The Moon is Blue

F. Hugh Herbert's The Moon is Blue was a hit Broadway play in the early '50s. It's become kind of a joke, mostly because of the slightly ridiculous "controversy" surrounding the movie version: Otto Preminger, who directed the movie and had staged the play on Broadway, decided to break down the Hollywood studios' production code by refusing to remove the word "virgin," released it without the Production Code seal of approval, and proved that people would go to see a movie without the seal of approval. It was another big step in the ongoing breakdown of the Studio System and in the decline of movies as a true mass phenomenon. The point of the Production Code was to make movies "morally acceptable" to the entire country; the point of abandoning the Production Code was that it was becoming almost impossible to make movies that would appeal to everyone, and so it no longer made sense to try and make a movie simultaneously acceptable to the city slicker in New York and the little old lady in Dubuque. Hence the decline of the Production Code and the rise of "niche" entertainment. The Moon is Blue was an appropriate place to start, because as a Broadway comedy with a very New York sensibility, it was a niche piece, dealing with "sophisticated," urban attitudes toward sex. Ten years earlier, Hollywood's instinct would have been to de-emphasize that sensibility and make it more "universal"; there was a fear that a movie would fail if it tried to deal with niche subjects (as Variety famously headlined about the failure of "rural" movies in rural areas: "HIX NIX STIX PIX"). Preminger just decided to keep that sensibility intact -- and in doing so, he exploded the myth that Hollywood movies couldn't succeed unless they had cross-country appeal.

But because the movie that brought down the Production Code is so innocuous, containing nothing worse than the words "virgin" and "mistress," The Moon is Blue has become, as I said, kind of a joke. It was the subject of one of the few good episodes M*A*S*H did in its last season, where Hawkeye and B.J. try to get a copy of the film, thinking it must be a "hot" movie because it was banned. The punchline is their disappointment at discovering that it's just a traditional light comedy. Well, The Moon is Blue, the original play, is a traditional light comedy, and then again it isn't.

(Note: what I'm discussing below is the play; the movie, which Herbert also wrote, is quite faithful to the play, but I haven't seen it in years.)

The basic plot of The Moon is Blue is thin even for a three-act Broadway comedy. Don Gresham (Barry Nelson in the play), a successful architect, meets a plain-spoken young woman named Patty O'Neill (Barbara Bel Geddes). She tells him at their first meeting that she is a virgin and intends to stay that way:

Look, it's very simple. Let's face it -- going to a man's apartment almost always ends in one of two ways: Either the girl's willing to lose her virtue or she fights for it. I don't want to lose mine, and I think it's vulgar to fight for it. So I always put my cards on the table. Don't you think that's sensible?

This piques Don's interest, and he takes her to his apartment, promising "Affection, but no passion." Patty keeps asking him questions about his sex life ("do you have a mistress?"), which irritates Don a bit:

DON: Why are you so preoccupied with sex?
PATTY (indignant): Who? Me?
DON: Yes -- you.
PATTY: Do you really think I am?
DON: Well, you're always asking people if they plan seduction, or whether they're bored with virgins, or if they have a mistress. If that isn't being preoccupied with sex, I'd like to know what is.
PATTY: You may be right. (Brightly) But don't you think it's better for a girl to be preoccupied with sex than occupied?

The only other important character in the play (there's one other character, Patty's father, an Irish cop who shows up to belt Don in the eye) is David Slater (Donald Cook), the fortyish, Southern playboy father of Don's ex-girlfriend Cynthia. David is the sort of guy who clearly wasn't cut out to be a father, and looks and feels ridiculous being the father of a grown-up daughter; he shows up half-heartedly vowing to "horsewhip" Don in retaliation for something he did to Cynthia (who never appears in the play). It turns out that what Cynthia is angry about is that Don didn't sleep with her, and David, the ultimate irresponsible parent, gets angry about it too:

DAVID: Let me ask you this: when a pretty girl offers herself to a man -- under conditions such as you've described -- what would stop him?
DON: Apart from moral barriers, which we needn't go into, nothing if the man's in love. Then he doesn't mind being committed.
DAVID: Correct me if I'm mistaken, but weren't you sort of engaged to her?
DON: There is an important distinction between an engagement and a commitment.
DAVID: Aha.
DON: As man to man -- I was unwilling to lose the intiative -- I've given it a lot of thought.
DAVID: Intellectual bastard, aren't you?
DON: When you're carrying the ball you don't like to lose it, on a fumble, in a casual bed.
DAVID: I'm not a football fan, but is it customary for the ball carrier to function also as the referee? Who blew the whistle?
PATTY (entering): What are you fighting about now? Football?
DAVID: Why, yes. We were just discussing an incompleted pass.

That's the end of the first act, and about all we've learned is that Patty's a virgin, Don considers sexual relations to entail a commitment, and David thinks of sex as more of a casual thing. In other words, there's no real plot, but a lot of talking: about sex, attitudes to sex, what it means to have sex and what it means not to have sex. Don and David are opposites, and they are both intrigued by Patty's self-proclaimed virtuousness. To Don, the stolid hero, Patty represents an ideal, the virtuous heroine, the girl who won't put out, and just as Patty proclaims her own virtue to everyone who will listen, Don proclaims his own virtue by loudly stating his honorable intentions:

DON: I'd hate to have a mind like yours. Haven't you ever wanted to spend the evening alone with a girl without trying to make her? (David suddenly sits down) What's the matter with you?
DAVID: I'm trying to think....

When Don concludes, through the obligatory Wacky Misunderstandings, that Patty really is That Kind of Girl after all, he gets so disillusioned that he accuses her of being a "professional virgin," exploiting the appearance of innocence for her own advantage. But meanwhile, David, the playboy, the spokesman for promiscuity, the cynic who first suggests to Don that Patty may not be as innocent as she seems -- David becomes more and more convinced that Patty really is innocent, and more willing to accept the notion that innocence exists:

You know, there's a popular theory that nice little girls are always led astray or seduced by nasty old men. It isn't so. for every nice girl seduced by a nasty old man, there are fifty betrayed by inexperienced nice young men. Only nasty old men have an instinctive respect for innocence.

