael Fielding (while he plays, of all things, a piano transcription of the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) if that’ll help him get a leg up in the competition. Zoe has a traumatic response when she sees the creek outside the Fielding estate; she imagines she sees a young woman leap off the bridge over the creek, fall in the water and drown. Later this turns out to be an hallucinatory flashback and the woman was her mother; she committed suicide by leaping into the creek and Zoe witnessed it, but was only a baby.
The local priest, Rev. Gregory (Clifford Rose), and his nun, Sister Agnes (Elizabeth Bell) — I was trying to figure out what denomination this was; I’d have assumed Church of England except I don’t think it has nuns — took baby Zoe and placed her for adoption with the Stocks, though when Zoe returned to the town Gregory sent off a pair of DNA samples, some hair of hers as a baby and saliva from her taking the communion cup (and breaking out into a rash because she’s allergic to alcohol) — but the murders start happening before the cops learn why he ordered a DNA test on two samples or what the results were. We’re also sent a couple of red herrings, one in the form of Benedict Marsh (Richard Fleeshman, who’s nowhere near as drop-dead gorgeous as Matthew James Thomas but is cute enough I wouldn’t have minded seeing the two do a Gay porn film together), who just missed the cut of three for Sir Michael Fielding’s master class and who’s crashed the community and is holding out there in case something happens to one of the other contestants; and Orlando’s sexual escapades with both Zoe and Francesca, who of course get ferociously jealous once each finds out that Orlando has had the other. The action starts when Zoe and Father Gregory are nearly killed by a pile of bricks being dropped from the roof of the church (it’s being remodeled) — we know it’s not an accident because we saw the person who pushed the bricks off the roof receive a cell phone call immediately before, though we only see hands, nothing by which we can identify the assailant — but it’s not until part two that someone, Orlando, actually dies: he’s found hanging from a branch of the tree supporting the treehouse where he had trysts with his fellow contestants, and the medical examiner finds he was struck with a blunt instrument before he was hung and therefore it was murder, not suicide. (I joked to Charles that in a Lifetime movie the cutest guy in the dramatis personae is almost always the murderer; in a British mystery he’s almost always the first victim.)
Later Father Gregory is found bent over the altar, his throat slit from end to end, and Zoe’s adoptive parents, Terry (Ian Puleston-Davies) and Dawn (Janet Sibley), nearly die in a car crash after someone cuts their brake line. They recover enough to give Zoe the shocking news that she’s adopted (I had thought it might be that Terry was Zoe’s actual father and Zoe’s mom committed suicide when he wouldn’t leave his wife and marry her), but they don’t tell her who her real parents were because they themselves don’t know. Zoe eventually realizes that her mom was the mystery woman she saw commit suicide while Zoe was still a baby, and [spoiler alert!] in an ending writer Nicholas Martin obviously ripped off from Robert Towne’s script for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, it turns out her dad was Sir Michael Fielding. What’s more, Fielding wasn’t just a sick old dude who got his kicks from doing his kids; he’s also a crazy racist and a devotee of the eugenics theories of Sir Francis Galton, an early-20th century scientist who first established the science of fingerprint identification and also argued that the British gene pool was getting polluted by people from lesser races, and Fielding adopted that view and decided to do something about it by breeding himself and his daughters — and he’s just about to seduce and presumably impregnate Zoe (who’s both his daughter and his granddaughter — Molly, the girl who committed suicide 18 years earlier, was another of Fielding’s daughters) when the police drive up to his house and yell at Zoe to get out of there. “Master Class” is a bit of good clean kinky fun, well constructed and with hints of the Fieldings’ inbreeding (not only Zoe’s allergies and bleeding but also a bottle of medicine used to treat porphyria, the disease that drove King George III crazy) carefully dropped in Martin’s script, expertly directed by Renny Rye and gifted with that amazing talent pool of British actors.
Monday, December 9, 2019
Angel Has Fallen (Millennium Films, G-BASE, Campbell Grobman Films, Lionsgate, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Angel Has Fallen, third in the “ … Has Fallen” trilogy starring Gerard Butler as U.S. Secret Service agent Mike Banning, essentially a superhero who in the first two films, Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, saved the U.S. President (Aaron Eckhardt) from assassination by terrorists, North Koreans in the first film and Middle Easterners in the second. The Black director Antoine Fuqua did Olympus Has Fallen and told reporters he had taken the script because the terrorists were not from a Muslim country; when he got the script for London Has Fallen and the terrorists were Muslims, he bowed out and Babak Naiafi took over. Angel Has Fallen had yet a third director — Ric Roman Waugh, who also gets a screenplay credit with Robert Mark Kamen and Matt Cook, though the “original” story is credited to Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt — and the film has the usual flaws of something written by a committee: gaping plot holes and an overall sense that we’ve seen this before. It’s the kind of movie that often inspires me to say, “written — or at least compiled,” since all too often a movie with this many writers seems stuck together, Frankenstein-style, from bits and pieces of older and better films. In the previous two films Mike Banning saved the President from enemies foreign; this time the enemies are domestic. The film opens with an elaborate action sequence that turns out to be a war-games training exercise, after which Banning tells someone who screwed up, “If you don’t train like it’s real, you’re dead when it is.” (Cliché Bank deposit alert!)
Then the action proper begins as Banning leads a Secret Service detail protecting U.S. President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman, the only actor besides Butler who’s been in all three “ … Has Fallen” movies, though his character has steadily risen from Speaker of the House in Olympus to vice-president in London and president here) while he’s on a private lake fishing. Only Trumbull has been set up for an assassination by a group of fighters — at this stage we still don’t know who they are or what they’re after — who have a fully professional military rocket-launcher that sends out waves of bat-like drones, each one of which is capable of blowing up just about anything in the area. Banning saves the President by forcing him to swim underwater, though when the attack subsides Turnbull, though still alive, is in a coma and is immediately hospitalized. His vice-president, Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson, who according to imdb.com was deliberately made up to look like current-day Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who produced several movies — including the quite good and surprisingly anti-capitalist The Accountant — before joining the Trump administration), invokes the 25th Amendment and starts preparing for an attack on Russia, since the mysterious people who attacked the President faked it to look like Banning was responsible for the attack (they even planted his DNA on the trigger of their rocket launcher — though the writing committee doesn’t even drop a hint as to how they obtained it — while themselves wearing light blue haz-mat suits and dark blue gloves, which led me to joke, “The President is being attacked by the Blue Man Group?”) and Russia paid him $10 million to do it.
This puts Mike Banning in the classic position of an Alfred Hitchcock hero, unjustly accused of a crime and realizing that his only chance of clearing himself is to avoid getting arrested and use his Secret Service skills to track down the real culprits — though the film’s high-octane action sequences (nearly 100 stunt people were credited, as were four effects houses — quite a lot of CGI for a film that doesn’t contain a character with super-powers or any deviation from normal physical reality) mark it as closer to James Bond — and after Angel Has Fallen has already tapped the tropes of a terrorist movie, a Bond movie and a Hitchcock movie, the writing committee suddenly turns it into High Sierra: Banning escapes to the rolling hill country around Pennsylvania and goes to a remote, off-the-grid cabin inhabited by a quirky character who in a 1940’s movie would have been played by Walter Brennan but here is an old, grizzled Nick Nolte (quite a comedown for anyone who liked the young Nick Nolte and thought he was hot!) playing Clay Banning, Mike Banning’s long-lost father (though if he’s so long-lost how did Mike know where he is?). Apparently Clay Banning fought in the Viet Nam War and came home with the mother of all post-traumatic stress disorders, which led him to bail on his family and force Mike’s mom to raise him as a single parent. Clay helps Mike escape and loans him an old tan Chevrolet pickup (the sinister vans the bad guys drive are Chevy SUV’s and the President’s limousine is a Cadillac — did General Motors pay for product placement on this film?) and when a black-clad team of fighters corner them at the cabin Mike kills all of them and chisels on the wall against which he leans their bodies, “We Work for Salient.”
It turns out that Salient is a private military contractor headed by Wade Jennings (Danny Huston, continuing in the tradition of his dad John Huston, who played a similar all-powerful psycho in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown) and they were hired to kill the President. At first we hear the voice of the person who hired Jennings’ firm only on the end of a phone line and through a voice distorter, but about an hour into this two-hour movie we learn [spoiler alert! — though it’s really not that much a surprise: I guessed it well before the big reveal] that the mastermind of the plot and the man who’s paying Jennings’ company to pull it off is Vice-President Kirby. Apparently he decided to kill Turnbull so he could assume the presidency and start a U.S. war against Russia using private contractors — before he became comatose Turnbull had decided to pull the U.S. back from its military presence in the world and end the U.S. military’s use of private contractors altogether — and Kirby cut a deal with Jennings so Salient would kill the President and Kirby would attack the Russians with Salient’s forces rather than the U.S. military. In the dumbest plot hole of a movie that’s full of them, Mike Banning goes to an ordinary pay phone and places a call to his wife Leah (former “Queen of the Indies” Piper Perabo, replacing Radha Mitchell, who played her in the first two films, though they’re the same character) and their daughter Lynne (Jessica and Maisie Cobley — the casting directors used the common dodge of casting identical twins as a pre-pubescent character to avoid working either child longer than the maximum hours allowable under state law) — and the Secret Service and FBI easily trace his location. A real Secret Service agent being chased wouldn’t make such an elementary mistake, and I was surprised the writers didn’t have Mike make the call from a cell phone and “spoof” the call to make it seem like he was in a different location from his real one. Instead they have Mike Banning and his dad show up at home just in time to rescue his wife and daughter from a couple of Salient goons trying to kidnap them.
Meanwhile, FBI Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith, blessedly getting a rare chance to act without her husband and son in tow) and her partner Ramirez (Joseph Millson) figure out the plot, assume Mike’s innocence and launch an investigation of Salient — only to get killed by Salient’s security people when they go to the company’s compound. (It’s an intriguing action-movie variant on the Lifetime trope of the heroine’s African-American best friend who figures out the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can tell anybody what she’s found.) Eventually President Turnbull comes to and exonerates Mike Banning, and having left the dead bodies of two FBI agents behind at his compound Jennings decides to move his entire operation offshore, only first he wants to kill the President to salvage as much as he can of his conspiracy, and to do that he stages an attack on the hospital where the President is being kept — Jennings’ men slaughter a whole lot of innocent people (nobody on imdb.com has tried to do a “body count” for this film because I suspect it would be impossible for anybody, including the writers, to keep track) and blow up half the hospital in a scene I suspect was inspired by the real Oklahoma City bombing, though ultimately the President is rescued after Mike barricades him in a hospital office, and Mike and Jennings have a duel to the death on top of the part of the hospital that’s still standing that ends with Mike stabbing Jennings to death. Angel Has Fallen is a pretty good action movie if you can ignore all the plot holes — though the close-ups of Gerard Butler’s wounded face get oppressive after a while and his boredom with the role is pretty evident (he’s said this will be his last one in the series, though as with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine I suspect he’ll change his mind if someone waves a check at him with enough zeroes at the end) — though I lament the failure of the writers and director Waugh to do more with the angst of the manhunter turned manhunted!
