Music-Free Movies

The Gunfighter, the first "revisionist Western" and one of the best, comes out on DVD tomorrow. Buy it. It is awesome. (The two Westerns it's packaged with I have not seen yet, but one of them has a Bernard Herrmann isolated score, so that can't be bad.)

Henry King had an odd career. His style, as I've said often, is very similar to John Ford's; their movies look similar, have similar cutting, lighting, camera angles, both of them liked relatively static shots at low angles with the ceilings in full view, etc. He wasn't as self-consciously arty as John Ford, and he wasn't as sentimental; his best movies for Fox are as good as Ford's or better. The difference between them was that King didn't have Ford's independent streak, and starting in the mid-'30s he was happy to spend virtually his entire career as a Fox contract director, doing basically whatever project was handed to him. As a director-for-hire, he was probably better than Ford (Ford kind of shut down when he was handed a project that he hadn't had any role in developing), but directing-for-hire is just about all he did, meaning that the quality of his films depended more on the work of the producer than on him. He was the Michael Curtiz of Fox; he didn't do as many great films as Curtiz because Warner Brothers was a better studio than Fox for most of the '30s and '40s, but they were both brilliant directors-for-hire.

One thing about The Gunfighter that I noticed is that even though Alfred Newman gets a music credit, it has no music at all except in the opening and the closing. It seems like there were a number of movies in the post-war period that tried to turn the lack of music into a sort of special musical effect. (Nunnally Johnson, the producer and uncredited co-writer of Gunfighter, had tried something similar with The Grapes of Wrath, which he co-produced: that movie has a bit of music in a few sequences, but most of it is deliberately music-free even where you'd normally expect to have some soundtrack music.) I'm thinking especially of three movies from MGM: The Asphalt Jungle (1950) has opening credits music and then not a single piece of musical scoring until the final scene, when Dix gets out of the city and into the country; Intruder in the Dust (1949) has no music except in the opening credits; otherwise it's all "source" music (music played by radios and so on), and Lady In the Lake (1947) not only has that crazy POV camera gimmick but doesn't score any of the scenes.

There are others; those are the ones that come to mind. I don't know if this move toward music-free filmmaking was a reaction against the over-use of soundtrack music in the late '30s and early '40s (when some movies were wall-to-wall music) or if it was an attempt to play more with other things you could do on a soundtrack -- The Gunfighter uses distant crowd noise, kids shouting outside, etc. -- but it was almost a return to the early talkie pictures that had music stings at the beginning and end but nothing in between.

The Crystal Skull?

Turns out not only did Bob Bolling come up with the name "Doctor Doom" either before or exactly at the same time as Marvel Comics, but when the Archie title assigned him to Sabrina the Teen-age Witch for a few issues in the '80s (the idea being to see if he could liven up that title with his trademark mix of action-adventure and comedy, the way he did for Little Archie), here's one of the stories he came up with.



I don't know what the new Indiana Jones movie will be like, but I think it would be seriously enlivened by the presence of Professor Pither (say it without the lisp) in Mad Doctor Doom's Time Taxi. (The idea of this brief run of Bolling Sabrinas was that her arch-nemesis was using Mad Doctor Doom's house, Crackstone Manor, and all his gadgets, while Doom and Chester were away.)

WKRP Episode: "God Talks to Johnny"

I really like this season 2 episode, written by Hugh Wilson and directed by Will Mackenzie. The structure of it is quite odd, though: essentially, the plot stops after the cold open and doesn't start up again until Act 2. The first act is mostly a series of self-contained scenes with Johnny talking to other characters who aren't involved in the story, getting their perspectives on the situation. It works because the scenes are very strong, culminating in the famous physical-comedy routine in Carlson's office (Gordon Jump gives an object lesson in how to play off a big laugh from the audience and even extend it), but today the other characters in the office would be given a B story to give them something to do, instead of commenting on the A story. Music: "Arrow Through Me" by Paul McCartney and Wings.

Unfortunately this episode is missing a few seconds: originally at the end of the scene in the broadcast booth, after Johnny turns the Paul McCartney music back on, Herb enters the scene and says: "John?" Johnny, without looking around, stands up and says "Yes, yes, Lord, what is it?" Herb replies: "New advertising copy," hands Johnny the papers and leaves, looking confused. This bit was cut from the old syndication versions, and on the Comedy Network's complete version it was badly redubbed with voice actors (to get rid of the music). What I did was dub over the music from the beginning of the act, turning it into a silent sequence, to at least show how it played. If I ever get an original CBS version of this episode, I will re-post the episode with the missing lines.