By the end of the play David has been shaken out of his cynicism enough that he actually starts to take seriously his fatherly responsibilities, and in particular the idea that a father's job is to teach his children to be virtuous, even if he's no good at it:

DAVID: Spoke to [Cynthia] for an hour about hell fire and damnation... Never batted an eyelash. Laughed at me. Of course I found it hard to keep a straight face. Guess you have to believe in it yourself if you want to put the fear of God in anybody else. Bawled the hell out of that girl.
DON: Isn't that rather belated -- this making a noise like a father?
DAVID: You know, that's exactly what Cynthia said. Stopped me cold. Good point. That's why I locked her in her bedroom.

All the best Broadway light comedies succeed by putting some kind of original spin on traditional comedy stories, and The Moon is Blue is no exception: instead of the virtuous young lovers triumphing over the wicked older man, each of the three characters in this triangle learn something unexpected. David learns the virtue of virtue. Don comes to understand that his seeming respect for virtue was really a kind of cynicism (a willingness to think the worst of Patty the moment he had any reason to think anything less than the best of her), while Patty understands, at least momentarily, that her preoccupation with sex is really just a cover-up for her desire to be occupied with it:

PATTY: I'm fed up with being...
DAVID: The status to which I presume you're referring needn't be permanent. There comes a time, my child, when you should follow your feminine instincts -- when understanding is more precious than virtue.
PATTY: I know, but we've only known each other for such a little time. Wouldn't he lose all respect for me if...
DAVID: For a gift one is always beholden. Goodnight, Patty. You're a nice kid.

After this conversation, David leaves, and Patty, after much deliberation, knocks on the door of Don's room. She knocks again, with no answer, and is about to knock again when she gets cold feet and leaves. So of course she doesn't actually have sex before marriage; it's a comedy in praise of virtue, after all, and for all that people mock the "sex comedies where no one has sex," it would be out of character for Patty to actually succumb or for Don to seduce her. But the fact that she is willing to succumb, or at least to consider it as an option, is what makes the happy (monogamous) ending possible. Patty's protestations of virtue are an emotional shield, a way of avoiding making a sexual or emotional commitment; when she knocks on Don's door, the staging -- and the placement of the moment as the climax of the third act, even though there's another short scene that follows it -- makes it clear that this is the moment when she agrees to make a commitment. That's the ethos of the traditional Broadway comedy: being willing to have sex implies being willing to make a commitment. So the characters are rewarded with a virtuous ending in return for being willing to at least consider giving up their virtue. Naughty thoughts as an enabler of traditional values: this paradoxical notion turns up in a lot of old Broadway comedies, and The Moon is Blue is one of the better examples of the genre, though the assumptions it's based on would probably make it unrevivable today. (Don at one point says, in all seriousness: "Nobody in their right mind would seriously object to being called a virgin, even if they weren't one." That would get an unintentional laugh today.)

F. Hugh Herbert -- I believe he adopted the "F. Hugh" on purpose, just for the sound of it -- was born in England and moved to the U.S. as a young man; like John Van Druten, he splits the difference between European and American mores, though Van Druten's characters, unlike Herbert's, actually have sex. Herbert also wrote a lot of movies, including one of the best movies of the '40s, the melancholy nostalgia-comedy Margie with Jeanne Crain. The only other thing I remember hearing about him is that he always employed a secretary and dictated every word of everything he ever wrote; he boasted of never using a pen or a typewriter to write anything.

The Id Back in Yid

Seems like Everybody's talkin' about Philip Roth. I admit I haven't read a lot of Roth -- I guess he's not obscure enough for me -- but I do like Portnoy's Complaint, even if I don't exactly enjoy spending that much time with a character like Alex Portnoy. Roth came along at a time when Jews had finally crawled back into American pop culture after years of being written out. Look at movies from the '30s or '40s and you'll hardly ever see a Jewish character, and when one does appear, like Felix Bressart's character in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, he's not explicitly referred to as a Jew. There was an idea among entertainment-industry executives, many of whom were of course Jewish, that no one wanted to see Jewish characters; hence slogans like "Write Jewish, cast Italian," whereby Jewish stereotypes would be disguised as some other ethnic group. When Jews did appear, as in the movie Gentleman's Agreement or Arthur Laurents's play Home of the Brave (the movie version of which substituted a black character for the Jewish lead character), they tended to be given no particular cultural identity, with the odd result that non-Jewish characters would sometimes act more stereotypically Jewish than the Jewish characters. (A novel like What Makes Sammy Run? was an exception, and a still-controversial one.)

Explicitly Jewish characters, culturally Jewish characters, started to appear more often in the '50s and early '60s, and by the time Philip Roth came along, there was a fairly well-established type of mainstream Jewish humor. It might be about growing up in the city, like Sam Levenson's comedy routines and books; it might be about the modern suburbs, like Allan Sherman's three best-selling record albums; it might be something like Fiddler on the Roof, but it was uniformly pleasant and likable, portraying Jewish culture as very mainstream, very easily assimilated into the majority culture. The theme of Fiddler is that the insularity of Jewish tradition -- the things that make it seem alien to the American majority culture -- break down or change, and Tevye and his family will come to America and fit in.

