by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, that’s the biggest difference between King Kong and the other two movies on TCM’s stop-motion
animation tribute last night! After King Kong they showed Clash of the Titans (1981), a nonsensical farrago of Greek mythology
that was the last film for effects expert Ray Harryhausen. As a kid Harryhausen
saw King Kong and was enthralled
by the whole idea that animated models could be made not only to move but to
act; like Travis Knight, he decided that he wanted to make that his life’s
work, and by 1949 he got the chance to work on another Cooper-Schoedsack-Rose
film about a giant ape, Mighty Joe Young, as Willis O’Brien’s assistant. (O’Brien gave Harryhausen one of the
original armatures — the metal skeletons on which the animated models are built
— from King Kong and Harryhausen
recycled it for the Cyclops in his 1958 film Jason and the Argonauts.) Clash of the Titans, which for some reason I’d never seen before, is a
mediocre film that would probably have seemed better if it hadn’t been shown right after King Kong; it’s a movie that seems to go wrong in just about
all respects except the effects
work. It begins with the king of an island kingdom off the coast of Greece
declaring, “Bear witness, Zeus, and all you gods on high Olympus! I condemn my
daughter Danaë and her son Perseus to the sea! Her guilt and sin have brought
shame to Argos! I, Acrisius the King, now purge her crime and restore my honor!
Their blood is not on my hands!” There’s just one little problem with
Acrisius’s curse: Zeus (Laurence Olivier, whose presence in this movie
practically defines “overqualified” even though he was very ill during filming
and his role is basically just a handful of close-ups and oracular
pronouncements) isn’t interested in condemning Perseus. Quite the contrary:
since what Acrisius was condemning his daughter Danaë for was having had sex
with Zeus while the god was disguised as a shower of gold coins (elsewhere in
the film writer Beverley Cross, in a rare show of wit, has Thetis, queen of the
sea-nymphs — played by Maggie Smith, about the only one of the British “name”
actors producer Charles H. Schneer recruited who lives up to her reputation —
joke, “So many women, and all these transformations and disguises he invents in
order to seduce them. Sometimes a shower of gold, sometimes a bull or a swan.
Why, once he even tried to ravish me disguised as a cuttlefish”), and Perseus
was the child of this union. So naturally Zeus is going to go out of his way to
protect Perseus — it’s his son! He supplies Perseus (Harry Hamlin) with a
series of magic objects (which Perseus keeps losing), including an all-powerful
sword, a shield with a reflective back (which becomes an important plot point
later), a helmet that can turn him invisible, and a mechanical owl that was obviously the filmmakers’ attempt to come up with something as
cute and appealing to audiences as R2-D2 from the original Star Wars movie in 1977. (The owl is also pretty obviously a
mechanical device, energized either by clockwork or electricity, rather than a
Harryhausen stop-motion model, and when it has to fly it does so on ordinary
wires.)
Like all too many of Harryhausen’s movies, Clash of the
Titans is entertaining only when his
creations are front-and-center: as limp as Hamlin is as a screen hero (he’s a
talented actor but abysmally miscast here) and as dull as his love interest,
Princess Andromeda (Judi Bowker), is (about the only cool thing that happens to
her is she gets taken out of her bedroom in a gilded cage carried by a giant
vulture, one of Harryhausen’s cooler creations), at least Hamlin-as-Perseus, given
a ridiculous page-boy haircut and clad in a half-off tunic that at least lets
us see one of his pecs, gets to
battle a whole host of Harryhausen monsters. Among them are a two-headed dog
that guards the entrance to Hades (apparently he had three heads in the
original story, but producer Schneer told Harryhausen they were already pushing
it on the budget and they couldn’t afford a third head), Medusa (the woman who
had snakes growing out of her head instead of hair; one glimpse of her would
turn a human, or any other life form, into stone; and her blood would be toxic
to humans — this is why Perseus needed a shield with a reflective back, so he
could view her as a mirror reflection, which was safe, and kill her that way),
the three scorpions that grow out of the ground when Medusa’s blood drops on
it, and the final monster, Kraken — a Nordic rather than a Greek myth — a giant
humanoid whom Perseus kills by using the head of Medusa, which he’s severed
from its body and carries with him in a cloth bag, to turn the Kraken into a
stone statue which promptly crumbles). One can realize why Harryhausen, though
still a relatively young 61, decided to get out of the business after Clash
of the Titans; he felt his story concepts
were old-fashioned and no longer appealed to audiences (the mechanical owl is
cute and works as the comic-relief character the filmmakers wanted, but one can
sense Harryhausen’s frustration that his film had to include an R2-D2 clone for
commercial reasons), and whenever Harryhausen’s spectacular creations aren’t front and center Clash of the Titans — inexplicably directed by Desmond Davis, whose most
famous previous credit was a modern-day slapstick comedy called Smashing
Time — is just boring, yet another dull
amble through the typical swords-and-sandals clichés.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
One Million Years B.C. (Hammer Studios, Associated British-Pathé, Seven Arts, 1966)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The third film on last night’s Turner Classic Movies marathon of films featuring stop-motion animation — co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Travis Knight, modern-day stop-motion practitioner and director of last year’s film Kubo and the Two Strings (and son of Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight, which means he never had to struggle as an artist or rent space in a crumbling old firetrap like the victims of the recent fire in Oakland) — was another Ray Harryhausen production, or at least a movie he was involved in: One Million Years B.C., a 1966 Hammer Studios remake of the 1940 film One Million, B.C. that Hal Roach not only produced but also co-directed with his son, Hal Roach, Jr. The 1940 original made a star of Victor Mature in the role of Tumak, one of two sons of the chief of the Rock People, who has a fight with his brother, is driven out of the Rock People’s caves and ends up on the beach with the Shell People, where he’s discovered by and falls in love with Loana (played by Carole Landis in the original and by Raquel Welch in the remake that became her star-making vehicle — for years teenage boys hung huge posters of Welch in her scanty fur cave-girl costume, with as much of her breasts showing as they could get away with during the long, slow death of the Production Code, and you can guess what many of these boys were doing and thinking of as they gazed at Raquel’s huge image). Along the way, in both versions, the cave people encountered living dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures that may have really existed on Earth but not at the same time humans did — though, as I joked to Charles when he arrived home in mid-movie and he pointed that out, a “creation scientist” would believe in this movie! In their book The Golden Turkey Awards, in which they named Mature and Welch among the worst actors of all time, Harry and Michael Medved wrote, “It is no coincidence that Victor Mature and Raquel Welch … started their careers in different versions of this prehistoric saga. Playing a caveman demands a minimum of verbal mastery and dramatic subtlety while affording a maximum opportunity for display of the male or female Body Beautiful in skimpy, cunningly designed fur costumes.”
The “minimum of verbal mastery and dramatic subtlety” was predetermined by a mistake Hal Roach made in the original version and which the makers of this one, Hammer studio head Michael Carreras (who not only personally produced the film but wrote its script as well) and his chosen traffic cop — oops, I mean director — Don Chaffey, all too faithfully followed. Roach had originally offered silent-era veteran D. W. Griffith the job of co-directing One Million, B.C. and Griffith, who in 1940 hadn’t made a film in nine years, eagerly accepted the job in hopes it would be the route to a comeback. Then Roach and Griffith had an argument over how the cave people would express themselves: Griffith wanted them to speak recognizable English, while Roach wanted them to speak gibberish that supposedly represented the cave people’s language. Griffith left the project (sources differ on whether he quit or was fired), but when I watched One Million, B.C. I wrote, “Judging from the final film, Griffith was right: hearing the cave people babble incomprehensibly in a made-up language the filmmakers didn’t bother to subtitle gets annoying pretty quickly.” And if Griffith was right in 1940, he was even more right in 1966 (even though by then he’d been dead for 18 years); John Richardson, who I got the impression was probably a very talented British actor given the right role (or at least one in which he could speak English or any other recognizable human tongue!), had the unenviable task of fitting into Victor Mature’s fur garments as the new Tumak. He tries to look interested in Raquel Welch but goes through the whole role — when he isn’t running, hunting or fighting, which according to this script seem to be the principal aspects of cave-man life (that and committing gang rape — there’s the predictable sexist scene in which Richardson has to save Welch’s virtue from all the horndogs among his fellow Rock tribe, and just to make it sexist in both directions there’s an earlier scene on the beach in which Richardson seems to be in danger of being gang-raped himself by all the Shell girls) he goes through his entire role with a blank expression on his face, as if he’s not all that sure what this boy-girl business is about. (Part of that may be due to the fact that in the establishing scenes before Richardson got thrown out of the Rock People for attacking his brother — and seemingly killing him, though he turns up alive later — there appears to be only one woman in the Rock tribe, and though she’s dark-haired and Raquel Welch, at least in this movie, is blonde, she looks like she could give la Welch considerable competition in the mammary department.)
As with Clash of the Titans — but even more so, given that not only did Clash of the Titans have more intrinsically talented actors, they even got to speak English — One Million Years B.C. is really entertaining only when Ray Harryhausen’s creations take center stage. Though the first scene with a dinosaur in it uses the usual cheap expedient that became fashionable in the 1950’s — filming a living lizard in slow motion on miniature sets and trying to pass it off as a dinosaur (Mankiewicz’s commentary suggested that Harryhausen wanted a realistic opening shot before he brought in the stop-motion, but I suspect this was done just to save money on the budget — and it doesn’t work; despite the slow motion, the live lizard still moves too quickly to have the ponderousness one would expect from a dinosaur) — but the rest of the creatures, including a Brontosaurus, a Pterodactyl (who carries off Raquel Welch in a scene that suggests Harryhausen was deliberately copying the scene in which a Pterodactyl carries off Fay Wray in King Kong and Kong kills the flying dinosaur and rescues her), an Allosaurus and a Triceratops — the last two have a big fight scene that is also quite Kongian, as John Richardson and Raquel Welch watch it from behind trees in a window-like setting to make the process work of combining humans and animated models in the same frame easier), as well as a giant turtle which the Shell People call “Achelon” (the actual scientific name of the animal — though it didn’t co-exist with either dinosaurs or humans the Achelon turtle did exist, but under the constraints of a Hammer budget Harryhausen wasn’t allowed to animate its hind legs, so he had to have it emerge from water and not show its back end at all), are vivid, lifelike, absolutely convincing and the only reason anyone today would want to watch this movie (unless you’re a young straight boy who still thinks Raquel Welch is hot!). Part of me wishes that if TCM were going to do a tribute to Ray Harryhausen, they should have picked his best movies, Jason and the Argonauts (whose story, like that of Clash of the Titans, is a cut-and-paste pastiche of Greek myths, but is a good deal stronger, more coherent and a better match for Harryhausen’s spectacular visuals) and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but there was certainly something to be said for showcasing these two much more rarely seen films — especially One Million Years, B.C., in which Raquel Welch’s posters were far more popular and widely circulated than the actual film!
The third film on last night’s Turner Classic Movies marathon of films featuring stop-motion animation — co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Travis Knight, modern-day stop-motion practitioner and director of last year’s film Kubo and the Two Strings (and son of Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight, which means he never had to struggle as an artist or rent space in a crumbling old firetrap like the victims of the recent fire in Oakland) — was another Ray Harryhausen production, or at least a movie he was involved in: One Million Years B.C., a 1966 Hammer Studios remake of the 1940 film One Million, B.C. that Hal Roach not only produced but also co-directed with his son, Hal Roach, Jr. The 1940 original made a star of Victor Mature in the role of Tumak, one of two sons of the chief of the Rock People, who has a fight with his brother, is driven out of the Rock People’s caves and ends up on the beach with the Shell People, where he’s discovered by and falls in love with Loana (played by Carole Landis in the original and by Raquel Welch in the remake that became her star-making vehicle — for years teenage boys hung huge posters of Welch in her scanty fur cave-girl costume, with as much of her breasts showing as they could get away with during the long, slow death of the Production Code, and you can guess what many of these boys were doing and thinking of as they gazed at Raquel’s huge image). Along the way, in both versions, the cave people encountered living dinosaurs and other monstrous creatures that may have really existed on Earth but not at the same time humans did — though, as I joked to Charles when he arrived home in mid-movie and he pointed that out, a “creation scientist” would believe in this movie! In their book The Golden Turkey Awards, in which they named Mature and Welch among the worst actors of all time, Harry and Michael Medved wrote, “It is no coincidence that Victor Mature and Raquel Welch … started their careers in different versions of this prehistoric saga. Playing a caveman demands a minimum of verbal mastery and dramatic subtlety while affording a maximum opportunity for display of the male or female Body Beautiful in skimpy, cunningly designed fur costumes.”