God Talks To Johnny Part 1
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God Talks to Johnny Part 2
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They Blu Themselves

You may have heard that The Criterion Collection has announced it's jumping into the Blu-Ray format and will be re-releasing a bunch of titles in Blu-Ray -- plus Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, the first product of his "Remember When We Weren't Tired of Wes Anderson?" period.

I don't have a Blu-Ray player yet, and am not enough of a videophile to go for one until the prices go down still further. (That is, I know that Blu-Ray looks better than Standard, but not so much better that I would notice at the moment.) I assume they will eventually become the standard, just as widescreen TVs are becoming the standard, but for now the question about Blu-Ray is whether it can actually revitalize the sagging DVD business.

Those of us who collect DVDs have noticed that the quantity and quality of DVD releases has gone down lately, especially older movies and shows. Part of this is that the studios were holding back until one format won in the high-def wars, but it's also that DVD sales have flattened out, and that studios now have a good idea of what old movies will and won't sell on DVD.

I think we were lucky, to an extent, because from 2002 to 2005 or so, DVDs were booming and so the studios had a lot of releases, but the format was new enough that they weren't really sure what would sell or how much money these things were expected to make. It was in those years that we got a lot of old movies in surprisingly elaborate special editions or expensively-done transfers, TV shows released with music intact, and so on. Around 2005-6, that started to change a bit, and some studios dropped out of classics almost completely (Paramount) or started chopping out all the music from TV shows (Paramount, Fox).

Will Blu-Ray help revive the market for non-new films? I kind of doubt it, though obviously Criterion getting into the act is an important thing in that respect. (Though most of the movies they're starting with for Blu-Ray are not really ones that would make me want to save up for a player and discs to go with it.) Warner Brothers already kind of tested this by putting out two of their best-selling classics -- Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood on high-def, and apparently they did not sell particularly well. On the other hand, doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment, since so few people have high-def DVD players. But there is the problem of bang for the buck: while black-and-white movie will presumably look better in high-definition, they won't look so much better.

Also, just as Super Audio CD never really took off because consumers preferred lower-quality but easier-to-access online downloads, I have a suspicion that we may be seeing the same with Blu-Ray: the companies will be pushing it, and maybe it'll work out, but this is a time when more and more of us clearly don't want the very highest quality, we just want to see stuff -- see it on TV, see it online, whatever. The age of YouTube and downloading is not a great time to be pushing audiophile/videophile formats. But we'll see; I'm not making predictions. I do think that I'll get more excited when/if I see the studios putting more old movies and TV shows online; for worse or better, we're more likely to see our favorite unreleased classics online than on Blu-Ray.

Oh!

I think that of all the stupid Superfriends moments, this may be my favorite. The villain sends the ulimate weapon to defeat Green Lantern:

Grudge Match: Magnificent Seven vs. Seven Samurai

East meets West, original meets remake: The Seven Samurai face off against The Magnificent Seven in an all-out fight without weapons. Will Brynner's Band Bring the Badassery, or will Takashi and Toshiro's Team Take them to the Top?

Why are no weapons allowed in this fight? Because the Seven Samurai have swords. The Magnificent Seven have guns. Indiana Jones can tell you how that fight turns out.

Alice Faye Is More Popular Than Betty Grable?

Fox released a Betty Grable collection on DVD, and it didn't do well enough for them to release a second set (so far), but they have announced The Alice Faye Collection, Volume 2, with "Hollywood Cavalcade," "Rose of Washington Square" (aka "Please Don't Sue Us, Fanny Brice"), "The Great American Broadcast," "Hello, Frisco, Hello," and the USO tribute "Four Jills in a Jeep" (which doesn't actually star Faye; she and Grable and other Fox stars appear as themselves).

If the Faye collection sold better than the Grable collection, as this seems to indicate (though it may be that the films in this collection, being mostly black-and-white, are cheaper to remaster than Grable's mostly Technicolor movies), it surprises me; neither is among my favorite musical stars of the period but I'd always assumed that Grable was better-known. Apparently not.

Speaking of Fox musicals with Alice Faye, the best of the lot, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, received a transfer with incorrect colors last time around; Fox is releasing a "remastered," and hopefully corrected, version with the same extras, either individually or as part of a Carmen Miranda Collection -- which, except for Gang, is really more of a Vivian Blaine collection, since she's in most of those movies.