Portnoy's Complaint said, wait a minute. It portrayed Jewishness as insular, alienating, making Portnoy feel at once inferior and superior to the majority culture. Portnoy is always emphasizing the extent to which Jews are set apart, portraying dietary laws, for example (which were almost never mentioned in '50s or '60s Jewish stories) as a way of simultaneously torturing ourselves and making ourselves feel superior to the goyim. If Fiddler on the Roof says that the Jews aren't so different after all, Portnoy's Complaint says that Jews are very different, and not as completely assimilated as we like to think. (This is different from What Makes Sammy Run? which centred around a negative Jewish stereotype but portrayed him as the rotten apple in the barrel, not as a representative of Jewish culture.) In that sense, it could be considered one of the progenitors of the "multicultural" American and Canadian literature of the past 30 years or so, where the basic theme is the ambiguous attitude of, and relationship of, a minority toward the majority culture. When I read Portnoy I sort of long for the assimilationist Jewish popular culture that came before it; I kind of miss Allan Sherman assuring America that Jews just go to camp and sing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" like everyone else. But I also know, as a Jew, that there's some truth in Roth's emphasis on cultural differences, and I have to say that if someone was going to bring it out in the open, I'm glad it was someone who could write it funny, instead of preachy.

If you've read this far, I also want to mention the much-maligned movie version of Portnoy's Complaint. The maligning, by the way, is deserved; the script isn't much, the direction is worse, and some of the casting is just wrong, notably Richard Benjamin as Portnoy (Gene Wilder was considered, and he'd have been much better) and Jill Clayburgh as an Israeli. What makes the film kind of fascinating to watch, in spite of all that, is that it was made in 1972 but looks like it could have been made in the late '50s. Ernest Lehman, the writer-producer-director, was an Establishment Hollywood figure, having written such films as North by Northwest, The Sound of Music, and Hello, Dolly! (which he also produced). But other Establishment Hollywood figures tried to get "hip" in the '70s. Lehman, directing for the first and last time, made a movie with the look, style and feel of the movies that were being made during the decline of the Studio System: unnaturally bright lighting, careful compositions, obvious studio interiors, back projection. There's one scene where Portnoy and The Monkey (Karen Black) are in a car; the car is barely moving, the road behind them is obviously back-projected; shadows are projected onto them at predictable intervals; the camera stares straight at them and doesn't move; the lighting is too bright and uniform to suggest a real car trip. In other words, it looks in every way like a bad studio film from the late '50s or early '60s -- so that when Karen Black says "Oh, fuck the radio," you can hardly believe it; how can they be using that word in what is so clearly an Old Hollywood production? I'm not a great fan of the '70s "Golden Age of Cinema," which I tend to think of as the golden age of inaudible dialogue, bad film stock, and trendy downbeat endings. But if you need anything to remind you why the Old Hollywood style was no longer working and had to be replaced with something, have a look at Portnoy, the movie. It's not on DVD yet, though, and I doubt it's a high priority for Warners, which owns it.

Funditry

In the ‘80s, when P.J. O’Rourke was becoming famous for his right-leaning humor pieces in Rolling Stoneand other magazines, a standard line was that you didn’t have to agree with him to enjoy his work. Nowadays, on the other hand, you often do have to agree with him to enjoy P.J. O’Rourke, and even then it’s probably difficult. Once an entertaining combination of the styles of the National Lampoon (which he used to edit), his friend Hunter Thompson, and whatever libertarian writer he’d skimmed recently, O’Rourke is now less a humorist than a conservative oracle that happens to crack an occasional joke in mid-pronouncement. That's not to say he's a bad writer; his most recent Atlantic Monthly piece is very good. But it's a good piece of non-partisan political punditry, and since political punditry was basically created by Satan, this limits its appeal. It's not primarily a humorous piece. The stuff that made O'Rourke's reputation -- his National Lampoon stuff, his early Rolling Stone travel pieces, his pieces for Car and Driver, and completely insane stuff like his side-by-side comparison of The New York Review of Books with an evening of network television -- is collected in the book Republican Party Reptile.

The book includes O’Rourke’s best piece, “Ship of Fools,” written for Harper’s in 1982, about the passengers on a “peace cruise” down the Volga (it was originally published under the far funnier title of “Fellow Travellers”). Michael Kinsley was editor of Harper's at the time -- he was fired soon after for making the magazine too politically diverse, and Lewis Lapham was brought out of retirement to lead it back down the path of respectable boredom -- and he commissioned O'Rourke to go on the cruise and report his experiences; the letters column that followed the publication, from fellow peace-cruisers complaining about how dare this drunk criticize peace and love, is an even bigger hoot than the piece itself. As with most of O’Rourke’s travel pieces, it’s a little hard to believe as reporting: most of the people seem drawn from literary cliches rather than life, especially the Russians, who are all either shifty Party types or boisterous, friendly drunks. But the piece still works as a portrayal of the anti-nuclear hysteria of the ‘80s, of different kinds of overzealous activism (O’Rourke distinguishes between the Old Leftists on the tour, who want to protect the Soviet Union from “reactionary forces,” and the relatively apolitical peace activists, who are not so much pro-Soviet as anti-nuke). Most interestingly considering when it was written, the piece shows us an Iron Curtain being broken down by an infusion of American culture. A running joke is that the Russians are more interested in American music and cars than most of the Americans on the tour, and at one point an Old Leftist woman, a left-wing reactionary in the mold of Lillian Hellman, snaps: "Why do young people, even in the socialist countries, pick up that awful rock music and those sloppy blue jeans?" Through O'Rourke's self-admitted drunken stupor, you can almost see the Soviet Union crumbling already.

It’s pretty easy to identify the point where O’Rourke became an Institution: The 1991 book Parliament of Whores, recently reissued with an introduction telling us what a hit it was in Washington. It was O’Rourke’s first book that attempted to be a full-fledged book rather than a collection of short pieces; though it incorporated many Rolling Stone articles, there was new linking material creating sections and chapters, and an attempt to frame the book as a full-length explanation of why the federal government doesn’t work. This isn't about the politics themselves. This attempt to use humor for “respectable” purposes - to be at once a humorist and a political pundit - has watered down O’Rourke’s writing to the point that it seems hard to distinguish from ordinary political "humor."