The “minimum of verbal mastery and dramatic subtlety” was predetermined by a mistake Hal Roach made in the original version and which the makers of this one, Hammer studio head Michael Carreras (who not only personally produced the film but wrote its script as well) and his chosen traffic cop — oops, I mean director — Don Chaffey, all too faithfully followed. Roach had originally offered silent-era veteran D. W. Griffith the job of co-directing One Million, B.C. and Griffith, who in 1940 hadn’t made a film in nine years, eagerly accepted the job in hopes it would be the route to a comeback. Then Roach and Griffith had an argument over how the cave people would express themselves: Griffith wanted them to speak recognizable English, while Roach wanted them to speak gibberish that supposedly represented the cave people’s language. Griffith left the project (sources differ on whether he quit or was fired), but when I watched One Million, B.C. I wrote, “Judging from the final film, Griffith was right: hearing the cave people babble incomprehensibly in a made-up language the filmmakers didn’t bother to subtitle gets annoying pretty quickly.” And if Griffith was right in 1940, he was even more right in 1966 (even though by then he’d been dead for 18 years); John Richardson, who I got the impression was probably a very talented British actor given the right role (or at least one in which he could speak English or any other recognizable human tongue!), had the unenviable task of fitting into Victor Mature’s fur garments as the new Tumak. He tries to look interested in Raquel Welch but goes through the whole role — when he isn’t running, hunting or fighting, which according to this script seem to be the principal aspects of cave-man life (that and committing gang rape — there’s the predictable sexist scene in which Richardson has to save Welch’s virtue from all the horndogs among his fellow Rock tribe, and just to make it sexist in both directions there’s an earlier scene on the beach in which Richardson seems to be in danger of being gang-raped himself by all the Shell girls) he goes through his entire role with a blank expression on his face, as if he’s not all that sure what this boy-girl business is about. (Part of that may be due to the fact that in the establishing scenes before Richardson got thrown out of the Rock People for attacking his brother — and seemingly killing him, though he turns up alive later — there appears to be only one woman in the Rock tribe, and though she’s dark-haired and Raquel Welch, at least in this movie, is blonde, she looks like she could give la Welch considerable competition in the mammary department.)
As with Clash of the Titans — but even more so, given that not only did Clash of the Titans have more intrinsically talented actors, they even got to speak English — One Million Years B.C. is really entertaining only when Ray Harryhausen’s creations take center stage. Though the first scene with a dinosaur in it uses the usual cheap expedient that became fashionable in the 1950’s — filming a living lizard in slow motion on miniature sets and trying to pass it off as a dinosaur (Mankiewicz’s commentary suggested that Harryhausen wanted a realistic opening shot before he brought in the stop-motion, but I suspect this was done just to save money on the budget — and it doesn’t work; despite the slow motion, the live lizard still moves too quickly to have the ponderousness one would expect from a dinosaur) — but the rest of the creatures, including a Brontosaurus, a Pterodactyl (who carries off Raquel Welch in a scene that suggests Harryhausen was deliberately copying the scene in which a Pterodactyl carries off Fay Wray in King Kong and Kong kills the flying dinosaur and rescues her), an Allosaurus and a Triceratops — the last two have a big fight scene that is also quite Kongian, as John Richardson and Raquel Welch watch it from behind trees in a window-like setting to make the process work of combining humans and animated models in the same frame easier), as well as a giant turtle which the Shell People call “Achelon” (the actual scientific name of the animal — though it didn’t co-exist with either dinosaurs or humans the Achelon turtle did exist, but under the constraints of a Hammer budget Harryhausen wasn’t allowed to animate its hind legs, so he had to have it emerge from water and not show its back end at all), are vivid, lifelike, absolutely convincing and the only reason anyone today would want to watch this movie (unless you’re a young straight boy who still thinks Raquel Welch is hot!). Part of me wishes that if TCM were going to do a tribute to Ray Harryhausen, they should have picked his best movies, Jason and the Argonauts (whose story, like that of Clash of the Titans, is a cut-and-paste pastiche of Greek myths, but is a good deal stronger, more coherent and a better match for Harryhausen’s spectacular visuals) and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but there was certainly something to be said for showcasing these two much more rarely seen films — especially One Million Years, B.C., in which Raquel Welch’s posters were far more popular and widely circulated than the actual film!
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Hairspray Live! (Storyline Entertainment, Universal Television, Sony, New Line, NBC-TV, December 7, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show was technically called Hairspray Live! and was an adaptation of the 2002 Broadway musical Hairspray, which in turn was based on John Waters’ marvelous 1988 film about how heavy-set, beehive-haired Tracy Turnblad not only crashed her way onto the dance floor of Corny Collins’ American Bandstand-like rock ’n’ roll TV show but started a civil-rights revolution that broke down the segregation between Blacks and whites in the Baltimore music scene. Though the show was filmed in 2007 (while it was still in the middle of its seven-year run on Broadway; it racked up 2,642 performances from 2002 to 2009 and it’s been revived since) and I’m sure Charles and I have the film somewhere in our DVD backlog, I realized with a start that I’d never actually seen the musical before, though I’ve watched the 1988 film at least twice. (John Gabrish and I watched it on home video in 1989 and later Charles and I saw it together at a San Diego Public Library screening.) I knew instantly from the opening song, “Good Morning, Baltimore,” that I was in for a very different experience from John Waters’ film even though the basic plot was carried over virtually without change — at least until the final sequence — and it was going to be a considerably lighter one in which the fun aspects of the original material would be played up and its political implications (pretty much de trop these days in the age of TrumpAmerica and its return to the pre-civil rights ideas of “Americanism” and white supremacy that were being seriously challenged in 1962, when Hairspray takes place) played down.
That’s pretty much what we got, though the show was still fun and Tracy Turnblad’s (newcomer Maddie Baillio, who does a good job filling Ricki Lake’s ample dance pumps even though she’s not that good a dancer and, as in previous NBC “live” musical productions, the skill and professionalism of the chorus dancers helps to make up for deficiencies in the leads) worm-turning triumph from on-campus loser and bullying victim to Hairspray Queen on Corny Collins’ show, apostle of integration and girlfriend of hot stud rocker Link Larkin (Garrett Clayton) is still moving, especially for someone like me who still remembers how I was treated in school. The big difference between Hairspray the John Waters film and Hairspray the musical (written by Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell, with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) was the sheer relentlessness of the music. This has got to be one of the most music-heavy musicals ever created — the singing-to-talking ratio is so heavily weighted towards singing that the dialogue sequences, and indeed the entire plot, seem to be there just to set up the songs and the big production numbers to them — and rather than the ironic use of music in Waters’ original film (mostly actual records of the period and with a charmingly anachronistic title song by Rachel Sweet in her normal late-1980’s style), the Shaiman-Wittman songs are pastiches of late-1950’s and early-1960’s rock and soul. The songs are entertaining enough and do their jobs, but there’s only one here that even approaches greatness: the gospel-tinged soul song “I Know Where I’ve Been” sung by the Black D.J. Motormouth Maybelle (played in Waters’ original film by 1950’s soul legend Ruth Brown and here by Jennifer Hudson) in the second act, and I’m not sure whether that song stood out because it’s that much better than the rest of the score or because Jennifer Hudson tore into it with the same drama and power with which she’d sung “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” in her Academy Award-winning performance in the film Dreamgirls.
Hairspray Live! was adapted from the Meehan-O’Donnell book by Harvey Fierstein, who was also in the production playing Tracy’s mother Edna (continuing the cross-gender casting tradition of this role established when Waters cast Divine, in her last film before her untimely death, in the original movie; Fierstein was also in the 2002 Broadway production of the musical and was the only original cast member who repeated their role in this production, and though he played the part well enough his gravelly voice has always annoyed me). The plot centers around Tracy Turnblad’s desire to crash Corny Collins’ dance troupe — she says that she goes to high school (where she’s constantly getting assigned detention for no particular reason except the woman principal running the place just doesn’t like her attitude) and watches his show, and does nothing else (though at the end of the program, after she’s won her heart’s desires — Link’s class ring and the Miss Hairspray prize — she announces that she wants to go to college and major in musicology with a minor in ethnic studies). When Corny Collins announces an open audition for dancers, Tracy wants to cut school to apply, and her mom says no but her dad Wilbur (Martin Short, oddly disappointing in a role the late Jerry Stiller, Ben’s dad, played to perfection in the 1988 film), who ekes out a living for the Turnblads running a company that makes and sells whoopee cushions and other “novelty” products, says yes. Despite a lot of cruel jokes about her weight, and her hackle-inducing comment that she wants every day on the show to be “Negro Day” (a once-a-month event during which Motormouth Maybelle hosts and the Black dancers get to be in the foreground instead of being stuck behind a rope — in a lot of venues that weren’t big enough to have separate white and Black sections, a rope was hung across the dance floor to keep white and Black couples separate, and a lot of times the rope came down in mid-dance), she gets on the show.
She also goes to the dark side of town to visit Motormouth Maybelle and her star dancer, Seaweed J. Stubbs (Ephraim Sykes), and Tracy’s best friend Penny Pingleton (played by current music star Ariana Grande, who turned down the producers’ offer to write additional songs for her and insisted on playing the part come scritto, though what the original script gave the character to sing was so nondescript I suspect Grande would have come off better if she had let them write her extra material) falls hard for Seaweed just as Tracy has her heart set on Link. That arouses the ire of Corny Collins’ producer, Velma Von Tussle (Kristin Chenoweth), who is rigging the entire show, including the Miss Hairspray contest (which, it’s established, she won herself during her teen years), for the greater glory of her bitch daughter Amber (Dove Cameron, who previously played Chenoweth’s daughter in a Disney TV-movie called Descendants), who makes a nice villainess and is particularly effective in her song “Cooties,” sung as her entry in the dance contest that climaxes the film (and which takes place in Corny’s studio instead of at an amusement park which Black Baltimoreans sought to integrate — a real-life incident Waters remembered from his childhood and which helped inspire the story in the first place). Amber and her mom figure she has the contest won because Tracy had got herself arrested in a civil-rights demonstration and, though she escaped (absurdly easily, and in a way Messrs. Meehan, O’Donnell and Fierstein never quite explain), the Von Tussles, mère et fille, are convinced she won’t dare show for the final broadcast. At one point the Von Tussles are convinced Tracy is hiding in the huge prop hairspray can that adorns the set of the dance-off finale, but she isn’t — she slips into the studio by the side and does her big number, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” (fulfilling the plot’s conceit that Tracy has been able to overcome her size and become a great dancer by learning spectacular soul moves from her Black friends), following which Motormouth Maybelle emerges from the can (and yes, there’s a scatological joke about that) for a final big song — and as if that weren’t enough, the producers of Hairspray Live! put in a last duet between Jennifer Hudson and Ariana Grande that has no part in the plot but simply serves as a way to showcase two of the bigger names in their cast.
Hairspray Live! was directed by Kenny Leon and Alex Rudzinski, and from Leon’s prior reputation I assume he choreographed and staged the big spectacular dance numbers while Rudzinski directed the plot portions, such as they are. Hairspray Live! was an engaging but somewhat lumbering production — it ran three hours (less commercials, some of which were cleverly integrated into the show the way they often were in the 1950’s before the FCC cracked down on that sort of thing, only to allow it again in today’s age of blind worship of The Market) compared to the 92 minutes of Waters’ original film, and it seemed bloated — and while one felt for all the good-looking young people who were working so hard and giving their best, it’s one of those shows in which the old pros, Kristin Chenoweth and Jennifer Hudson, came out with an air of “step aside, kids, and let us show you how it’s done.” I could have done without the ring of pink smoke that engulfed Chenoweth at the end of her big number, but the folks in charge were obviously inserting this as a reminder of what’s become Chenoweth’s most famous role, as Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, the big musical off-take of the Oz stories (in which the Witch’s name was “Momba,” by the way). Chenoweth has managed to maintain her kewpie-doll appearance and affect even as she’s grown old enough to be the bratty young girl’s mother instead of playing the bratty young girl herself, and though the top of her voice is a bit shrill she’s still one of the few non-operatic singers who knows how to do coloratura. Overall, Hairspray Live was entertaining enough, though a bit too long for its own good, and NBC is planning these things out far enough that there was a promo for the one they plan to do in 2017, Bye Bye Birdie with Jennifer Lopez as Rosie, the role Janet Leigh played in the movie — and it’ll be interesting to see who they get to do the Ann-Margret role and whether she can duplicate Ann-Margret’s orgasmic moan, “Boye-Boye BURT-hee,” in the title song!
The show was technically called Hairspray Live! and was an adaptation of the 2002 Broadway musical Hairspray, which in turn was based on John Waters’ marvelous 1988 film about how heavy-set, beehive-haired Tracy Turnblad not only crashed her way onto the dance floor of Corny Collins’ American Bandstand-like rock ’n’ roll TV show but started a civil-rights revolution that broke down the segregation between Blacks and whites in the Baltimore music scene. Though the show was filmed in 2007 (while it was still in the middle of its seven-year run on Broadway; it racked up 2,642 performances from 2002 to 2009 and it’s been revived since) and I’m sure Charles and I have the film somewhere in our DVD backlog, I realized with a start that I’d never actually seen the musical before, though I’ve watched the 1988 film at least twice. (John Gabrish and I watched it on home video in 1989 and later Charles and I saw it together at a San Diego Public Library screening.) I knew instantly from the opening song, “Good Morning, Baltimore,” that I was in for a very different experience from John Waters’ film even though the basic plot was carried over virtually without change — at least until the final sequence — and it was going to be a considerably lighter one in which the fun aspects of the original material would be played up and its political implications (pretty much de trop these days in the age of TrumpAmerica and its return to the pre-civil rights ideas of “Americanism” and white supremacy that were being seriously challenged in 1962, when Hairspray takes place) played down.
