When Were Movies Invented? 1977? Or Later?

Earlier today I was discussing the fact that on most areas of the internet, movie history is basically about 25 years long. This also applies to a lot of movie magazines, critical videos, and so on: you'll get people discussing movies in historical context, or making lists of the greatest movies or movie moments, but only from 1985 onward (if that). If an earlier movie shows up, it's almost a freak occurrence. An example is this guy, who makes great videos about movie clichés and corny lines, but includes very few movies from the '50s, '60s or even '70s.

I don't mean this as a "these kids today, why don't they know their movie history" kind of thing. For one thing, it's not just The Kids™. For another thing, you can't blame people for not being familiar with a lot of older movies. As I've said in the past, the only reliable way to learn about old movies (get used to the grammar and acting choices and all the rest) is by osmosis, watching them for entertainment and letting the style become something we naturally understand and accept. That's what the easy availability of old movies on TV used to do for us, just as the presence of "oldies" on the radio makes us familiar with pop-music styles from the '50s onward. (So someone who doesn't know much about '50s movies might know, if not a lot more, at least more about '50s pop music. It's in the blood.) But now the afternoon or late night black-and-white movie is a rare thing, except on specialty channels like TCM.

Without that, the only way to get into old movies is if you actively decide to learn about them, and you can't blame anyone for not wanting to sit through movie after movie as a learning experience. That's not what they were intended to be, anyway, and they don't come off well in that context. I kind of wish people felt guiltier about not getting into older movies (or pre-Sopranos television, or whatever), the kind of Boomer guilt that is visited on people who don't know the great pop acts of the '60s. But I'm not going to do the guilt tripping; if you don't have the style in your blood from an early age, a movie can be a chore to get through.

What I'm wondering is where the dividing line is: where does "movie history" now begin for the average film enthusiast? I used to think it was 1977, the year Star Wars invented movies. But it was pointed out to me that Star Wars may actually belong with The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and other movies in the freak category: "old" movies that people have heard of, exceptions to the rule. (These movies often tend to be kid-oriented movies like the three I've just named; people don't notice that Star Wars is in an older style because, when you're exposed to a movie at a young age, the style seems like a very natural thing.) There aren't a whole lot of movies from 1977 through the early '80s that are on the current radar.

It was suggested that the starting point for modern movie history is Terminator 2, the epitome of the modern masterpiece: a sci-fi special effects epic that takes itself too seriously. But I think that's placing it too late. You at least have to go back to Die Hard, the action movie that is still considered the foundation of all modern action movies (no one can do an action-movie spoof without spoofing Die Hard at some point).

So I would place the beginning of movie history in 1985, when The Breakfast Club came out. John Hughes' death, and the over-wrought celebration of his work at the Oscars, confirmed that his movies are genuinely part of the cultural consciousness; more than that, they're considered masterpieces of film comedy. They aren't anything of the kind, and that's my problem with the condensed version of film history that seems to be taking hold.

I'd compare it, in a strange and debased way, to the views of critics like James Agee who felt that movies had never really recovered from the introduction of sound, and that there was something special about the silent era that the sound era was struggling to recapture. If a critic thinks that the key period in movie history is a relatively short period, he will wind up over-rating a lot of movies from that period. And sure enough, silent-firsters were maybe a bit indiscriminate about what films they considered masterpieces. I get the feeling that the current trend is going beyond this; a lot of movie fans now remind me of a PBS old-movie host I used to see who refused to watch movies made after four-letter words were introduced. If someone is mostly comfortable with films made in his or her lifetime, and finds it a chore to sit through most older movies, then that's understandable, but it isn't any more understandable than someone who doesn't like movies that aren't "clean." And the result is similar; a world where there isn't much movie history is inevitably going to be a world where Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a masterpiece. Who knows what movies will be masterpieces ten years from now, when movie history begins in 1999 (much like TV history begins in the late '90s)?

Despite my plague-on-both-your-houses attitude in the last paragraph, I know this post comes off cranky. I guess it is. I would like to repeat that I understand why viewers wouldn't run around spending money and making special efforts to immerse themselves in movie or television history. Being historically-inclined, and maybe a bit more sympathetic to older film grammar (i.e. I still think movies today are over-edited, just as someone else would find an older movie to be under-edited), I have to kick myself and force myself sometimes to keep up with new developments; some viewing experiences come naturally to me, and others I have to work at. I don't blame myself for liking what I like, and so I don't blame anyone else for it either.

So the feeling is not so much crankiness, let alone blame, as sadness at something inevitable and unavoidable: movie history, and perhaps all of pop-culture history, is going to contract. There has never been a greater amount popular culture history accessible, in the sense of being there for anyone who wants to see it. But it's been a long time since there has been less popular culture history accessible in the other sense, of being something that the average person can assimilate without a long, hard slog.

I was going to say there has never been less interest in pop-culture history, but that's not true at all. Traditionally, people have been more interested in new books, plays, music. The idea of gathering to listen to a concert of old music, or building an entire repertoire of old plays, is fairly new. So maybe the current situation is simply the way it ought to be.

Carl Barks Playing For the Other Team

The invaluable Doug Gray, who has pretty much my favorite comics blog), has Carl Barks's venture into the opposition camp, the Porky Pig story "Porky of the Mounties." Bugs and Porky weren't characters he liked, and the story isn't one of his best, but just seeing Barks work with the Warner Brothers characters is kind of strange and fun. I would say it's like a Marvel guy working for DC, except they all did work for DC and vice versa.

It's also a reminder that whereas the comic book form added a lot to the Disney cartoon characters, it didn't really do the same for the WB characters. There are some characters who maybe have more dimension in the comics than they do in the cartoons, like Porky (who has Petunia as his regular girlfriend, and isn't quite as big a patsy as he is in the animated shorts), but I don't feel like they're improved as characters the way Donald and Mickey were improved in the comics. And that's to say nothing of all the WB characters who were watered down, because they couldn't be as violent and vicious in comics as they were in films.

In part this may just be about the general superiority of WB shorts to Disney shorts, at least during the period when these comics were popular. The WB directors would add things to a story and make it better than it would have been in comic book form. I can't find it, but Thad Komorowski once posted a Michael Maltese comics story (non-WB, as I recall) that he also used, with some variations, for A Pest In the House. The comics story was funny, but Chuck Jones's cartoon was much funnier, and contained better-motivated and more well-rounded characters. In Disney, that kind of excellence was more likely to come from a Barks or a Gottfredson than most of the animation directors.

Carmen, The Greatest Dead End of All Time

If you don't mind my doing another music-related post, I wanted to follow up something I wrote in an earlier post, which is that Carmen, The Magic Flute and Porgy and Bess are the three great dead ends in the history of music theatre (because they pointed the way toward a fusion of popular and serious musical theatre, but their composers all died young without writing another opera).



(Yes, the most recent televised Carmen is on period instruments. There's actually a better period performance of the Carmen preludes on a disc of Bizet instrumental music by Marc Minkowski -- but unfortunately he hasn't recorded the whole piece.)

A commenter rightly noted that the influence of Carmen was felt in the brief wave of so-called verismo operas, dealing with lower-class passions and subject matter. But the influence there was mainly in terms of the non-musical material: once Carmen became popular, there were a bunch of other operas about characters who were not "noble" either in rank or in the emotions they expressed. And even that didn't last long. (The actual verismo movement burned out sometime in the '90s, replaced by operas about aristocratic characters, like Tosca, or exotic locales, like Madame Butterfly.) The verismo operas didn't show much musical influence from Carmen; instead, composers continued to do what they had been doing since the '60s: try to come to terms with the influence of Wagner.