O'Rourke's writing now belongs to a truly flesh-crawling genre: the political pundit who thinks he or she is funny, or as I like to call it, the "fundit." Prominent fundits include O'Rourke, Michael Moore (as a writer), Al Franken, and Mark Steyn. The father of the genre might well be R. Emmett Tyrell of the American Spectator (side note: did you know that Lewis Lapham of Harper's guest-wrote a long Carter-bashing article for that publication?). Tyrrell is best known now as an insane Clinton-basher, but he became sort of famous in the '70s by fancying himself the reincarnation of H.L. Mencken, writing a lot of Carter-bashing columns where he called everyone a "poltroon" or "the honorable" something. His columns were what Mencken would have been had Mencken been a political hack, and paved the way for more "funny" political hackery from right and left.

Funditry is basically a standard political column or book, organized around a point and backed up with statistics the writer's assistant pulled off the Web. The only difference is that it adopts the tone and rhythm of comedy writing, with the result that the writer can say anything, however stupid, and claim that he was only joking. It's a political pundit's dream: he can say whatever he wants in defence of his argument, and if anyone says boo about it, they come across as humorless cretins.

If funditry is bad political writing, it tends to be worse humor. Michael Moore, as Daniel Radosh pointed out some time ago, is a poor writer with a shockingly stale sense of humor, going in for weary old "observational" jokes. Mark Steyn, a talented arts and entertainment writer who Conrad Black decided to turn into a political columnist (as if the real Frank Rich isn't bad enough, we get the right-wing version) muddles through on the strength of a few lame puns ("the vast bulk of his credibility derives from his vast bulk") that he recycles several times over.

P.J. O'Rourke is a better writer than these guys, and he hasn't descended as deep into the pit of funditry. But a book like All Trouble in the World is still basically funditry: a political tome without the courage to play it straight, a humorous book that commits the sin of sacrificing humor to argument. If you want the Republican Party Reptile O'Rourke you're more likely to find it in his interviews, like this one. Always better to write funny stuff, and leave the funditry to the people who aren't funny enough to be humorists and aren't smart enough to be political writers.

Mwah! Goodnight, Everybody!

I've been wanting to write something about Animaniacs (or, if you're pedantic about reading the full title on the screen, "Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs"), which was pretty much my favourite TV show when I was in college. It wasn't even on in Montreal, where I was studying, so I would get my parents to tape it at home and then run home on various weekends, mostly to watch the tapes. It's hard to remember just how popular it was for the couple of years it was on the Fox network; the alt.tv.animaniacs newsgroup was huge, and it was looking like a genuine cult phenomenon. Indeed, I think that at its peak it had a bigger cult following, among college students at least, than Ren and Stimpy.

Now, alas, it's mostly forgotten; it's not running anywhere and there's no DVD as yet (though WB Home Video executives have said they're considering it). It was a victim of changing tastes in "kids' shows." When it started, the fashion was for kids' shows that appealed just as much to adults. By the time it moved to the WB network a few years later, networks were looking for shows that appealed exclusively to children and especially to very young children. Animaniacs and other shows like it were crushed by the Godzilla-like foot of the Pokemon movement.

I don't have time right now to write a piece on why I liked the show so much, so for now I'll link to this article I wrote a few years ago (it was supposed to be the first of a series, but I was never able to write more). Remember, the password is "Froinleven."

The Deservedly Unknown Cole Porter

Courtesy of The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, here are some Cole Porter song lyrics that you probably won't be hearing in De-Lovely:

And that's why Chinks do it, Japs do it,
Up in Lapland, little Lapps do it,
Let's do it, let's fall in love.
(first refrain of "Let's Do It")

I'm already in the kitchen fryin' chicken,
And I hear Paw givin' Maw her daily lickin'.
("The Ozarks are Callin' Me Home", Red Hot and Blue)

When the owl stops blinking
And the lamb stops bleating,
When the Irish cease drinking
And the Scotch have begun treating...
When the mad Duck Donald
Gets over his crazy quirks,
When Benito stops
Giving the Wops the works...
When the Chinks stop suey
And the Tammany tiger stops Dewey,
When it's all over and through,
That's when Poppa stops loving you.
("When the Hen Stops Laying," cut from Leave it to Me)

There's a slant-eyed doll
Called Tokyo Moll,
She was last year's Miss Japan.
And when her hips
Do Nipponese nips,
Can she wave her fan?
Yes, she can!
("Come On In," Dubarry Was a Lady)

You'll soon see spics and gringos
In the dicty sumps,
Mixin' lingos,
Not to mention bumps!
("The Good-Will Movement," Mexican Hayride)

Howdy, Maryland,
You're lookin' good.
Hail, Queen of Fairyland,
How's Hollywood?
("The Good-Will Movement")

Hopefully no one will draw the conclusion that Porter was a bad, bad man; standards were different then. Still, anyone reviving "Dubarry Was a Lady" is not going to be able to use the line quoted above. I think an Encores! concert version changed "Nipponese nips" to "Decorous dips," which is a really good change, since it preserves the alliteration. "Let's Do It" is a tougher case, because the preferred solution -- replacing the opening lines with "Birds do it, bees do it" (adapted from lines in a later refrain of the song) -- spoils Porter's scheme of building each refrain around a theme (the first refrain is supposed to be about various nationalities). But Porter never came up with new lines for that opening, so I guess we're stuck with "Birds do it." By the way, I believe Billie Holliday was the last person to record the song with the original lyrics.

Hold Onto Your Potatoes

Am I the only one who doesn't think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the weak link in the Indiana Jones trilogy? The answer is no; Pauline Kael, who didn't like Raiders of the Lost Ark or that third movie that shamelessly rehashed Raiders, adored Temple of Doom, calling it "one of the most sheerly pleasurable physical comedies ever made." I think Kael had it about right.

