Corrupting the minds of America’s youth

During my hiatus, my younger sister Debbie made a pilgrimage to Savannah, along with her husband and young daughter, for the expressed purpose of attending her twenty-year high school reunion.  Mom made arrangements for Deb and my brother-in-law to stay at a Hampton Inn (we’re kind of starved for space here at Rancho Yesteryear—plus sister Kat and her roommate came down for the weekend as well) while making sure my niece stayed at the house in order to spoil her rotten spend quality time with her only granddaughter.

I don’t get the opportunity to see niece Rachel too often.  I did see her in June, when we made our yearly trek to West Virginia for the annual Shreve reunion (a.k.a. “The Driest Weekend of the Year”), so I was really pumped about her visiting.  The first night she’s here, she tells my mom she can’t sleep—and with the day she had, with the travel and planes and all, it’s no wonder—so “Nana” gets the idea to let her hang out in my room and watch DVDs on my portable player.

I had the Bozo collection I told you about on top of a waste-high shelf, and upon seeing that she wanted to watch some of the shows.  I couldn’t figure out how she knew who Bozo was until she reminded me that I had got her a Bozo doll a few Christmases back—which I did; I bought one at a Cracker Barrel at which the ‘rents and I breakfasted on some long forgotten trip.  (Normally, I do not make it a habit to eat at the Barrel because I strenuously disagree with their policy of refusing to allow homosexuals serve me my food, but since I wasn’t paying I made an exception.)  She watched about a show and a half of the World’s Famous Clown, and then announced she was going to bed.  But then she stops, and looks at some other DVDs on the shelf.

“What’s that one with the moose?” she asks.

Lo and behold, she had found my Rocky and Bullwinkle stash.  And like the proud uncle I am, we watched a few of those before she definitely decided that it was time to hit the hay.

Rachel is pretty bright for her age, but many of the jokes from the residents of Frostbite Falls went over her head—this, however, didn’t matter.  One of the great things about kids is that they don’t discriminate when it comes to cartoons.  We watched a couple of the Bozo shorts—and let me tell you, the animation is lousy—but she didn’t care at all…nor did she go off on a rant (the way I did when I got older) about the limited animation that is Moose and Squirrel.  If it’s a moving drawing, they’ll sit and watch with rapt attention.  The other thing that I marveled about my niece was that after we tucked a few Bozos under our belt, she knew the theme song by heart.  (I’m lucky if I can remember the chorus.)

Rachel had a pretty good stay here in Savannah—she got to go to the beach, swim in my step-Gran’s pool, played some games on the computer (Bombast would pick that weekend to go down, by the way) and watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bozo and Fun and Fancy Free (1947) with ol’ Uncle Ivan (again, she couldn’t figure out why I was cackling during the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy exchanges…but she did recognize Charlie when he first appeared onscreen).  The only downer came when my Mom talked with her on the phone Sunday evening after they returned to Iowa: she was in total tears because she had to go home after having so much fun.

“The apes have taken over…while we were busy watching television and filling our freezers, they’ve come out of the jungle and moved in!” – Professor Sam Bastion (Frank Lovejoy), Shack Out on 101 (1955/Allied Artists)

Leonard Maltin describes the cult classic Shack Out on 101 (1955) in his Classic Movie Guide thusly: “Lee Marvin is Slob in this trash classic about the efforts of hash slinger [Terry] Moore to combat Communism while juggling the lecherous advances of nearly all her co-stars.”  And that’s as accurate a description of this film as you’re ever going to get. (The film’s original title was supposed to be Shack Up on 101—but star Moore objected to its suggestiveness.) As a Lee Marvin devotee, watching this movie was pretty much a done deal—and I enjoyed the hell out of it, despite its existential bizarreness.  Marvin is wonderful; it’s as if his character from The Wild One (1954) decided to abandon the open road and make a desperately futile bid for working class respectability.

OTR veteran Frank Lovejoy is in Shack, playing a character who’s referred to throughout the eighty-minute proceedings as “The Professor.”  I think Lovejoy was one hell of a radio actor, but most of his silver screen forays showcase a thespian who can be embarrassingly stiff at times.  This movie features one of his better performances, though his romance with Moore isn’t at all convincing.  (Lovejoy's love scene with Moore, as they passionately make out while discussing the U.S. Constitution, has to be seen to be believed.)  His character is supposed to be in cahoots with Marvin’s (Slob’s not really a fry cook—he’s a Commie spy!) but anyone who’s seen I Was a Communist For the FBI (1951) will know that Lovejoy’s “traitor” persona is all just an act.

Keenan Wynn (who owns the beanery where about 95% of the film takes place), Whit Bissell, Frank DeKova and Len Lesser (Seinfeld’s “Uncle Leo”) also make appearances in Shack, a truly one-of-a-kind film written and directed by Edward Dein.  Other than The Leech Woman (1960), a wacky horror flick starring former noir siren Coleen Gray, I’ve not been exposed to much of Dein’s oeuvre, though according to the IMDb he was a rather prolific screenwriter (The Falcon Strikes Back, Calling Dr. Death, Boston Blackie’s Rendezvous). 

Shack Out on 101 was part of a double feature I ran last night (something I’ve decided to call “Cold War Paranoia Theater”); the second entry being Ladybug Ladybug (1963), Frank and Eleanor Perry’s follow-up to their critically-acclaimed debut film David and Lisa (1962),  Since Perry’s The Swimmer (1968) and Last Summer (1969) are two of my favorite 60s flicks, I’ve been wanting to see Ladybug for some time now—and got the opportunity via Five Minutes to Live (where I also purchased Shack).  Ladybug tells a fascinating story of a rural elementary school and its reaction to what may or may not be an eminent nuclear attack.  As it turns out, the sounding of the “attack” alarm is due to nothing more than a short circuit, but by the time this is discovered, events have been set in motion that result in tragedy for one of the students sent home.

There are quite a few familiar TV faces in this movie: William (St. Elsewhere) Daniels plays the school principal, and Nancy (Lou Grant) Marchand is one of the teachers assigned to lead a “patrol” of students home.  Other well-known character actors include Judith Lowery (Mother Dexter from Phyllis), Richard Hamilton and Estelle Parsons—the latter two playing the stern parents of one child who’s so freaked out by the experience that she hides under her bed when she’s refused permission to take shelter in the basement.  Miles Chapin, an actor who you may have seen in movies like Hair (1979) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), plays one of the kids in Ladybug, as does Alice Playten—an actress known for both her voice work and participation in various National Lampoon productions…but for some odd reason, will always be associated (to me, anyway) as the babysitter in the Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning classic The Lost Saucer.

Ladybug Ladybug is reportedly based on an actual event, but of the two films I think Shack holds up better—after all, it’s essentially an espionage melodrama…and they never go out of style no matter who the bad guys are.  But if you grew up in a time when adolescents were scared shitless of the bomb (and, as the film notes, the adults are just as nervous) and were drilled endlessly to “duck and cover” at their school desks, I’m sure it will resonate; it’s definitely worth seeking out.

Eat my dust

He passed away on September 28, 2007 of this year, but my Bombast Comcast.net home page is just now getting the news that Charles B. Griffith, a writer-director-producer…and even sometime actor, has gone on to his rich reward.  He was 77.

Griffith will remain best-known for his authorship on the screenplay for Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), a.k.a. The Film Shot in Two Days (though this isn’t technically true); a cult favorite about a nebbish (Jonathan Haze) who makes good in the floral business after finding a plant that begins to demonstrate none-too-attractive cannibalistic qualities.  (Horrors was later brought to the stage in musical form, and that in turn saw a cinematic version directed by Frank Oz in 1986.)  In addition to the screenplay, Griffith served as second unit director (uncredited) and actor (he plays three roles—one of which is the voice of Audrey, Jr.) on the project.

Personally, I’m not a fan of either version of Horrors—the 1960 version doesn’t have the budget it needs to get the picture’s admittedly novel concept across, and the 1986 film has a sugary-sweet happy ending tacked on.  I prefer Griffith’s treatment for A Bucket of Blood (1959), a mordant black comedy about a nebbish (Dick Miller) who becomes the toast of the art world by murdering people and encasing them in clay.  Among the other memorable Corman films he wrote are It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957), Rock All Night (1957), The Undead (1957) and The Wild Angels (1966).

Naturally, when working for Roger Corman, you’re going to wind up directing at one time or another—just ask Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, etc., etc., etc.  Griffith got the opportunity to sit in the director’s chair on a few occasions, notably the Ron Howard car crash delight Eat My Dust (1976) and Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980), an interesting (if unsuccessful) take on the Dr. Jekyll tale starring Oliver Reed.