Puccini became the most successful composer of the post-Wagner era because, apart from his talent, he hit on a way to write operas that were both "Wagnerian" and traditionally Italian: La Boheme and Tosca make room for more or less traditional arias and ensembles, but they also use the Wagnerian style: there are motifs that are repeated and developed throughout the evening, the music is continuous with no "recitatives." But Puccini's success reinforced the idea that the Wagnerian style was the way to go; he proved that the style didn't have to be Teutonic and could be made specifically Italian-sounding, but he also demonstrated that you were nowhere unless you had fully absorbed the lessons of Wagner. (Verdi, in his last years, went for something a little different from both Puccini and Wagner; he built his last opera, Falstaff, out of a collection of little bits of sung melody that are rarely repeated -- the opposite of the lush Wagner style, but something that was not easy to imitate.)

But Carmen, coming at a time when Wagner was being recognized as the model for all musical theatre (Verdi was in semi-retirement at the time, so there was literally no active composer who could compete with Wagner's influence), was something else again. Carmen was an "advanced," modern work at the time, but one that was built out of all the formulas that Wagner had rejected. Carmen, being an opera-comique with spoken dialogue, is a pure "numbers opera," which was the form that Wagner had rebelled against: Wagner had eliminated all separate numbers, and even applause breaks within acts, and turned every act into a continuous piece of music. Carmen is divided into solos, duets, ensembles, choruses, most of them strictly separated and coming to applause-baiting endings before the dialogue begins.



Whereas Wagner advocated putting more of the musical interest in the orchestra, often letting the orchestra carry the melody while the singer filled in something else on top of it, Carmen is full of old-fashioned song, with the singer's part dominating over the orchestra. And Bizet, like Verdi, prefers to come up with fresh melodic material for each new development in the piece, rather than using the Wagnerian method of developing themes we heard before. Bizet will quote an earlier theme only as a sort of mnemonic, a reminder of an idea; so he has a "fate" theme that he quotes a few times, just as Verdi had a "fate" theme in La Forza Del Destino (which may have been where he got the idea), but like Verdi and his hero Mozart, he considers each section a new test of his power to characterize it with a specific, appropriate tune.



By applying all these old-fashioned techniques to a sensationalistic subject, Bizet did something new with Carmen, but what was really new was that he made all these techniques seem fresh again. Just because Carmen's music is so good, so powerful and immediate, and such a brilliant mishmash of serious and popular, Bizet suggested that the pre-Wagner techniques weren't obsolete at all, as long as they were used with his kind of imagination (since almost none of the numbers are just simple songs; Bizet plays around with the forms he's using). And the immediacy of the characters and the plot seemed inseparable from the deceptively accessible tunes and forms that Bizet employed. It was as if the use of closed forms and songs was perfect for characters who were to emerge as people, rather than the symbolic figures that Wagner specialized in. That's one of the key benefits of the populist style of Carmen; because the characters express themselves in music that sounds less high-flown than the usual opera, they have an immediacy and relatability that wasn't usually associated with the operatic form. That helped lead to the modern musical that uses popular musical forms for ambitious purposes; that in turn was what Oscar Hammerstein paid tribute to when he turned Carmen into Carmen Jones.



So that's what Carmen seemed to suggest: that there was an alternative, musical and theatrical, to Wagnerism. And the whole thing fell apart because Bizet died, and no one knew how to follow it up. Some people, like Tchaikovsky, learned from Bizet's manipulation of the traditional numbers form; Tchaikovsky didn't like Wagner very much, and probably drew on the lessons of Carmen (which he loved) when he was working on Eugene Onegin. And others learned from the idea that you could incorporate folk and popular elements into opera (not that Bizet was the first to do this, but along with The Bartered Bride from a few years earlier, it helped to re-acquaint international audiences with this approach). Still others liked the idea of slumming it with the subject matter. But putting it all together -- sort of a Mozart approach to music combined with a populist approach to subject and characters -- was not something anyone tried to do until, well, Porgy and Bess. And, as I said, the composer of Porgy met the same fate as Mozart and Bizet: he died before he could write a follow-up.

And I think, though I don't have time to look for examples, that it may be the follow-up that really matters in terms of influence. That is, one truly unique work is very difficult for others to imitate. Once the same artist produces something else in a similar style, he creates a sort of template -- or at least he demonstrates that you can learn from the original without producing a pale copy.

The Man With the Three Exclamation Points

I've recently been going over some old Marvel/Timely/Atlas Patsy Walker comics by Al Hartley, and one thing that surprised me is how similar his early work is to his better-known Christian (or Christian-influenced) comics. He underwent a religious conversion in the late '60s, at which point he started consciously working Christian messages into secular comics -- though as I've said before, the messages were sometimes hard to distinguish from "hippie" messages of the same era; he shared the hippie obsession with the idea of returning to a better, purer, more natural state -- and, eventually, into the Spire comics.

But this story from Patsy Walker # 72, which Hartley drew and also wrote himself (Stan Lee didn't even put his name on it), has all the characteristics I associate with Hartley's later stuff: the combination of moralizing and trippy fantasy. The binary opposition, where one character is purely "good" and another character's function is to learn from the pure, good character. The over-wrought dialogue, often ending with Hartley's trademark, the triple exclamation point !!! Hartley really didn't change much in the '60s; he simply added an explicit religious dimension to what was already a quasi-religious preachiness.




Hartley's Patsy is a pretty interesting title for that and other reasons. As I've said, Hartley's art kind of creeps me out, with all the huge eyes and facial lines. But it certainly is different from other comics of this type, which went for art that was either more realistic or more cartoony. Patsy was like that even before Hartley took it over, but his predecessor, Al Jaffee, didn't like the material; Hartley completely embraced the fusion of romance comics with humor comics, and turned out a title that had a strange freakish integrity.

Art and Nature, Thus Allied

After writing an earlier post about the old-school approach to Gilbert and Sullivan -- and how at this point it often comes off better than attempts to freshen them up -- I found this longer excerpt from the 1966 D'Oyly Carte film of The Mikado, the first 10 minutes of the second act. (It was their second film of G&S's most popular work, though the 1938 film version was abridged, and had a non-member, Kenny Baker, as Nanki-Poo. The 1938 version is closer to an actual movie; the 1966 version is just a studio reproduction of what they were doing on stage at the time.) I think it conveys the strengths and weaknesses of the "traditional" G&S approach.

The weakness is that stilted delivery of dialogue, the broad gestures, become predictable and rule out any possibility of surprise or sudden illumination of character or theme. (I think Gilbert was stronger in themes than characters -- his characters are helpless puppets in the power of society's arbitrary rules -- but I could see a director or performer bringing more individuality to his characters than they usually get.) You can almost predict, if you know the music and the text, what the next movement will be.

The good thing is that the movements are related to the music and text, and don't try to go against them. The staging of "The Sun Whose Rays" in 1966 probably had a lot more movement than Gilbert's own staging (I don't know if it was as static as the version in Topsy Turvy, but I do get the impression that he preferred as little movement as possible during a song), but it's certainly not "busy" and doesn't try to pep it up with additional business. And the madrigal "Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day," of which we unfortunately get only the very beginning in this clip, is done exactly as it needs to be: very statically, with all the visual interest coming from the way the characters are posed. There's not much that a director can do to add to this great number, and plenty he or she can do to detract from it with gimmicks.

