by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I broke out volume 1 of
Universal’s two boxed sets of films by W. C. Fields — the one I paid a bit too
much for at Amazon.com to get the 1932 movie International House. Between them the two boxes contain 10 films, six
made at Paramount between 1932 and 1936 and the four Fields actually made at
Universal (Charles is a bit resentful at the way Universal, who acquired these
films from MCA-TV after Universal and MCA merged in 1962, Paramount having
previously sold its entire library of sound films from 1928 to 1949 to MCA-TV
in the 1950’s, has slapped their modern logo on movies they had nothing to do with making). After Paramount
fired Fields, Mae West and Marlene Dietrich in 1938 (for different reasons:
Fields because his age and alcoholism were leading to long bouts with ill
health during which stand-ins and doubles had to fill in for him; West because
neither the quality nor popularity of her films had recovered from the Legion
of Decency’s campaign in 1934 and the strict enforcement of the Production Code
that resulted; Dietrich because a series of quirky but unpopular films had put
her on Harry Brandt’s infamous “Box-Office Poison” list alongside Greta Garbo,
Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire), Universal signed all of
them and gave Fields the film You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Bergen and
Fields had become a popular team on Bergen’s radio show but the chemistry
didn’t work on film — You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man was a reasonably amusing film but not the laugh-riot
it could have been and not the richer, deeper, more pathos-ridden work Fields
had had in mind when he’d written the original story (under his usual pen-name,
“Charles Bogle”).
Then Fields did My Little Chickadee with Mae West — the script was credited to both of
them but in 1969 West told Life
magazine that she’d written all of it except for one scene in a bar (and it was
so clearly a parody of The Girl of the Golden West that if it had another author, it was David Belasco)
— and after that Universal finally gave Fields near-total control of his movies
and ended up with two masterpieces, The Bank Dick (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even
Break (1941). The Bank Dick, the film Charles and I watched two nights ago, is
the last of Fields’ henpecked-husband movies, in which the hell his nice
suburban house (with the typical ghastly floral wallpaper of the period — it
looks a little better than a PRC
set, but not much) has become from the three generations of his family sharing
it with him is vividly dramatized by an out-of-tune trumpet soloist playing
“Home, Sweet Home” every time it’s introduced on screen. Fields plays Egbert
Sousé (“accent grave over the
‘e,’” he keeps explaining so no one will call him “Souse,” as in “drunkard”),
who spends his days working crossword puzzles, entering contests and sneaking
cigarettes and alcohol in his room when he’s not hanging out at the Black Pussy
Cat Café in town, run by Joe Guelpe (Shemp Howard, who would later replace his
brother Curly in the Three Stooges but was a first-rate comic actor on his own,
frequently appearing with Abbott and Costello). The name of that establishment
represents Production Code enforcement at its absolute dippiest: Fields
originally wanted to call it the “Black Pussy Café” after a real bar his friend, British comedian Leon Errol, owned
in Los Angeles. But the Production Code Administration vetoed “Black Pussy
Café” as the name of a movie bar. Fields wrote a series of increasingly surreal
letters saying basically that if the California Alcoholic Beverage Control
Board didn’t mind there being an actual bar named “Black Pussy Café,” the Code people shouldn’t object to a
fictional one. In the end the signs on the bar set had to proclaim its identity
as the “Black Pussy Cat Café,”
but both Fields and another actor say just “Black Pussy Café” in the dialogue.
For The Bank Dick Fields got to
write not only the original story but the complete script as well — he’d been
upset at the changes Universal’s screenwriters had made to You Can’t
Cheat an Honest Man, especially that they’d
eliminated almost all the sympathetic aspects of his character and turned him
into a lout — a credit he took under the name “Mahatma Kane Jeeves.” One
imdb.com “Trivia” contributor said he got that from the call in plays of the
period, “My hat, my cane, Jeeves!,” but when he was interviewed in the 1970’s
by Richard Schickel for his series The Men Who Made the Movies, Orson Welles claimed Fields had come up with the
name as a tribute to him. Welles had performed amateur magic shows under the
name “The Great Mahatma,” “Kane” came from Citizen Kane (which was shooting at the same time as The
Bank Dick but wasn’t released until a year
later) and “Jeeves” from the butler character in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie
Wooster novels, which both Fields and Welles admired.
Indeed, not only Fields’
character and his screenwriting
credit have typically Fieldsian names, but so do virtually all the dramatis personae in the film; his hellish family consists of his wife
Agatha Brunch Sousé (Cora Witherspoon), his mother-in law Hermisillo Brunch
(Jessie Ralph) — who runs the house with all the compassion and love of a commandant in a German concentration camp — and his daughters
Myrtle Sousé (Una Merkel, surprisingly good as an ingénue even though she was
old enough to have played Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith’s Abraham
Lincoln a decade earlier, and her portrayal
of Fields’ daughter is considerably edgier and less sympathetic than Mary
Brian’s in The Man on the Flying Trapeze and Rochelle Hudson’s in Poppy) and Elsie Mae Adele Brunch Sousé (child actress Evelyn Del Rio), a
mouthful of a name whose attempts of the other players to pronounce it in full
are themselves funny. Myrtle has a boyfriend, Og (short for “Oglethorpe”)
Oggilby (Grady Sutton, a frequent actor in Fields movies who lasted long enough
in the business to play the head of the school board in the Ramones’ vehicle Rock
’n’ Roll High School), who’s a teller at
the Skinner National Bank in Lompoc, the small town where all this takes place.
(When I saw this movie as a kid I assumed W. C. Fields had made up the name
“Lompoc” and the makers of the hilarious Roger Ramjet cartoons in the 1960’s had ripped it off from him,
so I was astonished to find there was a real California town named Lompoc; according to an
imdb.com “trivia” poster, the Lompocians pronounced the name “Lom-poke” instead
of the “Lom-pock” version heard in the movie, and it was also founded as a “dry”
town in which alcohol would not be available — and therefore they were not
happy that one of the most celebrated drunks in movies not only depicted their
city but put a bar in the middle of it.) What’s amazing about The
Bank Dick is that, even more than the
starring vehicles Fields had made before it, it and its successor, Never
Give a Sucker an Even Break (Fields’ last
film as star, though he made guest appearances in three more movies before his
death in 1946), is how totally it sits in the world of W. C. Fieldsiana: his
own script (not just the story but the actual screenplay), his favorite
director (ex-Keystone Kop Eddie Cline, whom he’d brought in to do his scenes in
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man
after George Marshall, a first-rate comic director for Bob Hope, had proved
unable or unwilling to fit his work into the Fields ethos), and a land in which not only Fields’ own character
but virtually everyone in the
movie had an elaborate cognomen — Charles declared that “Fields was the best
nomenclator since Dickens,” and while he seemed more interested in getting a
rise out of me for using the word “nomenclator,” the comparison is apt since
Dickens was Fields’ favorite writer and Fields was superb as Mr. Micawber in
the 1935 MGM film of David Copperfield. (One of Fields’ great unrealized ambitions was to star in an
adaptation of The Pickwick Papers,
though to my mind the tragically
unmade Fields movie was one in which he would have played Shakespeare’s
Falstaff.)
The plot of The Bank Dick,
to the extent it has one, consists of Egbert Sousé’s more-or-less drunken
ramblings around Lompoc, during which he stumbles into Mackley Q. Greene
(future Captain America Dick Purcell), production manager for a movie company
shooting a one-reeler on location in Lompoc. When the official director, A.
Pismo Clam (played by fabled movie drunk Jack Norton), goes on a bender after
he gets a dear-John letter from his wife, Our Hero volunteers to take over and
boasts, “In the old Sennett days, I used to direct Fatty Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the
rest of ‘em.” Eddie Cline had co-directed Keaton in several early films,
including Sherlock, Jr. (from
which he “borrowed” a great stunt gag in which a motorcycle cop drives through
a trench filled with diggers, upends them out of the trench and ends up
gripping the handlebars of his bike without the rest of it — this bit appears
in The Bank Dick as part of the
vertiginous final car-chase scene) and Fields himself had worked for Sennett,
but well past Sennett’s prime in a series of early-1930’s sound two-reelers (The
Dentist, The Pharmacist, The Barber Shop
and the awesome vest-pocket masterpiece The Fatal Glass of Beer). Sousé starts dictating a script which the studio
stenographers take down, though ultimately a clash with his family literally knocks him out of his director’s chair (for some
reason it’s on rockers) and Clam re-takes over the production. Then a couple of
bank robbers played by Al Hill and George Moran try to hold up the Skinner bank
— there’s some confusion as to their character names (the credits list Hill as
playing “Filthy McNasty” — a name Horace Silver later appropriated as the title
of one of his jazz originals — and Moran as “Cozy Cochran,” but in the actual
dialogue Hill is called “Repulsive Rogan” and Moran “Loudmouth McNasty” — and
Sousé sits down on a bus bench under which Moran’s character has just fallen
unconscious. Sousé is given credit for catching and incapacitating the man —
and naturally he exaggerates the life-threatening peril he was in, saying the
man held an “assegai” on him, a long knife which takes on broad-sword
dimensions and grows with each of his retellings — and he’s rewarded by bank
president Skinner (Pierre Watkin) with a job as the bank’s on-site security
person — “a bank dick,” Skinner
helpfully explains. Sousé tells his daughter’s boyfriend Og that he’ll come in
disguise and Og is supposed to wave to him if he recognizes him — Og
demonstrates the wave and it’s such a Gay hand gesture Sousé snarls, “Not so
obvious” (yet another one of those weirdly homoerotic gags Fields sometimes
threw into his movies — the most famous one is in International House, when Franklin Pangborn tells him “Wu-Hu” to inform
him where he is — Wu-Hu, China — and Fields looks down at the flower in his
lapel, throws it away and says, “Don’t let the posy fool ya’”) — though when Og
does give him the wave Sousé
can’t for the life of him remember why. On his first day as “bank dick” Sousé
collars an obnoxious kid with a toy pistol, and when the kid’s mom takes
umbrage Sousé asks, “Is his gun loaded?” “No,” mom replies, “but I think you are!”
Then an obvious con artist named J.
Frothingham Waterbury (Russell Hicks) comes into the bank looking for a buyer
for his 5,000 shares in beefsteak mines, and of course Sousé falls for it; he
recommends that Og buy the shares and “borrow” the $500 from his teller drawer
to pay for them. Both figure the money won’t be missed until the bank pays Og
his bonus four days later, but they don’t reckon with the sudden arrival of
bank examiner J. Pinkerton Snoopington (Franklin Pangborn, who instead of his
usual “pansy” cliché is a character of Javert-like singlemindedness and obsession;
it’s probably his best performance ever), who shows up with an imperious manner
and a determination to examine the bank books. Og expresses deathly fear in
that peculiarly baby-ish way Grady Sutton expresses such emotions, and Sousé
takes it upon himself to get Snoopington incapacitated (he takes him to the
Black Pussy [Cat] Café and asks Joe, “Has Michael Finn been in today?” “No, but
he will be,” Joe answers, signaling that he’s received the message that he’s
supposed to serve the bank examiner a drugged drink) and look after him in the
New Old Lompoc House hotel, but Snoopington has too much of a sense of duty to
be deterred. When he shows up at the bank with pince-nez to look at the books,
and he confesses that he’s blind without his glasses, Sousé manages to get him
to drop them to the floor, then crushes them under his foot. No matter, says
Snoopington; he opens his attaché case and he has at least four spare pair.