Regular readers know that I’m quite enamored of Mr. Corman—the King of the B’s—so when I hear of the passing of one of his loyal minions, I can’t help but be more than a little depressed.  R.I.P., Charles—you will be missed.

Webb of suspicion

In Appointment with Danger (1951), diminutive movie tough guy Alan Ladd plays Al Goddard, a postal detective who’s investigating the murder of a colleague named Gruber—and in the course of his examination finds that the only witness to the crime is a saintly nun in the form of Sister Augustine, played by Phyllis Calvert.  Sister Augustine singles out a suspect from a mug book, but his “friends” manage to croak him before Goddard can get to him—necessitating that the postal cop pretend to be “on the take” and infiltrate the gang undercover to find out what their game is…namely a big payroll heist on a postal truck.

I know, it sounds pretty routine—and truth be told, it pretty much is.  But the soon-to-be-pushing-up-daisies hood is played by Harry Morgan (billed as Henry here, he later changed it so as not to be confused with the acerbic radio-TV comedian) and his buddy, who beats him to death with a pair of bronzed baby shoes, is none other than Jack Webb.  Watching the two of them before their celebrated stint on Dragnet in the 1960s is all the fun—in fact, this movie, directed by Lewis Allen (The Uninvited, Suddenly), has the stink of Dragnet all over it.  The screenplay was co-scripted by longtime Webb crony Richard L. Breen, and two of Dragnet’s “road company” players appear in it—Stacy Harris as the “inside” man at the post office and Herb Vigran as the cop in the scene when Sister Augustine peruses the mug books.

Before creating what would become his radio and television legacy, Jack Webb appeared in a number of feature films and to be honest, he wasn’t too bad an actor.  From small, unbilled roles in films like Hollow Triumph (a.k.a. The Scar) (1948) and Sword in the Desert (1949) he went on to do first-rate work as one of Marlon Brando’s fellow paraplegics in Elia Kazan’s The Men (1950) and as William Holden’s jovial buddy in Sunset Blvd. (1950).  Dragnet, unfortunately, completely changed his personality—transforming him into the stick-up-his-ass, crime-fighting automaton that we’ve all come to know and love.  (That’s why I was disappointed to learn that Webb turned down John Landis when he was offered the role of Dean Wormer in National Lampoon’s Animal House—he would have been sensational.)  In Danger, he plays vicious low-rent thug Joe Regas, whose job skills offer little outside of beating people up…but it’s interesting to note that he doesn’t trust Ladd’s character through the course of the movie, and he turns out to be right.  (The scene where he and Ladd play handball is worth the price of admission.)

Danger features character great Paul Stewart as the gang’s leader; an Orson Welles crony, Stewart had many memorable moments in silver-screen villainy—he’s the guy who menaces annoying little Bobby Driscoll in The Window (1949), and the sebaceous Carl Evello in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).  (Even when he was playing a half-way decent guy, like in Champion [1949], there was still something a bit seedy about him.)  TDOY fave Jan “Smoochie” Sterling plays Stewart’s main squeeze, and if you look fast, Kathleen Freeman has a bit part as a nun—long before she was rapping the knuckles of Jake and Elwood Blues with a ruler in The Blues Brothers (1980).

Danger was filmed in 1949, but wasn’t released until 1951—which allowed Morgan to appear on a couple of Webb’s Dragnet programs long before he filled in for Ben Alexander as Joe Friday’s new partner in the 1967-70 TV version of the seminal cop show.  (You can definitely hear Morgan’s distinctive tones on one September 17, 1949 broadcast, where he doubles up as both a hotel manager and bank teller.)   Someone at Paramount must have liked the teaming of the two men, because they ended up on the wrong side of the law again in Dark City (1950), a seldom-shown noir that served as Charlton Heston’s introduction to the big screen.  Still, they remain the best thing in Appointment with Danger—a well-worth-your-time film noir that I purchased from the good people at Five Minutes to Live.

Tell them Boris sent you

So the ‘rents and I are dining on some fried chicken purchased from Publix for lunch this afternoon, and my Mother makes mention of the fact that she and Dad went to the National Guard Armory today to get flu shots.

“They have a drive-thru, you know,” she informs me.

Slight pause from me.  “You mean…you drive up, stick your arm out and…”

“That’s how they do it now,” she reaffirms.

“Good thing you weren’t there for a tetanus shot,” I responded, getting back to my chicken.  A three-minute pause, then the two of them begin to cackle like hens, having just got the joke.  (Just more evidence to add to the already voluminous pile of verification that I was adopted.)

Anyway, some eBay-related business (okay, I had packages to mail) kept me getting anything accomplished today (like watching something for the blog), so I thought I’d direct you to a nifty little feature at Laughing Gravy’s In the Balcony entitled “31 Days of Boris Karloff”.  Every day this month, the Gravymeister is watching some of Mr. Karloff’s finest (and…well, not-so-finest) films and reviewing them in his own inimitable style.

I mention this partly because I have nothing prepared, and partly because I loaned him my copy of The Walking Dead (1936), which I dubbed to DVD from a VHS recording (in the good old DirecTV days) two years ago.  Someone asked Gravy if he needed any more Karloff films and he mentioned that there were one or two that he had not yet seen, including West of Shanghai (1937).

Now…don’t tell him this…but I had this on VHS—except that I chucked it out two weeks ago.  I couldn’t remember why I recorded it (I got it confused with Lon Chaney’s West of Zanzibar—which I already had) and tossed it in the bin…then realized my error only after reading a short list of the Karloffs he had not yet seen.

D’oh!  Stupid getting-older-memory…

“When you live outside the law you have to eliminate dishonesty…” – Julian (Robert Keith), The Lineup (1958/Columbia)

One of my earliest posts here at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear was an essay on The Lineup, a CBS radio series that premiered on July 6, 1950 as an imitator of the then-popular police procedural Dragnet and lasted on the air until February 20, 1953.  Scripted by future film director Blake Edwards (who also created Richard Diamond, Private Detective for actor-crooner Dick Powell), the series starred OTR stalwart Bill Johnstone as Lt. Ben Guthrie and Wally Maher as Sgt. Matt Grebb (previously played by Joseph Kearns).  Lineup differed from Dragnet only in that its dramatized cases were mostly fictional, compared to Jack Webb’s “liberation” of actual police files from the L.A.P.D.

The Lineup was one of a handful of CBS radio series that made the successful transition to television, premiering October 1, 1954 with Warner Anderson taking over for Johnstone as Guthrie and Tom Tully pinch-hitting for Maher as Grebb (who had since been promoted to Inspector).  A third character, Inspector Fred Asher (Marshall Reed), was also added to “the lineup,” and the series had a home at 10:00pm on CBS’ Friday night schedule for five seasons before being expanded to an hour in the fall of 1959 on Wednesdays.  Tully and Reed got their pink slips, and a new cast joined Anderson: William Leslie as Insp. Dan Delaney, Tod Barton as Insp. Charlie Summers (that name sounds familiar), Skip Ward as Officer Pete Larkin and Rachel Ames as Policewoman Sandy McAllister.  Whether it was the brand-new cast or brand-new time slot—or simply that the series had worn out its welcome—the changes did little to keep the program on the air, and The Lineup left CBS-TV on January 20, 1960.  It was syndicated soon afterward; its name changed to San Francisco Beat.

During its stint on CBS, someone got the idea to produce a theatrical version of the series, a B-picture that has acquired a sizeable cult following due to its crisp, no-nonsense direction by the legendary Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry) and suspenseful Naked City-type script by Sterling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night).  Indeed, The Lineup starts off with a bang: the audience is taken to a pier where boat passengers are disembarking when a porter swipes a grip from art dealer Philip Dressler (Raymond Bailey, sans his Milton Drysdale toupee), throws it into the back of a waiting cab, and the cab heads off for points unknown.  The cabbie fails to see a large truck backing out in his path and he rams into it, causing the truck’s driver to exit his vehicle to start the usual “Why don’t you look where you’re going” brouhaha.  The cabbie drives around the truck, and plows right into a beat cop who’s motioning for him to stop—and as the cop’s body hits the ground he manages to get off a shot that hits the cab driver and causes him to ram into the back car of a stationary train.