Last night’s “feature” was Angel Has Fallen, third in the “ … Has Fallen” trilogy starring Gerard Butler as U.S. Secret Service agent Mike Banning, essentially a superhero who in the first two films, Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen, saved the U.S. President (Aaron Eckhardt) from assassination by terrorists, North Koreans in the first film and Middle Easterners in the second. The Black director Antoine Fuqua did Olympus Has Fallen and told reporters he had taken the script because the terrorists were not from a Muslim country; when he got the script for London Has Fallen and the terrorists were Muslims, he bowed out and Babak Naiafi took over. Angel Has Fallen had yet a third director — Ric Roman Waugh, who also gets a screenplay credit with Robert Mark Kamen and Matt Cook, though the “original” story is credited to Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt — and the film has the usual flaws of something written by a committee: gaping plot holes and an overall sense that we’ve seen this before. It’s the kind of movie that often inspires me to say, “written — or at least compiled,” since all too often a movie with this many writers seems stuck together, Frankenstein-style, from bits and pieces of older and better films. In the previous two films Mike Banning saved the President from enemies foreign; this time the enemies are domestic. The film opens with an elaborate action sequence that turns out to be a war-games training exercise, after which Banning tells someone who screwed up, “If you don’t train like it’s real, you’re dead when it is.” (Cliché Bank deposit alert!)
Then the action proper begins as Banning leads a Secret Service detail protecting U.S. President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman, the only actor besides Butler who’s been in all three “ … Has Fallen” movies, though his character has steadily risen from Speaker of the House in Olympus to vice-president in London and president here) while he’s on a private lake fishing. Only Trumbull has been set up for an assassination by a group of fighters — at this stage we still don’t know who they are or what they’re after — who have a fully professional military rocket-launcher that sends out waves of bat-like drones, each one of which is capable of blowing up just about anything in the area. Banning saves the President by forcing him to swim underwater, though when the attack subsides Turnbull, though still alive, is in a coma and is immediately hospitalized. His vice-president, Kirby (Tim Blake Nelson, who according to imdb.com was deliberately made up to look like current-day Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who produced several movies — including the quite good and surprisingly anti-capitalist The Accountant — before joining the Trump administration), invokes the 25th Amendment and starts preparing for an attack on Russia, since the mysterious people who attacked the President faked it to look like Banning was responsible for the attack (they even planted his DNA on the trigger of their rocket launcher — though the writing committee doesn’t even drop a hint as to how they obtained it — while themselves wearing light blue haz-mat suits and dark blue gloves, which led me to joke, “The President is being attacked by the Blue Man Group?”) and Russia paid him $10 million to do it.
This puts Mike Banning in the classic position of an Alfred Hitchcock hero, unjustly accused of a crime and realizing that his only chance of clearing himself is to avoid getting arrested and use his Secret Service skills to track down the real culprits — though the film’s high-octane action sequences (nearly 100 stunt people were credited, as were four effects houses — quite a lot of CGI for a film that doesn’t contain a character with super-powers or any deviation from normal physical reality) mark it as closer to James Bond — and after Angel Has Fallen has already tapped the tropes of a terrorist movie, a Bond movie and a Hitchcock movie, the writing committee suddenly turns it into High Sierra: Banning escapes to the rolling hill country around Pennsylvania and goes to a remote, off-the-grid cabin inhabited by a quirky character who in a 1940’s movie would have been played by Walter Brennan but here is an old, grizzled Nick Nolte (quite a comedown for anyone who liked the young Nick Nolte and thought he was hot!) playing Clay Banning, Mike Banning’s long-lost father (though if he’s so long-lost how did Mike know where he is?). Apparently Clay Banning fought in the Viet Nam War and came home with the mother of all post-traumatic stress disorders, which led him to bail on his family and force Mike’s mom to raise him as a single parent. Clay helps Mike escape and loans him an old tan Chevrolet pickup (the sinister vans the bad guys drive are Chevy SUV’s and the President’s limousine is a Cadillac — did General Motors pay for product placement on this film?) and when a black-clad team of fighters corner them at the cabin Mike kills all of them and chisels on the wall against which he leans their bodies, “We Work for Salient.”
It turns out that Salient is a private military contractor headed by Wade Jennings (Danny Huston, continuing in the tradition of his dad John Huston, who played a similar all-powerful psycho in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown) and they were hired to kill the President. At first we hear the voice of the person who hired Jennings’ firm only on the end of a phone line and through a voice distorter, but about an hour into this two-hour movie we learn [spoiler alert! — though it’s really not that much a surprise: I guessed it well before the big reveal] that the mastermind of the plot and the man who’s paying Jennings’ company to pull it off is Vice-President Kirby. Apparently he decided to kill Turnbull so he could assume the presidency and start a U.S. war against Russia using private contractors — before he became comatose Turnbull had decided to pull the U.S. back from its military presence in the world and end the U.S. military’s use of private contractors altogether — and Kirby cut a deal with Jennings so Salient would kill the President and Kirby would attack the Russians with Salient’s forces rather than the U.S. military. In the dumbest plot hole of a movie that’s full of them, Mike Banning goes to an ordinary pay phone and places a call to his wife Leah (former “Queen of the Indies” Piper Perabo, replacing Radha Mitchell, who played her in the first two films, though they’re the same character) and their daughter Lynne (Jessica and Maisie Cobley — the casting directors used the common dodge of casting identical twins as a pre-pubescent character to avoid working either child longer than the maximum hours allowable under state law) — and the Secret Service and FBI easily trace his location. A real Secret Service agent being chased wouldn’t make such an elementary mistake, and I was surprised the writers didn’t have Mike make the call from a cell phone and “spoof” the call to make it seem like he was in a different location from his real one. Instead they have Mike Banning and his dad show up at home just in time to rescue his wife and daughter from a couple of Salient goons trying to kidnap them.
Meanwhile, FBI Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith, blessedly getting a rare chance to act without her husband and son in tow) and her partner Ramirez (Joseph Millson) figure out the plot, assume Mike’s innocence and launch an investigation of Salient — only to get killed by Salient’s security people when they go to the company’s compound. (It’s an intriguing action-movie variant on the Lifetime trope of the heroine’s African-American best friend who figures out the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can tell anybody what she’s found.) Eventually President Turnbull comes to and exonerates Mike Banning, and having left the dead bodies of two FBI agents behind at his compound Jennings decides to move his entire operation offshore, only first he wants to kill the President to salvage as much as he can of his conspiracy, and to do that he stages an attack on the hospital where the President is being kept — Jennings’ men slaughter a whole lot of innocent people (nobody on imdb.com has tried to do a “body count” for this film because I suspect it would be impossible for anybody, including the writers, to keep track) and blow up half the hospital in a scene I suspect was inspired by the real Oklahoma City bombing, though ultimately the President is rescued after Mike barricades him in a hospital office, and Mike and Jennings have a duel to the death on top of the part of the hospital that’s still standing that ends with Mike stabbing Jennings to death. Angel Has Fallen is a pretty good action movie if you can ignore all the plot holes — though the close-ups of Gerard Butler’s wounded face get oppressive after a while and his boredom with the role is pretty evident (he’s said this will be his last one in the series, though as with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine I suspect he’ll change his mind if someone waves a check at him with enough zeroes at the end) — though I lament the failure of the writers and director Waugh to do more with the angst of the manhunter turned manhunted!
Monday, December 2, 2019
Frozen (Walt Disney Enterprises, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I dined on Thanksgiving leftovers and watched a DVD I had just picked up at Vons: the 2013 Walt Disney Enterprises mega-hit Frozen, which got reissued because the sequel, Frozen II, just hit theatres. The current Disney formula for these big computer-animated films seems to be to pick a remote and fairly exotic part of the world around which to build traditional stories of young people on quests — they’ve done Polynesia in Moana and Mexico in Coco and this time, as the title suggests, they did Scandinavia. The inspiration for the film came from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” but it got filtered through lead writer Jennifer Lee (who also co-directed with Chris Buck — Buck also gets a co-writer credit for the story with Lee and Shane Morris, though Lee is credited alone with the actual screenplay) into a tale of sisters Elsa (Eva Bella) and Anna (Livvy Stubenrauch). They’re the two daughters of a king and queen who rule a castle in the northern but still reasonably temperate country of Arundel — it has a major port city and trading ships routinely sail in and out of there in the summer — but Elsa is a sorceress with magical powers while Anna is just a normal girl. The two are playing — Anna is constantly imploring Elsa to come outside and build a snowman with her, and Elsa keeps begging off — when Elsa inadvertently unleashes her magical powers and knocks Anna unconscious with them. Their parents decree that Elsa will never be allowed to use her powers again, and she must always wear blue gloves that neutralize them. Then three years pass and the king and queen disappear from the story — presumably they both died, since the story resumes on the eve of Elsa’s coronation as the new queen. She’s rescued by a knight in shining armor from a remote monks’ community who rides in on a boat drawn by a swan that’s really Elsa’s brother in disguise — oops, wrong Elsa. Elsa (now voiced by Idina Menzel) is about to be crowned queen of Arundel when her sister Anna (now Kristen Bell) upsets her by saying she’s just met a prince from the southland named Hans (Santino Fontana) and wants permission to marry him. Elsa, making the rather sensible objection that Anna has just met the guy and knows nothing about him — not even his last name — refuses, and she gets so mad that she shows off her sorcery powers (she had to take off the protective gloves to receive the orb symbolizing her power as queen — Charles joked that they were doing a coronation ceremony without a crown; instead they just stuck something that looked like a Christmas-tree ornament on top of the gold headband she was already wearing).
Driven from the Arundelian court by a group of people shocked to find that their new queen is a sorceress, Elsa flees to the mountains and, while singing the film’s big hit song “Let It Go” (sung powerfully by Menzel here and even more powerfully by her on the 2014 Academy Awards telecast — needless to say, it won Best Song — there’s also a version by Demi Lovato over the end credits but even Lovato, whom I normally like as one of the better baby-divas around today, was totally outsung by Menzel), she uses her powers to freeze virtually everything in her path, condemning Arundel to perpetual winter and freezing the port so Arundel is cut off from all its sources of trade. Hans, whom Anna appointed as regent to rule Arundel while she chases off after her sister, distributes blankets to the people and does what he can to help them stay alive through the perpetual winter, pissing off Arundel’s 1-percenters who lament that if they’re forced to give stuff away they’ll have nothing to sell when the harbor opens up again. The film has been rather slow going through all this exposition, but when Elsa flees and leaves a trail of icicles behind her — all set to a song that sounds like a coming-out number along the lines of Jerry Herman’s “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” — and Anna follows her into the wilderness, the movie gets a lot more interesting. Along the way Anna picks up the obligatory helpers, including guide Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), who isn’t as hunky as Hans but is far more lovable (and it’s no surprise that Anna has transferred her affections to him by the fade-out) and his reindeer — there’s even a spoof of animation conventions when Kristoff drops his vocal register during some of his songs and makes it seem like the reindeer is singing. (Of course, this is an animated film — and a Disney one, at that — so there’s no reason they couldn’t have had the reindeer really talk and sing.) There’s also a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) who’s to this film what the comic-relief “droids” are to the Star Wars movies, who is apparently the creation of Elsa from back when they were kids, who’s grateful to Kristoff for giving him a carrot for a nose. Eventually they track down Elsa’s palace — there’s a nice scene in which Anna tries to climb up the mountain it’s on and gets only a few feet up before Olaf points out that just around the corner there’s a frozen staircase and they can just walk up.