While all this is happening the local newspaper, the Lompoc
Picayune-Intelligencer (it looks like
Fields looked around for the two silliest names for real newspapers he could
find and jammed them together), reports that the beefsteak mines have proved a
bonanza for their lucky owners — a plot twist that in a modern story would be
called “magical realism — and con-man Waterbury tries to get Og to sell him
back the shares, only Sousé reads the newspaper story in time to stop him. Then
Repulsive Rogan returns for a second crack at robbing the bank and commandeers
Sousé’s car and Sousé himself as his getaway driver. The cops give chase and
the cars drive through dirt roads and farms until Sousé gets the bad guy stuck
on the edge of a cliff. He gets the reward for Repulsive Rogan’s capture as
well as a movie contract to buy the rights to the story he outlined earlier and
direct the film himself, and the final scene shows Sousé and his family in a
larger, better appointed house with decent wallpaper instead of the floral
horror they started out with, and with the trumpeter who announces their abode
with “Home, Sweet Home” at least playing it in tune (a clever touch). A butler
gives him a hat and a cane as he leaves for the final fade-out.
The
Bank Dick remains a comedy classic,
savagely funny mainly due to Fields’ relentlessness, his ability to create a
multi-faceted comic character from which he can spin off a wild set of gags and
plot circumstances to set them up. Though the film is disjointed (virtually all
Fields’ films are) and some of the plot points are improbable, to say the least
(the bit about the beefsteak mines turning out to be a bonanza seems Fields’
own tongue-in-cheek satire on how normal moviemakers relied on nearly as
improbable gimmicks to make their leads successful and bring about a happy
ending), we don’t have the sensation, as we do in too many modern so-called
“comedies,” that the authors are willing to do anything to get a laugh, character consistency be damned. The
Bank Dick is 200-proof W. C. Fields, a
jaundiced view of the world, and his follow-up, Never Give a Sucker
an Even Break, is even wilder — in that one
Fields is a filmmaker and Franklin Pangborn is his producer, to whom he’s
outlining his new story and it’s deliberately kept unclear how much of what
we’re watching is “real” and how much is the plot of Fields’ proposed movie.
(W. C. Fields, ancestor of Fellini.) Though Fields was losing his ability
physically to sustain a leading role — comparing his swollen, bloated
appearance here to what he looked like in Cline’s Million Dollar Legs eight years earlier (in which Fields, though hefty
and with the famous bulbous nose, was fit enough he could play a super-athlete
and get away with it) is sad — his comic instincts were as sure as ever and he
created a rich, personal and very
funny comic masterpiece.
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Westinghouse Studio One: “Ten Thousand Horses Singing” (CBS-TV, aired March 3, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the next show in sequence in the Turner Classic Movies boxed set James Dean: The Television Legacy — “Ten Thousand Horses Singing,” an episode of the anthology series Westinghouse Studio One on CBS first aired March 3, 1952 and the first show in the box after Dean moved to New York after his first (and spectacularly unsuccessful) attempt to make it in Hollywood (where he got to do the TV shows Hill Number One and a guest shot on an episode of the sitcom Trouble with Father as well as two movies, Sailor Beware with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and Douglas Sirk’s Has Anybody Seen My Gal? with Rock Hudson, with whom Dean would cross paths later). He was in New York to attend Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio and learn the techniques of Method acting, but to support himself he made himself available to do live TV. The show was originally called Studio One in Hollywood but by 1952 it was firmly housed in New York, like most TV production then, and the TV business had slavishly copied the usual operation of the radio industry that had given it birth: they telecast their shows “live,” which usually meant a very simple production, a few cheap-looking sets that often shook when the characters had to open a door to make an entrance (that happens a couple of times here), a script that could take place in a minimum of interior locations, and seat-of-the-pants performances by the harried actors who were all too aware that if they made a mistake it would be broadcast all over the country — or at least all over the East Coast. In order to air the programs on the West Coast the networks would make something called a “kinescope,” which simply meant mounting a movie camera in front of a TV monitor and filming the result. The film was developed and flown across the country so the show could be seen on the West Coast three hours later — which also meant that West Coast viewers got a wretched-looking version of what East Coast viewers had seen. This continued to be the way virtually all scripted TV was done until Desi Arnaz insisted on doing I Love Lucy on film so the show would look good no matter where in the country you watched it — and also so he and Lucille Ball could keep their home in Hollywood instead of having to move to New York — and when the bigwigs at CBS told him, “But we want you to do it live because we think Lucy does best in front of a live audience,” Desi said, “Fine. We’ll film it in front of a live audience.”
“Ten Thousand Horses Singing” isn’t much of a James Dean item — he’s listed on imdb.com as playing a bellboy in the hotel in which the early scenes occur, but our only glimpse of him is inside a hotel elevator and he doesn’t have any lines — but it’s an oddly compelling show anyway. The show began as a story by Robert Carson that was adapted into a film by future Ben-Hur writer Karl Tunberg for a Universal-International film called You Gotta Stay Happy, made in 1948 and starring Joan Fontaine and James Stewart in a tale of a spoiled heiress who’s walked out on five previous fiancés but finally marries one, only to realize within a few hours of her wedding that she’s made a mistake. Stewart plays an independent airline pilot who helps her to escape and, of course, falls in love with her at the end. Apparently the producers of Studio One had a contract with Universal to rework some of their old movies as TV shows, because the week before “Ten Thousand Horses Singing” aired they’d done an adaptation of Max Ophuls’ 1948 classic Letter From an Unknown Woman, also originally starring Joan Fontaine. (The week after they would do a show based on Henry James’ novel The Wings of the Dove, starring Charlton Heston.) In the TV version a surprisingly good actress named Catherine McLeod plays the heiress, D. D. Dillward, and John Forsythe plays the pilot, Merv Payne, whose air transport service is licensed to carry only freight, not passengers. That doesn’t stop D. D. from bulling her way onto the plane after a nasty confrontation with her husband of several hours, Dick Hebert (George Ives) — who seems to be a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Merv’s, since they greet each other by name before Dick learns that when D. D. walked out on him (after a surprisingly violent confrontation for an early TV show in which she tries to escape his room and he literally grabs her and throws her back in, a scene which looked like it was done with a life-size but lightweight dummy) she ended up with Merv and they look altar-bound themselves by the end.
Along the way the plane picks up another passenger, Mr. Caslon (Grady Sutton), who at first tries to get on with his wife, is told they’re not taking anybody, but eventually bullies his way on without his wife and turns out to be an embezzler who’s stolen $50,000 but is now having guilt feelings and decides to turn himself in. (So for the second night in a row Charles and I were not only watching a film with Grady Sutton, but one in which he played an embezzler!) It all ends more or less happily, with the plane getting stranded on a farm in Oklahoma and the farmer agreeing to pull it out again with a tractor, and at the end D. D. buys out the other pilots in Merv’s operation, pays off all the losses from the cargo that got ruined (a llama that was supposed to go to a circus got sick, some frozen salmon got spoiled when the ice protecting it melted, and a corpse they were transporting in a coffin didn’t get there on time so the funeral was canceled) and buys Merv a new Lockheed Constellation plane, instantly recognizable to anyone who was around then by its three, count ’em, three tail fins. (Given that a decade after this film was made the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the Lockheed Constellation grounded permanently because of the high number of accidents it was involved in, this was a pretty nasty gift horse, but no one knew that’s how it would turn out in 1952.) Though marred by the usual limitations of live TV — whenever the characters had to go outside they had to be filmed in advance, and the cut-ins of these sequences as well as stock footage of New York City, where the story begins, and other needed locales are obvious and even tackier in quality than the main footage — “Ten Thousand Horses Singing” (a title unexplained until the very end — it’s the combined horsepower of the Constellation’s four engines) is an appealing, if rather quirky, entertainment … though it’s also impossible to watch this in a boxed set dedicated to James Dean and not wonder what it might have been like with Dean playing Forsythe’s role!
Last night Charles and I watched the next show in sequence in the Turner Classic Movies boxed set James Dean: The Television Legacy — “Ten Thousand Horses Singing,” an episode of the anthology series Westinghouse Studio One on CBS first aired March 3, 1952 and the first show in the box after Dean moved to New York after his first (and spectacularly unsuccessful) attempt to make it in Hollywood (where he got to do the TV shows Hill Number One and a guest shot on an episode of the sitcom Trouble with Father as well as two movies, Sailor Beware with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and Douglas Sirk’s Has Anybody Seen My Gal? with Rock Hudson, with whom Dean would cross paths later). He was in New York to attend Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio and learn the techniques of Method acting, but to support himself he made himself available to do live TV. The show was originally called Studio One in Hollywood but by 1952 it was firmly housed in New York, like most TV production then, and the TV business had slavishly copied the usual operation of the radio industry that had given it birth: they telecast their shows “live,” which usually meant a very simple production, a few cheap-looking sets that often shook when the characters had to open a door to make an entrance (that happens a couple of times here), a script that could take place in a minimum of interior locations, and seat-of-the-pants performances by the harried actors who were all too aware that if they made a mistake it would be broadcast all over the country — or at least all over the East Coast. In order to air the programs on the West Coast the networks would make something called a “kinescope,” which simply meant mounting a movie camera in front of a TV monitor and filming the result. The film was developed and flown across the country so the show could be seen on the West Coast three hours later — which also meant that West Coast viewers got a wretched-looking version of what East Coast viewers had seen. This continued to be the way virtually all scripted TV was done until Desi Arnaz insisted on doing I Love Lucy on film so the show would look good no matter where in the country you watched it — and also so he and Lucille Ball could keep their home in Hollywood instead of having to move to New York — and when the bigwigs at CBS told him, “But we want you to do it live because we think Lucy does best in front of a live audience,” Desi said, “Fine. We’ll film it in front of a live audience.”
“Ten Thousand Horses Singing” isn’t much of a James Dean item — he’s listed on imdb.com as playing a bellboy in the hotel in which the early scenes occur, but our only glimpse of him is inside a hotel elevator and he doesn’t have any lines — but it’s an oddly compelling show anyway. The show began as a story by Robert Carson that was adapted into a film by future Ben-Hur writer Karl Tunberg for a Universal-International film called You Gotta Stay Happy, made in 1948 and starring Joan Fontaine and James Stewart in a tale of a spoiled heiress who’s walked out on five previous fiancés but finally marries one, only to realize within a few hours of her wedding that she’s made a mistake. Stewart plays an independent airline pilot who helps her to escape and, of course, falls in love with her at the end. Apparently the producers of Studio One had a contract with Universal to rework some of their old movies as TV shows, because the week before “Ten Thousand Horses Singing” aired they’d done an adaptation of Max Ophuls’ 1948 classic Letter From an Unknown Woman, also originally starring Joan Fontaine. (The week after they would do a show based on Henry James’ novel The Wings of the Dove, starring Charlton Heston.) In the TV version a surprisingly good actress named Catherine McLeod plays the heiress, D. D. Dillward, and John Forsythe plays the pilot, Merv Payne, whose air transport service is licensed to carry only freight, not passengers. That doesn’t stop D. D. from bulling her way onto the plane after a nasty confrontation with her husband of several hours, Dick Hebert (George Ives) — who seems to be a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Merv’s, since they greet each other by name before Dick learns that when D. D. walked out on him (after a surprisingly violent confrontation for an early TV show in which she tries to escape his room and he literally grabs her and throws her back in, a scene which looked like it was done with a life-size but lightweight dummy) she ended up with Merv and they look altar-bound themselves by the end.