Lt. Guthrie (Anderson) and Insp. Al Quine (Emile Meyer—apparently Tom Tully wasn’t available to reprise his TV role as Grebb) are curious as to why the fuss over a simple suitcase has resulted in two deaths—and soon learn that a statue inside Dressler’s case is the hiding place for a nice little stash of heroin.  A narcotics smuggling ring is operating in Frisco, whereupon innocent tourists have smack planted on them and then are relieved of their cargo once they’ve left the boat.  That confiscation job falls to a pair of hoods played by Robert Keith and Eli Wallach; Wallach is the gunman described by his mentor (Keith) as “a wonderful, pure pathological study…a psychopath with no inhibitions.”  (Maybe so, but Keith comes across as a pretty creepy customer, too—particularly his habit of writing down the last words of dying individuals in a little notebook.)  Keith and Wallach (and wheelman Richard Jaeckel) have to obtain three parcels of heroin from three separate passengers and have it ready at a checkpoint before 2:00pm.

I had seen The Lineup one time before, and to give you an idea of how long it’s been it was on a television station that interrupted the movie with commercials.  I’ve come to appreciate it a little more with a second viewing, though I’m still not certain why it’s held in such high regard by cultists—there are an awful lot of slow spots in the film (primarily the scenes in which the cops appear…when your villains are more interesting than the law you’re bound to have trouble) and many of its memorable moments and ideas have been cribbed from earlier noir movies (T-Men, Kiss of Death, The Lady from Shanghai, etc.).  It does have a wild climactic chase that kicks in around the seventy-six minute mark, and the performances (particularly Wallach and Keith) are first-rate; my biggest delight while watching the film was recognizing right off the actor who plays Wallach’s contact as Bob Bailey, a.k.a. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (his voice was a dead giveaway).  (Jack “Rocky Jordan” Moyles has a bit part in this one, too, as a steam room attendant.)  My copy of The Lineup came courtesy of Five Minutes to Live, which is a nice site to locate hard-to-find noirs. 

Farewell, George

From my Bombast Comcast.net webpage comes some truly devastating news.  Actor George Grizzard has gone on to his rich reward at the age of 79.

His obituary covers in nice detail his incredible acting range, particularly in the area of live theater.  I wasn’t at all aware of Grizzard’s stage accomplishments—he won a Tony Award for his performance in 1996’s Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, and nominations for his work in The Disenchanged (1959) and Big Fish, Little Fish (1961).  His stage debut was opposite Paul Newman, playing his brother in 1955’s The Desperate Hours, which was later brought to the silver screen with Humphrey Bogart in the starring role.  Other highlights include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the original 1962 production), California Suite (1976) and Judgment at Nuremberg (2001).

Grizzard also did a goodly amount of television work, including the prestigious dramatic anthology Playhouse 90.  Among the series he appeared on: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, Ben Casey, Medical Center, Hawaii Five-O and Law & Order, on which he had a recurring role as Arthur Gold.  He also copped a Best Supporting Actor Emmy in 1980 playing opposite Henry Fonda in the TV-movie The Oldest Living Graduate.

But I’ll personally remember Grizzard best for performances in films like Advise & Consent (1962, as Senator Ackerman), Warning Shot (1967, as the flaky pilot-playboy who befriends David Janssen’s cop) and Bachelor Party (1984) because—and I mean absolutely no malice in this—no one could play a better asshole than George.  Any individual who has the cojones to play truly unlikable people time and time again is aces in my book.

R.I.P., Mr. Grizzard.  You will be missed. 

Everybody loves Raymond

Having watched The Further Perils of Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy and the DVD set Weiss-O-Rama of late, I cannot escape the fact that the silent film bug has bit me again.  It’s a recurring phenomena (though certainly nothing to get all plastic-sheeting-and-duct-tape about) whereupon I find myself buying goodly-sized portions of DVDs showcasing silent cinema, and again, while the consequences are slight (and most enjoyable), it does have a tiny tendency to put a dent in my wallet.  I’ve procured within the past two weeks alone some silent comedies and dramas from the likes of Grapevine Video, Sunrise Silents and Kino—which I hope to find time to watch and review in this space this month.

I’ve been a fan of silent films since I was a little gaffer—particularly the works of the great comedians.  I’m not entirely sure when and how this came about, though I’ve long suspected that my exposure to Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Charley Chase in their Columbia two-reelers would go a long way toward explaining it.  I’m also old enough to remember the hoopla surrounding the return of Charlie Chaplin to the United States (not knowing at the time, of course, that the U.S. was responsible for kicking him out in the first place) to participate in the 1972 Academy Awards.  A few years later, I made a point to borrow from the town library Walter Kerr’s seminal reference tome The Silent Clowns—not long after its publication, the author/critic appeared occasionally on a program that I watched on our local PBS affiliate entitled The Silent Comedy Film Festival.

But enough about my truly odd childhood.  This October 15th and 17th, the Museum of Modern Art has scheduled showings of Hands Up! (1926), Raymond Griffith’s Civil War comedic masterpiece.  I’d certainly love to be there (although Pam says the popcorn really sucks) but since I cannot, I spend last night (through the courtesy of Grapevine) watching it in the confines of my own home, where the popcorn is assuredly better.  Hands Up! is acknowledged by many silent comedy fans to be Raymond Griffith’s best feature, even earning a spot on the National Film Registry in 2005.  Author Kerr enthusiastically championed Griffith in Clowns, writing:  “Raymond Griffith seems to me to occupy a handsome fifth place—after Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon—in the silent comedy pantheon, a place that is his by right of his refusal to ape his contemporaries and his insistence on following the devious curve of an entirely idiosyncratic eye.”

It would be difficult for someone like myself to argue with Mr. Kerr’s assessment (though I do take issue with his assigning Langdon to fourth place—I think a strong case can be made for Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle) since I’ve only seen the one Griffith vehicle—and in fact, more knowledgeable fans than I demur based on the reality that many of Griffth’s films have been lost to the ravages of time.  In a February 2005 article in Classic Images, Bruce Calvert informs readers that only two of Griffith’s best comedies—Hands and Paths to Paradise (1925)—are available on video; some of his supporting performances also exist in that medium, but the rest of his starring films still extant remain locked away in private archives.  (In the case of Paradise, nearly every available print is missing the film’s final reel.)

But rather than lament what’s unavailable, allow me to praise what is: Hands Up! is a first-rate feature comedy, featuring Griffith as a Confederate spy assigned to keep a Nevada gold mine out of the hands of the Union Army (represented by Captain Montagu Love).  During the course of his mission, he faces a firing squad (one of the film’s most memorable sequences, as he cavalierly tosses plates in the air to distract his would-be executioners) and Indians on the warpath, and manages to fall in love with both daughters (Marian Nixon, Virginia Lee Corbin) of the mine owner (Mack Swain)—a sticky wicket resolved at the end with a gag that I’m certain raised more than a few eyebrows at the time.  Griffith’s unflappable character (adorned in silk hat and tuxedo) makes the comedic entanglements work, displaying a breezy insouciance that is positively engaging.  I also find Hands Up! intriguing in that like Keaton’s The General, both of its protagonists are backing the Confederate cause…even though we all know (with the possible exception of a few people hanging out in my neck of the woods) how that turned out.

In The Silent Clowns, Kerr states that “…’Hands Up!’ contains some work that is daring—for its period, certainly—and some that is masterfully delicate; the work of an inventive, unaggressive, amiably iconoclastic intelligence.”  To me, the test of a really good silent film is whether or not it encourages me to seek other entries by the same artists (actors, directors, writers, etc.) and in the case of Hands Up! it’s passed the exam with flying colors.

Requiem for a heavyweight producer

My Bombast Comcast.net home page reports the passing of television producer Martin Manulis, who has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 92.

This will demonstrate how much of a lowbrow I am, by the way.  I saw Manulis’ name and immediately recognized him as the executive producer of TDOY sitcom fave The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis—not stopping to realize, of course, that he was also the creator of television’s Playhouse 90, one of the most prestigious dramatic anthology series in the history of the TV airwaves, with productions like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Days of Wine and Roses to his credit.

Manulis was also the producer of the movie adaptation of Wine and Roses, which starred Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick., and he dabbled in film production through the 1960s with films like Dear Heart (1964) and Luv (1967) among his credits.  But it was on the small screen that he achieved his greatest fame, producing various programs from the likes of Suspense to Studio One to Adventures in Paradise to James at 15.

R.I.P., Mr. Manulis—you will be missed.

Blogs that make you go hmmm…

My good neighbor to the North, Brent McKee, has bestowed upon my humble blog a meme (and this just goes to show you how much I know—I thought it was pronounced “mem,” as when Madeline Kahn says to the cowboy in Blazing Saddles: “Tex mem?”) and to be honest, this isn’t any ordinary meme (you know what I’m talking about—the ones that ask “Paper or Plastic?”…or some such esoteric claim) but one that asks you to name five blogs that make you think.  I’m nothing sort of astonished when Brent says Thrilling Days of Yesteryear starts up the old thought processes for him because usually when people comment on my blog it’s a variation of “Lots of free time on your hands, huh?”