That’s pretty much what we got, though the show was still fun and Tracy Turnblad’s (newcomer Maddie Baillio, who does a good job filling Ricki Lake’s ample dance pumps even though she’s not that good a dancer and, as in previous NBC “live” musical productions, the skill and professionalism of the chorus dancers helps to make up for deficiencies in the leads) worm-turning triumph from on-campus loser and bullying victim to Hairspray Queen on Corny Collins’ show, apostle of integration and girlfriend of hot stud rocker Link Larkin (Garrett Clayton) is still moving, especially for someone like me who still remembers how I was treated in school. The big difference between Hairspray the John Waters film and Hairspray the musical (written by Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell, with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) was the sheer relentlessness of the music. This has got to be one of the most music-heavy musicals ever created — the singing-to-talking ratio is so heavily weighted towards singing that the dialogue sequences, and indeed the entire plot, seem to be there just to set up the songs and the big production numbers to them — and rather than the ironic use of music in Waters’ original film (mostly actual records of the period and with a charmingly anachronistic title song by Rachel Sweet in her normal late-1980’s style), the Shaiman-Wittman songs are pastiches of late-1950’s and early-1960’s rock and soul. The songs are entertaining enough and do their jobs, but there’s only one here that even approaches greatness: the gospel-tinged soul song “I Know Where I’ve Been” sung by the Black D.J. Motormouth Maybelle (played in Waters’ original film by 1950’s soul legend Ruth Brown and here by Jennifer Hudson) in the second act, and I’m not sure whether that song stood out because it’s that much better than the rest of the score or because Jennifer Hudson tore into it with the same drama and power with which she’d sung “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” in her Academy Award-winning performance in the film Dreamgirls.
Hairspray Live! was adapted from the Meehan-O’Donnell book by Harvey Fierstein, who was also in the production playing Tracy’s mother Edna (continuing the cross-gender casting tradition of this role established when Waters cast Divine, in her last film before her untimely death, in the original movie; Fierstein was also in the 2002 Broadway production of the musical and was the only original cast member who repeated their role in this production, and though he played the part well enough his gravelly voice has always annoyed me). The plot centers around Tracy Turnblad’s desire to crash Corny Collins’ dance troupe — she says that she goes to high school (where she’s constantly getting assigned detention for no particular reason except the woman principal running the place just doesn’t like her attitude) and watches his show, and does nothing else (though at the end of the program, after she’s won her heart’s desires — Link’s class ring and the Miss Hairspray prize — she announces that she wants to go to college and major in musicology with a minor in ethnic studies). When Corny Collins announces an open audition for dancers, Tracy wants to cut school to apply, and her mom says no but her dad Wilbur (Martin Short, oddly disappointing in a role the late Jerry Stiller, Ben’s dad, played to perfection in the 1988 film), who ekes out a living for the Turnblads running a company that makes and sells whoopee cushions and other “novelty” products, says yes. Despite a lot of cruel jokes about her weight, and her hackle-inducing comment that she wants every day on the show to be “Negro Day” (a once-a-month event during which Motormouth Maybelle hosts and the Black dancers get to be in the foreground instead of being stuck behind a rope — in a lot of venues that weren’t big enough to have separate white and Black sections, a rope was hung across the dance floor to keep white and Black couples separate, and a lot of times the rope came down in mid-dance), she gets on the show.
She also goes to the dark side of town to visit Motormouth Maybelle and her star dancer, Seaweed J. Stubbs (Ephraim Sykes), and Tracy’s best friend Penny Pingleton (played by current music star Ariana Grande, who turned down the producers’ offer to write additional songs for her and insisted on playing the part come scritto, though what the original script gave the character to sing was so nondescript I suspect Grande would have come off better if she had let them write her extra material) falls hard for Seaweed just as Tracy has her heart set on Link. That arouses the ire of Corny Collins’ producer, Velma Von Tussle (Kristin Chenoweth), who is rigging the entire show, including the Miss Hairspray contest (which, it’s established, she won herself during her teen years), for the greater glory of her bitch daughter Amber (Dove Cameron, who previously played Chenoweth’s daughter in a Disney TV-movie called Descendants), who makes a nice villainess and is particularly effective in her song “Cooties,” sung as her entry in the dance contest that climaxes the film (and which takes place in Corny’s studio instead of at an amusement park which Black Baltimoreans sought to integrate — a real-life incident Waters remembered from his childhood and which helped inspire the story in the first place). Amber and her mom figure she has the contest won because Tracy had got herself arrested in a civil-rights demonstration and, though she escaped (absurdly easily, and in a way Messrs. Meehan, O’Donnell and Fierstein never quite explain), the Von Tussles, mère et fille, are convinced she won’t dare show for the final broadcast. At one point the Von Tussles are convinced Tracy is hiding in the huge prop hairspray can that adorns the set of the dance-off finale, but she isn’t — she slips into the studio by the side and does her big number, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” (fulfilling the plot’s conceit that Tracy has been able to overcome her size and become a great dancer by learning spectacular soul moves from her Black friends), following which Motormouth Maybelle emerges from the can (and yes, there’s a scatological joke about that) for a final big song — and as if that weren’t enough, the producers of Hairspray Live! put in a last duet between Jennifer Hudson and Ariana Grande that has no part in the plot but simply serves as a way to showcase two of the bigger names in their cast.
Hairspray Live! was directed by Kenny Leon and Alex Rudzinski, and from Leon’s prior reputation I assume he choreographed and staged the big spectacular dance numbers while Rudzinski directed the plot portions, such as they are. Hairspray Live! was an engaging but somewhat lumbering production — it ran three hours (less commercials, some of which were cleverly integrated into the show the way they often were in the 1950’s before the FCC cracked down on that sort of thing, only to allow it again in today’s age of blind worship of The Market) compared to the 92 minutes of Waters’ original film, and it seemed bloated — and while one felt for all the good-looking young people who were working so hard and giving their best, it’s one of those shows in which the old pros, Kristin Chenoweth and Jennifer Hudson, came out with an air of “step aside, kids, and let us show you how it’s done.” I could have done without the ring of pink smoke that engulfed Chenoweth at the end of her big number, but the folks in charge were obviously inserting this as a reminder of what’s become Chenoweth’s most famous role, as Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, the big musical off-take of the Oz stories (in which the Witch’s name was “Momba,” by the way). Chenoweth has managed to maintain her kewpie-doll appearance and affect even as she’s grown old enough to be the bratty young girl’s mother instead of playing the bratty young girl herself, and though the top of her voice is a bit shrill she’s still one of the few non-operatic singers who knows how to do coloratura. Overall, Hairspray Live was entertaining enough, though a bit too long for its own good, and NBC is planning these things out far enough that there was a promo for the one they plan to do in 2017, Bye Bye Birdie with Jennifer Lopez as Rosie, the role Janet Leigh played in the movie — and it’ll be interesting to see who they get to do the Ann-Margret role and whether she can duplicate Ann-Margret’s orgasmic moan, “Boye-Boye BURT-hee,” in the title song!
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Scientology and Its Aftermath, part 2: “Fair Game” (A&E, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I switched to Arts & Entertainment for the second episode in actress and former Scientologist Leah Remini’s exposé of the church, this time profiling Mike Rinder, the church’s former enforcer of its “fair game” policy. The “fair game” policy was created by L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, as a part of his elaborate “ethics” scheme in which everybody in the world was ranked according to their usefulness or faithful servitude to Scientology. In 1967 Hubbard sent out a letter headed “Penalties for Lower Conditions” (available online at http://www.xenu.net/fairgame-e.html) which explains that people in the lowest “ethics” condition, “Enemy,” “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Hubbard formally revoked the “fair game” policy a year later but, according to the former Scientologists interviewed in this program, the church still acts on the policy — it just no longer calls it that. Rinder said in the program he got disillusioned with the church when he had to cover up for David Miscavige, current head of Scientology, who took over the church after Hubbard’s death in 1986 and who seems to have established his own personal craziness as part of it (sort of like Stalin after Lenin), including physically attacking Scientologists who displease him in some way. Rinder had been assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), Scientology’s internal discipline regime, and was living in an un-insulated trailer on the grounds of Scientology’s worldwide headquarters in Hemet, California (though they also have a setup in Clearwater, Florida that houses the Sea Org — Scientology’s main governing body, whose name is a relic of the time in the late 1960’s when Hubbard decided to evade the growing scrutiny of the British government of his operations there by relocating to a ship called the Apollo, which except when it needed provisions would be kept in international waters and therefore no government would have jurisdiction over it) when he was assigned to stop a documentary critical of Scientology being filmed by a British journalist named John Sweeney.
He gave an interview to Sweeney in which he said the accusations that Miscavige physically attacked people were “ridiculous,” but the task of defending a psycho against a journalist who was on to the truth about him was too much for Rinder. He describes his walkout in dramatic terms — he just walked out of the Scientology building, bought a ticket on the London Underground and turned up at the doorstep of one of his few non-Scientologist friends and asked for help — but the real tragedy was he left his entire family, including a dying mother as well as his wife and their three kids, behind in the church — and naturally the church used them as weapons to try, not necessarily to get him back, but at least to shut up. He relocated to Clearwater, remarried, had a son with his new wife (lucky kid; at least he’ll be spared the horrors of growing up in Scientology), got a job with a car dealership — and got regularly picketed by Scientologists carrying signs accusing him of being a drug addict, a child molester, and everything else they could think of. Rinder also discovered that the Church of Scientology had literally bugged his home through a camera concealed in a birdhouse that was photographing his property 24/7, and he found that under Florida law, unless the picketers actually came on his property, they weren’t breaking the law and there was nothing he could do about them. What’s fascinating about this show is that the conditioned response of the Church of Scientology to any criticism, from defectors, journalists or anyone else, is to unleash a nasty barrage of attacks — sort of like Donald Trump (they should feel right at home in TrumpAmerica!) — as salon.com writer Melanie McFarland wrote about this show (http://www.salon.com/2016/11/30/aes-leah-remini-scientology-and-the-aftermath-your-antidote-to-seasonal-belief-disorder/), “Including excerpts of these letters in the telecast is the network’s way of covering its backside from a legal perspective, a stipulation probably required by the church. Doing so also has precisely the opposite effect of what the Church of Scientology intended, in that they further solidify any outrage a person might feel at hearing allegations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse recounted in Remini’s series. … Knowing that Remini’s series has so vociferously riled up the church has to have goosed the curiosity of the A&E audience far more than if it had done the minimal disavowal and left it at that. Which (insert uninhibited, maniacal laugh track here) would never happen.”
I switched to Arts & Entertainment for the second episode in actress and former Scientologist Leah Remini’s exposé of the church, this time profiling Mike Rinder, the church’s former enforcer of its “fair game” policy. The “fair game” policy was created by L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, as a part of his elaborate “ethics” scheme in which everybody in the world was ranked according to their usefulness or faithful servitude to Scientology. In 1967 Hubbard sent out a letter headed “Penalties for Lower Conditions” (available online at http://www.xenu.net/fairgame-e.html) which explains that people in the lowest “ethics” condition, “Enemy,” “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” Hubbard formally revoked the “fair game” policy a year later but, according to the former Scientologists interviewed in this program, the church still acts on the policy — it just no longer calls it that. Rinder said in the program he got disillusioned with the church when he had to cover up for David Miscavige, current head of Scientology, who took over the church after Hubbard’s death in 1986 and who seems to have established his own personal craziness as part of it (sort of like Stalin after Lenin), including physically attacking Scientologists who displease him in some way. Rinder had been assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), Scientology’s internal discipline regime, and was living in an un-insulated trailer on the grounds of Scientology’s worldwide headquarters in Hemet, California (though they also have a setup in Clearwater, Florida that houses the Sea Org — Scientology’s main governing body, whose name is a relic of the time in the late 1960’s when Hubbard decided to evade the growing scrutiny of the British government of his operations there by relocating to a ship called the Apollo, which except when it needed provisions would be kept in international waters and therefore no government would have jurisdiction over it) when he was assigned to stop a documentary critical of Scientology being filmed by a British journalist named John Sweeney.
He gave an interview to Sweeney in which he said the accusations that Miscavige physically attacked people were “ridiculous,” but the task of defending a psycho against a journalist who was on to the truth about him was too much for Rinder. He describes his walkout in dramatic terms — he just walked out of the Scientology building, bought a ticket on the London Underground and turned up at the doorstep of one of his few non-Scientologist friends and asked for help — but the real tragedy was he left his entire family, including a dying mother as well as his wife and their three kids, behind in the church — and naturally the church used them as weapons to try, not necessarily to get him back, but at least to shut up. He relocated to Clearwater, remarried, had a son with his new wife (lucky kid; at least he’ll be spared the horrors of growing up in Scientology), got a job with a car dealership — and got regularly picketed by Scientologists carrying signs accusing him of being a drug addict, a child molester, and everything else they could think of. Rinder also discovered that the Church of Scientology had literally bugged his home through a camera concealed in a birdhouse that was photographing his property 24/7, and he found that under Florida law, unless the picketers actually came on his property, they weren’t breaking the law and there was nothing he could do about them. What’s fascinating about this show is that the conditioned response of the Church of Scientology to any criticism, from defectors, journalists or anyone else, is to unleash a nasty barrage of attacks — sort of like Donald Trump (they should feel right at home in TrumpAmerica!) — as salon.com writer Melanie McFarland wrote about this show (http://www.salon.com/2016/11/30/aes-leah-remini-scientology-and-the-aftermath-your-antidote-to-seasonal-belief-disorder/), “Including excerpts of these letters in the telecast is the network’s way of covering its backside from a legal perspective, a stipulation probably required by the church. Doing so also has precisely the opposite effect of what the Church of Scientology intended, in that they further solidify any outrage a person might feel at hearing allegations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse recounted in Remini’s series. … Knowing that Remini’s series has so vociferously riled up the church has to have goosed the curiosity of the A&E audience far more than if it had done the minimal disavowal and left it at that. Which (insert uninhibited, maniacal laugh track here) would never happen.”