Every time I return to Gilbert and Sullivan, I feel that Gilbert is one of the most fascinating, frustrating figures in the history of theatre, and one who has never fully received the kind of in-depth study he needs. His portrayal in Topsy-Turvy, as the ultimate repressed Victorian who appropriates another culture without really understanding it, shows how little Gilbert himself is understood. The extraordinary thing that Mike Leigh almost completely missed is that at a cruical moment in the G&S partnership, when Gilbert was under pressure to come up with a libretto with humanity and realism, he instead delivered the darkest comedy he'd ever written (and that's saying something), a play that is virtually all about the threat of death and torture, and society's desensitization to death and torture.

There's only one character who isn't either bloodthirsty or desensitized: ironically, it's Ko-Ko, whose job is to execute people, but "can't kill anybody," and is the only person in the play who seems to understand that inflicting death on other people is horrible (everyone else is mostly worried about being killed). And, typically of Gilbert, the one character who displays a spark of humanity is the one who's punished in the end, in this case by being made to marry the awful Katisha.

I've sometimes thought of Gilbert as a misanthrope, but this isn't really right; there's usually someone on the stage -- one character, usually, sometimes more than one -- who has his admiration or compassion, though it's not always who we think it is. In Yeomen of the Guard Jack Point is usually portrayed as the sympathetic figure, but though he's partly Gilbert's self-portrait, I don't think he comes off very well at all. Gilbert cared so little about him that he originally had Elsie "laugh aloud" at his plight at the very end, changing it to "dropped a tear" only when audiences found the line too cruel. But the character Gilbert seems to admire is Phoebe, the one person who feels something resembling unselfish love for another character, and the only character who will speak out against English bloodthirstiness. And, like Ko-Ko, she's horribly punished and forced to marry a disgustingly bloodthirsty character.

So Gilbert doesn't hate all people, but he does have a very dark view of most people, and his consistent view -- in his plays and poems -- is that there's not much hope for anyone who points out the stupidity of social rules and conventions, or the society's obsession with casually-inflicted death. The only way to arrive at a happy ending in Gilbert's world is to work within the system and make up your own stupid rules to amend the ones that already exist, the way the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe rewrites one arbitrary, bloodthirsty law ("Every fairy shall die who marries a mortal") into another ("Every fairy shall die who doesn't marry a mortal"). Unlike Shaw, he has no hope that anything can be changed by social enlightenment or a better system; the enemy, he implies, is humanity's compulsion to make up rules to live by. The theme that runs through all of Gilbert's work is that people will do anything, no matter how idiotic and awful, if convention dictates that they should. It's almost as if his enemy is society itself, because society is based on rules, and rules are inherently arbitrary and even evil.

Again, not much of this comes through in portrayals of Gilbert, but a lot of it is there in the texts, waiting to be brought out by an imaginative director. In the meantime, I think more of it will come out in a fairly straightforward, unfussy staging than one that tries to make points about things that are less interesting (like, for example, the cultural-appropriation issue in The Mikado) than the bleakness and anger of Gilbert's own themes.

Reckoning With Robin

I mentioned on Twitter that I hoped Kick-Ass (which I have not seen) would be a success because it might convince Warner Brothers to bring Robin back to the Batman movies. In 140 characters or less, you're tempted to make outrageous statements that will tempt people to respond, but I actually did mean that; I like Robin, and think that precisely because he wasn't well handled in the Joel Schumacher films, it's time for the movies to take a fresh look at him. If anything he needs a movie reboot more than Batman did, since the Chris O'Donnell version is the only movie version apart from the TV spinoff and the black-and-white serials.

Now, I agree that Robin will never show up as long as Christopher Nolan is in charge. But that says more about Nolan than the character. (And given that he basically turned the Joker into Dennis Hopper's character from Speed, with even less of an inner life, I doubt he'd do particularly well with Robin anyway.) The idea of someone else muscling in on Batman's turf, both helping him and threatening his image as the sole vigilante "hero this city needs" (tm), actually could fit in pretty well with Nolan's themes, particularly the attention he pays to Batman's creation of his public image and reputation. But realistically it'll have to wait for yet another reboot of the franchise.

The thing about the concept of Kick-Ass is that it deals with an aspect of the Robin character that has been batted around in the comics from The Dark Knight Returns on, and even in the animated shows, but has never been dealt with in the movies: superheroes inspire kid copycats. In a weird way Robin is more "realistic" than a man who, based on no apparent model except a bat, decides to fight crime in his underwear. Robin is someone who sees a superhero and decides to dress up in a costume and be like him. This makes him someone the kids can identify with (that's why he was added), but it also makes him a sort of commentary on the whole idea of identifying with superheroes and wanting to be like them.

Add to that the fact that Robin is a child (though how old he is depends on which version they're using this week) risking his life and inflicting violence, and there are all kinds of moral questions that open up: is it okay to watch a child doing this, is it okay for Batman to let a child risk his life (or get killed, again, depending on which Robin this is) just because it's useful to have someone around to act as a decoy. This stuff has been dealt with, but not in the movies, and I'd rather see that than some of The Dark Knight's post-9/11 obsessions.

Finally, Robin just makes a better confidante for Batman than all the Robin substitutes they've tried over the years. Robin was added, in part, because Batman needed someone to talk to. He still does, but they keep using Lucius "Morgan Freeman On Autopilot" Fox or Commissioner Gordon or Alfred where Robin is more effective. (Robin also makes Alfred more interesting, since he can talk to Robin about Batman or to Batman about Robin, giving his insights without the breach of etiquette that would involve telling off the young master face-to-face, and allowing him to tell us, through this other guy, what he knows about the characters' histories.) He was introduced as a "Watson" character; it was a good idea then and I think it's still a good idea now.

Again, none of this matters if the character is mis-handled. One way the TV series managed to make the character work was, against expectations, making Robin smarter than Batman. (Remember, it's a running gag that Robin solves the Riddler's riddles before Batman does.) The dynamic that made the show work is that Batman is completely unaware of his own absurdity, while Robin has a touch of real-world grounding, and sometimes seems mildly aware that what he's saying is ridiculous. That approach wouldn't work in a non-satirical movie, but the point is that if Robin is played a little differently from Batman, he can represent us, as he often does in the actual comics.

So there are at least some of my reasons why I'd like to see a non-Chris-O'Donnell Robin.

Grudge Match: Dick Dastardly vs. Professor Fate

Inspired by my Great Race reference in an earlier post, I return to a question that has haunted all of humankind ever since the '60s: who would win a race between Dick Dastardly (voice of Paul Winchell, Wacky Races) and Professor Fate (The Great Race?). Both are evil. Both have poor fashion sense. Both have mustaches and an infinite willingness to cheat. Both have silly voices. So who wins a race between two men who are basically doomed to lose? Yes, Fate won the race, but only because Leslie let him win. Dastardly won't do the same, yet unless one lets the other win, neither can win. So is this just doomed to go on forever?