Anyway, here is how this meme works:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.

2. Link to this post so that people can find the exact origin of the meme.

3. Optional: Proudly display the Thinking Blogger Award on your site with a link to the post you wrote.

Even though Brent’s already tagged Tom Sutpen, Stephen Cooke and Richard Gibson’s pop culturally delicious If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (which, in all fairness, has already been tagged previously)—one of the blogs I was going to include on my list, I thought I’d take a stab at this.  Here goes:

1. Blog d’Elisson – If you look at the “Yet More Self-Aggrandizement” Section in the right hand section of Steve’s blog, you’ll see a quote by me that I confess I swiped from Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in the movie The Maltese Falcon.  But in “liberating” this quote I meant no malice: simply put, Steve is one of the most fascinating individuals I’ve ever met.  His blog is a living, breathing example of esoteric; he has so many interests that he reminds me of a good friend in college who could hold forth on any subject without any hint of “I know more than you do.”  (Or, as Walter Brennan used to put it: “No brag…just fact.”)  There’s always something to be learned or taken away from Blog d’Elisson—and if you ever get the pleasure of meeting the man himself in person, take it from me: there’s no pretense about him, what you see is what you get.

2. Pop Culture Petri Dish – I have only one complaint about Tony Kay’s blog…he doesn’t update it nearly enough.  As an observer of pop culture, I am full-green-envious of those individuals who dissect it better than I can, and Tony is definitely in the top five.  In watching the TV chestnut Streets of San Francisco on DVD, Tony can’t help but marvel at the huge leaps in technology made since that series’ 1972-77 run: “’Where's his cell phone?’ my mind cried out more than once as I watched a beat cop forced to run to the nearest pay phone to call in a crime scene, and observing antique equipment like Tele-type machines and, hell, electric typewriters was like peeking in on a living museum.”  Great stuff.

3. The Third Banana - As an individual who’s been known to drive people out of the TV room with cries of “That’s so-and-so!” any time I recognize a character actor, it’s nice to know that Aaron Neathery and Company are there to share their immeasurable knowledge of comedians who are either forgotten today…or were obscure from the get-go.  Case in point, this on-the-money mini-review of The Wrong Miss Wright (1937), a Columbia two-reeler starring Charley Chase that Aaron notes “is arguably better than most of his final performances for [Hal] Roach…”  Nice to know that I’m not the only one who thinks Wright is one of Chase’s best comedies.

4. Something Old, Nothing New – I’ll just put it as succinctly as I can…I want to be Jaime Weinman when I grow up.

5. Scrubbles.net – Like any good pop culture blog, Matt Heinrichs samples everything from the buffet, from Siskel & Ebert to erotic playing cards to Disneyland records.  Matt consistently emphasizes what people have long suspected but are afraid to admit: kitsch is cool.  

“We’ve been tricked by cleverness!”

Laughing Gravy, who tears the tickets in half at the must-read classic films website In the Balcony, has alerted his loyal readers to a pair of cliffhangers available on DVD and currently being offered sporadically on eBay by a company calling itself Restored Serials.  Both of these serials are widely available from other dealers, but the Restored Serials versions feature slightly superior prints of two fan favorites: The Spider Returns (1941) and The Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949).

Returns is a sequel to The Spider’s Web, a 1938 chapter-play considered by many serial fans to be the best that Columbia Studios offered.  It was directed by James W. Horne, a man whose name is anathema to about fifty percent of serial aficionados…and a godsend to the other half.  Horne’s experience as a veteran comedy director (among his resume you’ll find Laurel & Hardy’s The Bohemian Girl and Way Out West) had a tendency to drift into his cliffhanger productions, often devising bits of intentional comedy that die-hard serial fans have denounced as the work of the Devil.  (In my opinion—and I stress that this is my opinion only—comedy can only help a serial.  Horne directed Captain Midnight, one of my favorite entries among Columbia’s prolific serial output.)  One member of the Serial Squadron, who vehemently disagrees with my comedy cliffhanger thesis, nevertheless told me in a chat session last night that if I continue to cling to my theory I will positively adore The Spider Returns.  Despite our disagreement, I value his judgment and am looking forward to seeing it.

Galahad is pretty much what the title implies; a romp with the famed Knight of the Round Table (played by future Superman George Reeves) and his quest to recover the sword known as Excalibur.  It has its detractors and defenders and while I haven’t viewed it yet, any serial that attempts to do something different always gets a vote of confidence from me (though Who’s Guilty almost put the kibosh on that).  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to slip it into the DVD player soon, but this evening I turned my attention to another serial purchased from Restored Serials, Republic’s The Crimson Ghost (1946).

Republic Studios’ reputation as the go-to guy for cliffhangers is, of course, legendary among serial fans—though I’ll risk blasphemy here and state that while some truly fine chapter-plays were cranked out from the “Thrill Factory,” some of them were so bad they made Columbia and Universal’s product look like masterpieces.  Many of the post-war Republics are like this; you can find a nugget among the dross but you have to look mighty hard.  Well, look no further than Ghost—an engaging little vehicle that moves at breakneck speed with energetic stunts and unique chapter endings to compliment its first-rate cast and script.

Professor Chambers (Kenne Duncan) is a scientific genius who’s developed a device known as the Cyclotrode, designed to detect and repel atomic-bomb attacks which he intends to use for niceness instead of evil.  Unfortunately, a costumed villain known as The Crimson Ghost has other designs on Chambers’ toy, and he kidnaps the good professor, placing him under his power by placing a “control collar” around his neck that will make the scientist bend to his will.  (It also repels fleas and ticks for up to three months…but as far as heartworms go, he’s on his own.)  Chambers’ protégé, scientist and criminologist Duncan Richards (Charles Quigley), has his hands full over twelve chapters trying to stop the Ghost’s diabolical scheme, his identity unknown but is suspected to be one of four professors at a nearby university to whom Richard reports in each chapter.  Dunky is also assisted by his lovely assistant, Diana Farnsworth—played by none other than Linda Stirling, a.k.a. “Queen of the Serials.”

The mystery element of Ghost—who is the person behind this costumed creep?—is one of the things that makes the serial so entertaining; Republic cleverly concealed the villain’s identity by having the Ghost played by a stuntman (Bud Geary) and voiced by several actors—one of which is I. Stanford Jolley, who receives fourth billing even though he has a tiny role as a man posing as a government-appointed psychiatrist.  The plot is also top-notch, Quigley is a likable (if slightly stiff) hero, and Stirling is always lovely to look at…though I prefer to watch her in cliffhangers in which she has more to do, like Zorro’s Black Whip (1944) and The Tiger Woman (1944).  I like how the serial’s plot contains a few interesting twists: one of the major characters snuffs it in the third chapter, and there’s a nail-biting sequence where Quigley attempts an operation on Stirling to remove a “control collar” bestowed upon her by the villainous Ghost.  (Previous attempts to remove these collars ultimately result in the deaths of the unfortunates.)  There are also some first-rate cliffhangers (my favorite is in Chapter 10, “The Trap That Failed,” in which a truck containing Stirling and one of the professors crashes through a wall of a warehouse and off the pier to the water below—I saw the warehouse and just assumed that the Brothers Lydecker would end up blowing it to smithereens) and slam-bang action sequences (Quigley’s stunt double steps off a wall in order to leap upon his opponent in the first chapter), and the ‘rents (who ended up watching it with me) enjoyed it as much as I did; Mom in particular, who was enchanted by the fact that her childhood hero, Clayton Moore, played the Ghost’s chief henchman.  (Hey—any serial that lets Moore appear not only in a gas mask but a surgeon’s mask, allowing the serial’s viewers to shout out “Who IS that masked man?” is aces in my book.)  Mom and I were also reduced to hysterics by the time of the twelfth chapter, in which the villains are subdued with the help of a ferocious dog named…wait for it…”Timmy.”  (“Get ‘im, Timmy!”)

During the viewing of Ghost, Mom started complaining that the only serials she ever sees Clayton Moore in are the ones in which he’s the bad guy.  (I guess she forgot about Jesse James Rides Again, which we watched back in January.)  If I can figure out what I’ve done with Perils of Nyoka (1942), I’m going to try and put that one on for her later this week—but if I’m unable to locate its whereabouts, we’ll have to settle for the too-boring-for-words Jungle Drums of Africa (1953).