Sunday, December 4, 2016
The Boss (Gary Sanchez Productions, On the Day, Universal, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Three nights ago Charles and I watched a surprisingly good recent movie, The Boss, the latest vehicle for the Saturday Night Live alumna Melissa McCarthy (as I’ve noted in these pages before, an apprenticeship on Saturday Night Live seems as de rigueur for aspiring comedians these days as a shot on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson once did). I’m generally not a fan of modern comedies — while dramatic films have benefited from the breakdown of the Production Code (but also suffered from it in that literalness and explicitness too often take the place of imagination) and action films have improved with the advent of CGI (even though a lot of the comic-book movies have action scenes that look digitally created and I sometimes find myself missing the craftspersonship of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen with their stop-motion animated models), there’s generally no contest between the comedies of yore — the vehicles for Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd in the silent era and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields and Abbott and Costello (whom I wouldn’t have put in the pantheon but I’m getting to respect more and more as Charles and I work our way through the boxed set of their complete movies for Universal, which include 28 of their total of 36) — and the comedies of today. Still, there’ve been exceptions — Stranger than Fiction, Little Miss Sunshine and the amazing, unexpected Kabluey — and though The Boss isn’t quite in that league, it’s considerably better than the common run of comedies today. The Blu-Ray disc we got it on offered you the choice of the 99-minute theatrical release (rated R “for sexual content, language and brief drug use”) or a 104-minute unrated version, and I went for the unrated version and I’m pretty sure I know which scene they had to delete to get an “R” rating instead of the “NC-17” kiss of death (one in which McCarthy is shown spraying artificial tanning solution on her private parts).
The basic plot casts McCarthy (in a film directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, with both of them and Steve Mallory as screenwriters and the daughter of Falcone and McCarthy, Vivian Falcone, playing McCarthy’s character as a 10-year-old whose foster parents return her to the Roman Catholic orphanage from which they got her because she was too much of a bitch for them to handle) as Michelle Darnell, a Chicago-based female finance diva who’s a sort of combination of Martha Stewart and Suze Orman. She’s shown at the beginning of the movie delivering a live presentation of her financial secrets, flown in on a model phoenix (the phoenix, the legendary bird symbolizing rebirth, is her personal talisman) in a scene that reminded Charles of Fricka’s entrance in Die Walküre in a chariot pulled by rams, and reminded me of Liberace’s entrance on his final tour, in which he was flown in, Peter Pan-style, wearing a preposterous feathered costume that made him look like a giant angel. She then proceeds to deliver a lecture containing the usual “success” bromides, after which she returns to her office building and demands that her long-suffering assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) and her long-suffering chauffeur Tito (Cedric Yarborough) make sure she doesn’t have to wait for the elevator. If you’ve seen more than three movies in your life you’re going to be certain the spoiled diva is being set up for a major comeuppance, and said comeuppance quickly arrives when rival financier Renault (Peter Dinklage, Hollywood’s current go-to actor when they need a male little person, and especially when they need a male little person villain) reports her to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for insider trading. Unlike Martha Stewart, who in real life was able to take over her business empire as soon as she was released following a brief “Club Fed” imprisonment on a similar charge, Darnell finds herself wiped out financially since the SEC not only got her convicted but seized all her assets and left her destitute. With nowhere else to go, she turns up on the doorstep of her former assistant Claire, who has a nine-year-old daughter named Rachel (Ella Anderson) and has a shit job for a woman broker with all of Michelle’s unscrupulousness and bitchiness and none of her charm. Michelle moves herself into Claire’s apartment and even ends up in Claire’s bed after the folding couch she was supposed to sleep on buckles itself closed when she’s in it and throws her across the room (a gag as old as Chaplin, but still funny).
Naturally Michelle is looking for a way back into the financial heights, and she discovers it when she’s dragooned into accompanying Claire and Rachel to a meeting of Rachel’s Dandelion troop (or “troup,” as it’s misspelled on their banner). Helen (Annie Mumolo), the adult leader of this Dandelion troop, takes an instant dislike to Michelle and says it’s inappropriate for a convicted felon to be at a troop meeting — the fact that Michelle’s crime had nothing to do with kids doesn’t seem to faze her one bit — and though there’s a sad-faced troop leader named Sandy (Kristen Schall, who proves they didn’t break the mold after they made ZaSu Pitts), Helen and her “giantess” daughter are clearly running the place. Driven out in humiliation, Michelle decides to strike back. She’s got a secret weapon: a killer brownie recipe Claire makes for Rachel. Michelle thinks that she can put the Dandelions’ (read: the Girl Scouts’) cookie drive out of business in Chicago by having Claire make up packages of her brownies, which she renames “Darnell’s Delights,” and organizing the girls who are fed up with the Dandelions and want to make some money for themselves (Michelle has pledged that her salesgirls will make a commission on their sales which will go to help them save up for college) into a rival sales force. There’s a great scene which seems to be a sort of nonviolent (or less violent) version of the rumble from West Side Story in which Michelle and the Delights girls confront Helen and the Dandelions and win — and an even more fun alternate version of this sequence available as a bonus item on the Blu-Ray disc in which Michelle confronts a bunch of guys headed by a big, hunky guy named Chad (played, according to imdb.com, by professional wrestler Dave Bautista — proving that these guys would actually be sexy if they weren’t costumed for their wrestling performances as if they were auditioning for Kiss), whom Michelle wallops in the nuts and then, as he’s cowering on the ground, asks for his phone number.
To expand Darnell’s Delights into a nationwide business Michelle seeks venture capital from her old mentor Ida Marquette (Kathy Bates, almost unrecognizable in a shrieking platinum wig), who helped her get her start in business and worked with Michelle until Michelle screwed her out of a deal. Michelle uses the money to take over a commercial kitchen in which Claire can bake the brownies, only just as the bigger operation is getting underway she spies Claire talking to her old nemesis Renault, and thinking Claire is about to sell her out to Renault, Michelle beats her to the punch and sells the operation to Renault herself. Then, in a sequence that probably had the ghost of Frank Capra smiling down from heaven and saying, “Folks, you learned my lessons well,” Michelle has a crisis of conscience and determines to get the company back from Renault by organizing herself, Claire and Claire’s boyfriend Mike Beals (Tyler Labine) — a nice bear-like schlub from Claire’s brokerage house whom Michelle encouraged Claire to date because she felt it was about time Claire started having sex again — to burglarize Renault’s building (“played,” ironically enough, by the Chicago Trump Tower with Renault’s name digitally replacing Trump’s) and steal back the one copy of the sales contract. Of course, Michelle and Claire end up with the company back, Claire gets Mike and Michelle gets Renault — she’s willing to forgive him everything because he’s so good in bed — and we get a comedy that seems, despite the “sexual content, language and brief drug use” that got the movie an “R” rating (the “brief drug use” occurs during a flashback showing Renault and Michelle as lovers before they became bitter enemies both in business and personally), surprisingly old-fashioned.
No one pukes or farts in this movie — which itself sets it above most movie “comedies” being made today — and aside from the Capra-esque finish one could readily imagine this movie having been made in the early 1940’s, with Preston Sturges directing, Barbara Stanwyck as Michelle, Joan Leslie as Claire and Claire’s single-parenthood explained by having her husband get killed in combat in World War II. (Stanwyck actually did play a Martha Stewart-type character in the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, but the gag in that one is that she was a columnist presented as a super-housewife but she really didn’t know the first thing about cooking or any of the other domestic arts — she got the recipes from a restaurateur friend of hers played by S. Z. Sakall and faked all the rest of it.) Surprisingly, one of the bonus items on the Blu-Ray disc is a tape of the original improv sketch in which Melissa McCarthy created the character of Melinda Darnell — and it’s surprisingly lame, which is a testament to the skill of her and her husband Falcone in developing a character who was just an avaricious bitch into one who had enough complexities she could sustain an entire 100-minute movie. The Boss isn’t a great film, and aside from a few McCarthy pratfalls it rarely had me laughing out loud, but I was amused throughout and some of the gags (notably one in which as part of the burglary team Mike is dressed as a phoenix, and the security guard turns out to be a Satanist who energetically engages Mike in a conversation about devils and thereby is distracted enough to let Melinda and Claire get by his station) are weird, audacious and beautiful. (There’s also a gag about which of the three principals — Michelle, Claire or Mike — is going to give the other security guard a blow job that’s just dumb and, as Charles pointed out, more typical of the Gay gags that got into movies a decade ago than what we expect in 2016.)
Three nights ago Charles and I watched a surprisingly good recent movie, The Boss, the latest vehicle for the Saturday Night Live alumna Melissa McCarthy (as I’ve noted in these pages before, an apprenticeship on Saturday Night Live seems as de rigueur for aspiring comedians these days as a shot on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson once did). I’m generally not a fan of modern comedies — while dramatic films have benefited from the breakdown of the Production Code (but also suffered from it in that literalness and explicitness too often take the place of imagination) and action films have improved with the advent of CGI (even though a lot of the comic-book movies have action scenes that look digitally created and I sometimes find myself missing the craftspersonship of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen with their stop-motion animated models), there’s generally no contest between the comedies of yore — the vehicles for Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd in the silent era and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields and Abbott and Costello (whom I wouldn’t have put in the pantheon but I’m getting to respect more and more as Charles and I work our way through the boxed set of their complete movies for Universal, which include 28 of their total of 36) — and the comedies of today. Still, there’ve been exceptions — Stranger than Fiction, Little Miss Sunshine and the amazing, unexpected Kabluey — and though The Boss isn’t quite in that league, it’s considerably better than the common run of comedies today. The Blu-Ray disc we got it on offered you the choice of the 99-minute theatrical release (rated R “for sexual content, language and brief drug use”) or a 104-minute unrated version, and I went for the unrated version and I’m pretty sure I know which scene they had to delete to get an “R” rating instead of the “NC-17” kiss of death (one in which McCarthy is shown spraying artificial tanning solution on her private parts).
The basic plot casts McCarthy (in a film directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, with both of them and Steve Mallory as screenwriters and the daughter of Falcone and McCarthy, Vivian Falcone, playing McCarthy’s character as a 10-year-old whose foster parents return her to the Roman Catholic orphanage from which they got her because she was too much of a bitch for them to handle) as Michelle Darnell, a Chicago-based female finance diva who’s a sort of combination of Martha Stewart and Suze Orman. She’s shown at the beginning of the movie delivering a live presentation of her financial secrets, flown in on a model phoenix (the phoenix, the legendary bird symbolizing rebirth, is her personal talisman) in a scene that reminded Charles of Fricka’s entrance in Die Walküre in a chariot pulled by rams, and reminded me of Liberace’s entrance on his final tour, in which he was flown in, Peter Pan-style, wearing a preposterous feathered costume that made him look like a giant angel. She then proceeds to deliver a lecture containing the usual “success” bromides, after which she returns to her office building and demands that her long-suffering assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) and her long-suffering chauffeur Tito (Cedric Yarborough) make sure she doesn’t have to wait for the elevator. If you’ve seen more than three movies in your life you’re going to be certain the spoiled diva is being set up for a major comeuppance, and said comeuppance quickly arrives when rival financier Renault (Peter Dinklage, Hollywood’s current go-to actor when they need a male little person, and especially when they need a male little person villain) reports her to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for insider trading. Unlike Martha Stewart, who in real life was able to take over her business empire as soon as she was released following a brief “Club Fed” imprisonment on a similar charge, Darnell finds herself wiped out financially since the SEC not only got her convicted but seized all her assets and left her destitute. With nowhere else to go, she turns up on the doorstep of her former assistant Claire, who has a nine-year-old daughter named Rachel (Ella Anderson) and has a shit job for a woman broker with all of Michelle’s unscrupulousness and bitchiness and none of her charm. Michelle moves herself into Claire’s apartment and even ends up in Claire’s bed after the folding couch she was supposed to sleep on buckles itself closed when she’s in it and throws her across the room (a gag as old as Chaplin, but still funny).
Naturally Michelle is looking for a way back into the financial heights, and she discovers it when she’s dragooned into accompanying Claire and Rachel to a meeting of Rachel’s Dandelion troop (or “troup,” as it’s misspelled on their banner). Helen (Annie Mumolo), the adult leader of this Dandelion troop, takes an instant dislike to Michelle and says it’s inappropriate for a convicted felon to be at a troop meeting — the fact that Michelle’s crime had nothing to do with kids doesn’t seem to faze her one bit — and though there’s a sad-faced troop leader named Sandy (Kristen Schall, who proves they didn’t break the mold after they made ZaSu Pitts), Helen and her “giantess” daughter are clearly running the place. Driven out in humiliation, Michelle decides to strike back. She’s got a secret weapon: a killer brownie recipe Claire makes for Rachel. Michelle thinks that she can put the Dandelions’ (read: the Girl Scouts’) cookie drive out of business in Chicago by having Claire make up packages of her brownies, which she renames “Darnell’s Delights,” and organizing the girls who are fed up with the Dandelions and want to make some money for themselves (Michelle has pledged that her salesgirls will make a commission on their sales which will go to help them save up for college) into a rival sales force. There’s a great scene which seems to be a sort of nonviolent (or less violent) version of the rumble from West Side Story in which Michelle and the Delights girls confront Helen and the Dandelions and win — and an even more fun alternate version of this sequence available as a bonus item on the Blu-Ray disc in which Michelle confronts a bunch of guys headed by a big, hunky guy named Chad (played, according to imdb.com, by professional wrestler Dave Bautista — proving that these guys would actually be sexy if they weren’t costumed for their wrestling performances as if they were auditioning for Kiss), whom Michelle wallops in the nuts and then, as he’s cowering on the ground, asks for his phone number.
