Another episode from the fourth season that feels a bit "off" in some ways, not because anybody's out of character, but because the acting and pacing seem a bit uncertain. This is probably due to the director, Howard Hesseman (he got to direct the episode because his character only has one scene in it), who didn't seem to take to directing as naturally as some of the other actors did. In writing terms, the episode has several story threads going on but seems oddly plotless: the main story, of Mr. Carlson finding out the truth about he and his wife met, doesn't really get going until the episode is almost over. (Though it actually used to be common for a sitcom plot to start late; it's surprising how many episodes of, say, The Bob Newhart Show don't begin the actual advertised plot until the halfway mark.)O
I don't know about the songs in this one, except for the final song, which needs no introduction. Interestingly, this song was removed in the late '80s but restored in the "redubbed" '90s syndication package -- making it perhaps the only song that the MTM dubbers put back in instead of taking out.
TCM, which has been getting access to more Fox films lately (a good thing for me, since I don't get the Fox movie channel), showed A Royal Scandal a couple of times recently, though both times I missed out on recording it. (But it's on YouTube as of this writing.) This comedy is a remake of one of Ernst Lubitsch's best silent films, Forbidden Paradise, a historical travesty about Catherine the Great.
Lubitsch chose to remake it as his second project after signing with Fox, and he hired Edwin Justus Mayer, writer of To Be Or Not To Be, to work on the script. Lubitsch and Mayer finalized the script, and Lubitsch chose the cast from Fox contract players (including stage superstar Tallulah Bankhead, who had finally made her movie breakthrough in Fox's Lifeboat the year before), and he rehearsed the cast, which explains why some of the cast members use the vocal inflections familiar from all Lubitsch talkies. (He liked to coach actors in line readings and gestures.) But his already-declining health left him unable to direct the film. Though his name remained on it as producer, most of the picture was directed by Otto Preminger.
Royal Scandal is not considered a classic, and it shouldn't be, but it's really, frustratingly close. The cast is mostly excellent, and the script is pretty consistently hilarious. Mayer was the perfect choice for the script because his Broadway play, The Affairs of Cellini, took a similar approach to historical figures. (That same year he, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin turned the play into a flop musical, The Firebrand of Florence.) It's quite a "modern" comedy script in that almost everybody is a comic character. Normally, when Old Hollywood did a comedy with a historical setting, most of the characters act exactly as they would in a serious treatment of the same subject. (If Bob Hope makes a film like Monsieur Beaucaire, it's Bob Hope being silly while everybody else thinks it's a normal historical epic.) But Lubitsch and Mayer created the ancestor of a Life of Brian type of movie: the characters don't quite step out of character and wink at the audience, but they're all supposed to be funny, and every scene is a send-up of the historical movie genre.
But the movie doesn't quite work, or it doesn't quite hold the interest -- it's the sort of movie where you can find something amusing in almost every scene, but not a great urge to keep watching or the sense that each scene is building to something. My temptation is to blame Preminger, who probably wasn't a great choice for this picture and seems to have been hired mostly because he was Fox's other Germanic director. Preminger admired Lubitsch, but apparently felt that Lubitsch was too superficial and brittle -- a common complaint, and not always inaccurate, but it's absolutely deadly to approach a movie like this without absolute, whole-hearted commitment to the style. This kind of story is on the thin line between parody and sincerity, almost like Blazing Saddles (a genre parody but with a story and characters who sort of exist as people).
The finished film seems to be a little slow and careful, like Preminger was worried that we wouldn't accept the characters if he didn't play down the parody elements. The timing is sometimes off, with insufficient pauses to let the jokes sink in. As someone pointed out on Twitter, Tallulah actually underplays her character some of the time, which is a weird choice both for the actress and for the character. Lubitsch is often mistakenly seen as a sophisticated, suave director, but he was often at his best when he was at his most vulgar, and as To Be Or Not To Be proved, he was probably the most vulgar, tasteless, over-the-top comedy director in Hollywood. Royal Scandal has a script that calls for the same approach, and it mostly doesn't get it.