Olaf hangs out in front of a fireplace and enjoys the sensation of heat without realizing that will be ultimately fatal to him (I couldn’t help but joke, “Olaf, step back from that fire! Does the name ‘Frosty’ mean anything to you?”), and he even sings a bizarre ode to the joys of summer. Finally Anna and Elsa embrace, her sister’s love frees Elsa’s doubtful mind and melts her cold, cold heart (apologies to Hank Williams) as well as the frost she’s put all around Arundel (ya remember Arundel?), and the two sisters send Hans (ya remember Hans?) packing as he tries to kiss Anna and they realize he’s just another male creep — think Harvey Weinstein in a hotter bod — and Elsa, Anna and all the Arundelians presumably live happily ever after, while Kristoff gets not only Anna but the concession to be Arundel’s official ice seller (a business he’s been in since he was a kid but which was killed after Elsa “froze” the country). If Mutiny in Outer Space was the sort of frustrating bad movie that seems to have a good movie struggling in it trying to get out, Frozen is the sort of good movie that just misses greatness because it all seems too familiar. The writers take us down all too well-worn roads and don’t seize the opportunity the plot gave them to create truly conflicted, multidimensional characters. Instead the aspects of the characters just clash: Elsa seems like she’s burdened by her special powers but also seems liberated by them — Charles compared her to the X-Men — even though her “liberation” also casts her country into seemingly endless darkness and cold. And what are we supposed to make of Hans, who in the opening reels seems like Prince Charming but has to show an asshole side so Anna will virtuously dump him for Kristoff, who’s nice-looking enough but has all the glamour and romantic appeal of the boy from Scooby-Doo.
I liked Frozen well enough to overcome my usual distaste for the overall look of computer animation — those stiff, blocky figures have neither the flexibility of real people nor the imaginative quality of drawn animation — and the banality of the songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (“Let It Go” is a great power ballad in the modern style, but the other songs sound so dated one could imagine them in a Walt Disney movie made during Walt Disney’s lifetime). It’s a fun “watch” but frankly I was more entertained by the oddball post-credits sequence, which featured an early (1929) Walt Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon called Get a Horse! (in which a heavy-set Bluto type kidnaps Minnie Mouse and drives away with her, leaving Mickey and Goofy behind to figure out how to give chase and rescue her) remixed by a crew led by Pixar founder (and #MeToo witchhunt victim) John Lasseter into a crazy fantasy in which Mickey, Minnie and some of the other characters bounce back and forth between black-and-white and color, and between Disney’s original screen and ours, in a quite delightful way. The DVD also featured videos of “Let It Go” sung in English, Spanish, Italian and a mystery language by various singers — indeed the disc begins with a screen that makes it easy to select what language you want to see the film in, since with animation it’s not that difficult to dub a movie since the character’s lip movements aren’t going to be that exact anyway. Frozen is a film of quality that deserved its mega-success (and “Let It Go” is a great song!); it’s just that while you’re watching it you’ll have the feeling that you’ve seen it all before, and it’s hard to imagine without having seen Frozen II just how they got a sequel out of it while still doing justice to people’s memories of the original film.
Last night Charles and I dined on Thanksgiving leftovers and watched a DVD I had just picked up at Vons: the 2013 Walt Disney Enterprises mega-hit Frozen, which got reissued because the sequel, Frozen II, just hit theatres. The current Disney formula for these big computer-animated films seems to be to pick a remote and fairly exotic part of the world around which to build traditional stories of young people on quests — they’ve done Polynesia in Moana and Mexico in Coco and this time, as the title suggests, they did Scandinavia. The inspiration for the film came from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” but it got filtered through lead writer Jennifer Lee (who also co-directed with Chris Buck — Buck also gets a co-writer credit for the story with Lee and Shane Morris, though Lee is credited alone with the actual screenplay) into a tale of sisters Elsa (Eva Bella) and Anna (Livvy Stubenrauch). They’re the two daughters of a king and queen who rule a castle in the northern but still reasonably temperate country of Arundel — it has a major port city and trading ships routinely sail in and out of there in the summer — but Elsa is a sorceress with magical powers while Anna is just a normal girl. The two are playing — Anna is constantly imploring Elsa to come outside and build a snowman with her, and Elsa keeps begging off — when Elsa inadvertently unleashes her magical powers and knocks Anna unconscious with them. Their parents decree that Elsa will never be allowed to use her powers again, and she must always wear blue gloves that neutralize them. Then three years pass and the king and queen disappear from the story — presumably they both died, since the story resumes on the eve of Elsa’s coronation as the new queen. She’s rescued by a knight in shining armor from a remote monks’ community who rides in on a boat drawn by a swan that’s really Elsa’s brother in disguise — oops, wrong Elsa. Elsa (now voiced by Idina Menzel) is about to be crowned queen of Arundel when her sister Anna (now Kristen Bell) upsets her by saying she’s just met a prince from the southland named Hans (Santino Fontana) and wants permission to marry him. Elsa, making the rather sensible objection that Anna has just met the guy and knows nothing about him — not even his last name — refuses, and she gets so mad that she shows off her sorcery powers (she had to take off the protective gloves to receive the orb symbolizing her power as queen — Charles joked that they were doing a coronation ceremony without a crown; instead they just stuck something that looked like a Christmas-tree ornament on top of the gold headband she was already wearing).
Driven from the Arundelian court by a group of people shocked to find that their new queen is a sorceress, Elsa flees to the mountains and, while singing the film’s big hit song “Let It Go” (sung powerfully by Menzel here and even more powerfully by her on the 2014 Academy Awards telecast — needless to say, it won Best Song — there’s also a version by Demi Lovato over the end credits but even Lovato, whom I normally like as one of the better baby-divas around today, was totally outsung by Menzel), she uses her powers to freeze virtually everything in her path, condemning Arundel to perpetual winter and freezing the port so Arundel is cut off from all its sources of trade. Hans, whom Anna appointed as regent to rule Arundel while she chases off after her sister, distributes blankets to the people and does what he can to help them stay alive through the perpetual winter, pissing off Arundel’s 1-percenters who lament that if they’re forced to give stuff away they’ll have nothing to sell when the harbor opens up again. The film has been rather slow going through all this exposition, but when Elsa flees and leaves a trail of icicles behind her — all set to a song that sounds like a coming-out number along the lines of Jerry Herman’s “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” — and Anna follows her into the wilderness, the movie gets a lot more interesting. Along the way Anna picks up the obligatory helpers, including guide Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), who isn’t as hunky as Hans but is far more lovable (and it’s no surprise that Anna has transferred her affections to him by the fade-out) and his reindeer — there’s even a spoof of animation conventions when Kristoff drops his vocal register during some of his songs and makes it seem like the reindeer is singing. (Of course, this is an animated film — and a Disney one, at that — so there’s no reason they couldn’t have had the reindeer really talk and sing.) There’s also a snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad) who’s to this film what the comic-relief “droids” are to the Star Wars movies, who is apparently the creation of Elsa from back when they were kids, who’s grateful to Kristoff for giving him a carrot for a nose. Eventually they track down Elsa’s palace — there’s a nice scene in which Anna tries to climb up the mountain it’s on and gets only a few feet up before Olaf points out that just around the corner there’s a frozen staircase and they can just walk up.
Olaf hangs out in front of a fireplace and enjoys the sensation of heat without realizing that will be ultimately fatal to him (I couldn’t help but joke, “Olaf, step back from that fire! Does the name ‘Frosty’ mean anything to you?”), and he even sings a bizarre ode to the joys of summer. Finally Anna and Elsa embrace, her sister’s love frees Elsa’s doubtful mind and melts her cold, cold heart (apologies to Hank Williams) as well as the frost she’s put all around Arundel (ya remember Arundel?), and the two sisters send Hans (ya remember Hans?) packing as he tries to kiss Anna and they realize he’s just another male creep — think Harvey Weinstein in a hotter bod — and Elsa, Anna and all the Arundelians presumably live happily ever after, while Kristoff gets not only Anna but the concession to be Arundel’s official ice seller (a business he’s been in since he was a kid but which was killed after Elsa “froze” the country). If Mutiny in Outer Space was the sort of frustrating bad movie that seems to have a good movie struggling in it trying to get out, Frozen is the sort of good movie that just misses greatness because it all seems too familiar. The writers take us down all too well-worn roads and don’t seize the opportunity the plot gave them to create truly conflicted, multidimensional characters. Instead the aspects of the characters just clash: Elsa seems like she’s burdened by her special powers but also seems liberated by them — Charles compared her to the X-Men — even though her “liberation” also casts her country into seemingly endless darkness and cold. And what are we supposed to make of Hans, who in the opening reels seems like Prince Charming but has to show an asshole side so Anna will virtuously dump him for Kristoff, who’s nice-looking enough but has all the glamour and romantic appeal of the boy from Scooby-Doo.
I liked Frozen well enough to overcome my usual distaste for the overall look of computer animation — those stiff, blocky figures have neither the flexibility of real people nor the imaginative quality of drawn animation — and the banality of the songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez (“Let It Go” is a great power ballad in the modern style, but the other songs sound so dated one could imagine them in a Walt Disney movie made during Walt Disney’s lifetime). It’s a fun “watch” but frankly I was more entertained by the oddball post-credits sequence, which featured an early (1929) Walt Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon called Get a Horse! (in which a heavy-set Bluto type kidnaps Minnie Mouse and drives away with her, leaving Mickey and Goofy behind to figure out how to give chase and rescue her) remixed by a crew led by Pixar founder (and #MeToo witchhunt victim) John Lasseter into a crazy fantasy in which Mickey, Minnie and some of the other characters bounce back and forth between black-and-white and color, and between Disney’s original screen and ours, in a quite delightful way. The DVD also featured videos of “Let It Go” sung in English, Spanish, Italian and a mystery language by various singers — indeed the disc begins with a screen that makes it easy to select what language you want to see the film in, since with animation it’s not that difficult to dub a movie since the character’s lip movements aren’t going to be that exact anyway. Frozen is a film of quality that deserved its mega-success (and “Let It Go” is a great song!); it’s just that while you’re watching it you’ll have the feeling that you’ve seen it all before, and it’s hard to imagine without having seen Frozen II just how they got a sequel out of it while still doing justice to people’s memories of the original film.