To expand Darnell’s Delights into a nationwide business Michelle seeks venture capital from her old mentor Ida Marquette (Kathy Bates, almost unrecognizable in a shrieking platinum wig), who helped her get her start in business and worked with Michelle until Michelle screwed her out of a deal. Michelle uses the money to take over a commercial kitchen in which Claire can bake the brownies, only just as the bigger operation is getting underway she spies Claire talking to her old nemesis Renault, and thinking Claire is about to sell her out to Renault, Michelle beats her to the punch and sells the operation to Renault herself. Then, in a sequence that probably had the ghost of Frank Capra smiling down from heaven and saying, “Folks, you learned my lessons well,” Michelle has a crisis of conscience and determines to get the company back from Renault by organizing herself, Claire and Claire’s boyfriend Mike Beals (Tyler Labine) — a nice bear-like schlub from Claire’s brokerage house whom Michelle encouraged Claire to date because she felt it was about time Claire started having sex again — to burglarize Renault’s building (“played,” ironically enough, by the Chicago Trump Tower with Renault’s name digitally replacing Trump’s) and steal back the one copy of the sales contract. Of course, Michelle and Claire end up with the company back, Claire gets Mike and Michelle gets Renault — she’s willing to forgive him everything because he’s so good in bed — and we get a comedy that seems, despite the “sexual content, language and brief drug use” that got the movie an “R” rating (the “brief drug use” occurs during a flashback showing Renault and Michelle as lovers before they became bitter enemies both in business and personally), surprisingly old-fashioned.
No one pukes or farts in this movie — which itself sets it above most movie “comedies” being made today — and aside from the Capra-esque finish one could readily imagine this movie having been made in the early 1940’s, with Preston Sturges directing, Barbara Stanwyck as Michelle, Joan Leslie as Claire and Claire’s single-parenthood explained by having her husband get killed in combat in World War II. (Stanwyck actually did play a Martha Stewart-type character in the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, but the gag in that one is that she was a columnist presented as a super-housewife but she really didn’t know the first thing about cooking or any of the other domestic arts — she got the recipes from a restaurateur friend of hers played by S. Z. Sakall and faked all the rest of it.) Surprisingly, one of the bonus items on the Blu-Ray disc is a tape of the original improv sketch in which Melissa McCarthy created the character of Melinda Darnell — and it’s surprisingly lame, which is a testament to the skill of her and her husband Falcone in developing a character who was just an avaricious bitch into one who had enough complexities she could sustain an entire 100-minute movie. The Boss isn’t a great film, and aside from a few McCarthy pratfalls it rarely had me laughing out loud, but I was amused throughout and some of the gags (notably one in which as part of the burglary team Mike is dressed as a phoenix, and the security guard turns out to be a Satanist who energetically engages Mike in a conversation about devils and thereby is distracted enough to let Melinda and Claire get by his station) are weird, audacious and beautiful. (There’s also a gag about which of the three principals — Michelle, Claire or Mike — is going to give the other security guard a blow job that’s just dumb and, as Charles pointed out, more typical of the Gay gags that got into movies a decade ago than what we expect in 2016.)
It’s a Wonderful Life (Liberty/RKO, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to watch last night’s NBC-TV presentation of Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. I hadn’t seen it in years but when I first caught it on a local TV station in 1972 I was blown away by its outfront sentimentality and its ineffably moving parable of an ordinary man whose compulsive pursuit of the welfare of others robs him of all his own ambitions, until at the end a life crisis forces him into an awareness of himself and how much good he’d done for other people staying just where he is. It’s a Wonderful Life actually began as a story by writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who wrote it as a booklet called The Greatest Gift and had copies printed privately so he could send them out to his friends as his Christmas card for 1943. RKO bought the movie rights and put a number of writers on it, including Clifford Odets, Dalton Trumbo, Marc Connelly, and Dorothy Parker (whose sensibility seems miles away from the film that actually got made), but RKO head Charles Koerner (the one who had fired Orson Welles after he took over from George Schaefer in 1942 and announced that from then on RKO’s movies would be based on “Showmanship Instead of Genius) didn’t like any of the scripts that crossed his desk and put the project aside. Then in 1945, Frank Capra, William Wyler and George Stevens, all just back from having directed for the U.S. war effort during World War II (Stevens was the leader of the first camera crew to enter the concentration camps, and it so deeply moved him as a human being it wrecked him as a filmmaker; unwilling to do the kinds of quiet romantic comedies that had been his best pre-war work, he insisted that every movie he worked on must project High Seriousness, and made a series of films that got gloppier, more sentimental and less entertaining with each go: A Place in the Sun, Shane, Giant, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told), organized an independent production company called Liberty Films. The logo for the company was an uncracked mockup of the Liberty Bell that Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin had used as the logo for their first independent production, Meet John Doe (1941), and looking for a partner among the major studios they hit on RKO. RKO had already had distribution deals with Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney that were making them lots of money, and they eagerly grabbed the right to co-finance and distribute Liberty’s product — only when Capra arrived on the RKO lot he had no idea what he wanted to make.
Koerner tipped him to The Greatest Gift, figuring (rightly) that a man driven to the end of his wits who’s given a chance to see what the world would have been like if he’d never been born was right up Capra’s alley. He agreed to sell the story to Liberty for the price he’d initially paid Van Doren Stern for the Christmas card, and threw in the rejected scripts for free. (Odets later said he hated the film that got made, and the only idea of his that got used was to have the hero, George Bailey, as a child notice that the druggist Mr. Gower has inadvertently filled a prescription with poison out of grief over the death of his son in the 1919 influenza epidemic.) Capra went into production and decided that the lead character, George Bailey (called “George Pratt” in the original story), was “a good Sam who doesn’t know he’s a good Sam,” and there was only one actor who could play him: James Stewart. Stewart had just got out of the U.S. Army Air Corps (it was only after World War II that the U.S. Air Force became a separate branch of the military) where he’d flown bombing missions in combat, and he wanted something appropriately “serious” for his first postwar film. He was moved by the tale of a man driven to contemplate suicide and ultimately saved by a guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers, presenting quite a different appearance from the only other film of his I’d seen when I first watched It’s a Wonderful Life: The Invisible Man, in which he played the head of the research lab that had previously employed John Griffin, the title character played by Claude Rains) and agreed to make the film. Capra cast quite a few of his “regulars” in the supporting roles and also put in a number of John Ford’s “regulars” as well, including Thomas Mitchell as George’s alcoholic (but depicted charmingly) uncle Billy; Beulah Bondi as George’s mother (according to imdb.com she played James Stewart’s mother no fewer than five times, including one of Capra’s previous films with him, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington); Ward Bond as Bert the cop, George’s lifetime friend; Frank Faylen (just back from the chilling scene as the nurse at the D.T. ward in Bellevue in The Lost Weekend) as taxi driver Ernie (there’s a widespread belief that Jim Henson named two of the Muppets “Bert and Ernie” in tribute to this film, but according to his daughter that’s not true); H. B. Warner as druggist Gower; Todd Karns as George’s brother Harry; Samuel S. Hinds as their dad Peter, founder of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in Bedford Falls, New York around which most of the action revolves; Frank Albertson as George’s friend Sam Wainwright; and Sheldon Leonard as Nick, bartender at the restaurant owned by Martini (William Edmunds).
For the other main principals Capra selected Donna Reed to play Mary Hatch Bailey, the local girl George marries; Gloria Grahame (who’d been languishing under contract at MGM, of all unlikely studios for her, when Capra borrowed her on the basis of some MGM screen tests one of their producers showed him) as the town’s “fast” girl, Violet Bick; and as the villain of the piece, Henry Potter, Lionel Barrymore. Capra had previously used Barrymore in his 1938 film You Can’t Take It With You but had cast him sympathetically, as the head of an eccentric family that attracts the ire of multimillionaire Edward Arnold because Arnold’s son (played by James Stewart in the first of his three Capra films) has fallen in love with Barrymore’s daughter (Jean Arthur, who was Capra’s first choice for the Donna Reed role in It’s a Wonderful Life but turned it down because she was rehearsing for the Broadway production of Born Yesterday — only the temperamental Arthur walked out on the show in its out-of-town tryouts and it was the then-unknown Judy Holliday who acted it on Broadway and became a star therefrom). This time around Capra cast Barrymore as the villain, an embittered rich man who owned virtually every business in Bedford Falls except the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan, and who’s positively Scrooge-like not only in his greed but also his lack of any family connections. Apparently Capra cast Barrymore because of his long history of playing Scrooge on radio — Barrymore had been set to do the film version in 1938 but at the last minute his chronic arthritis became so advanced he needed a wheelchair, so Reginald Owen replaced him but Barrymore remained so identified with the part he appeared in the film’s trailer — and in this film, as in many others he made around this time, Barrymore used his real-life disability to add bitterness and gall to his characterization.
Just about everybody knows the story of It’s a Wonderful Life by now — George Bailey is seen at the opening contemplating suicide, while an unseen voice from heaven (called “Franklin” in the original Van Doren Stern story after President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but unnamed in the movie — Capra, a lifelong Republican who voted against FDR all four times, would hardly have been likely to pay him tribute in a movie even though he was often referred to in the 1930’s as “cinema’s propagandist for the New Deal”) notes that quite a few people on Earth are praying for him. Accordingly Franklin assigns his case to Clarence, an “angel second class” because he hasn’t earned his wings yet, and Henry Travers’ rather befuddled, milquetoast playing is absolutely right for the part. Franklin briefs Clarence on Bailey’s life history — giving us the flashbacks that make up most of the film — and the impression he and we get is that time and time again George has put his own dreams aside in service to others. The result is that when all George’s woes come together at Christmastime — his brother loses $8,000 at the Building and Loan (he borrowed a newspaper from Potter to read the story of Harry Bailey being given the Congressional Medal of Honor for his war heroism, and when he returned it inadvertently folded the envelope with the money into it) just when bank examiner Carter (Charles Halton), who goes into his work with a grim determination that makes Javert seem open-minded by comparison (typically, the only time we get an indication that Carter has any normal human feelings is when he says he wants to wrap up Bailey’s case before nightfall so he can go home and spend Christmas with his own family); Potter sees the money, is briefly tempted to return it but then realizes that this is his chance to put the Bailey Building and Loan out of business once and for all (and, surprisingly for a 1946 film, there isn’t a worm-turning scene in which Potter turns decent and returns the money); George takes out his frustrations on his kids, his kids’ teachers, his friends and just about anyone in earshot — and he’s about to throw himself off the Bedford Falls bridge when Clarence shows up and jumps into the water himself, realizing that George’s good-Samaritan instincts would immediately switch him from offing himself to saving someone else from that fate. George Bailey says he never did himself or anybody else any good and he wishes he’d never been born — and Clarence decides that the way to save George’s soul and earn his wings is to grant his wish.
George Bailey steps out into what one critic called the closest Capra ever came to directing a film noir: in this alternate version of its history Potter not only took over all the businesses in Bedford Falls but even had it renamed “Pottersville.” Martini’s nice little homey Italian restaurant is a dive bar owned by Nick, who instead of the rather decent guy he is in the main story is playing his part with all Sheldon Leonard’s gangster inflections. We know it’s a dive when we see a Black piano player pounding away with ragtime (as usual in 1930’s and 1940’s movies there’s a contrast between “nice” Blacks, represented by the Bailey family maid Annie [Lillian Randolph], and not-so-nice Blacks like the piano player in Nick’s) and Nick throws both George and Clarence out of the bar (and Clarence, in a nice touch, feels he has to reassure his handlers back in heaven that he didn’t actually drink alcohol). George finds that his dad’s building and loan went out of business when dad died; his brother Harry died at age eight when he was sledding on a shovel and crashed through the ice (in the main story George saved his brother’s life by pulling him out of the ice, though at the cost of his hearing in his left ear); the working-class housing development the Bailey Building and Loan funded is a local cemetery (the usual colloquial meaning of “potter’s field” as a place where people whose families couldn’t pay for funerals were just dumped — though even in the alternate “Pottersville” reality the Baileys were well off enough they bought an elaborate tombstone for their eight-year-old son); Bailey’s Uncle Pete is in an insane asylum (probably due to his chronic alcoholism — the Irish-American Thomas Mitchell was often cast as a character who drank); Gower the druggist is an alcoholic street person who served 20 years in prison for manslaughter (since George wasn’t there to stop him from giving out the poisoned prescription); all the men in the troop transport Harry Bailey saved by shooting down the kamikaze that was about to attack them (for which he won the Medal of Honor) died because George hadn’t been around to save Harry; and in what for the alternate George is the final straw that makes him want to live after all even though he’s being threatened with exposure and arrest, his wife Mary is an old maid (wearing glasses, which she doesn’t in the main action) who’s just about to close up the library. (This has been criticized as clichéd, but at least Capra and the final writers he ended up with — the husband-and-wife team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, with Capra’s former colleague Jo Swerling credited with additional dialogue — “planted” it with a line of dialogue establishing that Mary was working as a librarian before she married George.)
It’s a Wonderful Life was Capra’s (and James Stewart’s) favorite among his films, though if nothing else it shows how increasingly desperate he was becoming at giving his movies happy endings: the breakdown of Claude Rains’ character on the Senate floor in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is singularly unbelievable; for his next film, Meet John Doe, Capra shot five different endings trying to work out a resolution; and in It’s a Wonderful Life, in order to end the story happily he literally had to resort to supernatural intervention. The life of It’s a Wonderful Life after its release is almost as bizarre as the process by which it got made; it was a box-office disappointment on its initial release (it grossed $3.3 million on an investment of $3.7 million, though it did well enough that the next year RKO greenlighted a similar film, Magic Town, also starring James Stewart, directed by William Wellman and produced and written by former Capra collaborator Robert Riskin — which was an even bigger flop) and was little known until 1972, when the copyright expired and there was a clerical error on the renewal application. The film thus fell into the public domain and for the next 20 years became a staple on local TV stations looking for something Christmas-themed for the holiday season — until the early 1990’s, when Republic Pictures reacquired the rights to Philip Van Doren Stern’s original story and bought the copyrights to Dimitri Tiomkin’s music, thereby successfully taking It’s a Wonderful Life out of the public domain: an unhealthy signal of how crazy and ludicrously overprotected “intellectual property” would become in the era of increasing corporate control over everything.