There are two things going for Fate, apart from that whole thing where he actually won in the end. One, he's the original and Dastardly is the Hanna-Barbera copy. In a fight between the original and the H-B ripoff, I'll bet on Ralph Kramden to beat Fred Flintstone, and Sergeant Bilko to beat Top Cat, so I guess Fate has the edge there. And two, Fate has the sidekick advantage. He has Max, who is... not exactly competent, but at least fun, and willing to try new things and push buttons. Muttley doesn't do anything except laugh.



Though some might argue that given Max's track record, it's better to have a sidekick who doesn't do anything.

The other argument for Dastardly is that he occasionally won as part of the Really Rottens team in the Laff-a-Lympics. That could make his record better than that of Fate, who only seems to have that one forfeit victory to his credit.

So which rotten rapscallion will ride the road to riches?

A Brief Plug

Sorry I've had so little to say here recently. I do want to note that according to this post at BoingBoing, the cartoonists who contributed sketches to Craig Yoe's "Jetta" collection (devoted to Dan DeCarlo's obscure, pre-Jetsons futuristic sit-comic) include friend of this blog Jenny Lerew.

Yoe has been putting a lot of books together lately; you've probably already seen the plug for his most important recent project, "The Complete Milt Gross." (Not actually the complete Gross, but a complete collection from one era of his work.) But if you haven't, allow me to plug that here.

The first time I saw a Gross cartoon was, I think, a reprint in the "Big Book of Jewish Humor." It was a retelling of the story of Rumplestilskin (or as the title put it, "Ferry Tale from Romplesealskin for Nize Baby Wot Ate Opp All de Crembarry Suss"). The experience of seeing it for the first time wasn't quite as weird as a first encounter with Krazy Kat, because at least Gross's dialect was recognizably based on -- though exaggerated from -- actual speech patterns. But it was still strange and new; no cartoons I'd ever seen in newspapers or comic books were anything like it. And more than anything else in that book, it seemed like an introduction to a different era of Jewish humor, a complicated balancing act between self-mockery and even self-criticism (since the dialect represented the way of talking that his readers were trying to get away from, and perhaps in some cases resented in their own parents) and pride in the way Jewish and "goyish" culture could intersect.

Favorite Musical Numbers in Blake Edwards Movies?

I've been re-watching some Blake Edwards movies lately, with my usual mixture of admiration and frustration: he really was a brilliantly talented filmmaker (in my opinion), and I admire him for managing to preserve his basic style -- an Old Hollywood approach in almost every aspect of moviemaking, really -- through all the changes in film in the '70s and '80s. But he could hardly ever make a movie that was good all the way through. I know I said a lot of this a few years back when I wrote about S.O.B. (a movie I still love in spite of its terrible scenes, maybe because I turn to it as a corrective to '70s movie nostalgia), but I wanted to say a bit of it in new words.

Edwards reminds me of what Bill James said about the baseball player Mickey Vernon, that if you took his best seasons and filled in just regular average seasons between them, you'd have a Hall of Famer. If you took the best scenes of Edwards' movies and just balanced them with scenes that aren't embarrassingly bad, you'd have a great body of work. (This explains, by the way, why Howard Hawks said something to the effect that the secret of a good movie is to have three great scenes and no bad ones. The rest of the movie doesn't have to be as good as the best bits, it just has to be without bits like the Mickey Rooney scenes in Breakfast at Tiffany's) Vernon had an excuse: he played injured a lot of the time. Edwards, I'm not sure. I thought back in 2004 that his unevenness was a sign of his insecurity, a lack of knowledge of or interest in what the public wanted. That could be; he certainly seems to be saying in S.O.B. that he either doesn't know what the public wants or, insofar as he knows, he hates what they want. But I don't think it explains everything. It might be that he just didn't have the capacity for self-correction, the ability to throw out bad ideas and keep good ones.

Well, his films are what they are. One thing I usually enjoy in Edwards' movies are his pointless musical numbers. Coming along after the original movie musical died, and having such a close working relationship with Henry Mancini, Edwards liked to work Mancini's songs into his movies -- but oddly enough, in my opinion, the more integrated the songs are into the film, the less well they work. Victor/Victoria is the closest thing he made to a real musical, and except for Robert Preston's simply-staged "Gay Paree" song I don't find the musical sequences terribly impressive (it doesn't help that the songs, with Leslie Bricusse lyrics, aren't up to Mancini's earlier work). Darling Lili works better, but only "Whistling Away the Dark" is really stunning.

But when Edwards just puts a number in for no good reason, it can be a highlight. Obviously I'm thinking primarily of "Meglio Stasera" in The Pink Panther, which is so pointless that Edwards can't even remember (on his commentary track) why he put it in. Yet it's one of the great scenes of '60s cinema, and in a strange way sums up the whole point of the film, its beauty and cruelty and jet-set snobbery and the tragic figure of Clouseau, who is considered out of step (literally, in this number) because he's the only decent human being in the movie. By the way, I have no idea why this upload is missing Jeffries saying "Ragazzi!" -- it must be from a foreign dub where they forgot to put it back in -- but it's the best-quality upload currently online.



And then there's Dorothy Provine's similarly out-of-nowhere number in The Great Race. It's not as memorable a tune or as beautifully-staged a number (though Johnny Mercer's lyrics are an asset as always); parts of it look like they shot a master and some close shots and then ran out of money. But I've always found it the most purely entertaining four minutes in a bloated movie, filled with scenes that want to be the funniest ever, and don't quite make it. The best moments in this film are the small ones, and this is just fun, in a way that most movies from the era never were. Again, if Edwards' comedies as a whole were anywhere near as uncontrived and entertaining as this one scene, he'd be a pantheon moviemaker, instead of a guy who created some good scenes.

Or Maybe God Was Right

Vince Keenan has some thoughts after seeing Bigger Than Life:

I don’t have many rules when it comes to movies, but here’s one: when every hosanna fawns over what a movie says but not what actually happens onscreen, odds are you’re in for a tough sit...

The lopsided script is so focused on Mason and his largely one note fugues that the behavior of the other characters is rendered incomprehensible. His doctors aren’t held to account. As for Mason’s wife (Barbara Rush), I had to keep stepping out of the movie to backtrack her motivations. “I suppose if she thinks X, it makes sense she’d do Y.” Many critics claim Bigger Than Life is fundamentally about issues of class – novelist Jonathan Lethem, a great admirer of the film, offers 27 minutes of cultural background on the DVD – but the movie treats money obliquely. In a key scene, Mason holds up medical bills shot in such a way that I couldn’t tell what they were until he’d already put them down. Here’s another of my rules: if your characters’ actions are essentially prompted by subtext, you’ve failed as a dramatist.

Vince also compares the film to the New Yorker article it's based on, and finds that the true story makes more sense at every point. (For example, in real life, the teacher's dosage of cortisone was constantly upped by the doctor; the writers of the movie, not wanting to portray doctors negatively, made it entirely the teacher's decision to overdose on the miracle drug.)

I don't really agree with his take, but it's worth reading lest the DVD release and the (deserved, in my opinion) acclaim for Bigger Than Life get us all too caught up in Ray-mania. Most of his movies have serious flaws and Bigger Than Life, which may be my favorite among his films, abounds in unclear motivations, absurd plot points, and most damningly of all (since this is something Ray could have fixed on his own, without help from the writers) some weak acting, particularly from Christopher Olsen in the big role of James Mason's son.