Saturday, November 30, 2019
George White’s 1935 Scandals (20th Century-Fox, 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Thanksgiving night my husband Charles and I had enough time alone after our dinner guests leave to watch a couple of movies together, including an oddball musical called George White’s 1935 Scandals. George White was a Broadway producer who, like Earl Carroll, decided to rip off Florenz Ziegfeld’s formula for success by doing a musical revue (Broadway-speak for a show without a plot or storyline) with a one-word title, changing the contents every year and putting the year number at the end of the show. Ziegfeld had the Follies, Carroll the Vanities, and White had the Scandals — a name he chose to let prospective audiences know that his show would feature racier sexual content than his competitors’. In 1934 the Fox Film Corporation hired White to make a movie called George White’s Scandals that, among other things, marked the screen debut of Alice Faye. The film was a big enough hit that they drafted Faye to be in this one, too, along with rather homely-looking leading man James Dunn (who’s playing a juvenile lead in this one even though his usual gig at Fox just then was playing Shirley Temple’s father — indeed, he did that so often quite a few 1930’s moviegoers thought he was Shirley Temple’s real dad!); Eleanor Powell, in her first film aside from a brief bit as “Party Guest/Dancer” in 1930’s Queen High); Ned Sparks; Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards; Arline Judge (who just two years after her — forgive the pun — sensational performance in Monogram’s proto-noir Sensation Hunters got stuck in a nothing role); and Lyda Roberti (the tragically short-lived Eastern European performer whose specialty, like Carmen Miranda’s later, was fracturing the English language; alas, after her marvelous showcase as “Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can Resist” in the 1932 film Million Dollar Legs, her film career had nowhere to go but down).
They also got Jack Yellen, who had co-written with Milton Ager the score for John Murray Anderson’s magnificent King of Jazz (1930), not only to work on the songs as lyricist for Joseph Meyer (indeed, one of the reasons I was interested in this film was because I’m working on a CD compilation of Meyer for my annual songwriters’ tribute), but to write the script as well, apparently attempting to duplicate the transition of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby from songwriters to screenwriters. Meyer apparently wrote only one complete score for a movie, this one, and from the pleasant but rather old-fashioned (even by 1935 standards) songs he supplied it’s easy to see why; Meyer was a great songwriter in the 1920’s and he lived until 1971, but unlike similarly long-lived songwriters like Ieving Berlin and Cole Porter his style didn’t change or grow with the times. George White’s 1935 Scandals is basically a revue, though there is something of a plot: on his way to a vacation in Palm Beach, Florida following the closure of the 1934 Scandals, George White (playing himself and claiming in the credits that the “entire production was conceived and directed by him — though imdb.com lists two “ghost directors,” Harry Lachman and James Tinling, as also working on the film) gets off the train for what’s supposed to be a five-minute stop at a town called Crossway[1] in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. (The name “Oglethorpe County” is a tribute to James Oglethorpe, who founded the first British settlement of Georgia in the 1730’s and set up the colony as an alternative for people in debtors’ prisons in England.) George White sees a poster advertising a local theatre performing a show called “White’s Scandals,” produced and directed by Elmer White (Ned Sparks at his most Ned Sparkiest), who’s also the ticket-taker, the ticket-seller, the MC and, it turns out later, both the mayor and the sheriff of Crossway. George White is particularly upset that they’ve ripped off his name and his concept for a show, especially one whose main attraction is a dog act, so he decides to stay in Crossway, see the faux “Scandals” for himself and essentially copyright-troll it out of existence.
Only he changes his mind rather quickly when he sees the show and in particular the team of Honey Walters (Alice Faye) and Eddie Taylor (James Dunn) doing an act together to a song James has written — or at least he dictated the words and music to Aunt Jane Harper (Emma Dunn, apparently no real-life relation), much the way Irving Berlin couldn’t read or write music and needed a “musical secretary” to transcribe his songs for him. They aren’t exactly the most charismatic musical leads of all time —Faye was still wearing her hair in the platinum-blonde color of Jean Harlow’s which photographed dead white on the relatively slow film used in 1935, and there’s only one song (a late-in-the-film reunion duet between her and James Dunn called “You Belong to Me”) where we hear the world-weary moan that later became Faye’s trademark. As for James Dunn, he’s an avuncular-looking fellow whose main gig at Fox at the time was playing Shirley Temple’s father — which he did so often a lot of 1930’s moviegoers thought he was her father for real. George White’s 1935 Scandals has a plot of sorts — George White plucks Honey Walters and Eddie Taylor out of the knock-off rump Scandals and stars them in the 1935 edition of the real Scandals; they’re an immediate sensation but he worries that the “Broadway mud” will attract them and stick to them. The Broadway mud duly arrives in the persons of Larry Daniels (Walter Johnson) and Marilyn Collins (Eleanor Powell in her first major role — she gets to do one solo dance in a stunning black sequined pantsuit, but other than that she’s just another “other woman”), who make beelines for Honey and Eddie, respectively. Under the thrall of their new partners, Honey and Eddie start showing up late for the Scandals, their performances fall off, George White chews them out and they respond by turning in their two-weeks’ notices — which White accepts immediately, being so disgusted with them he pays them their severance but firing them from the show. (The marquee for the theatre where the Scandals is playing rather mournfully changes the billing from “Honey Walters and Eddie Taylor” to “All Star Cast.”)
A slimeball agent named Lou Pincus (played as a comic-relief Jewish stereotype by an actor unidentified on the imdb.com cast list) hires Honey and Eddie to perform out of town in Scranton, Pennsylvania for $75 per week — but just then George White receives a telegram from Aunt Jane Hopkins back in Crossway (ya remember Aunt Jane Hopkins? Ya remember Crossway?) saying she’s coming to New York to see the sensationally successful Scandals show featuring her protégées. George White literally mobilizes the New York Police Department to find them — while simultaneously refusing to take the calls of Lou Pincus, the only character in the dramatis personae who actually knows where they are — and he finally catches up to them waiting in Pennsylvania Station (and it isn’t even quarter to four!) for the train to their gig in Scranton. They’re dragged back to the Scandals, they’re a huge success all over again, and for good measure they tell George White they got married that morning and therefore there won’t be any more nonsense involving other partners. George White himself (who takes an opening credit reading, “Entire Production Conceived and Directed By … ” and also a separate credit as dance director) and the “suits” at Fox seemed to have wanted the film to be a close replica of what it was like to watch the stage version of the Scandals — the opening production number is one of those ants-on-a-wedding cake things shit with an immovable camera from a safe distance, which led Charles to reference The Cocoanuts and suggest they really should have called this George White’s 1929 Scandals. The big numbers throughout the film are mostly pretty static — compare the treatment of the song “According to the Moonlight” with Busby Berkeley’s similar but far more cinematic staging of “Shadow Waltz” in Gold Diggers of 1933 (the one with the neon violins) — and when we finally get one overhead shot of a chorus line I burst out, “Finally!”
Though White and his co-directors weren’t as fiercely opposed to the Berkeley style as Mitchell Leisen was when he partnered with Earl Carroll for Paramount’s fascinating 1934 production Murder at the Vanities — Leisen decreed that the Berkeley numbers were ridiculous because they were supposedly being performed on a stage but really couldn’t be done in any conceivable live theatre, so the numbers in his movie would be shot from a safe distance (about that between the stage and an orchestra seat in a Broadway house) and he wouldn’t do moving-camera shots, overhead shots, dancers in kaleidoscope formations or any of the other items in Berkeley’s armanetarium. White seems to have been less doctrinaire about it — he even lifted the Scandals’ curtain design, with paintings of three Asian-looking women on triangular sections that part to reveal the stage, from the “Chinese” number in John Murray Anderson’s stunning masterpiece King of Jazz — but George White’s 1935 Scandals could have been a lot more fun had the big numbers been staged more imaginatively. The film also suffers from the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink mentality of White and a lot of the other revue producers: the opening scene of the performance in Crossway includes a dog act (a quite extended one with several dogs, which starts to pale after a while) and an on-stage dance contest with athletic and fun-looking dancers performing in old vaudeville styles that were already considered dated in 1935. Indeed, one of the most entertaining parts of the film is a dream sequence in which Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, either loaned out or paroled from MGM, fantasizes being the lover of some of the great “bad women” of history, Cleopatra and Du Barry, as well as playing Romeo in the balcony scene. (Iromically, Edwards had previously been in another movie, Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene was parodied, though he wasn’t involved in it. The scene in Hollywood Revue of 1929 is in two-strip Technicolor and features John Gilbert and Norma Shearer, first playing the scene “straight” and then in a 1920’s slang version.)
Most of Joseph Meyer’s songs are serviceable without being great; there’s a reason why nothing from this musical has become part of the standard songbook, and there was only one Meyer song in the film I’d ever heard before: “The Hunkadola.” I’d known this piece mainly because it was Benny Goodman’s first recording for RCA Victor when he jumped there from Columbia in 1935; though he was only at Victor for four years, those four years (1935 to 1939) were the years in which he established himself and became a star. “Hunkadola” — Goodman’s record eliminated the article but the song clearly refers to “The Hunkadola” — was apparently Fox’s and White’s attempt to start a dance craze based on the ones launched by the first two Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies: “The Carioca” from Flying Down to Rio and “The Continental” from The Gay Divorcée. (Those songs are referred to here as “The Tapioca” and “The Accidental,” and oddly Herb Magidson, who wrote the lyrics for the real “Continental,” is credited here with “additional lyrics” on top of the credited songwriters, Meyer for music and Lemon for words.) The problem with “The Hunkadola” is that the dance instructions in the song are so complicated and difficult it’s well nigh impossible to figure out from the lyrics just how the dance is done — and parts of the ensemble dance are so bizarre and potentially injurious to the female participants I found myself wondering whether some of the shots were done with dummies, especially one scene in which two male choristers literally swing a woman back forth while a third uses her as a jump rope. It’s one of those oddball movies that occasionally dips its toe into the pool of cinema but mostly feels stage-bound — as if White’s main interest in making it seems to have been more to show the rubes and hicks in rural America (of which there was far more then than there is now!) what a George White’s Scandals looked like than to make a truly cinematic musical!
Last Thanksgiving night my husband Charles and I had enough time alone after our dinner guests leave to watch a couple of movies together, including an oddball musical called George White’s 1935 Scandals. George White was a Broadway producer who, like Earl Carroll, decided to rip off Florenz Ziegfeld’s formula for success by doing a musical revue (Broadway-speak for a show without a plot or storyline) with a one-word title, changing the contents every year and putting the year number at the end of the show. Ziegfeld had the Follies, Carroll the Vanities, and White had the Scandals — a name he chose to let prospective audiences know that his show would feature racier sexual content than his competitors’. In 1934 the Fox Film Corporation hired White to make a movie called George White’s Scandals that, among other things, marked the screen debut of Alice Faye. The film was a big enough hit that they drafted Faye to be in this one, too, along with rather homely-looking leading man James Dunn (who’s playing a juvenile lead in this one even though his usual gig at Fox just then was playing Shirley Temple’s father — indeed, he did that so often quite a few 1930’s moviegoers thought he was Shirley Temple’s real dad!); Eleanor Powell, in her first film aside from a brief bit as “Party Guest/Dancer” in 1930’s Queen High); Ned Sparks; Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards; Arline Judge (who just two years after her — forgive the pun — sensational performance in Monogram’s proto-noir Sensation Hunters got stuck in a nothing role); and Lyda Roberti (the tragically short-lived Eastern European performer whose specialty, like Carmen Miranda’s later, was fracturing the English language; alas, after her marvelous showcase as “Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can Resist” in the 1932 film Million Dollar Legs, her film career had nowhere to go but down).