Along the way the plane picks up another passenger, Mr. Caslon (Grady Sutton), who at first tries to get on with his wife, is told they’re not taking anybody, but eventually bullies his way on without his wife and turns out to be an embezzler who’s stolen $50,000 but is now having guilt feelings and decides to turn himself in. (So for the second night in a row Charles and I were not only watching a film with Grady Sutton, but one in which he played an embezzler!) It all ends more or less happily, with the plane getting stranded on a farm in Oklahoma and the farmer agreeing to pull it out again with a tractor, and at the end D. D. buys out the other pilots in Merv’s operation, pays off all the losses from the cargo that got ruined (a llama that was supposed to go to a circus got sick, some frozen salmon got spoiled when the ice protecting it melted, and a corpse they were transporting in a coffin didn’t get there on time so the funeral was canceled) and buys Merv a new Lockheed Constellation plane, instantly recognizable to anyone who was around then by its three, count ’em, three tail fins. (Given that a decade after this film was made the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the Lockheed Constellation grounded permanently because of the high number of accidents it was involved in, this was a pretty nasty gift horse, but no one knew that’s how it would turn out in 1952.) Though marred by the usual limitations of live TV — whenever the characters had to go outside they had to be filmed in advance, and the cut-ins of these sequences as well as stock footage of New York City, where the story begins, and other needed locales are obvious and even tackier in quality than the main footage — “Ten Thousand Horses Singing” (a title unexplained until the very end — it’s the combined horsepower of the Constellation’s four engines) is an appealing, if rather quirky, entertainment … though it’s also impossible to watch this in a boxed set dedicated to James Dean and not wonder what it might have been like with Dean playing Forsythe’s role!
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Midnight Alibi (Warner Bros. as “First National,” 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Midnight Alibi, which I recorded from Turner Classic Movies last July as one of a run of quirky “B” movies they were showing from 3 a.m. on (one thing I miss about no longer being able to record since Cox’s damnable “all-digital” conversion is the long runs of “B”’s from the classic era TCM generally shows in the wee hours), this time as a birthday tribute to actor-turned-director Vincent Sherman. From the title I had guessed Midnight Alibi would be a gangster movie, which it was — sort of — though the credits proclaimed that it was based on a story called “The Old Doll’s House” by Damon Runyon, and once the film started and we got to see the usual Runyon lowlifes Charles had the feeling we’d seen it before even though we hadn’t. (Runyon was a good writer but he did tend to write the same stories over and over, which is why the most successful adaptation of him was the 1950 musical Guys and Dolls, which blended several Runyon tales and characters instead of basing itself on just one.) The central character is gambler Lance McGowan (Richard Barthelmess), who as the film opens is just returning on an ocean liner from a trip to Europe. While on board he romanced Joan Morley (Ann Dvorak, acting even more than usual like the beta version of Bette Davis) and fell in love with her, but there’s a problem with their relationship: she’s the sister of Angie Morley (Robert Barrat) — that’s right, a boy named “Angie”; Charles suggested it could be short for “Angelo” but a first name like “Angelo” hardly seems to go with a last name like “Morley” (unless we’re supposed to think the name was originally “Mortellini” or something and his family “Anglicized” it) — and while Lance has been away Angie has completely taken over the illegal gambling business in New York (we know the setting is New York because at the film’s beginning we saw a tacky-looking matte painting of the New York skyline) and managed to stay in business despite the major hit in organized crime’s income following the repeal of Prohibition.
We see Lance at work in one of Angie’s casinos, shooting craps and hiding the dice under his hat so no one can see what he’s thrown and they have to take his word for it when he says he’s made his point. Lance’s attempts to romance Joan are continually being frustrated by the attempt of Angie’s gangsters to kill him, and during one hair’s-breadth escape he flees into the supposedly “haunted” house near Angie’s Hummingbird Club. Lance makes a joke about Boris Karloff living there — it’s interesting that just three years after Frankenstein, a screenwriter at another studio (Warren Duff, adapting Runyon’s story and getting quite a few Runyonesque wisecracks into the film) was already invoking Karloff’s name as a symbol of menace. The house is actually occupied by Abigail Ardsley (Helen Lowell), an elderly woman who inherited a fortune from her father, who got the bright idea of buying up as many corner lots in New York as he could at a time when most people regarded them as worthless. Abigail tells Lance it has been a long time since anyone visited her at home — though she’s not as reclusive or as deranged as Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, she was similarly traumatized as a young woman by the loss of her great love, though instead of falling in love with a man who stood her up at the altar she fell in love with a clerk in her dad’s office, and her dad not only threw her boyfriend out of the house but ultimately shot him dead for trespassing. (Presumably, as a well-connected 1-percenter in the Gilded Age, he escaped legal jeopardy.) We learn all this in a flashback to Abigail’s younger days, in which the youthful Abigail is played by Helen Chandler from Dracula and her clerk-suitor, Robert Anders, is Richard Barthelmess in a dual role, equipped with a moustache and with all the greasy kid stuff scraped out of his hair so for once Barthelmess looks like a normal human being instead of (as S. J. Perelman once joked about him) someone with Duco cement lacquered to his scalp.
When the film returns to the 1934 present, Lance accepts an invitation from Angie to visit him in his office at the Hummingbird to settle their differences, and much to the consternation of Lance’s own gang members he refuses to bring a gun — only one of his henchmen follows him into Angie’s office and, when Angie pulls a gun on Lance, the guy from Lance’s gang draws his own gun and shoots Angie dead. Then the actual killer gets himself killed in an accident and Lance is arrested and put on trial for the crime, courtesy of a “reform” administration anxious to use Lance’s case to set an example and let the citizens of New York know that the age of gangsterism has ended with Prohibition. All seems to be going well for the prosecution — none of Lance’s former friends in Damon Runyon’s underworld are willing to risk the wrath of the city government by putting up money to bail him out, so he has to stay in jail until his trial, and the prosecution puts up a strong case until at the very last minute Abigail Ardsley emerges from her decades of seclusion and demands to testify. (One of the biggest things the movies get wrong about courtroom procedure is the whole idea of the “surprise witness.” In real trials, each side must provide a list of all the witnesses they intend to call and make it available to the other side before the trial begins; if they want to call someone who isn’t on the list they have to petition the judge, and they have to have a pretty damned good reason to convince a judge to let them put on the so-called “surprise witness.”) Since the prosecution already established that the murder occurred at midnight, Lance’s defense attorney asks what Abigail was doing when the clock in her home was at midnight, and she said Lance was with her — thus providing him the titular “midnight alibi.”
Lance’s attorney gets the charges against him dismissed by the judge, and Lance is released, he and Joan get together at last, and in a tag scene Abigail reveals that the reason she could testify that he was there when her clock was at midnight without committing perjury was that her late boyfriend was killed at midnight lo those many years ago, and she responded by stopping every clock in her house at midnight — though there’s a final shot of her restarting her big grandfather clock at last once Lance and Joan are safely paired up. Though hardly a great movie, Midnight Alibi is a solidly entertaining one with a certain charm that makes up for the plot’s improbabilities. TCM showed it as part of a birthday tribute to actor-turned-director Vincent Sherman, but this early in 1934 he’s only an actor, playing the minor part of a dealer at Angie’s casino and just appearing in one scene. The actual director of Midnight Alibi is Alan Crosland, who in 1926 and 1927 had been one of Warner Bros.’ top directors, helming the first Vitaphone music-accompanied film, the John Barrymore Don Juan, as well as the generally recognized “first talkie,” The Jazz Singer. Then his star had fallen from grace on the Warners lot until by 1934 he was getting “B” assignments like this and Warren William’s first film as Perry Mason, The Case of the Howling Dog — but Crosland was still a highly talented filmmaker and there are some striking and sometimes disorienting camera angles here. When I looked this film up on imdb.com I noticed a review by someone variously identified as “gerrytwo” and “gerrythree” from New York, who claimed that after Warner Bros. bought the First National company in 1928 — First National had been formed in 1918 by a group of independent theatre owners who were worried that Adolph Zukor’s Paramount studio was going to freeze them out by releasing their star product only to Paramount theatres, so they put together their own resources, formed a studio and hired the two biggest stars in the business, Mary Pickford (from Paramount) and Charlie Chaplin (from Mutual) — they continued to run it as at least a nominally independent company with Hal Wallis as studio head, while Darryl F. Zanuck ran Warner Bros. under Jack Warner’s supervision.
Then came the Depression, and by 1933 most of the studios were under court-ordered receivership under what was then called Chapter 77B of the federal bankruptcy law (today it’s Chapter 11), and to forestall the studios going out of business altogether Louis B. Mayer of MGM (ironically the one studio that hadn’t had to declare bankruptcy, and was even paying dividends to its shareholders) concocted a plan that everybody in the movie business take a 50 percent pay cut for the duration of the crisis. Needless to say, the studio workers, particularly the ones on the lower end of the income scale who weren’t making anything like star salaries, went ballistic — instead of forestalling unionization of the movie business, the plan actually accelerated it — and Zanuck angrily quit Warner Bros. when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was in charge of Mayer’s plan, refused to allow him to restore Warners’ workers to full salary when he had promised them he would. Jack Warner’s response was to fire a lot of the people on the lot who had supported Zanuck or were working with the unions to organize the studio — though, significantly, he did not drop James Cagney from his contract list even though Cagney was one of the 12 founding members of the Screen Actors’ Guild and was as tough off screen as he was on when the rights of his fellow actors, including character actors and bit players, were concerned. Among the people he fired were Alan Crosland and Richard Barthelmess, whom Jack Warner had inherited from First National — who in 1927 had signed him to a contract guaranteeing him $250,000 per film and giving him story and script approval as well as powers nearly amounting to being an independent producer. Midnight Alibi, a 58-minute film, was Barthelmess’ last film under either the Warner Bros. or First National banner (which were actually used pretty interchangeably — the 1934 Al Jolson/Dick Powell musical Wonder Bar was billed as a First National production on its own credits but as a Warner Bros. production on its trailer), and afterwards he cycled through the cheaper studios playing minor parts until he bade farewell to the screen as the second male lead in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings for Columbia in 1939. What was ironic about gerry-whatever’s defense of Barthelmess was that throughout Midnight Alibi I had been thinking what a better film it would have been if Jack Warner had given it to Cagney! Still, it’s an engaging movie and a nice blend of gangster movie and soap opera in the typical Damon Runyon style.
The film was Midnight Alibi, which I recorded from Turner Classic Movies last July as one of a run of quirky “B” movies they were showing from 3 a.m. on (one thing I miss about no longer being able to record since Cox’s damnable “all-digital” conversion is the long runs of “B”’s from the classic era TCM generally shows in the wee hours), this time as a birthday tribute to actor-turned-director Vincent Sherman. From the title I had guessed Midnight Alibi would be a gangster movie, which it was — sort of — though the credits proclaimed that it was based on a story called “The Old Doll’s House” by Damon Runyon, and once the film started and we got to see the usual Runyon lowlifes Charles had the feeling we’d seen it before even though we hadn’t. (Runyon was a good writer but he did tend to write the same stories over and over, which is why the most successful adaptation of him was the 1950 musical Guys and Dolls, which blended several Runyon tales and characters instead of basing itself on just one.) The central character is gambler Lance McGowan (Richard Barthelmess), who as the film opens is just returning on an ocean liner from a trip to Europe. While on board he romanced Joan Morley (Ann Dvorak, acting even more than usual like the beta version of Bette Davis) and fell in love with her, but there’s a problem with their relationship: she’s the sister of Angie Morley (Robert Barrat) — that’s right, a boy named “Angie”; Charles suggested it could be short for “Angelo” but a first name like “Angelo” hardly seems to go with a last name like “Morley” (unless we’re supposed to think the name was originally “Mortellini” or something and his family “Anglicized” it) — and while Lance has been away Angie has completely taken over the illegal gambling business in New York (we know the setting is New York because at the film’s beginning we saw a tacky-looking matte painting of the New York skyline) and managed to stay in business despite the major hit in organized crime’s income following the repeal of Prohibition.