And yet most of these flaws -- except the acting flaws, of course -- don't matter all that much to me personally. In a strange way, the lack of coherence in the film makes it more interesting than it would have been as a realistic case history, like Hitchcock's The Wrong Man the following year. In particular, the Barbara Rush character is more interesting to me because her motivations are so unclear and her behavior is so frankly bizarre. The thing I always find, when watching it, is that the wife drug-free (or is she? this being the '50s and all, who wasn't taking some sort of miracle drug?) is crazier than her husband on drugs. Her absolute insistence on playing the devoted wife role, no matter how things are collapsing around her, is almost pathological. It's like she is so determined to play her proper role in society, knowing her place, afraid even to go into a store that's out of her price range, that she is willing to let her husband destroy himself, her and her son rather than admit there's something wrong.

But while I think that's a valid interpretation of the film, borne out by what happens on the screen, it's also an interpretation that "justifies" what would normally be considered weak writing (a character who acts bizarrely for reasons that are never clarified, and whose bizarre behavior is never even addressed as such by the other characters). A lot of '50s Hollywood movies are like that. The directors of that era who caught the imagination of the French New Wave critics were often those like Ray or Sirk, who would take a compromised script -- often with hashy writing, tacked-on endings, and unjustified plot twists -- and made the movie look like it might mean something more than the script implied. (So at the end of Bigger Than Life Ray is using every device he can to make the happy ending look weird or sinister; it's not even that he has a specific, coherent comment to make on the convention of the happy ending, just that he wants to make it seem strange. Update: as noted in the comments, it's an exaggeration to say that there's no specific purpose to the way the ending is filmed. In particular, the final shot is pretty clearly intended to suggest that things might not get better for these people.) The New Wave saw this as a plus, because they were tired of "quality" movies from Europe and America, where every motivation was spelled out and every theme was explicitly stated.

So what seemed like weak writing in some of the films of Ray or Sirk, or the nonexistence of vital plot information in Artists and Models, or that plot point in Vertigo that is set up and never resolved, and many other such moments in '50s American movies, all seemed like a plus to the Godard generation. That generation of moviemakers set out to make movies that would deliberately incorporate the unclear motivations and messed-up characters that some of these filmmakers incorporated by accident. Which led to the cinematic status quo that so angered Pauline Kael in the early '60s, where both art and commercial movies paid less attention than ever to "motivations and complications, cause and effect."

The quality of Hollywood movies by the early '60s was far below what it had been in the '50s (and almost all the '50s favorites were in decline, in many cases having let their lovable flaws become much bigger flaws that choked off anything good in their movies), but you could argue that the decline was a direct consequence of the tendencies that appeared in the great Hollywood movies of the '50s: by ignoring the basics of good screenwriting, and trying to make movies that went against norms of good structure and characterization, these directors were doing something that could never work on a regular basis. This would explain why Howard Hawks, having broken many well-made movie rules with Rio Bravo -- creating a great film with an incredibly slow pace and some gaping plot holes (remember, we're told later in the film that Dean Martin witnessed a shooting that he wasn't actually conscious to see) -- spent much of the rest of his career making slow, plot-hole-filled movies that weren't very good, trying to repeat the Rio Bravo formula without the greatness.

But in those '50s movies, where the approach works, there's a certain exhilaration in seeing the rules of screenwriting class trumped by the power of images, performances and that unique atmosphere that a director and cinematographer can create. The fun of Johnny Guitar or Bigger Than Life is that the director and actors and cinematographer seem to be telling us that there's more to the story than the script will admit. I can see, in the right frame of mind, why so many young critics and filmmakers fell in love with that idea.

4000 Words From Somewhere Else

While I should post here more often, here are a couple of longer posts from other blogs that could have been done here. (And isn't that really the same thing as doing them here?... I guess not.)

- My 3000-word 80th-birthday post about Stephen Sondheim, with clips galore.

- One more Sam Schwartz post, with the added twist of quoting (with permission) from a letter he wrote in 1980.

- This post features a transcript of a 1968 article from the Los Angeles Times written after TV networks slashed their season orders to 26 episodes, explaining how we got from the old 39-episode season to the modern season length.

Overture

I couldn't figure out how to do this as a full-length post, so this will be more of a "here's this clip, go watch it" type of post. I made a little compilation of openings to a few overtures by Broadway orchestrator/arranger Hans Spialek. Spialek was one of the busiest orchestrators in New York in the '30s and early '40s (he did all of Richard Rodgers' scores from 1936 to 1940, for example), and it seems like when he created an overture, he would work from one or more unofficial "templates" he had in his mind. So all his overtures tend to sound the same no matter what melodies he's working with:



Spialek's contemporary Robert Russell Bennett was more inclined to give each overture its own flavour, particularly when it came to the openings. (Bennett's overtures include many of the most distinctive openings, from the startling despair of Show Boat to the fanfares at the beginning of My Fair Lady. Which of the openings were his idea and which the composer's, of course, is hard to say.)

And speaking of Broadway overtures, this next one has always been one of my very favorite examples of the genre (more so, than, say, the overture to Gypsy, which I always find a little grating). The overture to Wonderful Town perfectly sums up the show's combination of heart, '30s nostalgia and parody -- ending with the "Wrong Note Rag" makes for an exciting but weird-sounding climax -- and is just generally a model of how to do a traditional musical comedy overture.

According to Steven Suskin's book on orchestrators, most of this overture is the work of the former big-band arranger Jack Mason (whose other notable uncredited arrangement was for "With a Little Bit of Luck" in My Fair Lady), with a few bars of transition music contributed by Joe Glover and the show's credited orchestrator, Don Walker. The songs used are "Wrong Note Rag" (fanfare), "Swing!," "Ohio," "My Darlin' Eileen," "It's Love," and "Wrong Note Rag" again for the finale -- in other words, a cross-section of all the different musical moods of the show.

(Just as most composers didn't have time to do their own orchestrations, they didn't usually write their own overtures. The only overture Leonard Bernstein did himself was the deservedly famous Candide overture, which takes a different approach by treating themes from the show in a quasi-symphonic way, rather than the Broadway medley style.)

This performance, by Simon Rattle trying his hand at crossover, is a little stiff in spots (especially in the version of "It's Love"), but it's the only fully professional performance of it online, so:

The Waiting For a Bare-Bones DVD Is the Hardest Part

A delay of several months for the single-disc Bugs and Daffy cartoon collections. And as we've noted before, the collections -- with no extras and a list of cartoons that's not as good as the one initially posted on WB's website -- aren't such hot stuff to begin with, so the waiting is an additional, if minor, annoyance. I'll buy them, and I think anyone who wants one or more of the cartoons included should buy them. But unless the delay will make the product better (which I suppose could happen), I take this as another sign that we may not get as much of the remaining WB cartoon catalogue as we were hoping.

I should add that I'm not really against the bare-bones single-disc strategy. As the DVD market continues to decline, the only retailers left are the Wal-Mart and Best Buy behemoths, and the cheap, family-oriented cartoon DVDs are the ones they're most likely to stock. But even that market for standard-definition discs might not hold out long enough for them to release a lot of these things. And while I would probably bite the bullet and re-buy the previously-released cartoons if they came out on blu-ray (even though my ability to tell the difference is limited at the moment), that format doesn't look like it's ever going to have a lot of classics released by the major studios. So if the standard-def DVD releases dry up, I wouldn't count on blu-ray kick-starting things again, at least for now.