What Kael liked about Temple of Doom is that it seemed more like a real Spielberg movie than the first movie, or for that matter than the hideously solemn The Color Purple, which Spielberg made right after Temple. In a sense, it's weird to talk about Temple as a Spielberg movie when the story is by George Lucas and most of its faults -- ripped-off story (it's i>Gunga Din), silly dialogue, unquestioning acceptance of the racism and sexism of the old serials he grew up watching. But still, Temple is closer than Raiders to the stuff I like best in Spielberg movies: The sense of wonder and fun, the goofiness, the nastiness, the emphasis on children and childhood. Basically it's the sort of movie Spielberg used to make all the time; the cruelty and violence is no surprise from the guy who did Poltergeist. The fact that Spielberg now disowns Temple doesn't surprise me in view of the fact that he's become so tame, respectable and "grown-up." He should be disowning Color Purple instead.

Temple of Doom, as I once wrote in a usenet post, is basically a kids' movie. I mean that as a compliment. The scary stuff appeals to kids (ironic that it was attacked as being inappropriate for children, since if anything it's inappropriate for adults), as does the presence of a kid who gets to tag along with Indy on his adventures and even kick some ass on his own, the relative lack of emphasis on romance, the story of kids being liberated from the horrors of childhood by a sympathetic father figure. This is stuff that appeals to kids and the kid in us, whereas Raiders is more of a story about adults doing grown-up stuff like religion and war. The scary stuff in Temple mostly plays on childhood fears; whereas the Thuggees in Gunga Din are more or less plausible fanatics avenging their grievances, their equivalents in Temple are quasi-supernatural sickos who are seen as a child sees someone who makes his or her life miserable: big, frightening, incomprehensible. The business with the "black sleep" -- the spell that makes people act just like the bad guys -- plays on the childhood fear that your friends will abandon you and join up with the bullies: whereas Indiana Jones was a Bogart-type adult in the first movie, here he's more of a big kid, and when he falls under the spell, the horror is in seeing our favorite big kid turn into a zombie-like, kid-hating adult.

Raiders is the superior movie, but in some ways Temple of Doom is the more emotionally resonant movie, as long as you approach it in a childlike spirit... and overlook the childlike dialogue.

Best bit in ToD is when the kid is driving the car, and as the chase heats up he yells: "Wow!" and then adds in a hushed, awed voice: "Wow." Say what you will about Spielberg, no one else could bring off a moment like that in quite the same way.

By the way, do you realize that Temple of Doom is as old now as My Fair Lady was in 1984, or as The Ten Commandments was the year I was born. It hardly seems like it because the "blockbuster" genre George Lucas spawned is still going strong, but I guess it's now what the kids (I don't know what's wrong with these kids today) would describe as an "old" movie

Bohemian Rhapsodies

If you're looking for some good, relatively inexpensive recordings of the music of Antonin Dvorak, you could do worse than start with this five-disc set. Incorrectly labelled "complete symphonies," it's actually a grab-bag of Dvorak recordings issued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death. It includes recordings by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Royal Concertgebouw orchestra of Dvorak's last three symphonies (7, 8, and 9) and the four long symphonic poems ("The Wood Dove," "The Noon Witch," "The Water Goblin" and "The Golden Spinning-Wheel"). The performance of 7 is kind of subdued and fussy -- for a properly intense, no-holds-barred performance of Dvorak's darkest symphony, you might want to go with James Levine -- but the 8 is excellent and the performance of 9, the "New World," is just about the best recent recording I've heard; the Concertgebouw's celebrated wind players are perfect for this symphony (whose most famous moment is the cor anglais solo on the tune that later became "Goin' Home, Goin' Home"). The symphonic poems, which were written late in Dvorak's life and represent his celebration of musical nationalism or his sellout to Wagnerian-Straussian program music (depending on which critic you're reading) are also extremely well done. The set also includes performances of the "Life, Nature and Love" overtures (including the famous "Carnival") by the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur; David Zinman conducting the "Legends" and "American Suite," and the "Czech Suite" conducted by Armin Jordan. I haven't listened to these yet. The set only seems to be available in England at this point.

If you already have good recordings of the last three symphonies, and after all there have been plenty, Deutsche Grammophon has an excellent and cheap 3 CD set of the symphonic poems, overtures and "Slavonic Dances" conducted by Rafael Kubelik. Like Harnoncourt, Kubelik divides the violins left and right (firsts on the left, seconds on the right), which brings out the antiphonal effects -- phrases played by the firsts being echoed by the seconds, and so on -- that Dvorak and most composers of his time wrote into their music.

Lyrical Interlude

Speaking of The A-Team, I once tried, for fun, to put lyrics to Mike Post's theme music. And since if a blog is for anything it's for recycling stuff you can't use anywhere else, I figured I'd post 'em here. (After the introductory rum-te-tum):

Cheer for the Team!
Watch 'em fight!
It's the same thing
Every Tuesday night!
If they're so great,
Tell me just this:
Why do their guns
Always miss?
One thing I've learned from
All of their plots:
We lost the war 'cause
They were lousy shots!
Hannibal has the jazz and disguises,
Face is like Rockford, only less tall.
Murdock, who flies, supplies some surprises,
B.A. Baracus pities them all.
Once they had a girl there, you know,
But pretty soon she was fired 'cause she desired
A little more than seven lines per show.
They will defeat
Crazy fools
Long as they've got
Lots of welding tools!
If you enjoy
Four macho men,
Tune in and watch
The A-Team win again!

I also recently tried fitting words to the theme song from King of the Hill:

King of the Hill, I'm King of the Hill, that's all that I want to be,
I get a thrill from gas and a grill, I'm Texan, alive and free
In Arlen.
I've got a house, a son and a spouse, and sometimes a live-in niece,
Try though I might to raise Bobby right, he always disturbs my peace.
Twig-boys show up,
Make me throw up,
Life is a blur, it's crazy and random,
Changes occur, I don't understand 'em.
Life can be clear when I have a beer with Boomhauer, Dale and Bill,
I'm out of step, but when I give a "yep," then you know that I'm glad I'm still
Hank Hill.