The magnificence of the Ambersons

I mentioned back in January that I had ordered a copy of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) on a Region 2 DVD available from Universal (UK) via Sendit.com, and I just recently got around to slipping it into my DVD player for a look-see.  This amazing film—which some argue tops Welles’ freshman effort, Citizen Kane (1941)—receives a not-too-shabby treatment on disc…though once again, I’m curious as to how Universal (UK) obtained the rights to an RKO property that now belongs to Warner Home Video (courtesy of Ted Turner, natch).  I suppose I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth—after all, it could have been colorized like the loathsome Region 2 DVD treatment of The Big Steal (1949).

The grapevine says that WHV is bringing Ambersons to disc sometime next year, so I suppose I could have waited (if they do it up nice and include some interesting extras I may purchase that version) but this disc will do for the time being…and besides, I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now.  There is an interesting interview with Bill Krohn (a director-writer-producer on the 1993 documentary It’s All True, which partially reconstructs Welles’ ill-fated 1942 project of the same name) included on the Region 2 version that provides an interesting timeline on the events surrounding the butchering of Ambersons (approximately fifty minutes of the finished product was cut, leaving a bowdlerized version with a tacked-on “happy” ending), a film that just may very well have been (in its completed form) Welles’ true cinematic masterpiece.  The featurette is sort of tough to slog through, mainly because of Krohn’s halting French (but, hey—he speaks the language better than I do, so I suppose I should shut up), but I was taken with his argument that what sealed the director’s fate at RKO was not the poor box-office reception of Kane or Ambersons (Krohn argues that RKO wasn’t expecting either film to do boffo b.o. because of their “art” status) but that of Journey Into Fear (1942), the programmer produced and partially directed by Welles (who also played the memorable role of Colonel Haki) that the studio was counting on to recoup the losses from the first two films.

Every day’s a Holliday

Ah, Judy, Judy, Judy—how do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.  Better still, let me count the movie performances…sadly, there weren’t that many in a career tragically cut short by Holliday’s passing from breast cancer in 1965.  There is, of course, her Oscar-winning performance as “dumb blonde” Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday (1950); her “comeback” role (after being smeared by those HUAC weasels) as underdog Laura Partridge in The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956); her final silver screen turn in the 1960 Bells are Ringing (a part she had played on stage in 1957, winning a Tony).  I guesstimate that there are only a few Holliday movies I’ve yet to see; the major one being Full of Life (1956) but also the brief appearances in vehicles like Greenwich Village (1944), Something for the Boys (1944) and Winged Victory (1944).

Back in May of last year, Deep Discount DVD had a sale on some of their Columbia titles—which allowed me to score copies of Cadillac, It Should Happen to You (1954) and The Marrying Kind (1952) for $5.98 a pop.  This past weekend, I programmed Happen as part of my Midnight Movie Marathon and while the movie may not captivate me as it once did, it’s still fun, breezy entertainment.  In this one, Judy plays Gladys Glover, a model who’s just lost her job, whose chance meeting with aspiring documentary filmmaker (Jack Lemmon, in his first credited screen appearance) gives her an idea to rent a billboard with her name on it in New York City’s Columbus Circle..  A soap company is stymied by Gladys’ advertising coup (they had wanted the billboard to hawk their own product), and the son (Peter Lawford) of the company’s president tries to romance Gladys into giving up her space.  Gladys soon becomes a cause célèbre in the Big Apple; her moniker plastered on various billboards and her “career” handled by agent Brod Clinton (Michael O’Shea).

I like Happen because the subject matter still rings true today—how a person with absolutely no talent can still be a celebrity and public figure (the prime example being…well, their first name is a city in France and last a hotel chain) and how society feeds off the exploitation.  Holiday is great—the scene where she confronts the board members of the soap company (who clearly have their own agenda in mind) is sort of a blueprint for Solid Gold Cadillac—and her chemistry with Lemmon is first-rate (the two were paired again for another film released the same year, Phfft).  The film benefits from the input of Born Yesterday director George Cukor and scribe Garson Kanin, and there are lots of fun character actor cameos in this one as well: Jack Kruschen, Mort Mills, Cora Witherspoon and Frank Nelson (playing—what else?—a department store floorwalker).

Personally, I enjoyed the second Judy romp, The Marrying Kind, more: once again, it re-teamed Holliday, Cukor and Kanin (and wife Ruth Gordon) in a seriocomic tale about a married couple (Judy and newcomer Aldo Ray) seeking a divorce who, upon reflection, realize that their life together has had a lot of bumps along the old matrimonial road…but a lot of bright spots as well.  Kind is a real rarity in that it presents a warts-and-all view of marriage (it’s very similar to the later Two for the Road) and while there’s a lot of broad comedy in the film there are some real heartbreaking dramatic moments as well.  I’ve mentioned this before, but author-historian Danny Peary has argued in his book Alternate Oscars that Holliday’s performance in Kind is even better than that in Born Yesterday…and I have to say I agree with him; Judy’s role of Florence “Florrie” Keefer rises above the farcical aspects of Yesterday’s Billie Dawn and becomes a three-dimensional human being who you can’t help but root for.  Ray is able to keep up with Holliday despite the difficulties of his character (a man filled with too much stubborn pride to realize that money and financial standing shouldn’t dictate whether or not a marriage is working) and there are also nice turns from the supporting actors, including longtime TDOY fave Mickey Shaughnessy as Ray’s butcher brother-in-law (he has a great scene in his shop in which he lectures Ray on the realities of marriage).  Lots of familiar character and soon-to-be star faces populate this one, too:  Charles Bronson, Peggy Cass, Frank Ferguson, Nancy Kulp and an unmistakable voice cameo from Harry Von Zell.

“The place—a city…the time—now…the story of The Felony Squad.”

Back in the 1970s, when I watched television shows like Charlie’s Angels and The Love Boat because I simply didn’t know any better, I remember seeing actor Dennis Cole in a number of guest-star roles and marveling at how he got the gig only because he was Mr. Jaclyn Smith…that is, I should say, because he was married to the Charlie’s Angels star from 1978 to 1981.  Suffice it to say, I was a bit cynical in my youth (I’m much better now) and I did not realize that he actually appeared in other series before he and Ms. Smith were betrothed, like Bearcats! and Bracken’s World.

Cole’s biggest TV hit was a 1966-69 crime drama called The Felony Squad, in which he played rookie detective Jim Briggs opposite partner Detective Sam Stone—who was essayed by none other than “the greatest private detective of them all,” Howard Duff (well, on radio, anyway).  The two men, mentor and protégé, worked the mean streets of an unnamed Western city (though filmed in Los Angeles) under the supervision of Captain Frank Nye (Frank Maxwell), and later Captain Ed Franks (Barney Phillips).  The other main character on Squad was Jim’s father Dan, a desk sergeant played by Dragnet veteran Ben Alexander.  (In fact, when Jack Webb revived the classic radio-television series in January 1967, he had wanted his old friend to rejoin him as Frank Smith—but since Alexander had already committed to Squad Webb was forced to call upon the services of Harry Morgan as Bill Gannon.)

Richard Murphy, a screenwriter who contributed to classic film noirs like Boomerang! (1947), Cry of the City (1948) and Panic in the Streets (1950), was the creator of Felony Squad and also wrote and directed The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960), the TV adaptation of which was mentioned in a post by Jaime Weinman sometime back.  In its planning stages, Squad was originally titled Men Against Evil—which I have to admit, is a much dandier title.  The concept of the program was a sort of soap opera-ish look at the day-to-day routine of a police captain.  However, this idea was soon scrapped and the show was reworked into your standard police drama with the three main characters—and the title also went out the window when one of the show’s sponsors objected to the “Evil” part.  Squad premiered on ABC-TV September 12, 1966 and for two seasons was a Monday night viewing staple that, while not ruling the ratings roost, was a modest hit and had built a respectable following.  However, at the beginning of its third season in 1968, it was moved to Friday nights where it found itself pummeled senseless by CBS’ still-popular Gomer Pyle, USMC.  ABC then put the show out of its misery in mid-season on January 31, 1969.

Up until today, I had never seen an episode of Felony Squad—my curiosity in the series was, of course, sparked by the presence of OTR veterans Duff and Alexander—so I purchased an eight-disc set from one of those websites that advertise complete seasons of shows (I won’t sully the blog by mentioning the word…but it rhymes with “root peg”), thinking a series like Squad is going to be pretty far down the totem pole in seeing a proper DVD release anytime soon.  I didn’t pay very much for it but I will caveat emptor you right now: the source of these shows would appear to be old VHS tapes and while the video is watchable, the audio has an annoying hum that often makes it hard to hear the dialogue.  (I placed an order for this set back in November, and when I called five weeks later to inquire on its status, I couldn’t hear the person on the phone because it sounded as if she were working in a laundry at the time.  I guess that’s what they call in the writing bidness “foreshadowing.”)  Also, every site I’ve seen this set advertised trumpets it as “The Complete Series”; Squad aired seventy-three episodes during its three-season run but there are only fifty-two on the set.  Unless they’ve repealed some of the laws of mathematics that does not constitute “complete.”  (This is a shame, too, because the set doesn’t have the final episode of Squad, “The Law & Order Blues”—which guest-stars Carl Betz as attorney Clinton Judd in a “crossover” episode continued on Betz’s series Judd For the Defense.)