The real challenge in the coming years will be for WB to figure out some way to keep its cartoons in circulation. Unfortunately the company has made very little content and no cartoons available on Hulu, even though that would be just about the ideal format for the cartoons: with some legal, good-quality postings of cartoons that can be consumed in seven-minute bites, they'd stand a chance of getting some eyeballs. I would think that someday they're going to have to figure out how to make cartoons available online, or video-on-demand (which companies may consider the latest "coming thing" in terms of video distribution), or release the "restored" versions to television to recoup more of the money they spent on restoring them. But I haven't seen many signs of it happening, and that means more and more time spent without building brand awareness of these characters.

The link notes that Jerry Beck may have something to say about the DVD plans a week from now on Stu's Show, and that he's already confirmed that there are still (for now) plans to release two more discs this year.

For Students of the Laugh Track

(Cross-posted from the TV Guidance blog)

I've talked a few times about the differences between real laughter and canned laughter in television (which are often spoken of as though they're the same thing) without really illustrating what I mean. So I thought I'd put together a video to give an idea of how a multi-camera TV soundtrack is enhanced in post-production. I had a copy of an old WKRP episode in two different soundtracks: the "unsweetened" version, with no sounds added that were not recorded live on the set, and the "sweetened" version for final broadcast, with extra laughter and music added. I already showed a scene from this episode with and without music. What I've done here is put some excerpts side by side, along with some captions pointing out what's been added and whether the laughter is real or canned.

Now, the sound of a laugh track was different and more obvious 30 years ago, and there were differences in terms of sound mixing. (Today, it's more likely for ambient sounds, like crowd background noise, to be added. Back then there was basically nothing except the dialogue and laughter.) But the basic differences seem to be the same. First, in the final mix, the sound of the real audience laughter is sometimes a bit different, perhaps because of added echo. And sometimes the mixer adds in a canned laugh track, though this is not one of those episodes where the audience didn't laugh much. But you'll notice that the reason for the added laughter isn't always the same from clip to clip. Reasons for adding canned laughter include:

1) The audience didn't laugh at a joke and the producers want to keep it in. (Sometimes because it wasn't funny, as Woody Allen protests to Tony Roberts in Annie Hall, but sometimes because the joke was too much of a throwaway for the audience to laugh at it.) The extra laughter allows the joke to stay in without giving the impression that it fell flat compared to the jokes that did get big laughs.

2) The scene, or part of a scene, was done as a pickup after the audience went home, and the laugh track is inserted to make it fit, sonically, with the rest of the episode.

3) In a couple of spots in this video, very mild, almost inaudible laughs are inserted to cover a long pause and keep the sound from being "dead." It's very similar to the way one-camera shows use ambient noise or -- especially -- music.

4) Sometimes a laugh is extended a bit so it will last into the next shot. This is done to create a smoother transition between two shots that might come from different takes.

5) Finally, in the last clip from this video, the audience applauds after a joke. The producers apparently didn't want the applause, so they replaced the applause with a laugh track. So in this case the laugh track is used to tone down the audience response, which is something that is still done today.

Signor Visconti in Inghilterra

Film is permanent (hopefully); theatre is ephemeral. The inevitable result: directors who split their time between theatre and film wind up being judged for posterity only by their film work. That's just the way things have to be, since we can't actually know for ourselves what it was like to experience their theatre productions in the theatre. (We can guess, from descriptions, stills, and -- hopefully -- video evidence. But all of that just enables us to imagine what the production might have been like.) Some directors' careers look much worse than they really were when they're discussed solely as film directors. Rouben Mamoulian, for example. Film buffs often talk about him as someone who never fulfilled his early promise and got fired from a lot of movie projects, like Laura. But while he was making disappointing movies in the '30s and '40s, he was revolutionizing the theatre with productions like Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! After he got fired from Laura, he went back to New York and did Carousel. We can't see those productions, so half his career -- maybe the more important half -- is not something we can evaluate well.

All that is a way of saying that we can't fully judge a director's theatre career, even if we have video clips or complete videotaped productions in front of us. (Watching a videotape of a production is not watching a production. I guess you could say that watching a film on TV isn't really watching the film, but at least we're not seeing it from a distance.) But, that said, it's always fun to come across more evidence of a famous film director's theatre career, or to better understand the place theatre had in his career. One superstar movie director who made theatre a huge part of his career was Luchino Visconti, who alternated movies with stage productions, and especially opera productions.

Most of Visconti's productions aren't available in video form; I don't think I've ever seen any video of his work with Maria Callas. They were the most famous director-star opera team of their era, creating (reportedly creating, I mean; I wasn't there) a new level of psychological credibility for so-called "frivolous" Italian operas. Perhaps his most famous non-Callas production was Verdi's Don Carlo at Covent Garden in 1958, one of several '50s productions that turned this opera from a rarity into one of Verdi's most-performed works.

Anyway, in 1964, Visconti re-teamed with designer Filippo Sanjust and conductor Carlo Maria Giulini for a Covent Garden Il Trovatore, and this production was taped (I think by the BBC). Clips of this production have appeared on YouTube, and I've been greatly enjoying watching them. I don't think they bring me that much closer to understanding what Visconti brought to opera production, especially since Trovatore is not a piece that calls for a very interventionist directorial approach.

The plot of Trovatore takes a lot of crap, though it's actually a good libretto with a strong, solid melodramatic story; unlike many confused, convoluted plots, it's quite easy to follow and the characters' motivations are always clear. But there's nothing very complex about most of the characters. They mostly have very simple, unadorned motivations of jealousy, love and duty, and they express these feelings in equally simple, direct ways. That means the director needs to keep things simple as well, not get in the way of the characters. That's the way Visconti seemed to see it; in Il Mio Teatro he's quoted as saying that the characters of Trovatore are all preoccupied with their own emotions, that they express themselves to the fullest when they sing, and that the things they sing rarely demand an answer from anyone else. (In other words, the characters are not trying to communicate with each other. They're just thinking out loud.)

Anyway, what that all adds up to is that Visconti is not trying to re-invent Trovatore or even make a statement about what he thinks it means; he just wants to give the characters a chance to express themselves to the fullest. So his staging of Azucena's entrance song, sung by the great Italian singer Giulietta Simionato, isn't that much different from the way it's done in A Night At the Opera. But that's because there aren't many ways to do this number without getting in its way. It's a crazy old gypsy woman remembering the time her mother was burned at the stake; the director's options are limited, and it's up to the singer to sell it -- which she does. Incidentally, Simionato is still alive as of this writing, going on 100. That's almost as awesome as she is.

This is the number in two parts: the song, followed by the recitative (with tenor Bruno Prevedi) and then in part 2, the follow-up musical narrative where she fills us in on the backstory: she kidnapped the child of the man who put her mother to death, but in her insanity and delirium she murdered her own child instead, and raised the other child (the tenor) as her own. Yes, that pretty much is the inspiration for every Gilbert and Sullivan opera ever, but these baby-switching melodramas were very common in the 19th century, and this is one of the more plausible examples, because the character is just crazy enough to have done something like this.