We see Lance at work in one of Angie’s casinos, shooting craps and hiding the dice under his hat so no one can see what he’s thrown and they have to take his word for it when he says he’s made his point. Lance’s attempts to romance Joan are continually being frustrated by the attempt of Angie’s gangsters to kill him, and during one hair’s-breadth escape he flees into the supposedly “haunted” house near Angie’s Hummingbird Club. Lance makes a joke about Boris Karloff living there — it’s interesting that just three years after Frankenstein, a screenwriter at another studio (Warren Duff, adapting Runyon’s story and getting quite a few Runyonesque wisecracks into the film) was already invoking Karloff’s name as a symbol of menace. The house is actually occupied by Abigail Ardsley (Helen Lowell), an elderly woman who inherited a fortune from her father, who got the bright idea of buying up as many corner lots in New York as he could at a time when most people regarded them as worthless. Abigail tells Lance it has been a long time since anyone visited her at home — though she’s not as reclusive or as deranged as Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, she was similarly traumatized as a young woman by the loss of her great love, though instead of falling in love with a man who stood her up at the altar she fell in love with a clerk in her dad’s office, and her dad not only threw her boyfriend out of the house but ultimately shot him dead for trespassing. (Presumably, as a well-connected 1-percenter in the Gilded Age, he escaped legal jeopardy.) We learn all this in a flashback to Abigail’s younger days, in which the youthful Abigail is played by Helen Chandler from Dracula and her clerk-suitor, Robert Anders, is Richard Barthelmess in a dual role, equipped with a moustache and with all the greasy kid stuff scraped out of his hair so for once Barthelmess looks like a normal human being instead of (as S. J. Perelman once joked about him) someone with Duco cement lacquered to his scalp.
When the film returns to the 1934 present, Lance accepts an invitation from Angie to visit him in his office at the Hummingbird to settle their differences, and much to the consternation of Lance’s own gang members he refuses to bring a gun — only one of his henchmen follows him into Angie’s office and, when Angie pulls a gun on Lance, the guy from Lance’s gang draws his own gun and shoots Angie dead. Then the actual killer gets himself killed in an accident and Lance is arrested and put on trial for the crime, courtesy of a “reform” administration anxious to use Lance’s case to set an example and let the citizens of New York know that the age of gangsterism has ended with Prohibition. All seems to be going well for the prosecution — none of Lance’s former friends in Damon Runyon’s underworld are willing to risk the wrath of the city government by putting up money to bail him out, so he has to stay in jail until his trial, and the prosecution puts up a strong case until at the very last minute Abigail Ardsley emerges from her decades of seclusion and demands to testify. (One of the biggest things the movies get wrong about courtroom procedure is the whole idea of the “surprise witness.” In real trials, each side must provide a list of all the witnesses they intend to call and make it available to the other side before the trial begins; if they want to call someone who isn’t on the list they have to petition the judge, and they have to have a pretty damned good reason to convince a judge to let them put on the so-called “surprise witness.”) Since the prosecution already established that the murder occurred at midnight, Lance’s defense attorney asks what Abigail was doing when the clock in her home was at midnight, and she said Lance was with her — thus providing him the titular “midnight alibi.”
Lance’s attorney gets the charges against him dismissed by the judge, and Lance is released, he and Joan get together at last, and in a tag scene Abigail reveals that the reason she could testify that he was there when her clock was at midnight without committing perjury was that her late boyfriend was killed at midnight lo those many years ago, and she responded by stopping every clock in her house at midnight — though there’s a final shot of her restarting her big grandfather clock at last once Lance and Joan are safely paired up. Though hardly a great movie, Midnight Alibi is a solidly entertaining one with a certain charm that makes up for the plot’s improbabilities. TCM showed it as part of a birthday tribute to actor-turned-director Vincent Sherman, but this early in 1934 he’s only an actor, playing the minor part of a dealer at Angie’s casino and just appearing in one scene. The actual director of Midnight Alibi is Alan Crosland, who in 1926 and 1927 had been one of Warner Bros.’ top directors, helming the first Vitaphone music-accompanied film, the John Barrymore Don Juan, as well as the generally recognized “first talkie,” The Jazz Singer. Then his star had fallen from grace on the Warners lot until by 1934 he was getting “B” assignments like this and Warren William’s first film as Perry Mason, The Case of the Howling Dog — but Crosland was still a highly talented filmmaker and there are some striking and sometimes disorienting camera angles here. When I looked this film up on imdb.com I noticed a review by someone variously identified as “gerrytwo” and “gerrythree” from New York, who claimed that after Warner Bros. bought the First National company in 1928 — First National had been formed in 1918 by a group of independent theatre owners who were worried that Adolph Zukor’s Paramount studio was going to freeze them out by releasing their star product only to Paramount theatres, so they put together their own resources, formed a studio and hired the two biggest stars in the business, Mary Pickford (from Paramount) and Charlie Chaplin (from Mutual) — they continued to run it as at least a nominally independent company with Hal Wallis as studio head, while Darryl F. Zanuck ran Warner Bros. under Jack Warner’s supervision.
Then came the Depression, and by 1933 most of the studios were under court-ordered receivership under what was then called Chapter 77B of the federal bankruptcy law (today it’s Chapter 11), and to forestall the studios going out of business altogether Louis B. Mayer of MGM (ironically the one studio that hadn’t had to declare bankruptcy, and was even paying dividends to its shareholders) concocted a plan that everybody in the movie business take a 50 percent pay cut for the duration of the crisis. Needless to say, the studio workers, particularly the ones on the lower end of the income scale who weren’t making anything like star salaries, went ballistic — instead of forestalling unionization of the movie business, the plan actually accelerated it — and Zanuck angrily quit Warner Bros. when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was in charge of Mayer’s plan, refused to allow him to restore Warners’ workers to full salary when he had promised them he would. Jack Warner’s response was to fire a lot of the people on the lot who had supported Zanuck or were working with the unions to organize the studio — though, significantly, he did not drop James Cagney from his contract list even though Cagney was one of the 12 founding members of the Screen Actors’ Guild and was as tough off screen as he was on when the rights of his fellow actors, including character actors and bit players, were concerned. Among the people he fired were Alan Crosland and Richard Barthelmess, whom Jack Warner had inherited from First National — who in 1927 had signed him to a contract guaranteeing him $250,000 per film and giving him story and script approval as well as powers nearly amounting to being an independent producer. Midnight Alibi, a 58-minute film, was Barthelmess’ last film under either the Warner Bros. or First National banner (which were actually used pretty interchangeably — the 1934 Al Jolson/Dick Powell musical Wonder Bar was billed as a First National production on its own credits but as a Warner Bros. production on its trailer), and afterwards he cycled through the cheaper studios playing minor parts until he bade farewell to the screen as the second male lead in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings for Columbia in 1939. What was ironic about gerry-whatever’s defense of Barthelmess was that throughout Midnight Alibi I had been thinking what a better film it would have been if Jack Warner had given it to Cagney! Still, it’s an engaging movie and a nice blend of gangster movie and soap opera in the typical Damon Runyon style.
Monday, April 4, 2016
51st Annual American Country Music Awards (Dick Clark Productions/CBS-TV, aired April 3, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was the 51st annual American Country Music Awards, run on CBS from 8 to 11 p.m. and telecast from that legendary hotbed of country music, Las Vegas. It was hosted by Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley (the latter’s first name is usually pronounced “Dirks,” though one woman with an especially thick accent called him “Darks”!), and was pretty much par for the course for a “country-music” show these days. I’ve noted before in these pages that most of what passes for country music today is the sound that in the 1970’s was generally called “Southern rock” — the country singers performing now clearly owe a lot more to bands like the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Z. Z. Top (one of whose members actually guest-starred during one performance — more on that later) than to Jimmie Rodgers (either one), Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. About the only Williams reference all night was that the final award, Entertainer of the Year, was presented by Tom Hiddleston, who’s just starred in a new movie about him (and though he’s British and his best-known previous role was as Loki in the Thor movies, the resemblance is striking: he certainly looks more like Hank Williams than George Hamilton did!). Bryan and Bentley did a nice opening number called “Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day” — I was particularly struck by the electric banjo one of the musicians was playing (I hadn’t realized there was such a thing as an electric banjo!) and it was a good way to kick off a show that was appealing overall despite two flaws that afflict a lot of country-music presentations these days: a sameness in the material and the vocal styles, and an overdose of testosterone. Maybe I was a bit sensitive about this after having just seen the marvelous PBS American Masters special on Loretta Lynn, but only five of the featured performers (Cam, Cole Swindell, Carrie Underwood, Kelsea Ballerini and Miranda Lambert) were female, and as much fun as it is to watch all those guys in skin-tight jeans cavort as they sing about lost loves and tears in their beer (some things about country music haven’t changed), I’d have liked to hear more women. (There were some other female performers as duet partners and members of gender-mixed vocal groups, but even they were few and far between.)
This was also the first big country variety special since the breakup of Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert, and of course there was a certain prurient curiosity in how they’d handle that. Shelton sang “Keep Playing the Songs,” a typical she-left-me-for-another-guy-so-I’m-gonna-get-drunk country breakup song, and though I think he was just writing Clichéd Country Lyric #103 it was hard not to hear the song as autobiographical. Lambert appeared two hours later and, instead of doing one of her own songs, covered Z. Z. Top’s sex anthem “Tush” (of course when a woman sings “I’m just looking for some tush” it has a quite different affect than it does from a man!) with one of the Z. Z. Toppers in her band (you could tell because of their famous rabbi-like beards) along with Keith Urban, who’d played banjo (acoustic, not electric) for his own song “Wasted Time” (one of the better pieces of material all night) but uncorked a powerful electric-guitar solo on “Tush.” There was a song called “Stand Back” by a group called Old Dominion (one of those oddball names, like Lady Antebellum, reflecting the Confederate nostalgia indulged in by a lot of the country audience — a recent poll showed that 48 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters believe it was a bad thing that the South lost the U.S. Civil War) and then a great song by Kenny Chesney, a performer I usually don’t care for, called “Noise” which was basically country-punk — speed it up and add edgier guitars and a screeching vocal, and it would be a punk song, especially since its subject (the sheer volume of messages thrown at us by the modern media and the futility of getting a little peace and quiet amidst all the “noise” from the media) is surprisingly socially-conscious and a far cry from the usual concerns of country music. Then there was a duet between Chris Young and a woman (in a skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuit) whose name was something like Kate Cassidy on a song called “Think of You,” and after that Eric Church’s “A Record Year,” “record” as in vinyl, which incorporated a D.J. mixing samples of David Bowie, Scott Weiland, “Lemmy” from Mötorhead and Glenn Frey as a tribute to those recently deceased artists. After that Dierks Bentley did an O.K. ballad called “Somewhere on the Beach,” and then came one of the best songs of the evening: “Burning House” by Cam. Though I didn’t like the way the stage literally burned during her song — somebody thought it would be a good idea to illustrate the title by having giant jets of flame shoot up around her like Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre — she sang with such passion and sincerity, and the song itself was so lyrically complex instead of being a standard-issue country lament, I loved it anyway.