And one odd lapse in this film is it’s one of the few Capra made with scenes set in sub-zero temperatures in which you don’t see the actors’ breaths steam as if they were really out in the cold. For his 1930 film Flight Capra had tried putting pellets of dry ice in cages he put in the actors’ mouths — which would have worked O.K. in a silent film but made it impossible for the actors to utter dialogue intelligibly — and for Lost Horizon (1937) and Meet John Doe (1941) he had rented space in a Los Angeles icehouse, usually used for storing frozen meats, so he could shoot inside and not only have the actors’ breaths steam but use the icehouse’s artificial-snow machines (generally used to cut up large ice blocks and spray the results onto the meat and fish to keep them frozen) to blow snow at them. For some reason Capra didn’t do that in It’s a Wonderful Life; instead he shot the December scenes outdoors in the big Bedford Falls set he built on the RKO backlot (though the exterior of the house George and Mary Bailey live in is clearly our old friend, the recycled set from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons) in the middle of a July heat wave. RKO’s engineers invented a new type of artificial snow made out of foam (for which they got a technical Oscar) instead of the previous substitute — ground-up cornflakes — which were too noisy for scenes that involved snow but not blizzards. But that still left the actors having to perform difficult action scenes dressed for a New York winter in the 102° heat of a California summer, and at one point Capra gave his cast and crew a day off just to recover.
I decided to watch last night’s NBC-TV presentation of Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. I hadn’t seen it in years but when I first caught it on a local TV station in 1972 I was blown away by its outfront sentimentality and its ineffably moving parable of an ordinary man whose compulsive pursuit of the welfare of others robs him of all his own ambitions, until at the end a life crisis forces him into an awareness of himself and how much good he’d done for other people staying just where he is. It’s a Wonderful Life actually began as a story by writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who wrote it as a booklet called The Greatest Gift and had copies printed privately so he could send them out to his friends as his Christmas card for 1943. RKO bought the movie rights and put a number of writers on it, including Clifford Odets, Dalton Trumbo, Marc Connelly, and Dorothy Parker (whose sensibility seems miles away from the film that actually got made), but RKO head Charles Koerner (the one who had fired Orson Welles after he took over from George Schaefer in 1942 and announced that from then on RKO’s movies would be based on “Showmanship Instead of Genius) didn’t like any of the scripts that crossed his desk and put the project aside. Then in 1945, Frank Capra, William Wyler and George Stevens, all just back from having directed for the U.S. war effort during World War II (Stevens was the leader of the first camera crew to enter the concentration camps, and it so deeply moved him as a human being it wrecked him as a filmmaker; unwilling to do the kinds of quiet romantic comedies that had been his best pre-war work, he insisted that every movie he worked on must project High Seriousness, and made a series of films that got gloppier, more sentimental and less entertaining with each go: A Place in the Sun, Shane, Giant, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told), organized an independent production company called Liberty Films. The logo for the company was an uncracked mockup of the Liberty Bell that Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin had used as the logo for their first independent production, Meet John Doe (1941), and looking for a partner among the major studios they hit on RKO. RKO had already had distribution deals with Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney that were making them lots of money, and they eagerly grabbed the right to co-finance and distribute Liberty’s product — only when Capra arrived on the RKO lot he had no idea what he wanted to make.
Koerner tipped him to The Greatest Gift, figuring (rightly) that a man driven to the end of his wits who’s given a chance to see what the world would have been like if he’d never been born was right up Capra’s alley. He agreed to sell the story to Liberty for the price he’d initially paid Van Doren Stern for the Christmas card, and threw in the rejected scripts for free. (Odets later said he hated the film that got made, and the only idea of his that got used was to have the hero, George Bailey, as a child notice that the druggist Mr. Gower has inadvertently filled a prescription with poison out of grief over the death of his son in the 1919 influenza epidemic.) Capra went into production and decided that the lead character, George Bailey (called “George Pratt” in the original story), was “a good Sam who doesn’t know he’s a good Sam,” and there was only one actor who could play him: James Stewart. Stewart had just got out of the U.S. Army Air Corps (it was only after World War II that the U.S. Air Force became a separate branch of the military) where he’d flown bombing missions in combat, and he wanted something appropriately “serious” for his first postwar film. He was moved by the tale of a man driven to contemplate suicide and ultimately saved by a guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers, presenting quite a different appearance from the only other film of his I’d seen when I first watched It’s a Wonderful Life: The Invisible Man, in which he played the head of the research lab that had previously employed John Griffin, the title character played by Claude Rains) and agreed to make the film. Capra cast quite a few of his “regulars” in the supporting roles and also put in a number of John Ford’s “regulars” as well, including Thomas Mitchell as George’s alcoholic (but depicted charmingly) uncle Billy; Beulah Bondi as George’s mother (according to imdb.com she played James Stewart’s mother no fewer than five times, including one of Capra’s previous films with him, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington); Ward Bond as Bert the cop, George’s lifetime friend; Frank Faylen (just back from the chilling scene as the nurse at the D.T. ward in Bellevue in The Lost Weekend) as taxi driver Ernie (there’s a widespread belief that Jim Henson named two of the Muppets “Bert and Ernie” in tribute to this film, but according to his daughter that’s not true); H. B. Warner as druggist Gower; Todd Karns as George’s brother Harry; Samuel S. Hinds as their dad Peter, founder of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in Bedford Falls, New York around which most of the action revolves; Frank Albertson as George’s friend Sam Wainwright; and Sheldon Leonard as Nick, bartender at the restaurant owned by Martini (William Edmunds).
For the other main principals Capra selected Donna Reed to play Mary Hatch Bailey, the local girl George marries; Gloria Grahame (who’d been languishing under contract at MGM, of all unlikely studios for her, when Capra borrowed her on the basis of some MGM screen tests one of their producers showed him) as the town’s “fast” girl, Violet Bick; and as the villain of the piece, Henry Potter, Lionel Barrymore. Capra had previously used Barrymore in his 1938 film You Can’t Take It With You but had cast him sympathetically, as the head of an eccentric family that attracts the ire of multimillionaire Edward Arnold because Arnold’s son (played by James Stewart in the first of his three Capra films) has fallen in love with Barrymore’s daughter (Jean Arthur, who was Capra’s first choice for the Donna Reed role in It’s a Wonderful Life but turned it down because she was rehearsing for the Broadway production of Born Yesterday — only the temperamental Arthur walked out on the show in its out-of-town tryouts and it was the then-unknown Judy Holliday who acted it on Broadway and became a star therefrom). This time around Capra cast Barrymore as the villain, an embittered rich man who owned virtually every business in Bedford Falls except the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan, and who’s positively Scrooge-like not only in his greed but also his lack of any family connections. Apparently Capra cast Barrymore because of his long history of playing Scrooge on radio — Barrymore had been set to do the film version in 1938 but at the last minute his chronic arthritis became so advanced he needed a wheelchair, so Reginald Owen replaced him but Barrymore remained so identified with the part he appeared in the film’s trailer — and in this film, as in many others he made around this time, Barrymore used his real-life disability to add bitterness and gall to his characterization.
Just about everybody knows the story of It’s a Wonderful Life by now — George Bailey is seen at the opening contemplating suicide, while an unseen voice from heaven (called “Franklin” in the original Van Doren Stern story after President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but unnamed in the movie — Capra, a lifelong Republican who voted against FDR all four times, would hardly have been likely to pay him tribute in a movie even though he was often referred to in the 1930’s as “cinema’s propagandist for the New Deal”) notes that quite a few people on Earth are praying for him. Accordingly Franklin assigns his case to Clarence, an “angel second class” because he hasn’t earned his wings yet, and Henry Travers’ rather befuddled, milquetoast playing is absolutely right for the part. Franklin briefs Clarence on Bailey’s life history — giving us the flashbacks that make up most of the film — and the impression he and we get is that time and time again George has put his own dreams aside in service to others. The result is that when all George’s woes come together at Christmastime — his brother loses $8,000 at the Building and Loan (he borrowed a newspaper from Potter to read the story of Harry Bailey being given the Congressional Medal of Honor for his war heroism, and when he returned it inadvertently folded the envelope with the money into it) just when bank examiner Carter (Charles Halton), who goes into his work with a grim determination that makes Javert seem open-minded by comparison (typically, the only time we get an indication that Carter has any normal human feelings is when he says he wants to wrap up Bailey’s case before nightfall so he can go home and spend Christmas with his own family); Potter sees the money, is briefly tempted to return it but then realizes that this is his chance to put the Bailey Building and Loan out of business once and for all (and, surprisingly for a 1946 film, there isn’t a worm-turning scene in which Potter turns decent and returns the money); George takes out his frustrations on his kids, his kids’ teachers, his friends and just about anyone in earshot — and he’s about to throw himself off the Bedford Falls bridge when Clarence shows up and jumps into the water himself, realizing that George’s good-Samaritan instincts would immediately switch him from offing himself to saving someone else from that fate. George Bailey says he never did himself or anybody else any good and he wishes he’d never been born — and Clarence decides that the way to save George’s soul and earn his wings is to grant his wish.
George Bailey steps out into what one critic called the closest Capra ever came to directing a film noir: in this alternate version of its history Potter not only took over all the businesses in Bedford Falls but even had it renamed “Pottersville.” Martini’s nice little homey Italian restaurant is a dive bar owned by Nick, who instead of the rather decent guy he is in the main story is playing his part with all Sheldon Leonard’s gangster inflections. We know it’s a dive when we see a Black piano player pounding away with ragtime (as usual in 1930’s and 1940’s movies there’s a contrast between “nice” Blacks, represented by the Bailey family maid Annie [Lillian Randolph], and not-so-nice Blacks like the piano player in Nick’s) and Nick throws both George and Clarence out of the bar (and Clarence, in a nice touch, feels he has to reassure his handlers back in heaven that he didn’t actually drink alcohol). George finds that his dad’s building and loan went out of business when dad died; his brother Harry died at age eight when he was sledding on a shovel and crashed through the ice (in the main story George saved his brother’s life by pulling him out of the ice, though at the cost of his hearing in his left ear); the working-class housing development the Bailey Building and Loan funded is a local cemetery (the usual colloquial meaning of “potter’s field” as a place where people whose families couldn’t pay for funerals were just dumped — though even in the alternate “Pottersville” reality the Baileys were well off enough they bought an elaborate tombstone for their eight-year-old son); Bailey’s Uncle Pete is in an insane asylum (probably due to his chronic alcoholism — the Irish-American Thomas Mitchell was often cast as a character who drank); Gower the druggist is an alcoholic street person who served 20 years in prison for manslaughter (since George wasn’t there to stop him from giving out the poisoned prescription); all the men in the troop transport Harry Bailey saved by shooting down the kamikaze that was about to attack them (for which he won the Medal of Honor) died because George hadn’t been around to save Harry; and in what for the alternate George is the final straw that makes him want to live after all even though he’s being threatened with exposure and arrest, his wife Mary is an old maid (wearing glasses, which she doesn’t in the main action) who’s just about to close up the library. (This has been criticized as clichéd, but at least Capra and the final writers he ended up with — the husband-and-wife team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, with Capra’s former colleague Jo Swerling credited with additional dialogue — “planted” it with a line of dialogue establishing that Mary was working as a librarian before she married George.)
It’s a Wonderful Life was Capra’s (and James Stewart’s) favorite among his films, though if nothing else it shows how increasingly desperate he was becoming at giving his movies happy endings: the breakdown of Claude Rains’ character on the Senate floor in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is singularly unbelievable; for his next film, Meet John Doe, Capra shot five different endings trying to work out a resolution; and in It’s a Wonderful Life, in order to end the story happily he literally had to resort to supernatural intervention. The life of It’s a Wonderful Life after its release is almost as bizarre as the process by which it got made; it was a box-office disappointment on its initial release (it grossed $3.3 million on an investment of $3.7 million, though it did well enough that the next year RKO greenlighted a similar film, Magic Town, also starring James Stewart, directed by William Wellman and produced and written by former Capra collaborator Robert Riskin — which was an even bigger flop) and was little known until 1972, when the copyright expired and there was a clerical error on the renewal application. The film thus fell into the public domain and for the next 20 years became a staple on local TV stations looking for something Christmas-themed for the holiday season — until the early 1990’s, when Republic Pictures reacquired the rights to Philip Van Doren Stern’s original story and bought the copyrights to Dimitri Tiomkin’s music, thereby successfully taking It’s a Wonderful Life out of the public domain: an unhealthy signal of how crazy and ludicrously overprotected “intellectual property” would become in the era of increasing corporate control over everything.