The famous thing about this production was that Leontyne Price, originally set to star, had to pull out at the last minute and was replaced by one of Covent Garden's resident sopranos, Gwyneth Jones. She did a fine job, probably better than Price would have. (Price sang a lot of this role beautifully, but she wasn't good at the coloratura that other parts demanded. Jones even did the trills.) It made her an international star, but unfortunately, she didn't live up to the promise she displayed here; she took on a lot of heavy parts and her voice developed a heavy wobble. She was a fine singer with a long career, but a different kind of career than this would have suggested.

Here she is in the Act IV number followed by another number featured in A Night At the Opera, the "Miserere." (The tenor, Prevedi, was one of a number of good-but-not-great Italian tenors in the '60s; it was probably the last era when there were a lot of good Italian tenors. By the '70s, Pavarotti was practically the only one.) Again, I wouldn't say there's anything striking about the staging except that it doesn't get in the singer's way with a lot of extraneous detail; there isn't even anybody on stage except her during the "Miserere" number. (The director has to decide whether the tenor and the chorus should be offstage throughout or if they should be visible, like the tenor is visible at the window in A Night At the Opera.)



Visconti felt that Jones and Prevedi didn't quite get what he was going for, the idea that the characters were emotionally isolated and not listening to each other or waiting for a response, but that the singers who did get it were Simionato and (as the villain) the British baritone Peter Glossop. Here they are in the scene where Simionato is captured, and Glossop discovers that she is (he thinks) the person who murdered his brother and the mother of his romantic rival. That's fairly clear; what Visconti and Sanjust were thinking in putting the villain in a hat like that is less clear.



And here's the finale, which ends as follows:

- Soprano has taken poison, dies.
- Tenor is hauled offstage to be put to death.
- Baritone gleefully tells mezzo that her son is dead.
- Mezzo tells baritone that, no, the tenor was only her adopted son and he was actually the baritone's brother.
Verdi, as he frequently does, wraps up all this plot stuff in about one minute near the end, so the director's job is to make it all as emotionally clear as possible; every action has to "read" in only a few seconds.

Scheimer! And the Unreal Ghostbusters

There's an interesting discussion going on in the Cartoon Brew comments regarding Amid Amidi's dismissive post about Lou Scheimer's upcoming book (co-written with Scheimer's faithful Boswell, Andy Mangels). The comments start out mostly agreeing with Amid that this is "the book nobody's been waiting for," but Mark Evanier arrives to counterattack Amid for his snide tone, and other commenters point out the usual extenuating facts about Filmation: 1) It trained a lot of people who went on to help create the improved animation of the mid-'80s onward; 2) It was the only company that resisted the pressure to outsource the animation overseas; 3) A lot of people who worked for Filmation still have fond memories of the experience; 4) A lot of the shows were and still are beloved.

As a child, I was on both sides of the Filmation fence: I was addicted to He-Man, but Filmation cartoons were also the first cartoons whose shoddiness I really began to notice. (Once I realized that Filmation cartoons all had terrible -- or, really, nonexistent -- animation, I could move on to noticing the same problems in other shows. But Filmation's level of craftsmanship was so low that even a kid could become aware of it.) I don't think it's fair to say that Scheimer made the best cartoons he could with the resources and restrictions he had; if anything, Filmation was always coming up with ways to bring the level of Saturday morning cartoons down just a little bit further. Filmation may actually look worse from the point of view of a viewer than it does from the point of view of an animator. If you're an animator, at least it was a decent training ground. If you're a viewer, and you don't have a nostalgic fondness for these shows, then it can be argued that Filmation helped the quality of animation, voice acting and (especially) scriptwriting deteriorate even faster than it otherwise would have.

On the other hand, even if you think these shows were bad, Filmation and Scheimer have their fingerprints all over modern animation history. He may have made animation better and worse, in the sense that his shows drove the art form downward while many of his trainees helped drive it upward. So I don't quite get Amid's assumption that nobody would want to read a book like this; I'd think someone who wants to know what went wrong in animation would want to read it most of all (though Scheimer will talk as though it was all great, so we'll have to read between the lines).

But as someone who used to write posts entitled "things that suck" (and stopped because I realized it was nasty, and making the posts seem worse than they really were), I don't have standing to criticize Amid for his tone. So I'll end this post with what may be the first appearance of Lou Scheimer in comic book form. When Filmation started doing the (terrible) Archie TV cartoon, the comics did a story where the characters went to Filmation studios and met Scheimer (the man in the green suit), Norm Prescott (the guy with the pipe and glasses) and Hal Sutherland (the man in the black suit), whose name is misspelled "Southerland" by the comics' somewhat typo-prone letterer, Bill Yoshida.

The great Harry Lucey drew this rather sycophantic visit to Filmation (around the same time as another story that sucked up to music producer Don Kirschner), and as he often did, he drew the "real" characters in a less-cartoony-than-usual style. He makes the Filmation studio look better than Filmation made the comic characters look.

WKRP Episode: "Pilot, Part 2"

By request, an episode I hadn't featured before, the second episode. The title is misleading, because the show's actual pilot was only a half-hour; this was the first episode made after it was picked up as a series, the main difference being that Venus now has a beard. I think the title simply implies that this episode is showing the aftermath of what happened in the actual pilot: Andy changed the format in the pilot, and in this episode we learn that the station is losing advertisers and has to deal with fan protest over the dropping of the "beautiful music" format. The second episodes of Frank's Place and The Famous Teddy Z also pick up on and continue the story threads from the pilots, so Hugh Wilson clearly liked to write this way.

Before it came back strong in the post-M*A*S*H slot at the end of the first season, WKRP was sometimes accused of not living up to its acclaimed pilot. And there is a bit of sophomore-jinx syndrome here: the pilot was very fast-paced and packed a lot of story into 24 minutes, while this episode doesn't really have enough story for the whole time slot, and resorts to a number of scenes that feel padded. The best scene in the show is the only scene in the broadcast booth, featuring one of the show's most famous lines ("...I don't know what you want here, but..."). The audience laughter, which up until that point has hovered between mild and canned, finally explodes at Hesseman's delivery of the line.

Among the characters, a couple of them are coming into better focus than they did in the pilot: Jennifer, who wasn't much of a character in the pilot, is here established as having a sort of Radar/Colonel Blake relationship with Carlson, and Les is more clearly defined as a conspiracy theorist. Most of the other characters are still a little vague here, waiting for the actors and the writers to really figure them out. (Carlson, like Jimmy James on NewsRadio, is written much more ornery in these early episodes than he later became.)

The only scene with musical content is the one in the booth. All three songs are stripped out in the DVD/Hulu version: "Lies" and "Shattered" by the Rolling Stones, and "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger. All three songs were new at the time, and this episode helped to popularize "Old Time Rock and Roll."

The Oscars' Record Is Both Better and Worse Than It Looks

I've never had many good things to say about the Oscars, but one thing that occurred to me is that some of the winners look worse, in retrospect, because people compare them to movies that either weren't nominated or didn't have a chance to win.

An obvious case in point is Oliver!. It's often considered one of the worst Best Picture winners because it beat out 2001, or Rosemary's Baby, or The Producers. But none of those films were nominated for Best Picture. Of the five movies that actually were nominated that year -- Oliver!, Funny Girl, Paul Newman's well-meaning, well-made directorial debut Rachel Rachel (sort of his Ordinary People), Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, and The Lion In Winter -- I have no hesitation in saying that Oliver! was the best choice. If it hadn't won, the winner would probably have been Lion In Winter, a perfectly entertaining, well-acted stage adaptation that over-inflates the tongue-in-cheek play it's based on. Oliver! was one of the better stage-to-screen adaptations of the era, and I think the voters made the right decision among the five nominees; the problem was with the nominating process, which was skewed towards worthy, middle-of-the-road projects.