After that Jason Aldean came out with a song called “When the Lights Come On” — he won Entertainer of the Year, though the big winner in the other categories was Chris Stapleton, an unlikely country star because he’s big and homely (think “Meat Loaf goes country” and you’ve got him) and he started as a songwriter — indeed, there was a funny bit early in the program in which various artists claimed that they had given him his first big break by recording one of his songs and/or using him as a duet partner — and then a bit of a disappointment because they piped in Garth Brooks from the middle of a concert he was doing in Ottawa, Canada, but all they had him do was present the Album of the Year award. Next up were Cole Swindell with “You Should Be Here” (not as searing — literally or figuratively — as Cam’s performance, but still nice) and Brett Eldredge with “Drunk on Your Love” (the title gives away that it’s yet another clichéd reference to alcohol, though this time at the beginning of a relationship instead of at its end), followed by Keith Urban’s “Wasted Time” (I usually find him rather bland but I loved that song) and “Stay All Night” by the group Little Big Town (for whom I have an affection if only because their breakthrough song was “Girl Crush,” and it’s indeed the female singer telling us about her crush on another girl) with the neo-traditionalist jazz player Trombone Shorty trying to add to the song and, frankly, just getting in the way. After that there was a duet between Kelsea Ballerini and Nick Jonas on a couple of songs, “Love Me Like You Mean It” and “Lost Boy” — Ballerini was great but the ex-Jonas Brother just came out in the middle, played guitar and sang a virtually inaudible part that didn’t add much — and then Tim McGraw came out on stage for his big inspirational hit “Humble and Kind.” (From what I’ve heard about McGraw he’s about the last person on earth who should be singing about being humble and kind!) Then there was a nice ballad by Charles Kelley called “Lonely Girl,” and after that Carrie Underwood came on stage for a song called “Church Bells” in an overproduced staging that seemed like she was auditioning to join the Blue Man Group, but it was still a quite powerful piece of material from a performer I’d always thought of as talented but bland. After that Sam Hall came out for a song called “Make You Miss Me,” though after I’d fallen in lust with him at the Grammy Awards this was disappointing; he was dressed in baggy clothes and seated at a piano.
The next song was the Song of the Year winner, “Die a Happy Man” by Thomas Rhett (I think I have that name right!), which wasn’t that great a song (though it was nice and refreshingly free of breast-beating) but had the sound of what I thought at first was a pedal steel guitar. It wasn’t, but it was a lap guitar that gave the song that familiar “twang” which used to be one of the paradigmatic sounds of country music before the genre was taken over by Southern rock! Then Miranda Lambert sang her ode to the human rear end (particularly the male version thereof now that she’s, uh, “available” again), and after that came the big duet CBS had been hyping for weeks now: Dolly Parton and Katy Perry. Parton was there to receive the Tex Ritter award for her ghastly movie Coat of Many Colors — a touching story from her poverty-stricken childhood that made a great three-minute song and a lousy 90-minute movie (as I wrote in these pages when I saw the film, “I was expecting Coal Miner’s Daughter and I got The Waltons”) — and she and Perry did a medley of three songs that reflected three phases of Parton’s career: bluegrass (“Coat of Many Colors”), country (“Jolene”) and pop (“Nine to Five,” a reminder of the time Dolly Parton actually got to be in a great movie). The show lumbered to a close with only two more songs after that — “Confession” by Florida Georgia Line and “Fire Away” by Chris Stapleton (he is an O.K. performer rather than a truly great one, but after all those hot, sexy guys who look like their jeans have been appliquéd on Stapleton’s bear look was actually a refreshing change!) — and the presentation of Entertainer of the Year to Jason Aldean. Oddly, Stapleton wasn’t even nominated for Entertainer of the Year even though he was the big winner of the night in other categories — not that awards are the real business of an awards show anymore!
Last night’s “feature” was the 51st annual American Country Music Awards, run on CBS from 8 to 11 p.m. and telecast from that legendary hotbed of country music, Las Vegas. It was hosted by Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley (the latter’s first name is usually pronounced “Dirks,” though one woman with an especially thick accent called him “Darks”!), and was pretty much par for the course for a “country-music” show these days. I’ve noted before in these pages that most of what passes for country music today is the sound that in the 1970’s was generally called “Southern rock” — the country singers performing now clearly owe a lot more to bands like the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Z. Z. Top (one of whose members actually guest-starred during one performance — more on that later) than to Jimmie Rodgers (either one), Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. About the only Williams reference all night was that the final award, Entertainer of the Year, was presented by Tom Hiddleston, who’s just starred in a new movie about him (and though he’s British and his best-known previous role was as Loki in the Thor movies, the resemblance is striking: he certainly looks more like Hank Williams than George Hamilton did!). Bryan and Bentley did a nice opening number called “Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day” — I was particularly struck by the electric banjo one of the musicians was playing (I hadn’t realized there was such a thing as an electric banjo!) and it was a good way to kick off a show that was appealing overall despite two flaws that afflict a lot of country-music presentations these days: a sameness in the material and the vocal styles, and an overdose of testosterone. Maybe I was a bit sensitive about this after having just seen the marvelous PBS American Masters special on Loretta Lynn, but only five of the featured performers (Cam, Cole Swindell, Carrie Underwood, Kelsea Ballerini and Miranda Lambert) were female, and as much fun as it is to watch all those guys in skin-tight jeans cavort as they sing about lost loves and tears in their beer (some things about country music haven’t changed), I’d have liked to hear more women. (There were some other female performers as duet partners and members of gender-mixed vocal groups, but even they were few and far between.)
This was also the first big country variety special since the breakup of Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert, and of course there was a certain prurient curiosity in how they’d handle that. Shelton sang “Keep Playing the Songs,” a typical she-left-me-for-another-guy-so-I’m-gonna-get-drunk country breakup song, and though I think he was just writing Clichéd Country Lyric #103 it was hard not to hear the song as autobiographical. Lambert appeared two hours later and, instead of doing one of her own songs, covered Z. Z. Top’s sex anthem “Tush” (of course when a woman sings “I’m just looking for some tush” it has a quite different affect than it does from a man!) with one of the Z. Z. Toppers in her band (you could tell because of their famous rabbi-like beards) along with Keith Urban, who’d played banjo (acoustic, not electric) for his own song “Wasted Time” (one of the better pieces of material all night) but uncorked a powerful electric-guitar solo on “Tush.” There was a song called “Stand Back” by a group called Old Dominion (one of those oddball names, like Lady Antebellum, reflecting the Confederate nostalgia indulged in by a lot of the country audience — a recent poll showed that 48 percent of Donald Trump’s supporters believe it was a bad thing that the South lost the U.S. Civil War) and then a great song by Kenny Chesney, a performer I usually don’t care for, called “Noise” which was basically country-punk — speed it up and add edgier guitars and a screeching vocal, and it would be a punk song, especially since its subject (the sheer volume of messages thrown at us by the modern media and the futility of getting a little peace and quiet amidst all the “noise” from the media) is surprisingly socially-conscious and a far cry from the usual concerns of country music. Then there was a duet between Chris Young and a woman (in a skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuit) whose name was something like Kate Cassidy on a song called “Think of You,” and after that Eric Church’s “A Record Year,” “record” as in vinyl, which incorporated a D.J. mixing samples of David Bowie, Scott Weiland, “Lemmy” from Mötorhead and Glenn Frey as a tribute to those recently deceased artists. After that Dierks Bentley did an O.K. ballad called “Somewhere on the Beach,” and then came one of the best songs of the evening: “Burning House” by Cam. Though I didn’t like the way the stage literally burned during her song — somebody thought it would be a good idea to illustrate the title by having giant jets of flame shoot up around her like Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre — she sang with such passion and sincerity, and the song itself was so lyrically complex instead of being a standard-issue country lament, I loved it anyway.
After that Jason Aldean came out with a song called “When the Lights Come On” — he won Entertainer of the Year, though the big winner in the other categories was Chris Stapleton, an unlikely country star because he’s big and homely (think “Meat Loaf goes country” and you’ve got him) and he started as a songwriter — indeed, there was a funny bit early in the program in which various artists claimed that they had given him his first big break by recording one of his songs and/or using him as a duet partner — and then a bit of a disappointment because they piped in Garth Brooks from the middle of a concert he was doing in Ottawa, Canada, but all they had him do was present the Album of the Year award. Next up were Cole Swindell with “You Should Be Here” (not as searing — literally or figuratively — as Cam’s performance, but still nice) and Brett Eldredge with “Drunk on Your Love” (the title gives away that it’s yet another clichéd reference to alcohol, though this time at the beginning of a relationship instead of at its end), followed by Keith Urban’s “Wasted Time” (I usually find him rather bland but I loved that song) and “Stay All Night” by the group Little Big Town (for whom I have an affection if only because their breakthrough song was “Girl Crush,” and it’s indeed the female singer telling us about her crush on another girl) with the neo-traditionalist jazz player Trombone Shorty trying to add to the song and, frankly, just getting in the way. After that there was a duet between Kelsea Ballerini and Nick Jonas on a couple of songs, “Love Me Like You Mean It” and “Lost Boy” — Ballerini was great but the ex-Jonas Brother just came out in the middle, played guitar and sang a virtually inaudible part that didn’t add much — and then Tim McGraw came out on stage for his big inspirational hit “Humble and Kind.” (From what I’ve heard about McGraw he’s about the last person on earth who should be singing about being humble and kind!) Then there was a nice ballad by Charles Kelley called “Lonely Girl,” and after that Carrie Underwood came on stage for a song called “Church Bells” in an overproduced staging that seemed like she was auditioning to join the Blue Man Group, but it was still a quite powerful piece of material from a performer I’d always thought of as talented but bland. After that Sam Hall came out for a song called “Make You Miss Me,” though after I’d fallen in lust with him at the Grammy Awards this was disappointing; he was dressed in baggy clothes and seated at a piano.
The next song was the Song of the Year winner, “Die a Happy Man” by Thomas Rhett (I think I have that name right!), which wasn’t that great a song (though it was nice and refreshingly free of breast-beating) but had the sound of what I thought at first was a pedal steel guitar. It wasn’t, but it was a lap guitar that gave the song that familiar “twang” which used to be one of the paradigmatic sounds of country music before the genre was taken over by Southern rock! Then Miranda Lambert sang her ode to the human rear end (particularly the male version thereof now that she’s, uh, “available” again), and after that came the big duet CBS had been hyping for weeks now: Dolly Parton and Katy Perry. Parton was there to receive the Tex Ritter award for her ghastly movie Coat of Many Colors — a touching story from her poverty-stricken childhood that made a great three-minute song and a lousy 90-minute movie (as I wrote in these pages when I saw the film, “I was expecting Coal Miner’s Daughter and I got The Waltons”) — and she and Perry did a medley of three songs that reflected three phases of Parton’s career: bluegrass (“Coat of Many Colors”), country (“Jolene”) and pop (“Nine to Five,” a reminder of the time Dolly Parton actually got to be in a great movie). The show lumbered to a close with only two more songs after that — “Confession” by Florida Georgia Line and “Fire Away” by Chris Stapleton (he is an O.K. performer rather than a truly great one, but after all those hot, sexy guys who look like their jeans have been appliquéd on Stapleton’s bear look was actually a refreshing change!) — and the presentation of Entertainer of the Year to Jason Aldean. Oddly, Stapleton wasn’t even nominated for Entertainer of the Year even though he was the big winner of the night in other categories — not that awards are the real business of an awards show anymore!