As for the show itself, it’s darned good television—it’s a shame you don’t see this one rerun much (I don’t know if FX ever showed it in its early days of operation but one of the shows features a portion of a commercial with Married with Children’s David Faustino touting Fox t-shirts…so I suppose it’s possible).  At the risk of sounding facetious, it’s sort of a Reader’s Digest version of Naked City, telescoping everything that was grand about that equally-neglected series (were it not for the DVD sets released by Image Entertainment, I would have never even caught that one) into an economical half-hour.  Squad’s other connection to Naked City lies in the fact that Walter Grauman served as the show’s executive producer; Grauman also directed one of City’s classic episodes, “Prime of Life.”  Many of Felony Squad’s episodes were directed by up-and-comers like Michael Ritchie and Richard Donner, but also featured turns behind the camera from series star Duff, future Cheers player Nicholas Colasanto and OTR veteran Lawrence Dobkin!

Duff, Cole and Alexander turn in exceptionally fine work, and of course there are plenty future stars in guest parts (Ed Asner, Charles Grodin, Ricardo Montalban, Beau Bridges, Carol Kane, Joan Van Ark, etc.).  I’ve only watched the first disc but have already viewed a couple of very good episodes: the series’ premiere, “The Streets are Paved with Quicksand,” guest-stars Darren McGavin as a sleazy attorney who accuses Jim Briggs (Cole) of brutality, forcing Stone to defend his partner in a nice little plot-twist.  “Flame Out” co-stars James Best as a slightly nutso punk (and believe me, when it comes to playing flakes, Best was…well, the best) who senselessly murders a manager in an all-night diner and then plots an extortion scheme against a married woman (Pippa Scott).  And of course, what dramatic series from the 1960s would be complete without an appearance from Robert Duvall?  Bob’s a police snitch (a real geek with Coke-bottle glasses) in “The Death of a Dream,” which finds Stone and Briggs on the hunt for a pair of muggers who commit crimes while in drag.  The lottery is at $25 million this week, so if I get lucky you may soon be able to see Felony Squad on an independent television station near you.

The man who still won’t lie down

A few days ago, I wrote up a little review about the five-DVD release “Ham”: The Lost Magic of Lloyd Hamilton by Looser Than Loose (“Made with pride in New Hampshire, USA”), a company specializing in silent comedy shorts, old-time radio, etc.  When purchasing this set, it was kind of an afterthought because what I really had my eye on was their latest six-DVD collection, Buster Keaton: Educational Two-Reelers.  Now, by “educational” I don’t mean the shorts like the ones found on the Mackinac release Industrial Strength Keaton, but rather the sixteen two-reelers Buster churned for Educational Pictures between 1934 and 1937.

As Leonard Maltin writes in The Great Movie Shorts: “Hollywood has never been a particularly logical place, so it seemed perfectly natural to most people that one of the leading producers of comedy shorts was named Educational Pictures.”  In fact, the studio—founded by Earle W. Hammons in 1919—was originally commissioned to produce shorts for schools, but somehow got sidetracked along the way…so Hammons turned to comedy instead.  In the 1920s, Educational was one of the top mirth makers in the picture business, with product featuring stars like Lloyd Hamilton and Lupino Lane.  By the 1930s, however, the studio lost a bit of its former luster, as Maltin explains:

If one searched for a key word to describe the Educational comedies of the 1930s, the best one might be “cheap.”  Educational films almost always looked cheap, even though they were made in most cases by seasoned veterans.  One problem was the claustrophobia of shooting at the company’s eastern studio in Astoria, Long Island.  In addition, one suspects that the largest chunk of the small budgets went to pay the stars’ salaries, leaving very little for sets, costumes, and technical frills.  Nevertheless, the comedies (which were distributed by 20th Century Fox) always made money, despite the fact that the quality of the material was often downright poor.

“The best of the old comedy favorites…the brightest of the new stars” shouted the ad copy for Educational, and in 1934 new Educational hire Buster Keaton certainly qualified for the former part of that statement.  Keaton’s fortunes had taken a precipitous plunge since his glory days in the silents, and in 1933 was fired by MGM (the studio that seemed heckbent on ruining his career) because of his inability to toe the company line and report for work in the manner dictated by his studio bosses (his pull on the bottle was in full swing by that time, as anyone who’s seen What? No Beer? will testify).  His personal demons made him practically unemployable, but perpetually spiffed or not, Educational proved to be the only studio willing to throw him a lifeline.

“Legend has it that Buster Keaton’s career started sliding downhill in 1930 and never stopped—that his talkie films are unspeakable horrors,” writes Maltin in Movie Shorts.  “To be sure, they are not in the same league as Keaton’s silents, but they show a comic talent very much alive, and, in some cases, they compare favorably to other comedies being made at the same time.”  I’m sure I’ve mentioned in this space that my first exposure to The Great Stone Face was watching his Columbia shorts on television as a little shaver, and though I’m partial to the Columbias I must confess viewing the shorts in this Looser Than Loose collection has made me reconsider my position.  The Educational shorts (many co-directed by Keaton and Charles Lamont) aren’t the slapdash, mechanical efforts supervised by the likes of comedy directors such as Jules White, but are presented at a more leisurely pace that allows Keaton to crib ideas from his past silent shorts.  Having watched all of the Educationals over the past several days, I’m convinced that Buster’s batting average is better than previously noted…though as a devoted fan I’m certainly hip to the fact that I might be a tad prejudiced in this arena.

In the documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, Keaton’s widow Eleanor divulged that the only Educational two-reeler he had any particular fondness for was Grand Slam Opera (1936), and it’s still my personal favorite—a brisk and funny outing that has Buster competing for a girl’s affections at the same time he’s seeking fame and fortune on a radio show patterned after Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour.  By that same token, Leonard Maltin singles out amusing efforts like The Gold Ghost (1934), Allez Oop (1934), and One Run Elmer (1935) for special attention in Movie Shorts.  I particularly enjoyed a pair of shorts that don’t get the equal amount of attention as those I’ve previously mentioned: Tars and Stripes (1935) provides some excellent opportunities for mirth (including a hilarious running gag in which Buster schemes to be the first in line for chow outside the mess hall) playing a would-be sailor who keeps running afoul of petty officer Vernon Dent (longtime nemesis to the Three Stooges) by getting a little too cozy with Dent’s girlfriend (Dorothea Kent).  Mixed Magic (1936) is another neglected gem; in this one Buster becomes assistant to a jealous magician (Eddie Lambert) and proceeds to make a complete shambles out of the man’s act.

That having been said, there are a goodly amount of clinkers in Buster’s Educational output, including Palooka from Paducah (1935), Jail Bait (1937) and Ditto (1937).  A 1935 two-reeler, The Timid Young Man, is of some historical interest because it marks the only time that the “King of Comedy” (Mack Sennett) worked alongside the Great Stone Face…if only the short hadn’t turned out so “aggressively average,” as my friend Nick would say.  Keaton also kept the spirit of nepotism alive by hiring members of his family (father Joe, mother Myra, sister Louise and brother Harry) to populate the supporting casts: Joe, Myra and Louise appear in Paducah while mom, sis and Harry headline Love Nest on Wheels (1937), an amusing short (Buster’s last—and I realize I’m the minority regarding the laugh quotient on this one) that recycles gags from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s The Bell Boy (1918) and even reunites him with Arbuckle nephew Al St. John.  Myra and Louise also appeared in the manic Way Up Thar (1935), the two-reeler that served as Mack Sennett’s directorial swan song but introduced Joan Davis to the silver screen (the Sons of the Pioneers are also in this one, including a young Leonard Slye…better known as Roy Rogers).  This delightful short is featured among the ample bonus extras included in this six-DVD collection.

Other extras in the Keaton Educational collection include a 1957 appearance on Circus Time (I’m pretty sure it’s 1957, since Paul Winchell introduces Buster and notes that The Buster Keaton Story will be appearing in theatres soon) and a 1960’s TV sketch with Buster, Lucille Ball (who met Keaton while she was at MGM and became his devoted protégé) and Harvey Korman (as a cop).  There’s also a 1926 one-reeler (a Kodascope cut down) with Educational Pictures star Johnny Arthur—the poor man’s Charley Chase—and if sounds like I’m being a bit snarky about this, the short, Home Cured, is a blueprint for a later effort Chase made for Columbia in 1937, Calling All Doctors.  (Cured is included here because it was directed by William Goodrich—who was none other than Keaton’s mentor, Roscoe Arbuckle.)