They also got Jack Yellen, who had co-written with Milton Ager the score for John Murray Anderson’s magnificent King of Jazz (1930), not only to work on the songs as lyricist for Joseph Meyer (indeed, one of the reasons I was interested in this film was because I’m working on a CD compilation of Meyer for my annual songwriters’ tribute), but to write the script as well, apparently attempting to duplicate the transition of Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby from songwriters to screenwriters. Meyer apparently wrote only one complete score for a movie, this one, and from the pleasant but rather old-fashioned (even by 1935 standards) songs he supplied it’s easy to see why; Meyer was a great songwriter in the 1920’s and he lived until 1971, but unlike similarly long-lived songwriters like Ieving Berlin and Cole Porter his style didn’t change or grow with the times. George White’s 1935 Scandals is basically a revue, though there is something of a plot: on his way to a vacation in Palm Beach, Florida following the closure of the 1934 Scandals, George White (playing himself and claiming in the credits that the “entire production was conceived and directed by him — though imdb.com lists two “ghost directors,” Harry Lachman and James Tinling, as also working on the film) gets off the train for what’s supposed to be a five-minute stop at a town called Crossway[1] in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. (The name “Oglethorpe County” is a tribute to James Oglethorpe, who founded the first British settlement of Georgia in the 1730’s and set up the colony as an alternative for people in debtors’ prisons in England.) George White sees a poster advertising a local theatre performing a show called “White’s Scandals,” produced and directed by Elmer White (Ned Sparks at his most Ned Sparkiest), who’s also the ticket-taker, the ticket-seller, the MC and, it turns out later, both the mayor and the sheriff of Crossway. George White is particularly upset that they’ve ripped off his name and his concept for a show, especially one whose main attraction is a dog act, so he decides to stay in Crossway, see the faux “Scandals” for himself and essentially copyright-troll it out of existence.
Only he changes his mind rather quickly when he sees the show and in particular the team of Honey Walters (Alice Faye) and Eddie Taylor (James Dunn) doing an act together to a song James has written — or at least he dictated the words and music to Aunt Jane Harper (Emma Dunn, apparently no real-life relation), much the way Irving Berlin couldn’t read or write music and needed a “musical secretary” to transcribe his songs for him. They aren’t exactly the most charismatic musical leads of all time —Faye was still wearing her hair in the platinum-blonde color of Jean Harlow’s which photographed dead white on the relatively slow film used in 1935, and there’s only one song (a late-in-the-film reunion duet between her and James Dunn called “You Belong to Me”) where we hear the world-weary moan that later became Faye’s trademark. As for James Dunn, he’s an avuncular-looking fellow whose main gig at Fox at the time was playing Shirley Temple’s father — which he did so often a lot of 1930’s moviegoers thought he was her father for real. George White’s 1935 Scandals has a plot of sorts — George White plucks Honey Walters and Eddie Taylor out of the knock-off rump Scandals and stars them in the 1935 edition of the real Scandals; they’re an immediate sensation but he worries that the “Broadway mud” will attract them and stick to them. The Broadway mud duly arrives in the persons of Larry Daniels (Walter Johnson) and Marilyn Collins (Eleanor Powell in her first major role — she gets to do one solo dance in a stunning black sequined pantsuit, but other than that she’s just another “other woman”), who make beelines for Honey and Eddie, respectively. Under the thrall of their new partners, Honey and Eddie start showing up late for the Scandals, their performances fall off, George White chews them out and they respond by turning in their two-weeks’ notices — which White accepts immediately, being so disgusted with them he pays them their severance but firing them from the show. (The marquee for the theatre where the Scandals is playing rather mournfully changes the billing from “Honey Walters and Eddie Taylor” to “All Star Cast.”)
A slimeball agent named Lou Pincus (played as a comic-relief Jewish stereotype by an actor unidentified on the imdb.com cast list) hires Honey and Eddie to perform out of town in Scranton, Pennsylvania for $75 per week — but just then George White receives a telegram from Aunt Jane Hopkins back in Crossway (ya remember Aunt Jane Hopkins? Ya remember Crossway?) saying she’s coming to New York to see the sensationally successful Scandals show featuring her protégées. George White literally mobilizes the New York Police Department to find them — while simultaneously refusing to take the calls of Lou Pincus, the only character in the dramatis personae who actually knows where they are — and he finally catches up to them waiting in Pennsylvania Station (and it isn’t even quarter to four!) for the train to their gig in Scranton. They’re dragged back to the Scandals, they’re a huge success all over again, and for good measure they tell George White they got married that morning and therefore there won’t be any more nonsense involving other partners. George White himself (who takes an opening credit reading, “Entire Production Conceived and Directed By … ” and also a separate credit as dance director) and the “suits” at Fox seemed to have wanted the film to be a close replica of what it was like to watch the stage version of the Scandals — the opening production number is one of those ants-on-a-wedding cake things shit with an immovable camera from a safe distance, which led Charles to reference The Cocoanuts and suggest they really should have called this George White’s 1929 Scandals. The big numbers throughout the film are mostly pretty static — compare the treatment of the song “According to the Moonlight” with Busby Berkeley’s similar but far more cinematic staging of “Shadow Waltz” in Gold Diggers of 1933 (the one with the neon violins) — and when we finally get one overhead shot of a chorus line I burst out, “Finally!”
Though White and his co-directors weren’t as fiercely opposed to the Berkeley style as Mitchell Leisen was when he partnered with Earl Carroll for Paramount’s fascinating 1934 production Murder at the Vanities — Leisen decreed that the Berkeley numbers were ridiculous because they were supposedly being performed on a stage but really couldn’t be done in any conceivable live theatre, so the numbers in his movie would be shot from a safe distance (about that between the stage and an orchestra seat in a Broadway house) and he wouldn’t do moving-camera shots, overhead shots, dancers in kaleidoscope formations or any of the other items in Berkeley’s armanetarium. White seems to have been less doctrinaire about it — he even lifted the Scandals’ curtain design, with paintings of three Asian-looking women on triangular sections that part to reveal the stage, from the “Chinese” number in John Murray Anderson’s stunning masterpiece King of Jazz — but George White’s 1935 Scandals could have been a lot more fun had the big numbers been staged more imaginatively. The film also suffers from the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink mentality of White and a lot of the other revue producers: the opening scene of the performance in Crossway includes a dog act (a quite extended one with several dogs, which starts to pale after a while) and an on-stage dance contest with athletic and fun-looking dancers performing in old vaudeville styles that were already considered dated in 1935. Indeed, one of the most entertaining parts of the film is a dream sequence in which Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, either loaned out or paroled from MGM, fantasizes being the lover of some of the great “bad women” of history, Cleopatra and Du Barry, as well as playing Romeo in the balcony scene. (Iromically, Edwards had previously been in another movie, Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene was parodied, though he wasn’t involved in it. The scene in Hollywood Revue of 1929 is in two-strip Technicolor and features John Gilbert and Norma Shearer, first playing the scene “straight” and then in a 1920’s slang version.)
Most of Joseph Meyer’s songs are serviceable without being great; there’s a reason why nothing from this musical has become part of the standard songbook, and there was only one Meyer song in the film I’d ever heard before: “The Hunkadola.” I’d known this piece mainly because it was Benny Goodman’s first recording for RCA Victor when he jumped there from Columbia in 1935; though he was only at Victor for four years, those four years (1935 to 1939) were the years in which he established himself and became a star. “Hunkadola” — Goodman’s record eliminated the article but the song clearly refers to “The Hunkadola” — was apparently Fox’s and White’s attempt to start a dance craze based on the ones launched by the first two Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies: “The Carioca” from Flying Down to Rio and “The Continental” from The Gay Divorcée. (Those songs are referred to here as “The Tapioca” and “The Accidental,” and oddly Herb Magidson, who wrote the lyrics for the real “Continental,” is credited here with “additional lyrics” on top of the credited songwriters, Meyer for music and Lemon for words.) The problem with “The Hunkadola” is that the dance instructions in the song are so complicated and difficult it’s well nigh impossible to figure out from the lyrics just how the dance is done — and parts of the ensemble dance are so bizarre and potentially injurious to the female participants I found myself wondering whether some of the shots were done with dummies, especially one scene in which two male choristers literally swing a woman back forth while a third uses her as a jump rope. It’s one of those oddball movies that occasionally dips its toe into the pool of cinema but mostly feels stage-bound — as if White’s main interest in making it seems to have been more to show the rubes and hicks in rural America (of which there was far more then than there is now!) what a George White’s Scandals looked like than to make a truly cinematic musical!
[1] — It’s spelled “Crossways” in a printed insert, but
the actors pronounce it without the final “s.”
Mutiny in Outer Space (Hugo Grimaldi Productions, Woolner Brothers Pictures, 1964)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Thanksgiving night, after George White’s 1935 Scandals, Charles and I watched the 1964 film Mutiny in Outer Space, a considerably less prestigious movie produced under the dubious auspices of the Woolner Brothers (when we caught one of their productions on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 I joked, “At the top of the food chain of studios founded by brothers is Warner Brothers, and at the bottom is Woolner Brothers”) and Hugo Grimaldi Film Productions. The Woolner brothers (Bernard, David and Lawrence, in case you were interested) and Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce (when I went to one of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings in Golden Hill I saw his name on a writing credit and joked: “Ah! Screenplay by Arthur C. … uh, Pierce”) are the five co-credited producers, with Grimaldi directing from a script by himself and Pierce. (Imdb.com claims Pierce also co-directed but is “uncredited” in that capacity, though Pierce and Grimaldi have a joint credit for “Original Story for Screen.”) I was interested in Mutiny in Outer Space because the proprietor of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings (http://sdvsf.org/) had scheduled this for his late September screening, along with Missile to the Moon (the 1958 remake of the dreadful Cat Women on the Moon that was actually superior to the original from 1953, mainly due to the interestingly quirky direction of Richard Cunha and at least a slightly more literate script), but due to health issues was incapacitated for several months. While we had Missile to the Moon on a DVD boxed set with three other sci-fi cheapies, I’d never seen this and I went looking on archive.org for a download. Mutiny in Outer Space turned out essentially to be The Caine Mutiny meets Alien: virtually all the action takes place on Space Station X-7, where an exciting new shipment from the moon containing ice has just arrived and the commanders of Earth’s space program are really excited because if there’s ice on the moon, it can be melted down into water and also broken up into its elemental components of hydrogen and oxygen, which will give people something they can breathe. Then the world can colonize the moon and produce both food and industrial products there — which makes this movie sound like a prequel to Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, in which the moon gets turned into a penal colony á la 19th century Australia until the colonists, with the aid of a sentient computer, rebel and declare their independence. Alas, there’s one itty-bitty problem with that ice from the moon: once it melts, it releases a fungus that’s invariably lethal to humans and grows into snake-like tendrils that basically devour everything in their path.