And yet I'm not sure that I'm right to blame Preminger; this is where you get into the question of what exactly a director does and does not do. Many of the key functions of a filmmaker had already been carried out by Lubitsch before production started. He commissioned, supervised and finalized the script, chose the cast, rehearsed the cast, supervised the building of the sets and the production schedule, etc. Coming in when he did, all Preminger did was get the scenes on film. I'm still tempted to believe that if Lubitsch had been on the set, he would have executed the script better, but I'm reluctant to say for sure that he would have. Trying to figure out what exactly a director does on the set is almost like trying to figure out what a conductor does in front of an orchestra. And because it's hard to figure out, it's easy to overstate, particularly with directors like Lubitsch or Hitchcock who believed in having the movie pretty well planned out before they started. It could be that Preminger screwed up the movie or it could be that there was a fundamental flaw in the plan Lubitsch had for it. Hard to know if you weren't there, and probably hard to know even if you were.
Vadim Rizov at the AV Club has a good "Gateway to Geekery" piece on the work of P.G. Wodehouse. I agree with him that The Mating Season is perhaps the best introduction to the Jeeves novels; its plot, while complicated, requires less explanation than The Code of the Woosters (and doesn't depend on the now-incomprehensible term "cow-creamer"). It also isn't as cruel as Right Ho, Jeeves, where Jeeves is, as he often was in early stories, kind of a bastard: there are many stories that imply -- or, in the story narrated by Jeeves, outright say -- that Jeeves actively tries to maneuver Bertie into humiliating situations from which Jeeves can "save" him.
Also, it's one of the few Jeeves novels that doesn't involve Bertie's "good and deserving" Aunt Dahlia, which is a relief. Aunt Dahlia, an old lady who used to be a sportswoman (and Wodehouse is both admiring and terrified of athletic women; many of his golf stories revolve around a big, athletic golf player named Agnes Flack, who scares men away with her booming voice and robust physique), isn't a very interesting character, certainly nowhere near as funny as Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha -- who rarely appears in the novels -- and the plots involving her and her home, Brinkley Court, get very repetitive.
The one thing in the piece I don't really agree with is Rizov's praise of Laughing Gas. It's an interesting novel in theory because it's so different from Wodehouse's other books -- a supernatural fantasy, sort of like Thorne Smith without the sex -- but I don't find it very funny. It feels to me like Wodehouse wrote it in the hope of a movie sale (hence the American setting and the body-switching plot, which would be easy to execute in film), and, as usual, didn't get one. (Another book he originally conceived of as a movie was The Luck of the Bodkins, about a cruise ship voyage and an attempt to smuggle valuables into America hidden in a plush Mickey Mouse doll; it seems like he might have intended the story for RKO, which distributed Mickey Mouse cartoons at the time.) But with the exception of a few of his more surreal Mr. Mulliner stories -- my favorite Wodehouse series -- he wasn't the kind of writer who did well when he tried something different; his stories depend so heavily on the ritual of repetition, of story ideas, character types, and phrases (take a drink every time you read the phrase "like a rocketing pheasant" in a Wodehouse book) that a book doesn't feel quite right when it takes place in a different "universe" from the rest of his work.
His novels and stories mostly take place in the same world, with unusually strict continuity between them -- he frequently refers to characters and plot developments that happened in books written many years before -- meaning that none of them really stand on their own; reading one novel is amusing enough, but only by reading a whole bunch of them do you realize that much of the humor comes from references, allusions and shared situations between the different books.
I know the titles of these cartoons don't really matter, but I still enjoy learning about alternate titles. Like when "Birds Anonymous" was announced on the scoring track as "Tweety-totaler."
These sheets seem to have been prepared for Mel Blanc, since they only include the dialogue spoken by his characters (Update: Sorry, my mistake: the Elmer dialogue is there, but on a separate sheet) -- though in this cartoon, the Groucho and Carney impressions were in the end done not by Blanc but by Daws Butler. The other cartoons available in this form are "Good Noose," "Pre-Hysterical Hare," "Daffy's Inn Trouble" and "Weasel While You Work," all McKimson cartoons from the late '50s or early '60s.
Additional bit of trivia: I believe "Wideo Wabbit" was the last cartoon where Carl Stalling used his Bugs Bunny theme, "What's Up Doc?" The song was in and out of WB cartoons over the years. Stalling didn't seem to be a big fan of using the same theme for a particular character repeatedly, as Disney did for Donald and Goofy. (And Warners probably wouldn't have wanted an original theme used too often, since that reduced the opportunity to plug WB-owned pop songs.) While he used "What's Up, Doc?" in a few Bugs cartoons in the mid-'40s, it wasn't until 1950 (with the eponymous cartoon where the song was sung all the way through) that he and Milt Franklyn created a new arrangement, complete with fanfare, that introduced most Stalling-scored Bugs cartoons from 1951 to about 1954. Though just as Scott Bradley would sometimes put his Tom and Jerry theme on hold if the setting or subject matter called for it, as in the Mouseketeers cartoons, Stalling would use something other than "What's Up, Doc?" if a different song seemed necessary.