When writing about Looser Than Loose’s Lloyd Hamilton set I neglected to mention that there are a few “Easter eggs” present on the discs; most of these are promotional shorts released by the Jam Handy Company in the 1930s and 1940s, and can easily be located on the Internets.  The Keaton set has an amusing one I hadn’t seen previously, a 1938 one-reeler for Chevrolet called Back of the Mike, in which a young boy listens intently to a radio Western serial, with the action switching back-and-forth from a dramatization of the proceedings (what’s taking place in the boy’s mind) to the same play being performed in a broadcast studio.  It’s fun to watch—and highly recommended to old-time radio fans—though I seriously doubt that a western serial program would require the big honkin’ studio used in this short (not to mention the hefty cast and crew to do voices and sound effects).  If that’s not enough to inspire you to invest in this collection, there’s always a public domain copy of Hollywood Steps Out (1941), a Warner Brothers outing that features a cartoon version of the Three Stooges doing their eye-poking and slapping to a conga beat…and an animated Clark Gable reminding us: “Don’t go away, folks—this oughta be good.”  (I just wanted to see if there were any Night Flight fans in the audience.)

There’s no place like home

Okay, it’s a bit clichéd—but in this case, it’s also a completely accurate way to describe “the Luthersville experience” of the past few days; it’s always good to get back to your familiar stomping grounds…particularly if you’re a forty-two year old man who’s having to sleep on a futon.  (The ‘rents’ accommodations were a bit more comfortable: they opted to crash at a Hampton Inn in nearby Newnan.  I offered to use my La Quinta connections to snag them an employee rate, but Mom is trying to rack up enough Hilton Honors points before next year’s Shreve reunion…an event that the thought of which makes me break out in a cold sweat.)

But the title of this post is also accurate because my niece—affectionately known as the Peanut—watched The Wizard of Oz on DVD during our stay; the first of what I hope will be many visits to the Emerald City to come.  Her mother, sister Deb, experienced some trepidation over letting her view this American film classic, particularly due to its high Wicked Witch-winged monkey content.  (Deb has a tendency to be a tad overprotective at times; she reminds me of a woman in a Robert Klein routine who screeches at her son: “Don’t touch that!  You’ll get cancer!”)  But her daughter insisted that the darker elements in Oz would not bother her (she kept repeating “I’m brave” in a mantra-like fashion whenever Margaret Hamilton did her thing onscreen) and for the most part, she dug the movie up until the final ten or fifteen minutes.  When I asked why she was so fidgety, sister Deb explained that she had already seen the ending during a showing at her church.  The Peanut did, however, watch Disney’s Peter Pan with rapt attention and enjoyed the heck out of it.  Her mother, on the other hand, was not amused when I explained to her daughter just why the crocodile was constantly following Captain Hook.

Other Peanut-related activities included taking her swimming (she breathlessly informed her father via phone about how she jumped off the side from the four-foot end and touched the bottom!) and to the Mall of Georgia, where she was disappointed at the lack of a play place (there may or may not have been one, we never got the opportunity to see) but settled for a ride on a merry-go-round at the food court.  On the way home, Mom decided to drive around Deb’s alma mater, Oglethorpe University, and as Deb pointed out to her daughter the various buildings I heard an audible sigh from the back seat that seemed to say “Why did we get off the Interstate to see this?  This is cutting into my play time!”  Long treks are an anathema to my niece; we took a trip to Athens to scope out the house that her Aunt Kat will be moving into come mid-August and it was difficult for her to shake off the “Are-we-there-yet?” syndrome.

To address Pam’s query, the only equine-related activity during our stay involved feeding some leftover corn-on-the-cob to the horses—Peanut was much more stoked about a tiny litter of kittens that was dumped onto my sister by persons unknown.  Except for the sleeping arrangements, I enjoyed every minute of my vacation—though the old adage of “It’s never long enough” certainly applies here…plus, it’s difficult to shake off a night auditor’s sleep pattern in such a brief span of time; I found myself rising early enough to catch Green Acres and Gunsmoke reruns on TVLand.

“Down these dark streets…”

Jaime Weinman at Something Old, Nothing New pointed me towards an interesting article by Jonathan Rosenbaum at DVDBeaver.com entitled “Ten Overlooked Noirs.”  Jonathan lists each noir by category, noting a film that’s readily available on disc and one that is not.

It’s a very good read, and I love some of his choices for noirs that should be on DVD but aren’t: Ace in the Hole (1951), for example.  This underrated classic—directed by the one-and-only Billy Wilder—stars Kirk Douglas in one of his preeminent rat-bastard roles; that of an unscrupulous newspaperman who uses a man trapped in a cave-in to crawl his way back to the top of the print journalism game.  This corrosive film—dubbed by Paramount wags as “Ass in the Wringer”—was remarkably prescient in its examination of today’s media, and of course, it co-stars TDOY fave Jan Sterling as the man’s wife who has one of filmdom’s most memorably cynical retorts: “I don’t pray.  Kneeling bags my nylons.”  Someone mentioned a while back that they were finally going to release Hole—also known as The Big Carnival, its re-release title—on DVD but unfortunately that version is a documentary about the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Other “SBA’s” (should be available) noted by Rosenbaum include While the City Sleeps (1956), Fritz Lang’s better-than-it-ought-to-be account of the hunt for a serial killer by a team of reporters who spend most of their time getting sloshed in gin joints throughout the film’s running time, and The Sound of Fury (1950, a.k.a. Try and Get Me!), a movie that features OTR veteran Frank Lovejoy’s finest hour on the silver screen as a man who stupidly allows himself to become enmeshed in the schemes of a seriously-disturbed Lloyd Bridges (this flick was based on the events dramatized in Fritz Lang’s first American offering, Fury).  Another movie mentioned oh-so-briefly by Jonathan is The Phenix City Story (1955) a little-seen Phil Karlson docu-noir based on the corrupt Alabama town of the same name.  (I’d buy all these for a dollar!)

“Big clocks are never wrong!”

In fiddling around with the new DVD recorder, I have been learning a few interesting things concerning its operation—first off, recording copy-protected DVD’s is verboten.  It says as much in the instructions, of course, but I was curious to see how this worked—so I took the Netflix copy of You Only Live Once (1937) and tried to make a copy of it, only to have the machine politely tell me that it just wasn’t going to happen and to place both hands behind my head and not make any sudden moves.  (Okay, I'm only slightly kidding about this part.)

Apparently however, this fail-safe device does not apply to VHS tapes.  I have It’s in the Bag! (1945) on videocassette, and I was able to make a duplicate DVD of that with relative ease.   This, of course, might be due to many factors—one being that the tape predates the whole Macrovision process, for example.  I will, however, hang on to this videocassette—unless Artisan or whoever owns the Republic Pictures catalog releases it on DVD in the near future.  (There are actually two different versions of Bag, one of which presents a sort of running commentary by star Fred Allen that obliterates most of the film’s dialogue.  I think—although I’m not 100% on this—that I may have taped this version off of AMC a good many years back, and it’s currently cooling its heels in “The Urban Attic,” the storage place for much of my stuff.  I’ll be making a pilgrimage there Tuesday morning to get some VHS tapes to dub off, so if I run across it I’ll check it out to make sure.)

Today’s dubbing project was a movie that I’ve always enjoyed watching but for some reason or another gets dismissed a lot in conversations about film comedies—the 1971 satire Cold Turkey, which I believe is the only theatrical film (filmed in 1969 and released two years later) directed by television pioneer Norman Lear.  A slimy P.R. man named Merwin Wren (memorably played by Bob Newhart) creates a campaign designed to put the tobacco industry in a better light (similar to Alfred Nobel’s peace prize scheme, which made people conveniently forget that the guy made his fortune in dynamite and munitions).  The cigarette folks will offer $25 million to any town in America that can quit smoking for thirty days, and the only taker is a small Iowa community named Eagle Rock, headed up by the crusading Reverend Clayton Brooks (Dick Van Dyke).  The movie is a minor masterpiece, with its pointed satire directed at many societal taboos including addiction, religion, the media, the tobacco industry and small-town America, and many of the familiar faces from Lear’s television shows are on hand, including Vincent Gardenia, Barnard Hughes, Graham Jarvis (hilarious as the leader of a John Birch Society-like organization), Jean Stapleton and Paul Benedict.  The brilliant Bob (Elliott) and Ray (Goulding) are also featured; enjoying one of their finest film showcases as they send up various personalities in Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Paul Harvey and Arthur Godfrey; the cast also includes Pippa Scott, Tom Poston, Edward Everett Horton (in his last film role), Barbara Cason, Sudie Bond, Judith Lowry (who was the feisty Mother Dexter on the otherwise lackluster Phyllis, a spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Helen Page Camp.  Cold Turkey also features one of my favorite Randy Newman songs, “He Gives Us All His Love” during the opening and closing credits.  Why this film hasn’t received its due is still a mystery to me—although there’s a dog-kicking incident that might put off a few animal lovers in the audience.