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Deadly Daycare (Feifer Worldwide/Lifetime, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s prime-time 8 p.m. Lifetime movie was not a “world premiere,” as the ones in that time slot usually are, but a two-year-old production from Feifer Worldwide (three separate credit cards told us the movie was “written by Michael Feifer,” “produced by Michael Feifer” and “directed by Michael Feifer,” and I suppose some day if Michael Feifer has a son he’ll be given a job with his dad’s productions and billed something like, “Associate Producer: Michael Feifer, Jr., a Michael Feifer Production”) called Deadly Daycare. Well, they’d already done The Perfect Nanny and Nightmare Nurse, so why not Deadly Daycare? The previews for it offered a show that would follow what’s oddly become one of Lifetime’s favorite tropes — the woman who gets obsessed with another woman’s kid and is convinced the child is (or should be) her own —though Feifer’s script had some glosses on it that made it a bit more interesting than that. We first meet Our Heroine, Rachel (Kayla Ewell), when she’s having a terrible dream from which she wakes and first makes sure her daughter Mia (played by twins Ariella and Isabella Nurkovic — it’s a common casting strategy to have a pair of twins play a very young child so the director can alternate between the two and get the film done in a short schedule while not violating the legal limits on how long a child performer can work during a day) is safe. Then, when she wakes up for her day taking care of Mia, she receives a visit from her estranged husband Daniel (Bryce Johnson), a city prosecutor and Mia’s dad, who says his hours and pay are being cut back and he won’t be able to contribute as much financial support as he’d been doing. So Rachel decides she’s going to have to look for a job and find a day-care center in which to put Mia. She gets the job relatively easily — before her marriage she had worked as a courtroom sketch artist and her former employer is willing and eager to take her back in that position — though there’s a complication in that her first sketch assignment is a murder trial in which her ex is the prosecutor.
Of course, as we could guess from the title, her experience with daycare is considerably less positive: she picks the Little Ones day-care center because the head of it, Barbara (Caia Coley), seems nice and has enough of an obsession with security that virtually the whole place is wired with surveillance cameras so anyone with a kid in the place can log on to their Web site and see where their “little one” is and what they’re doing — except that there are a few dead spots which the cameras aren’t covering. Little Ones is run more like a pre-school than a day-care center, with at least two teachers, Gabby (Christy Carlson Romano) and her assistant Rebecca (Michelle DeFraites), and the kids spend most of their day sitting at desks reading or doing art projects. Our first intimation that something is Not Quite Right with Gabby is when she takes little Mia aside and tells her she was supposed to draw a picture of herself and Gabby together, and instead she drew a horse. Then we get a scene in which Gabby takes Mia aside and insists that she’s her daughter, and her name is really Crystal, and if she doesn’t believe that … Eventually we learn that the car accident Rachel was dreaming about in her nightmares actually happened: one day while Rachel was still pregnant with Mia, Rachel and her then-husband Daniel were out for a drive when they encountered Gabby and her husband Troy (Tyler Rice) along with their young daughter Crystal. At first it was just Gabby and Troy asking for directions in the daylight and Daniel trying but failing to help them, but later that night Daniel and Rachel literally ran into Gabby and Troy. Gabby survived the accident with no discernible impacts — at least not physical ones — but Troy ended up paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and their daughter Crystal was killed.
When Rachel puts Mia into the Little Ones day-care center, Gabby immediately recognizes Rachel as the woman who, with her own husband, crippled Troy and killed their daughter, and so Gabby hatches a revenge plot that involves “reprogramming” Mia to accept Gabby, not Rachel, as her mom and to call herself “Crystal,” while she ultimately either drives Rachel crazy or kills her, it’s not sure which. (Coherent plot explanations are not one of Michael Feifer’s strong suits as a writer, though this time the incoherence of Gabby’s scheme can be read as in itself a depiction of Gabby’s discombobulated mental state and her inability to reason her way through a criminal scheme that would actually make sense.) Gabby’s assistant Rebecca discovers the truth — or at least enough of it that she can report what’s going on to the police and give Gabby and the day-care center some unwelcome attention — so Gabby has her husband Troy run her down and kill her (she lingers in the hospital for a bit but then expires). Not only do we see Troy behind the wheel of his car without any indication that it’s been equipped with the special hand controls needed for a paraplegic to be able to drive, but both the civilian characters and the cops never seem to make the connection that a witness to the “accident” — the same witness that told the cops the driver deliberately aimed at Rebecca and therefore it was deliberate murder — also mentioned that the car had a handicapped license plate, and nobody makes the connection between the handicapped license plate on the murder car and the one on Troy’s car. There’s also a bizarre plot device in which Rachel goes to a shop that offers to sell spy cameras (the actor playing the proprietor, Brock Burnett, is quite attractive in a nerdy sort of way and I’d like to see more of him — in fact I was hoping he and Rachel would get together once she finally dumped her husband and divorced him) and buys one, then conceals it in the binding of a kids’ book in the Little Ones classroom (a plot gimmick I found pretty dumb — as did imdb.com reviewer Wes Connors, who wrote, “That’s really not the best hiding place in a classroom. One recess, and the camera’s kaput”). She falls asleep while she’s parked outside the day-care center but is awakened in time by the sound of Gabby chewing out Mia (who’d previously come home with bruises on her arms that looked like the ones battered women get in Lifetime movies about abusive husbands) and telling her her name is Crystal and Gabby her real mother. Rachel, Mia’s real real mother, comes charging in to the day-care center, only to find that Gabby has already left it.
Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to a shoot-out finale in which Gabby comes to Rachel’s house determined to kidnap Mia — and Daniel, who’s been kept abreast of the whole situation by Rachel even though they’re at least theoretically no longer a couple, comes there to protect their daughter. The cops arrive, called by Rachel, but not before Gabby has shot Daniel (I was thinking Michael Feifer would have her shot paralyze him, and that would have been her intention — to make Rachel suffer having a disabled husband the way Gabby’s had to — but fortunately, perhaps, he didn’t go that far) and chased Rachel around the house while desperately trying to find Mia. Rachel had indeed fled the house with a baby bundle under her arm, but it turns out to be a doll Rachel took to fool Gabby — the real Mia is hiding in a closet, under solemn instructions from her mom (her real mom) not to say a word or make a noise, though ironically once the police arrive, Gabby tries to kill herself with the gun but it’s run out of bullets so she’s taken alive, and Daniel and Rachel are reunited, Rachel forgets all about Mia and has to run into the house frantically to rescue her from that closet. Then there’s a tag scene showing Daniel and Rachel, now reconciled (hey, there’s nothing better for putting your marriage back together than having a psycho nearly kill you and kidnap your kid!) and taking Mia to the beach (this is set in Los Angeles and a good chunk of it was actually shot there, though the courtroom pictured is actually in Orlando, Florida). The performances by the two female leads are actually quite good — though Kayla Ewell as Rachel has a kewpie-doll look that makes her look dumber than the character is supposed to be — and Feifer’s direction, especially in the nighttime exteriors, has a pleasantly Gothic quality that creates a sinister mood. The problem is Feifer’s script (do I need to trot out once again my old line that when a director is also the writer, he has no one to blame but himself for a lousy script?), full of bizarre coincidences and plot holes and, like a 19th century opera libretto, reliant for whatever logic it has on the characters behaving like complete idiots. On balance, Deadly Daycare (despite that title, which almost seems like a parody of the genre), is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie and the kind of good clean sleazy fun we fans of this network look for on it, but it could have been a good deal better!
Last night’s prime-time 8 p.m. Lifetime movie was not a “world premiere,” as the ones in that time slot usually are, but a two-year-old production from Feifer Worldwide (three separate credit cards told us the movie was “written by Michael Feifer,” “produced by Michael Feifer” and “directed by Michael Feifer,” and I suppose some day if Michael Feifer has a son he’ll be given a job with his dad’s productions and billed something like, “Associate Producer: Michael Feifer, Jr., a Michael Feifer Production”) called Deadly Daycare. Well, they’d already done The Perfect Nanny and Nightmare Nurse, so why not Deadly Daycare? The previews for it offered a show that would follow what’s oddly become one of Lifetime’s favorite tropes — the woman who gets obsessed with another woman’s kid and is convinced the child is (or should be) her own —though Feifer’s script had some glosses on it that made it a bit more interesting than that. We first meet Our Heroine, Rachel (Kayla Ewell), when she’s having a terrible dream from which she wakes and first makes sure her daughter Mia (played by twins Ariella and Isabella Nurkovic — it’s a common casting strategy to have a pair of twins play a very young child so the director can alternate between the two and get the film done in a short schedule while not violating the legal limits on how long a child performer can work during a day) is safe. Then, when she wakes up for her day taking care of Mia, she receives a visit from her estranged husband Daniel (Bryce Johnson), a city prosecutor and Mia’s dad, who says his hours and pay are being cut back and he won’t be able to contribute as much financial support as he’d been doing. So Rachel decides she’s going to have to look for a job and find a day-care center in which to put Mia. She gets the job relatively easily — before her marriage she had worked as a courtroom sketch artist and her former employer is willing and eager to take her back in that position — though there’s a complication in that her first sketch assignment is a murder trial in which her ex is the prosecutor.
Of course, as we could guess from the title, her experience with daycare is considerably less positive: she picks the Little Ones day-care center because the head of it, Barbara (Caia Coley), seems nice and has enough of an obsession with security that virtually the whole place is wired with surveillance cameras so anyone with a kid in the place can log on to their Web site and see where their “little one” is and what they’re doing — except that there are a few dead spots which the cameras aren’t covering. Little Ones is run more like a pre-school than a day-care center, with at least two teachers, Gabby (Christy Carlson Romano) and her assistant Rebecca (Michelle DeFraites), and the kids spend most of their day sitting at desks reading or doing art projects. Our first intimation that something is Not Quite Right with Gabby is when she takes little Mia aside and tells her she was supposed to draw a picture of herself and Gabby together, and instead she drew a horse. Then we get a scene in which Gabby takes Mia aside and insists that she’s her daughter, and her name is really Crystal, and if she doesn’t believe that … Eventually we learn that the car accident Rachel was dreaming about in her nightmares actually happened: one day while Rachel was still pregnant with Mia, Rachel and her then-husband Daniel were out for a drive when they encountered Gabby and her husband Troy (Tyler Rice) along with their young daughter Crystal. At first it was just Gabby and Troy asking for directions in the daylight and Daniel trying but failing to help them, but later that night Daniel and Rachel literally ran into Gabby and Troy. Gabby survived the accident with no discernible impacts — at least not physical ones — but Troy ended up paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and their daughter Crystal was killed.