Anyway, after the 1953 shutdown, Stalling used the fanfare a few times, but "Wideo Wabbit" appears to be the last use of the song itself. That was pretty much it for LT/MM characters with theme songs, except for Foghorn Leghorn, who had firmly established the public-domain "Camptown Ladies" as his theme. (Also, Stalling and Franklyn occasionally re-used Smetana's "Dance of the Comedians" in the Road Runner cartoons, but it never really became a full-fledged theme song for the series.)
At one point, we're told, ABC under Fred Silverman planned to make it their most titillating show yet, which explains the story Evanier and Dennis Palumbo came up with (a guy trying to lose his virginity), while the version that got on the air was one where "the boy and girl had to have a real relationship that was likely to culminate in wedlock."
Here's the obituary of Karl Malden, dead at age 97. Maybe someone will prove that there was a period in the past where more celebrities died, but until then, I'm going to assume that, as Jon Stewart put it, "there's a serial killer who only kills celebrities with pre-existing medical conditions."
Anyway, Malden was a very fine actor who did a lot of good work in his long life and career, in good films and bad. He was particularly good at bringing a bit of weakness to characters who might otherwise have been too boring: the priest in On the Waterfront is someone who, as played by Malden, is someone who doesn't seem completely sure of his own rightness, and thereby avoids being a platitude machine. And of course he was very good at playing characters who were just plain weak, portraying the weakness without making them seem like complete milquetoasts (his famously strange looks helped; a tall, weird-looking man looks like someone who isn't naturally easy to dominate). A lot of his most famous roles are weak men in doomed relationships with strong, bad women: Mitch in Streetcar Named Desire, Herbie in the movie version of Gypsy, Archie in Baby Doll and Shooter in The Cincinnati Kid.
He became the kind of guy audiences just seemed to like (which perhaps interfered with his ability to play villains; he didn't always seem very threatening). Eventually he became so beloved by audiences that we could believe him when he told us of the terrifying hell that awaits anyone who carries cash.
The death of Michael Jackson has brought some new attention to Stanley Donen's The Little Prince, mostly because Bob Fosse's "Snake In the Grass" number was an obvious influence on Jackson. It's also brought renewed attention to just how badly Donen botched that movie, even before he (or the studio) chopped it down to 88 minutes. In "Snake In the Grass," Fosse is doing a brilliant dance routine, and Donen can't or won't let us see what he's doing: not only is he constantly cutting, but he's constantly cutting to different angles, and show-offy ones at that, for absolutely no reason. I sometimes think Fosse had too much cutting in his own movies, but his cutting usually follows some kind of rhythmic logic, whereas the cutting in this number doesn't even match the rhythms of the music or the dance a lot of the time.
The Little Prince is also a case study in how a movie can make a good score sound bad. When Alan Lerner wrote in his autobiography that Donen had ruined the Lerner-Loewe score (their last together; Loewe went back into retirement after this project), I was skeptical, considering it to be just another one of Lerner's self-serving anecdotes. But while Lerner's script was weak and bears some of the blame for the failure of the film, he was right about the score. The songs are lovely, in that lush neo-Viennese-operetta style that Loewe brought to Broadway and Hollywood, and some of them have gained a bit of popularity outside the film (like "I Never Met a Rose" and the title song). But in the movie, they stop and start in awkward places, and are sometimes cut down to nothing; "Be Happy" is a gorgeous melody but you'd never know it from the way it's done in the movie.
And even the ones that are done all the way through are sabotaged by weird arrangement choices, like the decision to do half of "I Never Met a Rose" in a fake "megaphone" sound, and give the orchestra the tinny sound of an old record (which is taking pastiche too far). The dialogue in this clip is dubbed, but the song is in English, and let's face it, the dialogue in this movie deserves to be dubbed over anyway.
Donen, it goes without saying, did wonderful work on many musicals before this; this was the decline phase of his career (Staircase, Lucky Lady, Saturn 3 -- some would consider Movie Movie a return to form; I don't care for it).