Every studio in the Golden Age of Movie Musicals (tm) had its strengths and weaknesses. Fox's strengths included photography (especially in Technicolor, of course), musical direction (Alfred Newman's arrangements could be overdone at times, but they were a lot more tasteful than the garish, generically loud work of the MGM department) and comedy relief players like Phil Silvers (who also helped out some musicals at Columbia). I think their front-line talent, like Faye and Grable, was not nearly as strong as the other studios'; their top musical stars are a lot more limited than anybody else's.

Update: It occurred to me that if Faye is indeed more popular than Grable, it might be evidence that movie-musical performers with one outstanding talent hold up better than performers who are good but not great at everything. Faye wasn't very strong as an actor, wasn't really a dancer, but she did have a genuinely outstanding singing voice. Grable was a valuable performer because she could supply all four things you look for in movie musicals: singing, dancing, acting, and looks. But she wasn't great at any of those things, she was good, not great. I think you could argue that a performer who is outstanding at one or two things but weak at other things will inspire more interest years down the road than someone who is good but not outstanding at everything, even though the latter performer is probably more valuable to the studio at the time.

"Well, That Was No Good At All."

Reading this post about Paula Prentiss's great performance in Howard Hawks' last comedy, Man's Favorite Sport?, reminded me of something I wanted to mention about this movie: I've noticed that in the past few years, this film's reputation seems to have gone up. Not so much among critics, but among average movie-goers; I keep hearing people remember it as one of the comedies they liked best when they saw it on TV growing up, or picking it as one of the great romantic comedies. I don't think it is, but I do think it's better than its critical reputation.

Man's Favorite Sport?, like every movie Howard Hawks made in the last decade of his career, is a re-hash of stuff Hawks had done before, with gags and lines lifted from Bringing Up Baby. He also lifts gags and story points from a movie he didn't make, Libeled Lady (where William Powell also tries to fish even though he doesn't know how, like Rock Hudson in MFS?). It is over-long, studio-bound and has a less-than-great cast except for Prentiss and the great veteran Roscoe Karns. All these problems together were obvious enough to critics at the time that even the most die-hard auteuriste critics, the ones who thought Hawks could do no wrong, thought he'd gone wrong with this one. (This was virtually the only Hawks movie that got a bad review from Andrew Sarris.) And, yeah, as a Hawks movie, it's a slightly sad indication of how much he'd lost in terms of pacing and story construction, and though the script was improved by Leigh Brackett's uncredited rewrites, it's still not great.

But most people coming to MFS? for the first time don't approach it as a Hawks movie; they see it instead as a Rock Hudson romantic comedy from Universal in the '60s. Because, well, it is that, too. And people who approach it that way are often pleasantly surprised to find that while it has the look and feel of a comedy from that period (the flat, studio-bound look is an inescapable part of the Rock/Doris world), it totally goes against what they're set up to expect from that kind of comedy. I remember someone explaining to me why he loved Man's Favorite Sport?: he was used to seeing Rock Hudson in comedies where he humiliates Doris Day all through the picture, and where the whole thing is slightly sexist and corny, and here's a movie that looks like those other movies, but the woman is getting the best of Rock Hudson right from the beginning, and the battle-of-the-sexes comedy feels more equal and more modern. I explained to him that a lot of what he liked in MFS? was borrowed from Bringing Up Baby, but he hadn't seen that movie (though he'd heard other people recommend that if he liked MFS? he should see Baby). A comedy about a man being constantly one-upped by a crazy, strong, dangerous woman was normal in the '30s but it was like nothing else being done in the '60s. So when Hawks re-did what he'd been doing for decades, it seemed fresh and cool by comparison with most other comedies of the period.

The fact that no one else was doing this kind of comedy is one explanation for why Paula Prentiss never became a huge star. ("She should be a big comedy star," Hawks said a few years later. "I don't know what's wrong.") With her height, her quirky line delivery and body language, Prentiss projected a strength of character -- albeit weird, off-kilter character -- that required others to play straight man to her, in a time when female leads in comedies usually played it straight. (Look at The Pink Panther, which came out around the same time and is one of the best '60s comedies: the women mostly play it straighter than the men do.) She needed movies like MFS? and shows like He & She where guys would play George Burns to her taller, curvier Gracie Allen, but there weren't many projects like that in the '60s.

WKRP Episode: "Jennifer Falls in Love"

This was the fourth episode broadcast in season 2, the second episode produced for the second season. For the first and only time in the series, Jennifer dates a man somewhere around her own age, while Les demands a raise. This episode features the famous exchange between Les and Jennifer's new boyfriend: "I like to think that a person's name tells us a lot about the type of person that he is."

Jennifer Falls In Love Part 1
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Jennifer Falls In Love Part 2
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