One more, a short one this time, to an early version of the theme song from The Bob Newhart Show (they rerranged it several times in several seasons):

Bob has a button-down mind
And Bob is a great psychologist,
Weirdos and psycopaths really need him.
Bob works a button-down grind
Then goes home and kisses Emily,
He's glad that Emily's there to feed him.
Bob may be better known
For his routines on the telephone.
Caught in a button-down bind?
A fix of the button-down kind?
Then come to the button-down mind
And Bob will save the day.

Okay, that's out of my system. I promise, no more.

Too Many Cuts

One of the things I didn't like about the movie version of Chicago was the excessive cutting in the musical numbers. I'm not talking about cutting between fantasy and reality, which was part of the theme of the movie; I'm talking about cutting from one composition to another in the middle of a scene. Here's Roxie in close-up, here's Roxie in long shot, here's one angle, here's a reverse angle. This doesn't look anything like a performance of a number; it looks like what it is: little snippets of various performances, joined together.

One of the things about a lot of the great musicals is that they did the numbers in long shots, with relatively few takes. Fred Astaire always insisted on doing his numbers in as few shots as possible, so everyone would know he was really dancing instead of benefiting from editing trickery, and in long shots, so audiences could see his dancing feet at all times. The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM took this idea a step further by doing not only the musical numbers but the dialogue scenes in as few takes as possible; watch a classic Freed musical and you'll find very few close-ups, with camera movement often used as a substitute for cutting.

In Meet Me In St. Louis, directed by Vincente Minnelli (who always worked in long takes, no matter what the genre), the centrepiece of the "Skip to My Lou" number is a long, two-minute shot where the camera moves back and forth, up and down, from one character or group of dancers to another, not cutting until it's absolutely impossible not to. As described in this essay:

It starts when Esther enters the shot carrying a tray of drinks, and eventually ends much later when John sings "Lost My Partner, Skip to My Lou". This sequence is immensely complicated. The camera movements are all coordinated with the dance numbers in the film. The camera sometimes soars over the dancers' heads. It can move rapidly and forcefully, or make small adjustments. The most intricate dancing in the film takes place here, an ensemble piece that also contains many individual brief numbers for small groups of dancers. I cannot imagine how hard this was to rehearse.

You don't notice the lack of cuts, but you definitely do notice that the characters are really performing with each other instead of being pieced together in the cutting room. Of course, as noted above, a shot like this takes an immense amount of rehearsal for the actors and the camera (and remember that the early Technicolor cameras were very bulky and hard to move, which makes it all the more amazing the kind of elaborate tracking shots that the MGM directors were able to pull off). But it's worth it, and I think that something is lost when directors start cutting back and forth, MTV-style, as though they don't trust the performers.

Interestingly, a lot of movie musicals that have (in my opinion) too much cutting were directed by successful stage people. Bob Fosse, whose movie of Cabaret was the movie musical for people who didn't like movie musicals -- no unrealistic bursting into song! no plot numbers! -- often shows a number from different angles, as though afraid that we'll tire of his trademark shuffle if we look at it too long from one angle. Morton Da Costa, who directed an ideal cast in the movie version of his stage hit The Music Man, does a lot of standard angle/reverse-angle cutting, and won't move his camera unless he absolutely has to. Of course, some of the best movie-musical directors were also stage directors (Rouben Mamoulian, director of Love Me Tonight and Silk Stockings, also directed the original Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and Carousel), so I don't want to generalize.

Malarkey

Following up the previous post about Pogo: the most famous series of Pogo strips, which made the strip the subject of controversy and has defined it ever since, is the 1953 story that satirized Senator Joseph McCarthy, in the form of "Simple J. Malarkey," a bobcat who looked just like the Senator. (By the time Malarkey returned to the strip a year later, he had even picked up McCarthy's famous catchphrase, "Let me finish... let me finish.") The story was about the attempt to rid the Okeefenokee Swamp of subversive elements. The message is clear, and it's brilliantly written and drawn. It was the first direct parody of McCarthy to appear in a comic strip, though Kelly had satirized the general phenomenon of McCarthyism a couple of years earlier.

But there are a couple of lesser-known things about this story that I wanted to point out. First, Malarkey doesn't appear much in the story; the villain for much of its length is Mole McAroney (later renamed Molester Mole), a shifty, mouthless character who joins forces with the local pious hypocrite, Deacon Mushrat (whose speech balloons are in elaborate Gothic lettering, to denote his pretentiousness) to rid the Swamp of treacherous "birds," and to get subversive content out of the local entertainment. Malarkey shows up several weeks into the story, but he's not seen doing the things we now associate with McCarthy -- the I-hold-here-in-my-hand speeches, the interrogations. Rather, his main concern is with grabbing power; he takes over the Deacon's anti-bird organization, the "Boy Birdwatchers," renames it the "Bonfire Boys," and he and Mole kick the Deacon out. A lot of people now talk of McCarthy as though he single-handedly invented the whole phenomenon that now bears the name "McCarthyism"; as this story correctly notes, he was more of an opportunistic bandwagon-hopper, riding a phenomenon already started by others (some of whom, like the Deacon and the Mole, were crushed by the very people they brought in to do the dirty work for them).

The other, more important thing, is thiis: the Mole is engaged in what we would nowadays call a witch-hunt, though in this case he's hunting first for subversive germs -- spraying everyone with pesticide to protect them from unseen germs -- and then for "migratory birds," reclassifying everyone in the swamp as a migratory bird. But he is assited in this hunt by two characters, the Cowbirds, who are Kelly's representation of Communists. The Cowbirds are treacherous, devious, paranoid, change their opinions according to orders from the Party, and love to "name names." In a later strip, with a pig who looks like Kruschev, the Cowbirds are his right-hand men. (Cowbirds are parasites, which is why Kelly drew his Communist characters as those particular birds.) When they offer their assistance to the Mole, they name Pogo as a possible subversive, pointing out why he can't be trusted: "He once befriended us, and everybody know what scurvy scum WE used to be."