By request, here's one of the episodes I haven't got around to yet. This is a season 4 episode that always feels like its story and structure would have been more at home on an Embassy TV sitcom, and also feels like Hugh Wilson may not have done his usual final rewrite on it. Everybody's just a little bit out of character. (James Wolcott, back when he was at The Village Voice, wrote a scathing review of this episode, particularly the predicability of Herb's last-minute conversion and speech.) Peter Torokvei may have done some work in this episode, or at least the lawyer scenes.
In terms of TV history, it's interesting to note that a lot of "issue" sitcom episodes from this early '80s period had downbeat or ambiguous endings. The Facts of Life, which Asaad Kelada was directing at the time, used to do this all the time, and that's what I was talking about when I said that the structure of this episode is more like an Embassy TV (producer of Facts of Life and Diff'rent Strokes) episode.
I'm not sure what the songs are in this episode apart from "What'd I Say" at the beginning.
Just something I found in my (too-small) videotape collection and wanted to post here. One of the tapes of the WKRP episode "The Painting" is an "unsweetened" version, which means it's without any of the soundtrack bits that were added after the taping, like canned laughter or post-dubbed music. Because one scene in the episode had music added after the taping, that creates a rare chance to hear a scene with and without music, but with the dialogue intact, just to get a sense of what pop music -- even played faintly in the background -- can add to the rhythm of a scene.
Here's the scene without music:
And here's the scene with music, "Breezin'" by George Benson. Note also that a few bits of canned laughter have been added to fill in spots where the audience didn't laugh. (After Bailey says "You don't like it" and Johnny repeats "I don't like it," there's a little extra laughter dubbed in.)
It's been long enough since my last Archie-related post (these posts are an outgrowth of some research I was doing) that I can justify posting this article I found around that time: what I believe is one of the few newspaper articles on Samm Schwartz, if not the only one. It's from the February 21, 1985 edition of the Miami Herald, written by Constance Prater.
One thing I should say before getting to the article is that Schwartz's work on Jughead -- which as I've said numerous times, is some of my favorite work in any comic book, from any company, superhero, cartoon, whatever -- actually got better after his company was no longer as good.
Schwartz was with MLJ/Archie almost from the beginning (he may have been brought in by his friend Joe Edwards), and he always did good work; he later became the primary Jughead artist and soon became synonymous with that character, whose humor and stories were a little different from everybody else's. (Archie's most popular character with its predominantly female audience is Betty, but I suspect that with boy readers, Jughead is the favorite; he certainly was mine.) In the mid-'60s Schwartz was lured away by the ill-fated Tower Comics to be one of their editors and artists; he drew most of the "Tippy Teen" comics. When Tower folded, he went back to Archie, which really needed him back: in his absence, the art on Jughead had been suffering badly. (When Schwartz left, the title was given to another veteran, Bill Vigoda, who simply wasn't as good.)
Schwartz's work after coming back to Archie was even better than it had been before, loosened up by his experience at Tower. He started throwing in more crazy background gags of his own, and returning to the '40s/'50s style of not respecting the boundaries of the panels: characters' legs and arms would protrude from one panel to another, they would stand on the speech balloons of the people in the panels below them:
Schwartz was also essentially a one-man operation. He did all the inking and lettering himself (even using the same lettering for nearly all his story titles); it was said that when they sent him a story, the editors never knew exactly what they were going to get until they received the completed black-and-white version.
Here's one of my favorite examples of Schwartz's elaborate bacgkround gags: while the exposition is going on, we see a complete story playing out in the background: somebody finds a bird in his locker, the bird flies over and snatches Mr. Weatherbee's toupee.
As the '70s went on and proceeded into the '80s, the artwork at Archie was no longer what it had been. Dan DeCarlo got kind of bland; Harry Lucey was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease and retired in the middle of the decade; he was replaced with DeCarlo, his sons, and DeCarlo-alikes like Stan Goldberg. Schwartz (and Bolling, when he contributed) was immediately recognizable to a young reader as having a different, funnier style than the "house" style that had emerged.