The first crew member of Space Station X-7 to catch the fungus is Captain Dan Webber (Carl Crow), who’s essentially this film’s antecedent of the Star Trek “red shirts” whose only plot function was to get killed early on so we’d know what danger the rest of the crew — including the name stars — were in. He gets a huge red sore (at least we presume that it’s red, since this film is in black-and-white — you think a Woolner Brothers production budget in 1964 could afford color?) that opens a hole in his leg, but fortunately Grimaldi cuts away from his leg just when it’s starting to look really yucky and we’re only told that Webber has expired. Also, the commanding officer of Space Station X-7, Col. Frank Cromwell (Richard Garland) has caught a bad case of “space rapture” (analogous to the “rapture of the deep” suffered by terrestrial divers who get so carried away by the splendors of the underwater realm that they do dumb things like stay down too long for their oxygen supply or ascend too fast and get “the bends”) and it’s made him surly, quick to anger, paranoid and willing to give stupid and counterproductive orders, like allowing spaceships to continue to dock on Space Station X-7 even despite the risk that they will carry the fungus back to Earth and it will decimate billions. The other protagonists are the station’s other top officers, including second-in-command Major Gordon Towers (William Leslie, top-billed); ship’s botanist Faith Montaine (Dolores Faith), who first notices the effects of the fungus when the three months’ food supply she’s synthesized on board gets reduced mysteriously to just a few days’ worth; Lt. Connie Engstrom (Pamela Curran); and Sgt. Andrews (Harold Lloyd, Jr., son of the legendary comedian and, according to his biography on imdb.com, “a submissive homosexual who would come home battered after a rough date”; his career abruptly ended when he suffered a stroke at age 34 from which he never fully recovered, and he died at age 40 in 1971 just a few months after the passing of his famous dad). along with the station’s resident medic, Dr. Hoffman (James Dobson), who first diagnoses the fungus, realizes how dangerous it is and orders the room in which Webber died from it sealed off so it doesn’t spread. (Incidentally one Josef von Stroheim is credited with “sound effects,” so Harold Lloyd, Jr. wasn’t the only person associated with this movie who had a far more famous dad.) Mutiny in Outer Space is that frustrating sort of bad movie with a good movie trapped inside it struggling to get out; the idea of an outer-space Captain Queeg isn’t inherently uninteresting, and though Richard Garland is hardly in Humphrey Bogart’s class as an actor he’s still the most authoritative player in this film.
The problems with this movie include an incredibly cheap-looking production — the model showing the space station’s exterior is reasonably convincing but the interiors looked like they were furnished from a thrift store and the little animated cut-out rocket that lands on the station (or tries to) is so inept it’s risible. Yes, the Woolner Brothers only had $90,000 to work with, but it’s still embarrassing that a movie with so cheap and unconvincing a depiction of a spacecraft came out just two years after the original Star Trek TV series, with its far better thought-out and depicted ships, stations and planets, came out (and Star Trek was in color, which in the 1960’s made the special effects considerably more difficult!). It also doesn’t help that the costumes are so obviously designed to appeal to horny straight teenage boys, which Hollywood considered then (and still considers now) the core audience for science fiction; the male officers and crew are dressed in nondescript grey tunics that look like something a mortuary staff would wear, but the women are dressed in skin-tight jump suits with push-up bras and plenty of emphasis on their curves. (Dolores Faith is also afflicted with the least believable plucked eyebrows and drawn-in replacements I’ve ever seen in a film.) There are also the usual scientific inconsistencies, including one howler Charles spotted before I did: we’re told that the fungus grows in warm environments and exposure to cold will either kill it or render it harmless (which is why no one noticed it encased in lunar ice until the ice melted), but in the film’s most obvious attempt at a shock scene the fungus’s tendrils have somehow managed to exit the space station and surround it without getting killed by the cold of outside space. All in all, Mutiny in Outer Space is the best film I’ve seen from its rather dubious sources — the Woolner Brothers, Hugo Grimaldi (and Gino, whom I presume is his brother, who’s credited as “assistant to producers”) and Arthur C. … uh, Pierce — which isn’t saying much for it, but one wishes this basic story premise could have attracted a better director and writer as well as a more authoritative cast and a decent budget for sets and effects.
On Thanksgiving night, after George White’s 1935 Scandals, Charles and I watched the 1964 film Mutiny in Outer Space, a considerably less prestigious movie produced under the dubious auspices of the Woolner Brothers (when we caught one of their productions on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 I joked, “At the top of the food chain of studios founded by brothers is Warner Brothers, and at the bottom is Woolner Brothers”) and Hugo Grimaldi Film Productions. The Woolner brothers (Bernard, David and Lawrence, in case you were interested) and Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce (when I went to one of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings in Golden Hill I saw his name on a writing credit and joked: “Ah! Screenplay by Arthur C. … uh, Pierce”) are the five co-credited producers, with Grimaldi directing from a script by himself and Pierce. (Imdb.com claims Pierce also co-directed but is “uncredited” in that capacity, though Pierce and Grimaldi have a joint credit for “Original Story for Screen.”) I was interested in Mutiny in Outer Space because the proprietor of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings (http://sdvsf.org/) had scheduled this for his late September screening, along with Missile to the Moon (the 1958 remake of the dreadful Cat Women on the Moon that was actually superior to the original from 1953, mainly due to the interestingly quirky direction of Richard Cunha and at least a slightly more literate script), but due to health issues was incapacitated for several months. While we had Missile to the Moon on a DVD boxed set with three other sci-fi cheapies, I’d never seen this and I went looking on archive.org for a download. Mutiny in Outer Space turned out essentially to be The Caine Mutiny meets Alien: virtually all the action takes place on Space Station X-7, where an exciting new shipment from the moon containing ice has just arrived and the commanders of Earth’s space program are really excited because if there’s ice on the moon, it can be melted down into water and also broken up into its elemental components of hydrogen and oxygen, which will give people something they can breathe. Then the world can colonize the moon and produce both food and industrial products there — which makes this movie sound like a prequel to Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, in which the moon gets turned into a penal colony á la 19th century Australia until the colonists, with the aid of a sentient computer, rebel and declare their independence. Alas, there’s one itty-bitty problem with that ice from the moon: once it melts, it releases a fungus that’s invariably lethal to humans and grows into snake-like tendrils that basically devour everything in their path.
The first crew member of Space Station X-7 to catch the fungus is Captain Dan Webber (Carl Crow), who’s essentially this film’s antecedent of the Star Trek “red shirts” whose only plot function was to get killed early on so we’d know what danger the rest of the crew — including the name stars — were in. He gets a huge red sore (at least we presume that it’s red, since this film is in black-and-white — you think a Woolner Brothers production budget in 1964 could afford color?) that opens a hole in his leg, but fortunately Grimaldi cuts away from his leg just when it’s starting to look really yucky and we’re only told that Webber has expired. Also, the commanding officer of Space Station X-7, Col. Frank Cromwell (Richard Garland) has caught a bad case of “space rapture” (analogous to the “rapture of the deep” suffered by terrestrial divers who get so carried away by the splendors of the underwater realm that they do dumb things like stay down too long for their oxygen supply or ascend too fast and get “the bends”) and it’s made him surly, quick to anger, paranoid and willing to give stupid and counterproductive orders, like allowing spaceships to continue to dock on Space Station X-7 even despite the risk that they will carry the fungus back to Earth and it will decimate billions. The other protagonists are the station’s other top officers, including second-in-command Major Gordon Towers (William Leslie, top-billed); ship’s botanist Faith Montaine (Dolores Faith), who first notices the effects of the fungus when the three months’ food supply she’s synthesized on board gets reduced mysteriously to just a few days’ worth; Lt. Connie Engstrom (Pamela Curran); and Sgt. Andrews (Harold Lloyd, Jr., son of the legendary comedian and, according to his biography on imdb.com, “a submissive homosexual who would come home battered after a rough date”; his career abruptly ended when he suffered a stroke at age 34 from which he never fully recovered, and he died at age 40 in 1971 just a few months after the passing of his famous dad). along with the station’s resident medic, Dr. Hoffman (James Dobson), who first diagnoses the fungus, realizes how dangerous it is and orders the room in which Webber died from it sealed off so it doesn’t spread. (Incidentally one Josef von Stroheim is credited with “sound effects,” so Harold Lloyd, Jr. wasn’t the only person associated with this movie who had a far more famous dad.) Mutiny in Outer Space is that frustrating sort of bad movie with a good movie trapped inside it struggling to get out; the idea of an outer-space Captain Queeg isn’t inherently uninteresting, and though Richard Garland is hardly in Humphrey Bogart’s class as an actor he’s still the most authoritative player in this film.
The problems with this movie include an incredibly cheap-looking production — the model showing the space station’s exterior is reasonably convincing but the interiors looked like they were furnished from a thrift store and the little animated cut-out rocket that lands on the station (or tries to) is so inept it’s risible. Yes, the Woolner Brothers only had $90,000 to work with, but it’s still embarrassing that a movie with so cheap and unconvincing a depiction of a spacecraft came out just two years after the original Star Trek TV series, with its far better thought-out and depicted ships, stations and planets, came out (and Star Trek was in color, which in the 1960’s made the special effects considerably more difficult!). It also doesn’t help that the costumes are so obviously designed to appeal to horny straight teenage boys, which Hollywood considered then (and still considers now) the core audience for science fiction; the male officers and crew are dressed in nondescript grey tunics that look like something a mortuary staff would wear, but the women are dressed in skin-tight jump suits with push-up bras and plenty of emphasis on their curves. (Dolores Faith is also afflicted with the least believable plucked eyebrows and drawn-in replacements I’ve ever seen in a film.) There are also the usual scientific inconsistencies, including one howler Charles spotted before I did: we’re told that the fungus grows in warm environments and exposure to cold will either kill it or render it harmless (which is why no one noticed it encased in lunar ice until the ice melted), but in the film’s most obvious attempt at a shock scene the fungus’s tendrils have somehow managed to exit the space station and surround it without getting killed by the cold of outside space. All in all, Mutiny in Outer Space is the best film I’ve seen from its rather dubious sources — the Woolner Brothers, Hugo Grimaldi (and Gino, whom I presume is his brother, who’s credited as “assistant to producers”) and Arthur C. … uh, Pierce — which isn’t saying much for it, but one wishes this basic story premise could have attracted a better director and writer as well as a more authoritative cast and a decent budget for sets and effects.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Dolly Parton: Celebrating 50 Years as a Member of the Grand Ole Opry (NBC-TV, “live,” November 26, 2019)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night NBC-TV put on a two-hour music special featuring country legend Dolly Parton celebrating her 50th anniversary as an official member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, which was excellent when Parton herself was on stage but less so when they dredged up a long series of guest artists. I would have preferred it if the guests had sung with Parton instead of just being trotted out either to cover a Parton song or do their own schtick — but Parton’s own voice has held up beautifully and so have her looks. In terms of defying the visible signs of aging she’s the white Tina Turner, and of course she’s had incomparably better luck in the man department (married to the same guy for 53 years). I was a bit put out by her print-the-legend version of the history of women in country music, naming Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” as the first country song in which a woman took an independent, assertive position — what about Rose Maddox? I’ve become quite possessive about Rose Maddox since I discovered her on Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary on the history of country music, but I’ll say it again: there wouldn’t have been Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and on up to today’s women country stars like Miranda Lambert and Kim Perry if Rose Maddox hadn’t blazed the trail for women to sing country music with fierce independence and raw power. Still, I enjoyed the Dolly Parton show overall and especially the gospel number she did towards the end (remember that Parton, like Elvis Presley, started singing in church — it wasn’t just the great Black singers who started in church choirs!).