When Rachel puts Mia into the Little Ones day-care center, Gabby immediately recognizes Rachel as the woman who, with her own husband, crippled Troy and killed their daughter, and so Gabby hatches a revenge plot that involves “reprogramming” Mia to accept Gabby, not Rachel, as her mom and to call herself “Crystal,” while she ultimately either drives Rachel crazy or kills her, it’s not sure which. (Coherent plot explanations are not one of Michael Feifer’s strong suits as a writer, though this time the incoherence of Gabby’s scheme can be read as in itself a depiction of Gabby’s discombobulated mental state and her inability to reason her way through a criminal scheme that would actually make sense.) Gabby’s assistant Rebecca discovers the truth — or at least enough of it that she can report what’s going on to the police and give Gabby and the day-care center some unwelcome attention — so Gabby has her husband Troy run her down and kill her (she lingers in the hospital for a bit but then expires). Not only do we see Troy behind the wheel of his car without any indication that it’s been equipped with the special hand controls needed for a paraplegic to be able to drive, but both the civilian characters and the cops never seem to make the connection that a witness to the “accident” — the same witness that told the cops the driver deliberately aimed at Rebecca and therefore it was deliberate murder — also mentioned that the car had a handicapped license plate, and nobody makes the connection between the handicapped license plate on the murder car and the one on Troy’s car. There’s also a bizarre plot device in which Rachel goes to a shop that offers to sell spy cameras (the actor playing the proprietor, Brock Burnett, is quite attractive in a nerdy sort of way and I’d like to see more of him — in fact I was hoping he and Rachel would get together once she finally dumped her husband and divorced him) and buys one, then conceals it in the binding of a kids’ book in the Little Ones classroom (a plot gimmick I found pretty dumb — as did imdb.com reviewer Wes Connors, who wrote, “That’s really not the best hiding place in a classroom. One recess, and the camera’s kaput”). She falls asleep while she’s parked outside the day-care center but is awakened in time by the sound of Gabby chewing out Mia (who’d previously come home with bruises on her arms that looked like the ones battered women get in Lifetime movies about abusive husbands) and telling her her name is Crystal and Gabby her real mother. Rachel, Mia’s real real mother, comes charging in to the day-care center, only to find that Gabby has already left it.
Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to a shoot-out finale in which Gabby comes to Rachel’s house determined to kidnap Mia — and Daniel, who’s been kept abreast of the whole situation by Rachel even though they’re at least theoretically no longer a couple, comes there to protect their daughter. The cops arrive, called by Rachel, but not before Gabby has shot Daniel (I was thinking Michael Feifer would have her shot paralyze him, and that would have been her intention — to make Rachel suffer having a disabled husband the way Gabby’s had to — but fortunately, perhaps, he didn’t go that far) and chased Rachel around the house while desperately trying to find Mia. Rachel had indeed fled the house with a baby bundle under her arm, but it turns out to be a doll Rachel took to fool Gabby — the real Mia is hiding in a closet, under solemn instructions from her mom (her real mom) not to say a word or make a noise, though ironically once the police arrive, Gabby tries to kill herself with the gun but it’s run out of bullets so she’s taken alive, and Daniel and Rachel are reunited, Rachel forgets all about Mia and has to run into the house frantically to rescue her from that closet. Then there’s a tag scene showing Daniel and Rachel, now reconciled (hey, there’s nothing better for putting your marriage back together than having a psycho nearly kill you and kidnap your kid!) and taking Mia to the beach (this is set in Los Angeles and a good chunk of it was actually shot there, though the courtroom pictured is actually in Orlando, Florida). The performances by the two female leads are actually quite good — though Kayla Ewell as Rachel has a kewpie-doll look that makes her look dumber than the character is supposed to be — and Feifer’s direction, especially in the nighttime exteriors, has a pleasantly Gothic quality that creates a sinister mood. The problem is Feifer’s script (do I need to trot out once again my old line that when a director is also the writer, he has no one to blame but himself for a lousy script?), full of bizarre coincidences and plot holes and, like a 19th century opera libretto, reliant for whatever logic it has on the characters behaving like complete idiots. On balance, Deadly Daycare (despite that title, which almost seems like a parody of the genre), is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie and the kind of good clean sleazy fun we fans of this network look for on it, but it could have been a good deal better!
Trouble with Father: “Jackie Knows All” (Robert Reed Productions/Hal Roach Studios/ABC-TV, 12/7/51)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I filled out our evening with an intriguing item from the James Dean: The Lost Television Legacy boxed set: a 1951 episode of The Stu Erwin Show, also known as Trouble with Father. Stu Erwin, a veteran of interesting early-1930’s movies like The Big Broadcast with Bing Crosby, International House with W. C. Fields and Pigskin Parade with Judy Garland (a formidable list of talents his presence here puts one degree of separation from James Dean!), apparently saw the huge success other showbiz couples were having on TV — particularly The George Burns-Gracie Allen Show and, of course, I Love Lucy — and decided he wanted some of that for himself, so he dragooned his real-life wife June Collyer Erwin into a family sitcom in which Stu would play a high-school principal (though there’s no intimation in this particular episode of what he does for a living) and the focus would be on his home life with his wife and their two daughters, Jackie (billed here as Sheila James but later known as openly Lesbian California legislator Sheila Kuehl — so the Bisexual James Dean wasn’t the only Queer in this cast!) and Joyce (Ann E. Todd). The episode featuring James Dean was first aired December 7, 1951 (tenth anniversary of the Day That Will Live in Infamy!) and was called “Jackie Knows All,” in which a series regular identified only as “Boy with Glasses” (Teddy Infuhr) sells younger daughter Joyce a book that’s supposed to be able to read minds. When it proves less than successful, the boy brings over a radio with a microphone attached through which they’re able to bug just about anybody and overhear secret conversations. There’s also a subplot about Stu holding a piece of swampland property that’s suddenly become valuable because the city is going to build an airport on it and drain the swamp to make that possible, and Mr. Parsons (Emory Parnell) and an agent named Smith want to buy the property, pay a low-ball price for it and thus make the money on the land acquisition for the airport. Joyce, the Boy with Glasses (who looks like he’s going to grow up to be one of the original inventors of the personal computer) and their magical bugging radio overhear the scheme between Parsons and Smith. They also overhear Jackie’s boyfriend, Drexel (the almost terminally boring Martin Milner — when we watched him in Valley of the Dolls I wondered if director Mark Robson had an assistant with a little mirror to hold under Milner’s face and see if he was still breathing after a particularly somnolent take from him), talking with Randy (James Dean, making a few bucks during his first stint in L.A. before he headed to New York to attend the Actors’ Studio and do live TV there to support himself) about how to keep a woman’s interest in you by keeping her waiting so Jackie doesn’t find out until the last minute that Drexel does intend to invite her to the school dance. This show was shot on film at the old Hal Roach studios by producer Roland Reed, and thus it doesn’t have the technical limits of the ancient kinescopes of live TV shows of the period — but it’s also not very interesting and would be of no moment whatsoever if Dean weren’t in it.
Charles and I filled out our evening with an intriguing item from the James Dean: The Lost Television Legacy boxed set: a 1951 episode of The Stu Erwin Show, also known as Trouble with Father. Stu Erwin, a veteran of interesting early-1930’s movies like The Big Broadcast with Bing Crosby, International House with W. C. Fields and Pigskin Parade with Judy Garland (a formidable list of talents his presence here puts one degree of separation from James Dean!), apparently saw the huge success other showbiz couples were having on TV — particularly The George Burns-Gracie Allen Show and, of course, I Love Lucy — and decided he wanted some of that for himself, so he dragooned his real-life wife June Collyer Erwin into a family sitcom in which Stu would play a high-school principal (though there’s no intimation in this particular episode of what he does for a living) and the focus would be on his home life with his wife and their two daughters, Jackie (billed here as Sheila James but later known as openly Lesbian California legislator Sheila Kuehl — so the Bisexual James Dean wasn’t the only Queer in this cast!) and Joyce (Ann E. Todd). The episode featuring James Dean was first aired December 7, 1951 (tenth anniversary of the Day That Will Live in Infamy!) and was called “Jackie Knows All,” in which a series regular identified only as “Boy with Glasses” (Teddy Infuhr) sells younger daughter Joyce a book that’s supposed to be able to read minds. When it proves less than successful, the boy brings over a radio with a microphone attached through which they’re able to bug just about anybody and overhear secret conversations. There’s also a subplot about Stu holding a piece of swampland property that’s suddenly become valuable because the city is going to build an airport on it and drain the swamp to make that possible, and Mr. Parsons (Emory Parnell) and an agent named Smith want to buy the property, pay a low-ball price for it and thus make the money on the land acquisition for the airport. Joyce, the Boy with Glasses (who looks like he’s going to grow up to be one of the original inventors of the personal computer) and their magical bugging radio overhear the scheme between Parsons and Smith. They also overhear Jackie’s boyfriend, Drexel (the almost terminally boring Martin Milner — when we watched him in Valley of the Dolls I wondered if director Mark Robson had an assistant with a little mirror to hold under Milner’s face and see if he was still breathing after a particularly somnolent take from him), talking with Randy (James Dean, making a few bucks during his first stint in L.A. before he headed to New York to attend the Actors’ Studio and do live TV there to support himself) about how to keep a woman’s interest in you by keeping her waiting so Jackie doesn’t find out until the last minute that Drexel does intend to invite her to the school dance. This show was shot on film at the old Hal Roach studios by producer Roland Reed, and thus it doesn’t have the technical limits of the ancient kinescopes of live TV shows of the period — but it’s also not very interesting and would be of no moment whatsoever if Dean weren’t in it.
Saturday, April 2, 2016
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Amblin/Universal, 1982)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I ran a DVD of the film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which as virtually all the world knows was made by Steven Spielberg, released in 1982 and quickly became the most popular film, at least in gross box-office receipts, to that time (though more recent researchers, attempting to neutralize the effects of inflation by counting how many people bought tickets to see a movie in a theatre, no matter how much they paid for it, insist that in terms of all-time paid admissions Gone With the Wind remains the most popular film of all time), surpassed only by Jurassic Park (another Spielberg movie) and then by James Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar. The print we were watching was marked as an “Anniversary Edition” — though which anniversary is unclear; apparently Spielberg recut the film slightly for its 2002 re-release, redoing some of the E.T. effects with CGI and including a couple of sequences originally deleted (which appear here not as part of the original film but in a “deleted scenes” section on the DVD, including one in which E.T. nearly drowns in a bathtub and one in which there’s a burning jack-o’lantern on Hallowe’en and Mary, Dee Wallace Stone’s character and the mother of the three children who are actually the central human characters, gets an egg thrown at her car), but given that the running time of the 1982 original is listed as 115 minutes and the 2002 version as 120 minutes, and our disc timed out at 115 minutes, I suspect what we got on this disc was the 1982 original. (One can see the difference between this and a modern movie in the rather “soft” visual quality, a problem with Eastmancolor in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s; Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws had to be colorized for its first video release in 1985 because, even though it was in color originally, the colors had faded so badly in just 10 years they had to be tweaked in the lab.)