And one odd lapse in this film is it’s one of the few Capra made with scenes set in sub-zero temperatures in which you don’t see the actors’ breaths steam as if they were really out in the cold. For his 1930 film Flight Capra had tried putting pellets of dry ice in cages he put in the actors’ mouths — which would have worked O.K. in a silent film but made it impossible for the actors to utter dialogue intelligibly — and for Lost Horizon (1937) and Meet John Doe (1941) he had rented space in a Los Angeles icehouse, usually used for storing frozen meats, so he could shoot inside and not only have the actors’ breaths steam but use the icehouse’s artificial-snow machines (generally used to cut up large ice blocks and spray the results onto the meat and fish to keep them frozen) to blow snow at them. For some reason Capra didn’t do that in It’s a Wonderful Life; instead he shot the December scenes outdoors in the big Bedford Falls set he built on the RKO backlot (though the exterior of the house George and Mary Bailey live in is clearly our old friend, the recycled set from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons) in the middle of a July heat wave. RKO’s engineers invented a new type of artificial snow made out of foam (for which they got a technical Oscar) instead of the previous substitute — ground-up cornflakes — which were too noisy for scenes that involved snow but not blizzards. But that still left the actors having to perform difficult action scenes dressed for a New York winter in the 102° heat of a California summer, and at one point Capra gave his cast and crew a day off just to recover.
Friday, December 2, 2016
Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow Four-Night Crossover Event (DC Comics, Berlanti Productions, Warner Bros., 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a surprisingly good episode of Supergirl that the CW network is billing as the first night in a four-night superhero “crossover” event which will continue on tonight’s episode of The Flash, though this also worked as a self-contained story as part of the Supergirl sequence (even though we won’t be getting a new episode of Supergirl until January 16!). The episode title was “Medusa,” and Medusa turns out to be a bioengineered virus created back on Krypton by Supergirl’s natural father (who appears in the episode as a sort of dream vision, much the way Marlon Brando as Superman’s father Jor-El kept turning up as a ghostly vision in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and, via unused footage from Superman II, kept playing that part even after Brando himself died!) as a sort of defensive bioweapon. The gimmick is it would kill anyone who wasn’t Kryptonian (though writers Jessica Queller and Derek Simon never explain why it’s harmless to Earth people) and could therefore be loosed in case of an interplanetary invasion, since it would kill the invaders and leave the home population alone. Medusa gets released as a sort of test-marketing campaign in a bar frequented by aliens (one can’t help but be reminded of the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars — or, as it’s called these days to fit it into the mega-cycle, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope) and all of them die; Mon-El from Daxom (Chris Wood) survives because he was outside the bar fighting Cyborg Superman (David Harewood) when the virus was released, though he got exposed by going into the bar later and trying to rescue the patrons and he comes close to death.
It turns out that, since Daxom was a sister planet of Krypton and therefore Kryptonians and Daxomites are genetically similar, that Mon-El gets sick from Medusa but survives, and his immune reaction to it is strong enough that Eliza Danvers (Helen Slater), biomedical researcher and mother of Alex Danvers (Chyler Leigh) and foster mother of Kara Danvers, a.k.a. Supergirl (Melissa Benoist), is able to use it to synthesize an antidote. Meanwhile the people behind the Medusa release are the secret society Cadmus, headed by Lillian Luthor (Brenda Strong), who’s determined to exterminate all aliens from Earth because she’s still pissed at Superman for having branded her genius son Lex as a super-criminal and got him a life prison sentence. She asks her daughter Lena (Katie McGrath) — who until this episode we’ve been led to believe was a good Luthor to make up for her bad-Luthor mom and brother — for “Isotope 454,” the only medium through which Medusa can be released, and after Cadmus agents stage a break-in at Lena’s corporate headquarters but fail to steal the isotope, Lena merely gives it to her mom … only there’s a beautiful final scene in which the red flakes of isotope that are carrying Medusa slowly shrivel up and disappear in mid-air, and it turns out Lena rendered the isotope inert before she handed it over and thus the big rocket that was supposed to disperse Medusa worldwide and kill all the aliens spread a useless item. There are also the usual subplots, including a turn in the relationship between Alex Danvers and her friend Maggie Sawyer (Floriana Lima), with whom Alex fell in love, realized that she was a Lesbian and then got jilted by Maggie because she doesn’t do Lesbian newbies; this time around they share a pizza at home and it turns out they may be relationship-bound after all. (I’m still pretty amazed that a superhero show in 2016 can prominently feature two Lesbian characters and at least hint at a relationship between them; how pre-Trump!) The only part of the show relevant to the much-hyped “crossover event” takes place at the end, when a hole in the space-time continuum (that first appeared early on during the Danvers’ Thanksgiving dinner) opens and reveals Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash (Grant Guskin), and his long-haired and considerably better-hung (at least from the size of their on-screen baskets) sidekick Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes), though what they’re doing in Supergirl’s home town of National City and how the plot is going to continue are mysteries that aren’t going to resolve until tonight’s episode of The Flash and the other two shows in the sequence. — 11/29/16
•••••
I watched the CW Network’s episode of The Flash that was the second installment in the four-night “crossover event” that united the Legends of Tomorrow, as DC Comics is calling its younger superheroes when they work together. The series had started with Monday night’s Supergirl episode — though that had also been a self-contained advancement of the Supergirl story arc and had benefited from that — at the end of which The Flash, a.k.a. Barry Alden (Grant Gustin, personable and handsome without being drop-dead gorgeous), and Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) crashed through a hole in the space-time continuum to reach Supergirl on a parallel Earth. Yes, this is one of those science-fiction stories in which they can do alternative histories by positing that there are a series of universes, each of which contains an Earth where the overall arc of history has been the same as the one on the Earth we know but the details can be strikingly different. As if that isn’t enough plot for you, The Flash episode also included time travel and the so-called “butterfly effect” — it seems that 40 years later than the events we were watching, Barry Alden did a time-travel run back into the past and did something that disrupted the space-time continuum and led to the death of Cisco’s brother (so Cisco is really pissed at Barry!) and the sex-change of one of the other characters’ kids from a son to a daughter. So the young superheroes spend as much time fighting each other as they do fighting the menace from outer space they’re supposed to be taking on: the Dominators, a race from another planet (their makeup and CGI look a lot like the White Martians on Supergirl, enough that it’s possible we’re supposed to read them as the same species) who in 1951 sent an advance guard to gather intelligence on Earth and see if we had any way to resist them. We didn’t, but after a while the Dominators gave up, got back in their spaceship and left. Now, 65 years later, they’re ba-a-a-a-ack, and Barry sets up a training to see if their heroes can fight super-powered aliens by using Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) as their sparring partner. It doesn’t go well for Our (Other) Heroes, and after kidnapping the President of the United States (Jerry Wasserman) — if this happened after January 20, 2017 I’d be tempted to tell the aliens, “Keep him!” — to lure the Legends of Tomorrow, the Dominators use a Star Trek-style transporter beam to beam them into their own spacecraft, to do heaven knows what with them — that’s the cliffhanger. There are some interesting characters in this one, including Stephen Arnell as the Green Arrow, a.k.a. Oliver Queen (he’s sort of a male version of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, though the Green Arrow was apparently a minor character in the DC universe well before Suzanne Collins started her trilogy); Willa Holland as Speedy, a.k.a. Thea Queen; Franz Drameh as Firestorm, a.k.a. Jefferson Jackson; Caity Lotz as White Canary, a.k.a. Sara Lance; failed Superman (he starred in the flop Superman Returns from 2006 that almost killed the whole franchise) Brandon Routh as The Atom, a.k.a. Ray Palmer; Keiynan Lonsdale as Black superhero wanna-be Wally West (he insists that he can run faster than The Flash and only needs training to don his superhero mantle); Candice Patton as his sister Iris and Jesse L. Martin from the final cast of Law and Order as their father. But the story seems pretty by-the-numbers and I can only hope it gets better over the next two nights! — 11/30/16
•••••
I watched the latest episode of Arrow, the third out of the four “crossover nights” on the CW channel and a show that was virtually incomprehensible because I’ve never watched the series before and therefore it was impossible for me to tell what was supposed to be “real” in the series’ universe and what was being altered for this episode. At the end of The Flash episode seen the night before, three of the superheroes who more or less united to fight the Dominators — the super-powerful, high-tech-equipped beings from outer space who first came to Earth in 1951 and decided we were a species on such a low level of technology they could easily defeat and slaughter us and take over our planet — were beamed onto the Dominators’ spaceship. One might have expected a show filled with spectacular action scenes as the three heroes on the ship — including Oliver Queen, a.k.a. Arrow (in the comic books he was the Green Arrow but I suspect they dropped the color to avoid him being confused with the Green Lantern!) — fought their way off the vessel, but that didn’t happen until the last 15 minutes of the show. Instead they did a surprisingly Ray Bradbury-ish “memory” episode in which the outer-space intelligence creates a dream world for them out of the memories in their own psyches and gives them a bucolic middle-class existence at variance with the ruling assumptions of the overall series. I had a hard time figuring out who was who, what was what and how the plotline of this episode deviated from the series until I looked up the imdb.com page for both the series as a whole and this particular show. The synopsis of the series read, “Spoiled billionaire playboy Oliver Queen [Stephen Arnell] is missing and presumed dead when his yacht is lost at sea. He returns five years later a changed man, determined to clean up the city as a hooded vigilante armed with a bow.” The synopsis for this episode reads, “Oliver wakes up to a life in which his parents are alive and he is about to marry Laurel; Felicity [Smoak, played by Emily Bett Rickards] faces a new threat with the help of The Flash (Grant Gustin) and Supergirl (Melissa Benoist).” The show is actually considerably more interesting when it’s following Oliver and his doomed relationship with Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) than when the dream sequence ends (courtesy of yet another break in the space-time continuum that allows the three humans caught up in it to revert to their normal existences, though being trapped inside a Dominators’ ship hardly counts, even by the standards of superhero fiction, as “normal”) and they leap back, are still captives of the Dominators, and have to hijack a shuttlecraft to get back to Earth — and they find hundreds of other Dominator shuttlecraft chasing them, the “cliffhanger” on which this episode ends. Had I been following The Arrow all along I probably would have liked this one better, and had it actually featured Oliver Queen as the sort of male Katniss Everdeen I would have expected from the title and the central premise instead of portraying him through most of the action as a normal, non-super human being, that might have helped too — but at least I give writers Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg credit for ambition. Ripping off people at the level of Ray Bradbury and Stanislaw Lem is obviously at least aiming for a higher level than just cranking out another superhero tale inspired by old comic books! — 12/1/16
•••••
I put on the last of the four episodes of the CW Network’s big “four-night crossover” event between their superhero shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow dealing with a threatened interplanetary invasion from the Dominators. The Dominators are an outer-space race who first came to Earth in 1951 for a reconnaissance mission and are now back, though just who they are and what they want remains ambiguous until the very end of this show. At first I thought this was going to be a simple Independence Day-style tale of a super-race from another planet who zeroed in on Earth as a technologically backward planet whose inhabitants they could simply wipe out so they could take over our world as a colony. The final resolution suggests that the writers, Phil Klemmer and Marc Guggenheim, couldn’t make up their minds whether they wanted the Dominators to be nasty, genocidal aliens à la Independence Day (and The War of the Worlds before it!) or aliens genuinely concerned about saving the universe from out-of-control Earthlings à la The Day the Earth Stood Still and Plan Nine from Outer Space. DC’s Legends of Tomorrow are a rag-bag collection of superheroes and superhero wanna-bes including The Atom, a.k.a. Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh, who seems to have got this role as a consolation prize after his Superman movie, Superman Returns, bombed and nearly killed the Superman franchise on film), who aside from what you might think is not a superhero whose power is to turn himself invisibly small; White Canary a.k.a. Sara Lance (Caity Palmer); Firestorm a.k.a. Jefferson Jackson (Franz Drameh), who not only can spit fire from his hands but can use them to transmute elements into other elements; Reverse-Flash a.k.a. Eobard Thawne (Matt Letscher); Vixen a.k.a. Amaya Jiwe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers); Steel a.k.a. Nate Heywood (Nick Zeno); and Heat Wave a.k.a. Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell), who’s the most interesting character of the bunch: an ex-con with a strongly anti-social attitude who doesn’t have flame-throwing powers himself like Firestorm but wields two heat weapons, one in each hand, and his overall anti-social bias and moral unpredictability reminded me of Rorschach in another D.C. property, Watchmen.