But in 1987, as part of their big series of shakeups -- which included a bunch of new titles that failed -- Archie comics re-launched two of their most popular titles, Betty and Veronica and Jughead, with the same title but a new series (starting with a new issue # 1). DeCarlo continued to do the new B&V, up until the company ungratefully fired him and wrote him out of their history. But the new Jughead series was not drawn by Schwartz. He continued to do Jughead stories for the company, but he was no longer the primary Jughead artist. Maybe he was no longer able to do it on a regular basis, but I wouldn't be surprised if his look was considered too old-fashioned. Whatever the reason, that was the end of the last really first-rate series Archie ever did.
And with that, here is the article I should have posted earlier:
CARTOONIST'S WORK MORE THAN FUNNY PICTURES
SAMM SCHWARTZ HAS BEEN DRAWING JUGHEAD COMICS FOR 41 YEARS.
Jughead, the hamburger eating Riverdale High student of comic book fame, is up to his old tricks again. He has programmed the school's new robot teaching assistant to fetch French fries and hot dogs for his friends. Samm Schwartz looks up from the drawing board in his North Miami Beach home and smiles.
"You know it's not always easy being funny. It's a question of what's funny," said Schwartz, a 64-year-old cartoonist who has been sketching Jughead's antics with pencil and ink for nearly 40 years. "It's not so much me drawing funny pictures. I draw pictures of people doing funny things," said Schwartz.
His artwork -- glimpses of Archie, Betty, Veronica and the whole Riverdale High gang from Archie Comics -- has appeared in English, Spanish, French and Italian comic strips.
Drawing for a living isn't easy, Schwartz said. Like when he sits down at his drawing board and stares at a blank sheet of paper.
"You reach into the drawer and take out a mortgage bill, a phone bill or an electric bill and suddenly you're inspired," he said.
Schwartz "was good then and he's even better now," said fellow cartoonist Bob Bolling.
Bolling, of Miami Lakes, started drawing for Archie Comics 25 years ago. Schwartz was one of the first people he met.
Schwartz's artistic career began when he was a boy, drawing chalk caricatures of cowboys on the sidewalks in Brooklyn in the 1920s.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Project Administration paid for free art classes for him at neighborhood schools.
He also attended the New York University School of Architecture and Allied Arts, the National Academy of Art and Design and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
His parents told him he could never make a decent living as an artist.
"For a while, they were right," Schwartz said.
His first job was as an apprentice in one of New York's many fashion studios, drawing sketches of women's fashions for department stores.
"I was a glorified go-fer," he said.
He also got 60 cents for posing as a male fashion model.
Although the comic book craze began in the early 1920s, it didn't take off until 1938 and the beginning of World War II.
Comics were the most popular selling magazines then. The public's obsession with the pictured stories of heroes like Superman, Captain Marvel and Wee Willie Winkle helped fuel young Schwartz's passion for the art.
"People were hungry for entertaining reading. A lot of GIs read them, which is no reflection on their mentality," he said.
He took his sketches, pencils and ink and knocked on publishers' doors.
In 1942, he began drawing for M.L.J., which later became Archie Comics.
"I was just getting a toehold when I was drafted," he said.
For the next two years, Schwartz was a drill instructor, public relations specialist, visual training aide and radio and radar mechanic for the U.S. Air Force.
He was stationed in Bal Harbour for 19 months.
In his spare time, Schwartz made extra money drawing portraits of his buddies' girlfriends and wives.
After the war, he went back to Brooklyn and Archie.
He used to draw as well as write the scripts, but creating the stories was too strenuous.
"It's on your mind 24 hours a day. It's much easier for me to draw a person doing something than describe it. It got fatiguing," he said. "Afterward, I didn't have energy to draw."
Schwartz has lived in North Miami Beach since 1979. He said he enjoys being his own boss.
"You don't have to punch a time clock. You don't have to get dressed in the morning. I don't have to shave if I don't want to."
To wrap this up, here is a story from Schwartz's golden '70s/'80s period, a story that has haunted me ever since I read it as a child, even though -- then and now -- I could never tell you what the point of it is. Jughead is kidnapped by a cult whose leader wears a similar hat, has the legend "B.S." tattooed on his head, and whose God is named "Harold," and Schwartz plays the whole thing so deadpan that it really seems like this is just another irritating distraction for his favorite character.
The opening of the story also shows off another late Schwartz trademark: putting the credits in unusual places. Once he was allowed to include credits, he would frequently make them part of the scene, as he does here (and sometimes he'd turn them into one of his graffiti gags, calling himself "Good ol' Samm" or something like that). Click on a page to enlarge:
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