Neither Charles nor I had seen E.T. since the 1980’s; he’d seen it theatrically at the Loma Theatre in Point Loma (which closed a decade later and is now a Bookstar bookstore) and I’d watched it on VHS with John Gabrish (who was so moved by the movie he went out and bought the soundtrack CD) — and I was unprepared for what a great, breathtaking classic it really is. Ironically, Charles was considerably less blown away by it on this go-round than I was; he found it surprisingly slow through much of its running time, and he said he’s read too much science-fiction to find the story’s conceit that impressive. I can see his point but I wouldn’t really call E.T. science-fiction even though its title character is a being from another planet; it’s really far more of a modern-dress fairy tale, in some ways a clever reworking of Peter Pan — the alien from a never-never land who gets stranded on Earth and finds children far more sympathetic to him than adults (and Peter Pan is directly referenced in the dialogue; later Spielberg would do an even more blatantly Pan-derived film in Hook, far less successfully both artistically and commercially) — and also with hints of Bambi in its depiction of humanity (at least adult male humanity) as the sympathetic alien’s mortal enemy. The plot is probably incredibly familiar even to people who haven’t seen it in 30 years, but just in case, here goes: a spaceship from another planet lands on Earth (the online synopsis says it’s staffed by a crew of alien botanists surveying and taking samples of Earth’s plant life, but the only hint that E.T. has anything to do with botany is the potted plant in the central family’s home, which grows and withers depending on whether E.T. is doing well or poorly in earth’s environment) and takes off without one of its crew members. E.T. turns up at the home of an unnamed family in a suburban environment — one of Spielberg’s and screenwriter Melissa Mathison’s cleverest conceits is contrasting the exoticism of an alien from outer space to the almost depressingly ordinary human environment he’s trapped in — consisting of mother Mary (Dee Wallace, who hadn’t yet added “Stone” to her last name) and three kids, older son Michael (Robert MacNaughton, who should have had a bigger career than he did; imdb.com lists only 12 acting credits for him, most recently in such things as Frankenstein vs. the Mummy and Laugh Killer Laugh, though he’s quite gorgeous in a Southern California surfer-boy way, he’s got a great ass and a disarming personality; also his character in E.T. is depicted as being a fan of Elvis Costello, which scores points with me right there; oddly at the time this movie was made Costello was frequently using his initials “E.C.” as a nickname!), middle daughter Gertie (Drew Barrymore) and younger son Elliott (Henry Thomas).
Elliott is the first family member to discover E.T. and the three ultimately take him into their home, befriend him, protect him from the adults who are trying to kidnap him so they can study him, and ultimately help him build an electronic gizmo with which he can contact his home planet so they can send another spaceship to pick him up. At the end E.T. and Elliott bid each other a sad farewell — E.T. invites Elliott to board the ship and go to his home planet but (unlike Richard Dreyfuss’s character in a previous Spielberg film about extraterrestrials, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) Elliott doesn’t take the invitation but instead chooses to remain on earth with his natural family. In case you’re wondering where dad is in all this, he abandoned the family and moved to Mexico with his girlfriend — when I first saw the film I assumed that Peter Coyote’s character (he’s part of the scientific crew who are trying to take E.T. and, when he nearly dies at their hands, their plan is to wait until he croaks and then dissect him, only he has a change of heart and helps the family revive E.T. and get him home) was the father of the family, having been called back as part of his work and ultimately reconciling with them, but there’s nothing that says that in the actual movie. E.T. seems to me (now) a masterpiece on every level, offering more proof that no living director can match Spielberg in his complete command of the grammar of film, his unerring instinct for when to hold the camera still and when to move it; when to hold a scene on the screen and when to cut; when to use dialogue and when to have the characters shut up so he can tell his story silent-film style with images, sound effects and music alone. It’s also blessed with a fascinating score by John Williams, who’s usually a functional rather than a truly great film composer but whose work here is far better than his norm; yes, the famous main theme is pretty sappy, but much of the music is surprisingly dissonant (apparently he was especially turned on by E.T.’s loneliness, his status as “a stranger in a strange land,” and the most powerful parts of his score are the ones accompanying E.T.’s scenes alone and his tentative outreach to the kids) and “advanced” for the score for a big commercial blockbuster.
E.T. is also helped by the fact that the title character is a real physical presence, not a bunch of pixels manipulated by a computer and blended with actors in front of a green screen; at least two people were in the E.T. suit (one a little person and one a Freaks-style “human torso”) but the person who got most of the credit for the performance was Italian puppeteer Carlo Rambaldi. E.T. himself is utterly convincing — in only one scene, in which E.T. is in the medical ward of the research facility and they’re attempting CPR on him, is it clear he’s an object and not a flesh-and-blood being. Incidentally I’m using the male pronoun for E.T. because early on in the film Elliott insists that “he’s a boy,” even though a genuine E.T.’s reproductive system would be so different from ours it would be hard even for a researcher, much less a 10-year-old kid, to tell. (The imdb.com “trivia” page on the film quotes Spielberg as saying he thought of E.T. as an animate plant, neither male nor female, and the species didn’t have different sexes and reproduced itself by vegetation. He also said he thought of E.T. as being about 10,000 years old.) Nonetheless, E.T. strikes me here and now as a magical movie, as great as everyone at the time (or almost everyone) said it was, and while I’m afraid I took it for granted when it came out, today it seems a deathless masterpiece worthy of its legendary status in film history — and yet more indication of why I felt when I first read Henry Kuttner’s story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (also a tale about children transformed by an alien presence) that Spielberg — especially the young, relatively innocent Spielberg who made E.T. — should have filmed it.
Two nights ago Charles and I ran a DVD of the film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which as virtually all the world knows was made by Steven Spielberg, released in 1982 and quickly became the most popular film, at least in gross box-office receipts, to that time (though more recent researchers, attempting to neutralize the effects of inflation by counting how many people bought tickets to see a movie in a theatre, no matter how much they paid for it, insist that in terms of all-time paid admissions Gone With the Wind remains the most popular film of all time), surpassed only by Jurassic Park (another Spielberg movie) and then by James Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar. The print we were watching was marked as an “Anniversary Edition” — though which anniversary is unclear; apparently Spielberg recut the film slightly for its 2002 re-release, redoing some of the E.T. effects with CGI and including a couple of sequences originally deleted (which appear here not as part of the original film but in a “deleted scenes” section on the DVD, including one in which E.T. nearly drowns in a bathtub and one in which there’s a burning jack-o’lantern on Hallowe’en and Mary, Dee Wallace Stone’s character and the mother of the three children who are actually the central human characters, gets an egg thrown at her car), but given that the running time of the 1982 original is listed as 115 minutes and the 2002 version as 120 minutes, and our disc timed out at 115 minutes, I suspect what we got on this disc was the 1982 original. (One can see the difference between this and a modern movie in the rather “soft” visual quality, a problem with Eastmancolor in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s; Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws had to be colorized for its first video release in 1985 because, even though it was in color originally, the colors had faded so badly in just 10 years they had to be tweaked in the lab.)
Neither Charles nor I had seen E.T. since the 1980’s; he’d seen it theatrically at the Loma Theatre in Point Loma (which closed a decade later and is now a Bookstar bookstore) and I’d watched it on VHS with John Gabrish (who was so moved by the movie he went out and bought the soundtrack CD) — and I was unprepared for what a great, breathtaking classic it really is. Ironically, Charles was considerably less blown away by it on this go-round than I was; he found it surprisingly slow through much of its running time, and he said he’s read too much science-fiction to find the story’s conceit that impressive. I can see his point but I wouldn’t really call E.T. science-fiction even though its title character is a being from another planet; it’s really far more of a modern-dress fairy tale, in some ways a clever reworking of Peter Pan — the alien from a never-never land who gets stranded on Earth and finds children far more sympathetic to him than adults (and Peter Pan is directly referenced in the dialogue; later Spielberg would do an even more blatantly Pan-derived film in Hook, far less successfully both artistically and commercially) — and also with hints of Bambi in its depiction of humanity (at least adult male humanity) as the sympathetic alien’s mortal enemy. The plot is probably incredibly familiar even to people who haven’t seen it in 30 years, but just in case, here goes: a spaceship from another planet lands on Earth (the online synopsis says it’s staffed by a crew of alien botanists surveying and taking samples of Earth’s plant life, but the only hint that E.T. has anything to do with botany is the potted plant in the central family’s home, which grows and withers depending on whether E.T. is doing well or poorly in earth’s environment) and takes off without one of its crew members. E.T. turns up at the home of an unnamed family in a suburban environment — one of Spielberg’s and screenwriter Melissa Mathison’s cleverest conceits is contrasting the exoticism of an alien from outer space to the almost depressingly ordinary human environment he’s trapped in — consisting of mother Mary (Dee Wallace, who hadn’t yet added “Stone” to her last name) and three kids, older son Michael (Robert MacNaughton, who should have had a bigger career than he did; imdb.com lists only 12 acting credits for him, most recently in such things as Frankenstein vs. the Mummy and Laugh Killer Laugh, though he’s quite gorgeous in a Southern California surfer-boy way, he’s got a great ass and a disarming personality; also his character in E.T. is depicted as being a fan of Elvis Costello, which scores points with me right there; oddly at the time this movie was made Costello was frequently using his initials “E.C.” as a nickname!), middle daughter Gertie (Drew Barrymore) and younger son Elliott (Henry Thomas).
Elliott is the first family member to discover E.T. and the three ultimately take him into their home, befriend him, protect him from the adults who are trying to kidnap him so they can study him, and ultimately help him build an electronic gizmo with which he can contact his home planet so they can send another spaceship to pick him up. At the end E.T. and Elliott bid each other a sad farewell — E.T. invites Elliott to board the ship and go to his home planet but (unlike Richard Dreyfuss’s character in a previous Spielberg film about extraterrestrials, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) Elliott doesn’t take the invitation but instead chooses to remain on earth with his natural family. In case you’re wondering where dad is in all this, he abandoned the family and moved to Mexico with his girlfriend — when I first saw the film I assumed that Peter Coyote’s character (he’s part of the scientific crew who are trying to take E.T. and, when he nearly dies at their hands, their plan is to wait until he croaks and then dissect him, only he has a change of heart and helps the family revive E.T. and get him home) was the father of the family, having been called back as part of his work and ultimately reconciling with them, but there’s nothing that says that in the actual movie. E.T. seems to me (now) a masterpiece on every level, offering more proof that no living director can match Spielberg in his complete command of the grammar of film, his unerring instinct for when to hold the camera still and when to move it; when to hold a scene on the screen and when to cut; when to use dialogue and when to have the characters shut up so he can tell his story silent-film style with images, sound effects and music alone. It’s also blessed with a fascinating score by John Williams, who’s usually a functional rather than a truly great film composer but whose work here is far better than his norm; yes, the famous main theme is pretty sappy, but much of the music is surprisingly dissonant (apparently he was especially turned on by E.T.’s loneliness, his status as “a stranger in a strange land,” and the most powerful parts of his score are the ones accompanying E.T.’s scenes alone and his tentative outreach to the kids) and “advanced” for the score for a big commercial blockbuster.
E.T. is also helped by the fact that the title character is a real physical presence, not a bunch of pixels manipulated by a computer and blended with actors in front of a green screen; at least two people were in the E.T. suit (one a little person and one a Freaks-style “human torso”) but the person who got most of the credit for the performance was Italian puppeteer Carlo Rambaldi. E.T. himself is utterly convincing — in only one scene, in which E.T. is in the medical ward of the research facility and they’re attempting CPR on him, is it clear he’s an object and not a flesh-and-blood being. Incidentally I’m using the male pronoun for E.T. because early on in the film Elliott insists that “he’s a boy,” even though a genuine E.T.’s reproductive system would be so different from ours it would be hard even for a researcher, much less a 10-year-old kid, to tell. (The imdb.com “trivia” page on the film quotes Spielberg as saying he thought of E.T. as an animate plant, neither male nor female, and the species didn’t have different sexes and reproduced itself by vegetation. He also said he thought of E.T. as being about 10,000 years old.) Nonetheless, E.T. strikes me here and now as a magical movie, as great as everyone at the time (or almost everyone) said it was, and while I’m afraid I took it for granted when it came out, today it seems a deathless masterpiece worthy of its legendary status in film history — and yet more indication of why I felt when I first read Henry Kuttner’s story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (also a tale about children transformed by an alien presence) that Spielberg — especially the young, relatively innocent Spielberg who made E.T. — should have filmed it.
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