Jan Sterling, dead at 82

Man...I just learned via an Old-Time Radio Digest post from Kermyt Anderson that one of my favorite actresses, Jan Sterling, has passed on. (By the way, there's an excellent website dedicated to her and maintained by her son Adams Douglas, whose father was Paul Douglas, actor and one-time OTR announcer.)

Where to start? She made appearances in some of my favorite noirs: Caged (1950, as "Smoochie"), Union Station (1950), Appointment With Danger (1951) and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957). She was great alongside Kirk Douglas in the classic Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole (1951) (why, oh why won't someone release this to DVD?) and she gives a very nicely understated performance as Humphrey Bogart's wife in Bogey's last hurrah, The Harder They Fall (1956).

She was also in a few of what I like to call my guilty pleasures: Split Second (1953, a great Dick Powell-directed B-pic about a group of people trapped in a ghost town that's due to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb test), Women's Prison (1955)--with a cast that includes Ida Lupino (as a waaaaay over-the-top prison warden), Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter and Ida's hubby Howard Duff, and of course, High School Confidential (1958).

The last movie I saw her in was the 1981 comedy First Monday in October (1981), which wasn't all that great, but it did have Walter Matthau in it, and if memory serves me correct, she played his wife. Again, another quiet but effective performance.

R.I.P, Jan -- you will be so missed.

“…and now, here’s America’s top master of ceremonies…”

Though I’m sure Ralph Edwards might have raised a few strenuous objections over those words, it was nevertheless the way Art Linkletter was introduced week after week as the host of People Are Funny—which competed with Edwards’ Truth or Consequences as radio’s best-known audience stunt show. Created by producer-director John Guedel, the series premiered over NBC Radio on April 10, 1942, and enjoyed a lengthy run of nearly twenty years before bowing out June 10, 1960.

Entrepreneur Guedel had a definite Midas touch when it came to creating hit radio shows; in addition to Funny, he was also responsible for launching House Party (a popular daytime program also hosted by Linkletter) and You Bet Your Life, the comedy-quiz starring the one…the only…Groucho Marx. Funny’s origins date back to 1938—with an audition record that cost him thirty dollars, Guedel would give birth to a program that would net him millions. In its earliest incarnation, it was known as Pull Over, Neighbor, heard over NBC and CBS stations in Los Angeles in 1939 and later revamped as All Aboard. The story goes that the show’s eventual title stemmed from Guedel’s attendance at a dull after-dinner speech; while observing that the fidgety audience was just as bored as he was, Guedel jotted down on a napkin—“People are funny, aren’t they?”

Not long after, Guedel was browsing through a magazine while at the doctor’s, and came across a blurb that mentioned the recent cancellation of a current radio show—so he telephoned the agency that produced the show, and sold them People Are Funny. The concept of the show would be a concentration on the humorous facets of human nature—a subject that Guedel, a self-proclaimed “jack of all trades,” knew a little something about. (Before getting into radio, Guedel’s colorful career included jobs as a ditch-digger, traveling salesman, and writer for motion picture comedy producer Hal Roach.) His first choice for the show’s host was a young announcer named Art Linkletter, whose tremendous talent for ad-libbing appealed to Guedel. Linkletter, however, was already employed in San Francisco—but it didn’t really matter to NBC anyway; the network wanted top emcee Art Baker for the host’s position, though Guedel brought in Linkletter as co-host in the program’s early weeks so that he could compare and contrast the two Arts in action on the same soundstage.

People Are Funny became an immediate Friday night smash for NBC, a popular quiz program that technically wasn’t a quiz program, but a show in which audience members participated in offbeat, unusual stunts for prizes of cash and merchandise. To illustrate with an example of how the show worked, a broadcast (undated, though believed to be from either 1955 or 1956) I previewed last night begins with an eight-year-old child actress who is sent out of the studio to a nearby grocery market. She has a grocery list—buttermilk, a ¼ lb. of butter, a loaf of bread and a bottle of catsup—and she has been given a dollar by her “father” to procure said groceries. (I’ll wait for the incredulous laughter to subside as we marvel at the low cost of comestibles back then.) Now, the premise dictates that she’s "lost" the dollar, and she must try to convince a passerby to loan her another—whereupon that individual will be brought back to the studio so that they can retrieve the amount loaned; it has been placed under the windshield wiper of a new Plymouth convertible, which is also theirs to keep. (The kid comes back later, and not one person has given the little moppet the necessary dollar—demonstrating that not only are people funny, they’re notoriously tight with a buck to boot.)

People Are Funny made a small change on October 1, 1943—the show gave Art Baker his walking papers and announced that Linkletter would now be the emcee. Baker did not go gently into that good night, however; he sued both Guedel and the show’s sponsor for breach of contract, stating that according to its terms he could be released only if the sponsor had cancelled the show. Baker accused them of conspiring to axe the program, and then quickly re-signing Linkletter (at a lower salary). Alas, Baker was not restored to his proper place on People’s throne (he lost the lawsuit, but would later resurface on television as host of You Asked For It)—and it wasn’t long before people were saying: “Baker…Baker…can’t say as I recollect the name…” Linkletter rode the program to national prominence, and he earned the respect and admiration from notables like Eddie Cantor and Bing Crosby for his ad-libbing prowess. (The radio show even went to the movies, in a 1946 film that showcased Linkletter and old-time radio stars like Jack Haley, Rudy Vallee, Ozzie Nelson and Frances Langford.)

Listening to People Are Funny today, one becomes keenly aware that while it’s a teensy bit dated, it still holds up fairly well. In addition to the little grocery guttersnipe, the first show has a single man who is extremely boastful regarding his culinary talents—so Linkletter has several women in the audience test him with cooking-related questions. If he’s able to answer five out of seven correctly, a motor scooter awaits him for his efforts; but for every one he misses, ingredients are added to a mixing bowl by Prudence Penny (the home economics editor of the Los Angeles Examiner), which he must sample generously if he loses. (Ms. Penny also serves as the arbiter as to whether or not the questions have been answered correctly.) Needless to say, our Galloping Gourmet isn’t quite as clever as he believes himself to be, and before he goes home with a stove as a consolation prize, he has a heaping helping of raw oysters, chocolate syrup, soft strawberry ice cream, sauerkraut, horseradish and raw egg (a concoction endorsed by both the salmonella industry and World O’Crap, in its early Regrettable Food Recipe days). Linkletter cracks (after also sampling this “goop mélange,” to show he’s a good sport): “This dish is the dish that you serve your relatives just before you want them to go back home.”

The second show has an interesting stunt in which a “bride” and “groom” are assigned to bring people back to the studio in order to prove that “all the world loves a lover.” The bride is assigned to return with “something old” (a person over the age of 60) and “something new” (someone under the age of 6), while the groom must nab “something borrowed” (a wife or girlfriend) and “something blue” (a sad or melancholy person). “You know, he’s the one really taking the chance—because if he borrows somebody’s wife [and] brings her back here he may find the guy doesn’t want her back and he’ll be stuck with two,” Linkletter remarks. Under the guise of needing witnesses for a wedding, the first one to return to the studio will be awarded “a 21-inch Stromberg-Carlson console model television” (on a show sponsored by RCA Victor, no less). The “bride” wins the TV, but the “groom” gets a nice camera and the guests get wristwatches (except for a little four-year-old girl, who nets a new bicycle out of the whole deal).

For most of its run, People Are Funny was an NBC staple, sponsored by Wings Cigarettes from 1942-45 and then by Kool/Raleigh Cigarettes and Sir Walter Raleigh Tobacco (1945-51). It then moved over to CBS for three seasons for Mars Candy, and then returned to NBC for a year sponsored by Toni, and multiple sponsorship after that. (The show also made the successful leap to television, from 1954-61.) The radio version (of which there are approximately fifty episodes extant) hasn’t lost its power to entertain audiences today, demonstrating that—to borrow the raison d’être of Candid Camera’s Allen Funt—that people are funny when caught in the simple act of being themselves.