The show began with Dolly singing “Nine to Five,” one of her great career triumphs not only because it’s a wonderful song but because it came from a brilliant movie and Parton held her own as an actress with the far more experienced Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. When I saw the recent — and horrible — movie Horrible Bosses, I wrote, “Through much of the film I found myself wishing a genuine comic genius could have got hold of this premise — what a movie Preston Sturges could have made around this concept! — until I remembered that in the late 1970’s a genuine comic genius, Colin Higgins, did get hold of this premise and made Nine to Five, a brilliantly funny film that also centered around three main characters (women instead of men) and an asshole boss (only one, whom all the heroines work for) they’d like to see dead, but brought a brilliant, anarchic energy to the concept and also did a lot more social commentary on the whole idea of ‘work,’ of why the people of a country that celebrates ‘rugged individualism’ and democratic freedom in the political and social arena passively accepts the regimentation and dictatorial control of bosses in the workplace. Comparing Horrible Bosses to Nine to Five is a sobering lesson in how much the Zeitgeist has changed in the intervening 31 years, from an era in which movies could at least play at criticizing capitalism to one in which the system is sacrosanct and the people subjected to it realize that they really have no alternative but to knuckle under and hope for the best.”
My little digression into political and social commentary above is a good introduction to one of the most remarkable things about country music in general and Dolly Parton’s oeuvre in particular; even a song like “Coat of Many Colors,” which on the surface is a heartwarming, sentimental tale about the coat from quilt scraps Dolly’s mother made for her and sent her to school in — only to get laughed at by the other children with their store-bought finery — is also a slashing attack on the whole concept of consumerism and the idea a lot of parents have (because the capitalist system in general and the advertising industry in particular) that the more money you spend on your kids the more you “love” them. Alas, after Dolly’s brilliant performance of “Nine to Five,” the next song we got was “Islands in the Stream.” which Dolly recorded as a guest artist on Kenny Rogers’ 1983 album Eyes That See in the Dark — and not surprisingly Dolly’s church-bred country soul totally wipes the floor with Rogers’ pop-crooner blandness. The version we got last night was by Lady Antebellum, with their two lead singers, Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley, taking the parts originally sung by Parton and Rogers, respectively — and once again the woman totally outpointed the man. (That’s one of my problems with Lady Antebellum — Hillary Scott is so much more powerful a singer than Charles Kelley her attempts to sing backup to him sound as imbalanced as the late Janis Joplin’s attempts to sing backups to the far less interesting voices of the men in her first group, Big Brother and the Holding Company. My other problem with them is their name: “ante-bellum,” which literally means “before the war,” is the term unreconstructed Southerners still use to describe the alleged golden age of the great plantations and the happy, contented slaves who worked them: I remember bitterly joking when I heard there was a country group called Lady Antebellum, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”)
Anyway, after one of the endless commercial breaks that inflicted this show (I suspect the total running time would be just about 80 minutes without the commercials) Dolly did one of her earliest hits, “Joshua,” about the unkempt, bearded, legendarily fierce mountain man of her youth, sort of like Mr. Brouckhoff in Meet Me in St. Louis, who she met when she trespassed on his land, he held a gun on her, but eventually she decided he was hot and fell for him. (Dolly hastened to assure us that this is one song of hers that is not autobiographical.) Then as a part of a reminiscence she sang a bit of a singularly beautiful song called “Mirror, Mirror” that could — and should — have had a full rendition. (Much of Dolly’s most powerful singing last night was on these little interstital segments during which she played oddball instruments, including dulcimer and autoharp.) The next song was Dolly’s dulcimer number, “My Tennessee Mountain Sweetheart,” and then Toby Keith came on and did a song called “Kentucky Gambler.” It’s not that great a song — as much as Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” has been ridiculed, it’s a better song on the same theme — but I was too relieved that Keith didn’t trot out one of his Right-wing “patriotic” anthems to mind any deficiencies in what he was singing. Afterwards Dolly did “Coat of Many Colors” — which got to be a trial when Dolly produced a two-hour TV movie dramatizing the story but still remains devastatingly effective as a three-minute song (though the movie made clear that the materials for the coat of many colors were collected by Dolly’s mom for a quilt she had planned to make for Dolly’s unborn brother, only she didn’t use them because he was tragically stillborn). Afterwards Dolly sang one of her earliest records, a George Jones cover called “If You Want to Be My Baby” which she performed, powerfully and beautifully, backed only by her own acoustic guitar.
Then Chris Janson came out for a cover of Dolly’s cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ country classic “Muleskinner Blues,” and he did it well enough even though I was irritated he got the first two lines of the lyric wrong (the correct words are “Good morning, Captain; good morning, shine; Do you need another muleskinner out on your new mule line,” and Dolly got them right but Janson got them wrong), and Dolly came back with a veteran banjo player whose name I can’t make out from my notes — it looks like Buck Tuitt or Tritt — for a song called “The Carroll County Accident,” in which the bodies of a man and a woman are found in the wreckage of a train and it turns out from the way the bodies are positioned and the ring one of them was wearing that they were having an extramarital affair. After a brief tribute to the Carter Family in which Dolly sang a bit of “Wildwood Flower” and played autoharp, Emmylou Harris came out with a cover of a Dolly Parton song, “To Daddy.” I still have a bit of resentment that Emmylou Harris had the career Ronee Blakely (who incandescently played the character based on Loretta Lynn in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville) should have, but she, Dolly and Linda Ronstadt made a beautiful couple of albums together and Harris has kept the flame of the true, beautiful old-time country music alive when so much of the “country” being played today is really what we who were young in the 1970’s called “Southern rock,” the music of the Allman Brothers and Lynryd Skynyrd. Dolly next performed “Here You Come Again,” one of the great crossover hits she had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that had country radio D.J.’s and the mavens of the Nashville establishment wondering, “Is Dolly still country?” — as if that thick twang (thicker when she speaks than when she sings) would allow her to pass for anything else? Afterwards there was a bit of an old film clip of Dolly — her blonde wig more restrained than the ones she wore later (she told an old joke of hers during the program: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”) — singing a surprisingly independent song for the early 1960’s called “Just Because I’m a Woman.”
Then Dierks Bentley covered a Parton song called “Old Flames” — the gist of which is that he can meet all his old flames again and he’ll still stay committed to his current partner because s/he’s better than all of them — for one of the better guest covers of the night (though it still would have worked better if he and Dolly had duetted on it!). Then Dolly did one of her best songs of the night, a tribute to Hank Williams that featured her doing an a cappella version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which she identified as her favorite of Williams’ songs. Almost inevitably this led into a segment featuring Hank Williams, Jr., who’s ballooned to enormous dimensions (would Hank, Sr. have ever looked like this if he’d lived longer? I doubt it!) and who did a medley of “Move It On Over” and “Mind Your Own Business,” which had basically the same melody and were therefore easy to combine. I recall Williams, Jr. demonstrating on the Ken Burns Country Music show that the early rock ’n’ roll classic “Rock Around the Clock” had the same melody as his dad’s “Move It On Over” — which it does, though Williams, Jr. didn’t mention that there’s an earlier source for the melody: the traditional blues song “Your Red Wagon.” (I was also struck that Williams, Jr. and his second guitarist, Bert Walker, were both playing with slides.) After that Dolly blessedly returned with one of her most haunting songs, “Jolene,” which on a recent YouTube comment I counterpointed with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” because Dolly seemed to be saying, “You are woman enough to take my man — but please don’t.”
After that there were a couple of other covers of Parton songs, Candi Carpenter doing “Little Sparrow” and doing it well (though I suspect Dolly herself would have been even better!) and Margo Price doing the beautiful white-gospel song “The Seeker.” Dolly then did one of her tributes to the greats of old and recalled an old-time banjo player who did a song called “Old Applejack,” playing the banjo herself as well as singing. The finale featured Dolly doing what’s become one of her most famous songs — even though she didn’t have the hit on it: “I Will Always Love You.” I had always read she wrote this song for the 1983 musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas until the Ken Burns Country Music documentary said it was actually written much earlier as a sorrowful mixed-emotions parting from Parton’s early mentor, Porter Wagoner, who put her on his country TV show (he patronizingly referred to her as a “girl” and generally treated her in a paternal way that comes off, especially now, as sexist) and built up her career. When she saw that she’d gone as far as she could with Wagoner and she’d have to leave him — they were not a romantic couple, though probably a lot of people back then (including me) had thought they were — in order to pursue the career she had the talent and ambition for, she wrote that bittersweet song about how much she’d always respect her and be grateful for what he did for her, but now she had to leave and make it (or not) on her own. The weird history of “I Will Always Love You” — particularly the way it became a huge hit not for Parton, but for Whitney Houston as the theme song of her film The Bodyguard (usually it’s white artists who take hit songs away from Black ones, but in this case it was the other way around) — can’t help but affect the way we hear it now.
What came over most to me last night was the way comparing the Parton and Houston versions shows my argument that despite the reputation country music has for emotional excess (there’s the old joke, “What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, your job back, your car back, your wife back and you sober up,” to which my husband Charles once added, “Yeah, and your mother and your dog come back to life”), the very greatest country singers — Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton among them — have had the gift of understatement. The best country singers deliver the heartfelt, if sometimes overwrought, sentiments of country songs in ways that play against the melodrama (much the way Billie Holiday took the “torch songs” of the 1920’s, with their melodic leaps designed to allow the singer to sob and cry while staying within the melody, and edited out all those gimmicks, sang them simply and straightforwardly with the direct phrasing she’d learned from Louis Armstrong and Lester Young, and made them far more powerful and moving — indeed I’ve argued that Patsy Cline phrased so much like Billie that she, not any of the white jazz singers who deliberately tried to copy Billie, deserves the title “the white Billie Holiday”). Whitney Houston turned “I Will Always Love You” into a big power ballad, showing off those spectacular chops, but it’s Dolly’s version that seems more true to life, more honest and more moving. The show ended with an outro of “Nine to Five” that I assumed would be just an instrumental featuring the crack band the Grand Ole Opry assembled for Dolly’s tribute, but no-o-o-o-o, she joined in and sang the show out just as the closing credits came up. While I’d have liked to hear fewer solo turns from the guest artists and more songs on which they and Dolly sang duets, otherwise this was a great program with a lot of really fine music — and Dolly herself is not only well preserved (though she made a joke about how many plastic surgeons she’s kept in business) but just as exuberant a performer and a personality as she’s always been.