And sometimes a winner can look bad by comparison with other movies that were nominated, but is a better choice than the movie it was really competing with. Take Going My Way. I am a big Leo McCarey fan, and it looks better if you're inclined to like his style, but I don't consider it one of his better films; the sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's, is a better movie. People notice that Double Indemnity was one of the best picture nominees that year, and bash the selection of Going My Way. But a seedy melodrama like Double Indemnity had, realistically, no chance of winning; it was kind of a miracle (a sign of the industry's respect for Billy Wilder) that it got nominated at all. The race was really between two mega-productions with powerful producers: Daryl Zanuck's Wilson (because everybody wants to see a two and a half hour Woodrow Wilson biopic) and David Selznick's Since You Went Away. It was a bit of a surprise that Going My Way beat out both those movies, but it was a much better choice than either of them. Double Indemnity would have been a better choice still, but again, I can't see that it ever could have won.

It's not saying much, but the Best Picture winners often look better compared to the movies that stood a chance of winning, rather than compared to the very best movies of the year.

Significant Linkage

I haven't been posting enough lately, but here are links to some things I've read:

- Thad has another animator breakdown, of the Friz Freleng classic "His Bitter Half" (aka "the one that got remade with Yosemite Sam replacing Daffy")

- A four-part series on the films of Nicholas Ray from the point of someone who doesn't particularly like Nicholas Ray. I don't necessarily agree with all or even most of it. (I think, for example, that it's often a mistake to look for Ray's "expressionistic" style in the shot setups and lighting, when that's only a part -- and not the biggest part, in the old studio-system days -- of what creates the over-the-top emotionalism of Ray's work.) But I found it interesting reading anyway.

- Speaking of Nicholas Ray, Bigger Than Life gets Criterion'd on March 23. I have to wonder how it plays in movie theatres -- it really does border on camp, and I've heard that the most famous line, "God was wrong!!!", gets laughs in revival showings these days. But it's perfect for the home viewing format, especially since it has a lot in common with modern TV dramas (in its combination of social commentary and over-ripe melodrama, it would fit right in on HBO).

- A blog entirely devoted to comics stories by John Stanley. And not just "Little Lulu," though there's lots of that, but also some obscure Stanley projects like "Linda Lark, Student Nurse."

- While I'm on the subject of comics, here's one of the few complete stories I could find online from Stan Lee and Al Hartley's run on "Patsy Walker." Marvel doesn't give its non-superhero characters nearly enough respect -- remember, Patsy is the character the company actually turned into a superhero, on the assumption that she isn't worth following if she doesn't wear a stupid costume. But I can never make up my mind how I feel about their non-superhero comics. I feel, for one thing, like Stan Lee's writing was never quite funny enough; when he did action-adventure, he was a lot funnier than your average superhero writer, but Millie the Model and Patsy needed better jokes. And with Patsy, while Al Hartley's art was a lot more consistent than it later became, he still indulges in the two habits that always made his art look scary to me: the weird facial lines, and the blank stares in the characters' wide eyes. He always looks like he's drawing zombies. Pretty, shapely zombies. Among the non-superhero Marvel artists, though, I still prefer Hartley to Stan Goldberg.

- I'm kind of enjoying this week of Family Circus reprints from 1960. Not enough to make me want to go out and buy the book of reprints, but enough to make me think the strip used to be better. I don't think the jokes were that much better, but the cartoony look of the characters (particularly the dad) and the manic expressions of the kids made it better. It's always been, basically, a strip about what destructive idiots children are, but back then the art didn't try to make us believe that these kids were cute.

- One death I missed last year was that of TV director Linda Day, who died of cancer at age 71. Day started directing TV in 1979, at a time when there were very few female directors in TV or movies. She started as Jay Sandrich's assistant, and became associate director for the first two and a half seasons of WKRP in Cincinnati. During the second season, Hugh Wilson gave her her first directing assignment, on a very difficult episode: "In Concert" the famous Who concert tragedy show. After that she directed many TV episodes, mostly sitcoms but also some hour-long shows like St. Elsewhere.

- I have no idea why this should be, but I was kind of happy to find the original, pre-Toni Basil version of "Hey Mickey," when it was called "Kitty." At least that name rhymes with "pity" and "pretty."

- The most famous documentary ever made about a classical recording, Humphrey Burton's "The Golden Ring" (about conductor Georg Solti, producer John Culshaw and his team recording Gotterdammerung in Vienna), has been posted on YouTube in nine parts. It's hard to imagine a modern classical recording being taken quite so seriously as a production in its own right; most classical records are made during live concerts, and the producer's job is to get the music sounding as good as it can. But Culshaw, like Glenn Gould, saw the recording as a completely separate experience from the live concert (he hated live recordings and said there was "no excuse" for making them), and his recordings remain a more involving experience than the average record -- or the average concert.

John Reed and the Sound of G&S

John Reed died two weeks ago at the age of 94. He was the D'Oyly Carte's lead patter performer -- the guy who handled the George Grossmith parts -- for 20 years. Because he was on most of the company's stereo recordings (which were the ones most easily available) he pretty much was Gilbert and Sullivan for me, since I learned most of the patter songs from his recordings.

The exception was the role of Ko-Ko in The Mikado, because I learned that score from the D'Oyly Carte's recording of 1958 -- one of the few recordings made by Reed's predecessor, Peter Pratt. (Pratt did not stay with the company as long as Martyn Green or Reed, but I think there's an argument that he was the best of them, at least as a singer.) Reed recorded Ko-Ko both in audio and video versions, but it's Pratt's voice I hear in my head whenever I think of the score.

We all tend to associate scores with the people who are singing them when we first hear them. But I find it's even more pronounced (for me) with Gilbert and Sullivan, because the recordings were the only chance I usually had to hear them in fully professional productions, with a good orchestra (or, sometimes, even an orchestra). So the inflections of Reed and his D'Oyly Carte colleagues of the era -- from quality opera singers like Valerie Masterson and Gillian Knight to not-so-great singers like Mary Sansom or Christene Palmer -- essentially defined what the scores should sound like.

That said, I sometimes think it's unfortunate that the Grossmith roles are rarely cast as true "singing" roles. It's true that Grossmith himself was not really a singer and Sullivan wrote with that in mind. But when people are trying to cast the G&S operas in a fresh or different way, they rarely consider that it might be genuinely fresh and different to cast these important parts with a solid, true baritone voice, the way Papageno in The Magic Flute (also written for a "performer" rather than a singer) usually is. Instead the casting always trends even more toward acting over singing -- even with the Judge in Trial By Jury, which wasn't written for Grossmith and really needs a good singer.

The Malcolm Sargent recordings on EMI started out trying to do something like that by assigning the patter parts to Geraint Evans, the prominent British opera singer. Evans sounded like he didn't enjoy the parts (he didn't) and he was replaced on later recordings by the veteran (and kind of over-the-hill at that point) patter singer George Baker. But I still think the operatic casting of the Grossmith parts could pay off.

In the meantime, Reed's voice is going through my head even more than it usually does. And here again is the clip of him singing Ko-Ko's "Tit-Willow" song.