The point here is that the anti-Communist witch hunters, represented by the Mole, are actually serving the interests of the Communists. This was a common theme in the '50s among traditional anti-Communist liberals: that by using Communism as an excuse to go after anyone whose politics they didn't like, the McCarthyites were discrediting the threat of Communism and playing right into the Kremlin's hands (tm). Actual hard-line Communists, of the sort represented by the Cowbirds, often welcomed the chance to exploit the political climate to ruin people whose politics they didn't like and to generally stir up trouble. Kelly's theme, in the strip, is not that Communism doesn't represent a threat, but that what's going on is distracting from that actual threat.

Another work of the Cold War era that uses this theme is, of course, the book and movie The Manchurian Candidate. In reviewing the sacrilegious remake, one reviewer wrote that the original was about a "right-wing conspiracy," which is precisely what it wasn't about; Richard Condon's big joke was that the McCarthy-style politician was actually a puppet of a Communist conspiracy. As in Pogo, extreme right is really indistinguishable from the extreme left.

Unfortunately the only Cold War-era attack on McCarthyism that most people are familiar with is Arthur Miller's dreary The Crucible, whose theme, so far as I can make it out, is that there were never any real witches and therefore there were never any real Communists either. Maybe the local Wiccan organization will sue Miller for denying their existence. Meanwhile, high schools would do much better to teach Pogo instead.

By the way, speaking of The Crucible: you know how people sometimes wonder why college students are more right-wing than they used to be? I blame the practice of teaching The Crucible in high school. Teenagers suffer through that play, along with a mess of commentary about how in the '50s there was a dark and evil conspiracy to hunt Communists, yada yada. Then they get to college, start reading on their own, and discover that Communism was evil, the Rosenbergs were guilty, etc. Then they're so disillusioned with everything their teachers told them that they go overboard and start campaigning for a flat tax and wearing business suits with little U.S. flags on the lapel. So if there are any teachers reading: if you don't want your students growing up to be Republicans, I beg of you, don't teach The Crucible. You'll thank me later.

How Much Wood Would a Wood Chunk Chunk

There's finally an official site for Walt Kelly's Pogo, though there's not a lot too it as yet; they've got a biography of Kelly, a list of out-of-print Pogo books (there was an attempt, about a decade ago, to reprint the whole strip, but as often happens, it didn't get beyond the first few years), and one measly strip a week.

The high reputation of Pogo among comic-strip artists (Bill Watterson, for example, cited Pogo and Peanuts as his two favourite strips) kind of obscures the fact that it was never all that popular in its time; it gained some popularity in the mid-'50s but it wasn't the sort of strip that could sell a newspaper by itself, as Peanuts could in its prime. Also, there are some things Kelly is wrongly credited for starting, most obviously, bringing politics to the comics page. Li'l Abner was doing political content long before Kelly did, but it doesn't get a lot of credit for it now, mostly because people mistakenly think it was a right-wing strip.

Pogo is mostly known now as the strip that dared to satirize Senator McCarthy, which is kind of a reductive way to remember a strip that was largely non-political. On the other hand, it's the political stuff that holds up best; Kelly's non-political humour (as in his Sunday strips, which he usually aimed more at children) is often more cute than funny, heavily influenced by the sweet, toothless, Pluto-on-flypaper physical comedy of the Disney cartoons he used to animate on. But what makes even those strips fun to read now is the detail of the artwork; comic strips back then had more space and were printed bigger, and Kelly filled the panels with physical action, things going on in the background, interesting perspectives -- it's anything but a talking-head strip.

Get the Sweet Beat

The upcoming movie It's De-Lovely will bring on a lot of articles about Cole Porter, which is fine with me. Here's a new Atlantic Monthly article by David Schiff, who makes some good points about Porter's style, including this one:

A typical Porter move—you can hear it in "Begin the Beguine" and "I Love Paris"—is to start a song in a low register and then push the line ever upward until it has an almost Wagnerian intensity.

(This was a trick that was picked up by Porter's friend Irving Berlin, who used it with success in songs like the Porter-esque "Let Yourself Go.")

One thing I'd take issue with is the statement that Porter "never had to broaden his stylistic scope." It's true that Porter always stuck to certain kinds of songs and shows (his show Mexican Hayride, written in 1944, was an old-fashioned, unstructured, slapdash musical comedy at a time when everybody else was scrambling to imitate Oklahoma!). You can always predict the types of songs you'll find in a Cole Porter score: the list song with topical references, the Latin-flavored love song, and so on. He didn't overhaul his style the way Kern did in the '20s or Rodgers in the '40s.

But Porter, more than most Broadway songwriters, modified his style to fit the changing fashions in popular music. In this he was different from, say, Jerome Kern, who disliked a lot of the changes in pop music and declined to acknowledge them in his music. (In 1924 Kern spoke out against jazz, which he felt showed disrespect for the composer by arranging his tunes beyond recognition. Rodgers and Hart actually wrote an anti-jazz song in 1939, called "I Like to Recognize the Tune.") Porter, who was sort of an outsider to Broadway and became successful by consciously figuring out how to write the kind of songs that the public wanted, always made sure to adapt his songwriting to the prevailing taste. He introduced Latin rhythms into his songs in the '30s in recognition of the fact that this kind of music was catching on; instead of scoffing at jazz, he paid tribute to it in songs like "Red, Hot and Blue." During World War II he wrote big band-flavored music and deliberately simplified (some might say dumbed-down) the references in his lyrics, again to suit the then-prevailing fashions. A Porter score is a time capsule; give him something like the Good Neighbor Policy, and he'll write a "dance sensation" song about it (Mexican Hayride):

A super step
Is the Good-Will Movement,
It's in that pep
Pan-American mood.
It's hyper-hep
But with this improvement,
It's got that rum-tum
Here's to ya, chum,
Salud, amigo, salud.