Last night NBC-TV put on a two-hour music special featuring country legend Dolly Parton celebrating her 50th anniversary as an official member of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, which was excellent when Parton herself was on stage but less so when they dredged up a long series of guest artists. I would have preferred it if the guests had sung with Parton instead of just being trotted out either to cover a Parton song or do their own schtick — but Parton’s own voice has held up beautifully and so have her looks. In terms of defying the visible signs of aging she’s the white Tina Turner, and of course she’s had incomparably better luck in the man department (married to the same guy for 53 years). I was a bit put out by her print-the-legend version of the history of women in country music, naming Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” as the first country song in which a woman took an independent, assertive position — what about Rose Maddox? I’ve become quite possessive about Rose Maddox since I discovered her on Ken Burns’ eight-part documentary on the history of country music, but I’ll say it again: there wouldn’t have been Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and on up to today’s women country stars like Miranda Lambert and Kim Perry if Rose Maddox hadn’t blazed the trail for women to sing country music with fierce independence and raw power. Still, I enjoyed the Dolly Parton show overall and especially the gospel number she did towards the end (remember that Parton, like Elvis Presley, started singing in church — it wasn’t just the great Black singers who started in church choirs!).
The show began with Dolly singing “Nine to Five,” one of her great career triumphs not only because it’s a wonderful song but because it came from a brilliant movie and Parton held her own as an actress with the far more experienced Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. When I saw the recent — and horrible — movie Horrible Bosses, I wrote, “Through much of the film I found myself wishing a genuine comic genius could have got hold of this premise — what a movie Preston Sturges could have made around this concept! — until I remembered that in the late 1970’s a genuine comic genius, Colin Higgins, did get hold of this premise and made Nine to Five, a brilliantly funny film that also centered around three main characters (women instead of men) and an asshole boss (only one, whom all the heroines work for) they’d like to see dead, but brought a brilliant, anarchic energy to the concept and also did a lot more social commentary on the whole idea of ‘work,’ of why the people of a country that celebrates ‘rugged individualism’ and democratic freedom in the political and social arena passively accepts the regimentation and dictatorial control of bosses in the workplace. Comparing Horrible Bosses to Nine to Five is a sobering lesson in how much the Zeitgeist has changed in the intervening 31 years, from an era in which movies could at least play at criticizing capitalism to one in which the system is sacrosanct and the people subjected to it realize that they really have no alternative but to knuckle under and hope for the best.”
My little digression into political and social commentary above is a good introduction to one of the most remarkable things about country music in general and Dolly Parton’s oeuvre in particular; even a song like “Coat of Many Colors,” which on the surface is a heartwarming, sentimental tale about the coat from quilt scraps Dolly’s mother made for her and sent her to school in — only to get laughed at by the other children with their store-bought finery — is also a slashing attack on the whole concept of consumerism and the idea a lot of parents have (because the capitalist system in general and the advertising industry in particular) that the more money you spend on your kids the more you “love” them. Alas, after Dolly’s brilliant performance of “Nine to Five,” the next song we got was “Islands in the Stream.” which Dolly recorded as a guest artist on Kenny Rogers’ 1983 album Eyes That See in the Dark — and not surprisingly Dolly’s church-bred country soul totally wipes the floor with Rogers’ pop-crooner blandness. The version we got last night was by Lady Antebellum, with their two lead singers, Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley, taking the parts originally sung by Parton and Rogers, respectively — and once again the woman totally outpointed the man. (That’s one of my problems with Lady Antebellum — Hillary Scott is so much more powerful a singer than Charles Kelley her attempts to sing backup to him sound as imbalanced as the late Janis Joplin’s attempts to sing backups to the far less interesting voices of the men in her first group, Big Brother and the Holding Company. My other problem with them is their name: “ante-bellum,” which literally means “before the war,” is the term unreconstructed Southerners still use to describe the alleged golden age of the great plantations and the happy, contented slaves who worked them: I remember bitterly joking when I heard there was a country group called Lady Antebellum, “What are they going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”)
Anyway, after one of the endless commercial breaks that inflicted this show (I suspect the total running time would be just about 80 minutes without the commercials) Dolly did one of her earliest hits, “Joshua,” about the unkempt, bearded, legendarily fierce mountain man of her youth, sort of like Mr. Brouckhoff in Meet Me in St. Louis, who she met when she trespassed on his land, he held a gun on her, but eventually she decided he was hot and fell for him. (Dolly hastened to assure us that this is one song of hers that is not autobiographical.) Then as a part of a reminiscence she sang a bit of a singularly beautiful song called “Mirror, Mirror” that could — and should — have had a full rendition. (Much of Dolly’s most powerful singing last night was on these little interstital segments during which she played oddball instruments, including dulcimer and autoharp.) The next song was Dolly’s dulcimer number, “My Tennessee Mountain Sweetheart,” and then Toby Keith came on and did a song called “Kentucky Gambler.” It’s not that great a song — as much as Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” has been ridiculed, it’s a better song on the same theme — but I was too relieved that Keith didn’t trot out one of his Right-wing “patriotic” anthems to mind any deficiencies in what he was singing. Afterwards Dolly did “Coat of Many Colors” — which got to be a trial when Dolly produced a two-hour TV movie dramatizing the story but still remains devastatingly effective as a three-minute song (though the movie made clear that the materials for the coat of many colors were collected by Dolly’s mom for a quilt she had planned to make for Dolly’s unborn brother, only she didn’t use them because he was tragically stillborn). Afterwards Dolly sang one of her earliest records, a George Jones cover called “If You Want to Be My Baby” which she performed, powerfully and beautifully, backed only by her own acoustic guitar.
Then Chris Janson came out for a cover of Dolly’s cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ country classic “Muleskinner Blues,” and he did it well enough even though I was irritated he got the first two lines of the lyric wrong (the correct words are “Good morning, Captain; good morning, shine; Do you need another muleskinner out on your new mule line,” and Dolly got them right but Janson got them wrong), and Dolly came back with a veteran banjo player whose name I can’t make out from my notes — it looks like Buck Tuitt or Tritt — for a song called “The Carroll County Accident,” in which the bodies of a man and a woman are found in the wreckage of a train and it turns out from the way the bodies are positioned and the ring one of them was wearing that they were having an extramarital affair. After a brief tribute to the Carter Family in which Dolly sang a bit of “Wildwood Flower” and played autoharp, Emmylou Harris came out with a cover of a Dolly Parton song, “To Daddy.” I still have a bit of resentment that Emmylou Harris had the career Ronee Blakely (who incandescently played the character based on Loretta Lynn in Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville) should have, but she, Dolly and Linda Ronstadt made a beautiful couple of albums together and Harris has kept the flame of the true, beautiful old-time country music alive when so much of the “country” being played today is really what we who were young in the 1970’s called “Southern rock,” the music of the Allman Brothers and Lynryd Skynyrd. Dolly next performed “Here You Come Again,” one of the great crossover hits she had in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that had country radio D.J.’s and the mavens of the Nashville establishment wondering, “Is Dolly still country?” — as if that thick twang (thicker when she speaks than when she sings) would allow her to pass for anything else? Afterwards there was a bit of an old film clip of Dolly — her blonde wig more restrained than the ones she wore later (she told an old joke of hers during the program: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”) — singing a surprisingly independent song for the early 1960’s called “Just Because I’m a Woman.”
Then Dierks Bentley covered a Parton song called “Old Flames” — the gist of which is that he can meet all his old flames again and he’ll still stay committed to his current partner because s/he’s better than all of them — for one of the better guest covers of the night (though it still would have worked better if he and Dolly had duetted on it!). Then Dolly did one of her best songs of the night, a tribute to Hank Williams that featured her doing an a cappella version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which she identified as her favorite of Williams’ songs. Almost inevitably this led into a segment featuring Hank Williams, Jr., who’s ballooned to enormous dimensions (would Hank, Sr. have ever looked like this if he’d lived longer? I doubt it!) and who did a medley of “Move It On Over” and “Mind Your Own Business,” which had basically the same melody and were therefore easy to combine. I recall Williams, Jr. demonstrating on the Ken Burns Country Music show that the early rock ’n’ roll classic “Rock Around the Clock” had the same melody as his dad’s “Move It On Over” — which it does, though Williams, Jr. didn’t mention that there’s an earlier source for the melody: the traditional blues song “Your Red Wagon.” (I was also struck that Williams, Jr. and his second guitarist, Bert Walker, were both playing with slides.) After that Dolly blessedly returned with one of her most haunting songs, “Jolene,” which on a recent YouTube comment I counterpointed with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man” because Dolly seemed to be saying, “You are woman enough to take my man — but please don’t.”
After that there were a couple of other covers of Parton songs, Candi Carpenter doing “Little Sparrow” and doing it well (though I suspect Dolly herself would have been even better!) and Margo Price doing the beautiful white-gospel song “The Seeker.” Dolly then did one of her tributes to the greats of old and recalled an old-time banjo player who did a song called “Old Applejack,” playing the banjo herself as well as singing. The finale featured Dolly doing what’s become one of her most famous songs — even though she didn’t have the hit on it: “I Will Always Love You.” I had always read she wrote this song for the 1983 musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas until the Ken Burns Country Music documentary said it was actually written much earlier as a sorrowful mixed-emotions parting from Parton’s early mentor, Porter Wagoner, who put her on his country TV show (he patronizingly referred to her as a “girl” and generally treated her in a paternal way that comes off, especially now, as sexist) and built up her career. When she saw that she’d gone as far as she could with Wagoner and she’d have to leave him — they were not a romantic couple, though probably a lot of people back then (including me) had thought they were — in order to pursue the career she had the talent and ambition for, she wrote that bittersweet song about how much she’d always respect her and be grateful for what he did for her, but now she had to leave and make it (or not) on her own. The weird history of “I Will Always Love You” — particularly the way it became a huge hit not for Parton, but for Whitney Houston as the theme song of her film The Bodyguard (usually it’s white artists who take hit songs away from Black ones, but in this case it was the other way around) — can’t help but affect the way we hear it now.
What came over most to me last night was the way comparing the Parton and Houston versions shows my argument that despite the reputation country music has for emotional excess (there’s the old joke, “What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, your job back, your car back, your wife back and you sober up,” to which my husband Charles once added, “Yeah, and your mother and your dog come back to life”), the very greatest country singers — Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton among them — have had the gift of understatement. The best country singers deliver the heartfelt, if sometimes overwrought, sentiments of country songs in ways that play against the melodrama (much the way Billie Holiday took the “torch songs” of the 1920’s, with their melodic leaps designed to allow the singer to sob and cry while staying within the melody, and edited out all those gimmicks, sang them simply and straightforwardly with the direct phrasing she’d learned from Louis Armstrong and Lester Young, and made them far more powerful and moving — indeed I’ve argued that Patsy Cline phrased so much like Billie that she, not any of the white jazz singers who deliberately tried to copy Billie, deserves the title “the white Billie Holiday”). Whitney Houston turned “I Will Always Love You” into a big power ballad, showing off those spectacular chops, but it’s Dolly’s version that seems more true to life, more honest and more moving. The show ended with an outro of “Nine to Five” that I assumed would be just an instrumental featuring the crack band the Grand Ole Opry assembled for Dolly’s tribute, but no-o-o-o-o, she joined in and sang the show out just as the closing credits came up. While I’d have liked to hear fewer solo turns from the guest artists and more songs on which they and Dolly sang duets, otherwise this was a great program with a lot of really fine music — and Dolly herself is not only well preserved (though she made a joke about how many plastic surgeons she’s kept in business) but just as exuberant a performer and a personality as she’s always been.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)