The plot deals with the Legends going back in time to capture one of the Dominators who invaded in 1951 and interrogate him to find out what the Dominators want from Earth — only the Legends themselves get captured by a group of sinister government bureaucrats dressed in Men in Black uniforms and the Dominator gets tortured — oops, given “enhanced interrogation.” With all the fooforaw in previous episodes about the changes in the timeline Barry Alden, a.k.a. The Flash (Grant Gustin) made — among other things, eliminating Cisco Ramon’s (Carlos Valdes) brother and giving the non-super head of the Legends, Dr. Martin Stein (Victor Garber — it’s nice to see this actor again but, aside from him being older than I remember him, he’s not particularly well-used here), a daughter, Lily (Christina Brucato), who’s a scientific genius in her own right and has the key to vanquishing the Dominators: a weapon which, when shot into their skin and then electrically activated, will cause them excruciating pain. It also turns out that what the Dominators were afraid of and why they invaded Earth was that they were fearful of the existence of super-powered “metahumans,” which include most of the superhero dramatis personae of this story (actually all of them except Supergirl, who like her cousin Superman got her powers by coming to earth from another planet, Krypton), and in particular what might happen if a person with an evil character was also meta-human. (Yipes! Donald Trump with a superpower! Maybe the Dominators have reason to fear us … ) Anyway, during the last two acts or so we finally get some kick-ass superhero action as the Dominators (who speak English in this episode even though it’s previously been established that their own language is a variant of Hebrew — I explained that to Charles and his eyebrows went up, and then I said that the explanation was that the Old Testament God had created everything and therefore His language, Hebrew, was the baseline for languages throughout the universe) attack the Earthlings and the Earthlings counter-attack with Lily Stein’s weapon until the Dominators, who had surrounded the earth with their ships in the best War of the Worlds and Independence Day traditions, call a general retreat and leave until the writers of these shows decide they need them again for a menace. As pretentious as this “four-night crossover” was, as difficult as some of it was to understand unless you’ve been following these shows all along (which, aside from Supergirl, I haven’t been), and as shaky as the transitions were between episodes, the whole event was actually good fun and I’m glad I stuck it out until the end. — 12/2/16
I watched a surprisingly good episode of Supergirl that the CW network is billing as the first night in a four-night superhero “crossover” event which will continue on tonight’s episode of The Flash, though this also worked as a self-contained story as part of the Supergirl sequence (even though we won’t be getting a new episode of Supergirl until January 16!). The episode title was “Medusa,” and Medusa turns out to be a bioengineered virus created back on Krypton by Supergirl’s natural father (who appears in the episode as a sort of dream vision, much the way Marlon Brando as Superman’s father Jor-El kept turning up as a ghostly vision in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and, via unused footage from Superman II, kept playing that part even after Brando himself died!) as a sort of defensive bioweapon. The gimmick is it would kill anyone who wasn’t Kryptonian (though writers Jessica Queller and Derek Simon never explain why it’s harmless to Earth people) and could therefore be loosed in case of an interplanetary invasion, since it would kill the invaders and leave the home population alone. Medusa gets released as a sort of test-marketing campaign in a bar frequented by aliens (one can’t help but be reminded of the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars — or, as it’s called these days to fit it into the mega-cycle, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope) and all of them die; Mon-El from Daxom (Chris Wood) survives because he was outside the bar fighting Cyborg Superman (David Harewood) when the virus was released, though he got exposed by going into the bar later and trying to rescue the patrons and he comes close to death.
It turns out that, since Daxom was a sister planet of Krypton and therefore Kryptonians and Daxomites are genetically similar, that Mon-El gets sick from Medusa but survives, and his immune reaction to it is strong enough that Eliza Danvers (Helen Slater), biomedical researcher and mother of Alex Danvers (Chyler Leigh) and foster mother of Kara Danvers, a.k.a. Supergirl (Melissa Benoist), is able to use it to synthesize an antidote. Meanwhile the people behind the Medusa release are the secret society Cadmus, headed by Lillian Luthor (Brenda Strong), who’s determined to exterminate all aliens from Earth because she’s still pissed at Superman for having branded her genius son Lex as a super-criminal and got him a life prison sentence. She asks her daughter Lena (Katie McGrath) — who until this episode we’ve been led to believe was a good Luthor to make up for her bad-Luthor mom and brother — for “Isotope 454,” the only medium through which Medusa can be released, and after Cadmus agents stage a break-in at Lena’s corporate headquarters but fail to steal the isotope, Lena merely gives it to her mom … only there’s a beautiful final scene in which the red flakes of isotope that are carrying Medusa slowly shrivel up and disappear in mid-air, and it turns out Lena rendered the isotope inert before she handed it over and thus the big rocket that was supposed to disperse Medusa worldwide and kill all the aliens spread a useless item. There are also the usual subplots, including a turn in the relationship between Alex Danvers and her friend Maggie Sawyer (Floriana Lima), with whom Alex fell in love, realized that she was a Lesbian and then got jilted by Maggie because she doesn’t do Lesbian newbies; this time around they share a pizza at home and it turns out they may be relationship-bound after all. (I’m still pretty amazed that a superhero show in 2016 can prominently feature two Lesbian characters and at least hint at a relationship between them; how pre-Trump!) The only part of the show relevant to the much-hyped “crossover event” takes place at the end, when a hole in the space-time continuum (that first appeared early on during the Danvers’ Thanksgiving dinner) opens and reveals Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash (Grant Guskin), and his long-haired and considerably better-hung (at least from the size of their on-screen baskets) sidekick Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes), though what they’re doing in Supergirl’s home town of National City and how the plot is going to continue are mysteries that aren’t going to resolve until tonight’s episode of The Flash and the other two shows in the sequence. — 11/29/16
•••••
I watched the CW Network’s episode of The Flash that was the second installment in the four-night “crossover event” that united the Legends of Tomorrow, as DC Comics is calling its younger superheroes when they work together. The series had started with Monday night’s Supergirl episode — though that had also been a self-contained advancement of the Supergirl story arc and had benefited from that — at the end of which The Flash, a.k.a. Barry Alden (Grant Gustin, personable and handsome without being drop-dead gorgeous), and Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) crashed through a hole in the space-time continuum to reach Supergirl on a parallel Earth. Yes, this is one of those science-fiction stories in which they can do alternative histories by positing that there are a series of universes, each of which contains an Earth where the overall arc of history has been the same as the one on the Earth we know but the details can be strikingly different. As if that isn’t enough plot for you, The Flash episode also included time travel and the so-called “butterfly effect” — it seems that 40 years later than the events we were watching, Barry Alden did a time-travel run back into the past and did something that disrupted the space-time continuum and led to the death of Cisco’s brother (so Cisco is really pissed at Barry!) and the sex-change of one of the other characters’ kids from a son to a daughter. So the young superheroes spend as much time fighting each other as they do fighting the menace from outer space they’re supposed to be taking on: the Dominators, a race from another planet (their makeup and CGI look a lot like the White Martians on Supergirl, enough that it’s possible we’re supposed to read them as the same species) who in 1951 sent an advance guard to gather intelligence on Earth and see if we had any way to resist them. We didn’t, but after a while the Dominators gave up, got back in their spaceship and left. Now, 65 years later, they’re ba-a-a-a-ack, and Barry sets up a training to see if their heroes can fight super-powered aliens by using Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) as their sparring partner. It doesn’t go well for Our (Other) Heroes, and after kidnapping the President of the United States (Jerry Wasserman) — if this happened after January 20, 2017 I’d be tempted to tell the aliens, “Keep him!” — to lure the Legends of Tomorrow, the Dominators use a Star Trek-style transporter beam to beam them into their own spacecraft, to do heaven knows what with them — that’s the cliffhanger. There are some interesting characters in this one, including Stephen Arnell as the Green Arrow, a.k.a. Oliver Queen (he’s sort of a male version of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, though the Green Arrow was apparently a minor character in the DC universe well before Suzanne Collins started her trilogy); Willa Holland as Speedy, a.k.a. Thea Queen; Franz Drameh as Firestorm, a.k.a. Jefferson Jackson; Caity Lotz as White Canary, a.k.a. Sara Lance; failed Superman (he starred in the flop Superman Returns from 2006 that almost killed the whole franchise) Brandon Routh as The Atom, a.k.a. Ray Palmer; Keiynan Lonsdale as Black superhero wanna-be Wally West (he insists that he can run faster than The Flash and only needs training to don his superhero mantle); Candice Patton as his sister Iris and Jesse L. Martin from the final cast of Law and Order as their father. But the story seems pretty by-the-numbers and I can only hope it gets better over the next two nights! — 11/30/16
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I watched the latest episode of Arrow, the third out of the four “crossover nights” on the CW channel and a show that was virtually incomprehensible because I’ve never watched the series before and therefore it was impossible for me to tell what was supposed to be “real” in the series’ universe and what was being altered for this episode. At the end of The Flash episode seen the night before, three of the superheroes who more or less united to fight the Dominators — the super-powerful, high-tech-equipped beings from outer space who first came to Earth in 1951 and decided we were a species on such a low level of technology they could easily defeat and slaughter us and take over our planet — were beamed onto the Dominators’ spaceship. One might have expected a show filled with spectacular action scenes as the three heroes on the ship — including Oliver Queen, a.k.a. Arrow (in the comic books he was the Green Arrow but I suspect they dropped the color to avoid him being confused with the Green Lantern!) — fought their way off the vessel, but that didn’t happen until the last 15 minutes of the show. Instead they did a surprisingly Ray Bradbury-ish “memory” episode in which the outer-space intelligence creates a dream world for them out of the memories in their own psyches and gives them a bucolic middle-class existence at variance with the ruling assumptions of the overall series. I had a hard time figuring out who was who, what was what and how the plotline of this episode deviated from the series until I looked up the imdb.com page for both the series as a whole and this particular show. The synopsis of the series read, “Spoiled billionaire playboy Oliver Queen [Stephen Arnell] is missing and presumed dead when his yacht is lost at sea. He returns five years later a changed man, determined to clean up the city as a hooded vigilante armed with a bow.” The synopsis for this episode reads, “Oliver wakes up to a life in which his parents are alive and he is about to marry Laurel; Felicity [Smoak, played by Emily Bett Rickards] faces a new threat with the help of The Flash (Grant Gustin) and Supergirl (Melissa Benoist).” The show is actually considerably more interesting when it’s following Oliver and his doomed relationship with Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) than when the dream sequence ends (courtesy of yet another break in the space-time continuum that allows the three humans caught up in it to revert to their normal existences, though being trapped inside a Dominators’ ship hardly counts, even by the standards of superhero fiction, as “normal”) and they leap back, are still captives of the Dominators, and have to hijack a shuttlecraft to get back to Earth — and they find hundreds of other Dominator shuttlecraft chasing them, the “cliffhanger” on which this episode ends. Had I been following The Arrow all along I probably would have liked this one better, and had it actually featured Oliver Queen as the sort of male Katniss Everdeen I would have expected from the title and the central premise instead of portraying him through most of the action as a normal, non-super human being, that might have helped too — but at least I give writers Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg credit for ambition. Ripping off people at the level of Ray Bradbury and Stanislaw Lem is obviously at least aiming for a higher level than just cranking out another superhero tale inspired by old comic books! — 12/1/16
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I put on the last of the four episodes of the CW Network’s big “four-night crossover” event between their superhero shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow dealing with a threatened interplanetary invasion from the Dominators. The Dominators are an outer-space race who first came to Earth in 1951 for a reconnaissance mission and are now back, though just who they are and what they want remains ambiguous until the very end of this show. At first I thought this was going to be a simple Independence Day-style tale of a super-race from another planet who zeroed in on Earth as a technologically backward planet whose inhabitants they could simply wipe out so they could take over our world as a colony. The final resolution suggests that the writers, Phil Klemmer and Marc Guggenheim, couldn’t make up their minds whether they wanted the Dominators to be nasty, genocidal aliens à la Independence Day (and The War of the Worlds before it!) or aliens genuinely concerned about saving the universe from out-of-control Earthlings à la The Day the Earth Stood Still and Plan Nine from Outer Space. DC’s Legends of Tomorrow are a rag-bag collection of superheroes and superhero wanna-bes including The Atom, a.k.a. Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh, who seems to have got this role as a consolation prize after his Superman movie, Superman Returns, bombed and nearly killed the Superman franchise on film), who aside from what you might think is not a superhero whose power is to turn himself invisibly small; White Canary a.k.a. Sara Lance (Caity Palmer); Firestorm a.k.a. Jefferson Jackson (Franz Drameh), who not only can spit fire from his hands but can use them to transmute elements into other elements; Reverse-Flash a.k.a. Eobard Thawne (Matt Letscher); Vixen a.k.a. Amaya Jiwe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers); Steel a.k.a. Nate Heywood (Nick Zeno); and Heat Wave a.k.a. Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell), who’s the most interesting character of the bunch: an ex-con with a strongly anti-social attitude who doesn’t have flame-throwing powers himself like Firestorm but wields two heat weapons, one in each hand, and his overall anti-social bias and moral unpredictability reminded me of Rorschach in another D.C. property, Watchmen.
The plot deals with the Legends going back in time to capture one of the Dominators who invaded in 1951 and interrogate him to find out what the Dominators want from Earth — only the Legends themselves get captured by a group of sinister government bureaucrats dressed in Men in Black uniforms and the Dominator gets tortured — oops, given “enhanced interrogation.” With all the fooforaw in previous episodes about the changes in the timeline Barry Alden, a.k.a. The Flash (Grant Gustin) made — among other things, eliminating Cisco Ramon’s (Carlos Valdes) brother and giving the non-super head of the Legends, Dr. Martin Stein (Victor Garber — it’s nice to see this actor again but, aside from him being older than I remember him, he’s not particularly well-used here), a daughter, Lily (Christina Brucato), who’s a scientific genius in her own right and has the key to vanquishing the Dominators: a weapon which, when shot into their skin and then electrically activated, will cause them excruciating pain. It also turns out that what the Dominators were afraid of and why they invaded Earth was that they were fearful of the existence of super-powered “metahumans,” which include most of the superhero dramatis personae of this story (actually all of them except Supergirl, who like her cousin Superman got her powers by coming to earth from another planet, Krypton), and in particular what might happen if a person with an evil character was also meta-human. (Yipes! Donald Trump with a superpower! Maybe the Dominators have reason to fear us … ) Anyway, during the last two acts or so we finally get some kick-ass superhero action as the Dominators (who speak English in this episode even though it’s previously been established that their own language is a variant of Hebrew — I explained that to Charles and his eyebrows went up, and then I said that the explanation was that the Old Testament God had created everything and therefore His language, Hebrew, was the baseline for languages throughout the universe) attack the Earthlings and the Earthlings counter-attack with Lily Stein’s weapon until the Dominators, who had surrounded the earth with their ships in the best War of the Worlds and Independence Day traditions, call a general retreat and leave until the writers of these shows decide they need them again for a menace. As pretentious as this “four-night crossover” was, as difficult as some of it was to understand unless you’ve been following these shows all along (which, aside from Supergirl, I haven’t been), and as shaky as the transitions were between episodes, the whole event was actually good fun and I’m glad I stuck it out until the end. — 12/2/16
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