Only Irving Berlin was as responsive to changes in popular music as Porter was, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence that both Berlin and Porter started to lose their footing in popular music in the mid-'50s, when there was no more consensus on the "prevailing" style in pop music.

As a lyricist, Porter's specialty was the internal rhyme (rhymes within a line, as opposed to at the end of lines). One of his favourite tricks, which almost no one did before Porter started doing it, was to rhyme consecutive words within a line, which, in Stephen Sondheim's description, "makes [a] line rock solid" and emphasizes the rhythmic profile of the music. Examples:

Get the sweet beat of the organ sealing our doom
("It's De-Lovely")

If you know of such a spot, not too far from town
("Pick Me Up and Lay Me Down")

That dopey, mopey menace
("We Open in Venice")

Of Fledermice and Men

Operatic translations have mostly fallen by the wayside, except for a few holdouts like England's Peter Moores, who keeps paying for the making of complete operatic recordings in English (making Chandos, which releases them, one of the few companies still making complete opera recordings). There are two reasons for this: 1) The use of titles in opera houses has made translations less necessary; 2) Most translations suck.

The reasons most operatic translations suck are well-known: the sounds of the new language don't match the sounds the composer set and therefore sit badly with the music; it's hard to keep the literal meaning of the original words and still write singable new lyrics; the original texts are often so archaic that a literal translation would turn audiences off (Wagner, for example, deliberately wrote the Ring libretto in a pseudo-archaic style, which means that to translate it accurately you'd have to have everybody singing "thee" and "thou" a lot). There's also the point that translators of opera libretti tend not to be particularly distinguished songwriters; Andrew Porter, who wrote many solid, usable translations, was a music critic, not a lyricist.

One of the few major songwriters who did operatic translation was Howard Dietz, who wrote many hit songs with Arthur Schwartz ("Dancing in the Dark," "That's Entertainment," "I Love Louisa," to name a few). The Metropolitan Opera commissioned him to write the English lyrics for a production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus in 1951, with Garson Kanin writing the new dialogue. The production was a huge success at the time, but Dietz's lyrics have always been controversial among purists, who tut-tut that they throw out the literal meaning of the original lyrics, affix new words to what are merely repetisions in the original, and are "often vulgar and sometimes corny" (to quote David Hamilton in High Fidelity). It's true that the lyrics depart significantly from the originals, and that they call attention to themselves in the style of Broadway or Gilbert and Sullivan, whereas the original lyrics by Haffner and Genee are more of the solid, stolid, functional kind you usually get in German operetta. And some of the new lyrics are just too self-conscious, even to the point of breaking the fourth wall:

You will find
If your mind
Is an ever-sharp stiletto,
It's the kind
Of libretto
Where we all are at a ball.

On the other hand, there's no substitute for the expertise of a longtime professional lyricist; Dietz understands that the first test of writing lyrics to music is whether the lyrics are singable, whether the sounds of the words sit well with the music, whether they are good lyrics. Most translations of Fledermaus are more faithful to the originals, but they're poor lyrics. Dietz's are not:

(opening of the Champagne song)
A Bacchanalian revel,
Tra la la la la la la la,
Devil take the devil,
Tra la la la la la la la la.
An evening that is grapeless
Is absolutely shapeless.
Whoever would be sober,
Return around October.
A fond farewell
Before a single "prosit" --
Whoever would oppose it
Go out the door and close it.
Farewell, farewell, farewell...

(The "Farewell, farewell, farewell" sits well on the notes that originally go with "stosst an"; if you wrote something closer to the original, like "drink up," it wouldn't sing well at all)

The untranslatable "duidu" chorus (based on a distinction among pronouns that has disappeared from the English language) becomes a straightforward chorus about love, but one that is well-written and, again, fits the music very well:

You and I, you and I
Are not afraid of love.
We will show this is no
Mere masquerade of love.
Every move goes to prove
What can be made of love.
You and I, you and I
Stole a star from the sky.
Finding a light
In the dark of the night
Is a sign
That you are mine, all mine.

Based on the success of this production, Dietz was hired to write a translation of La Boheme for the Met; it was performed in 1952, but it wasn't a success, and the Met quickly went back to Italian. I haven't been able to find the Dietz version so I can't tell you about it, but I have to think it would be better than some of the more sober and dull Boheme translations I've seen. The Fledermaus production was recorded for Columbia, but for some reason it's never been released on CD (even though it should be out of copyright by now).

Dickensian Verse

I'm currently re-reading Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), the not too successful link between Dickens' early, shapeless novels and his later, more thematically coherent stuff. Dickens tried to build this novel around a theme -- human selfishness and hypocrisy -- but the theme was so relentlessly and unvaryingly pounded away at in the first instalments of the novel that it was in danger of being a flop; Dickens solved the problem by sending his young hero Martin to America, where attacks on American selfishness and hypocrisy would be more to the readers' liking than attacks on those problems among themselves. (Whatever you think about Anti-Americanism, the one fact is that it has always sold and always will.) But since so many of the characters are distinguished solely by their relationship to the theme of selfishness -- how selfish they are, or how unselfish they are -- the novel feels repetitive, and not worth the 800 pages expended on a very thin plot. Dickens would continue to try to build his novels around overriding themes, but his later novels have more variety in characterization and, above all, lots and lots of plot (so that the story remains exciting even if the theme doesn't particularly interest you).

One thing I've noticed about Dickens' prose is that he'll often break into what basically amounts to disguised blank verse. If you read Dickens' descriptive passages, they often have an iambic rhyhm and break down into what amounts to lines of verse; sometimes the usual ten syllables, sometimes eight, sometimes twelve. It's not actually poetry disguised as prose; there is no strict verse form or line length being followed, and Dickens doesn't use the iambic rhythm all the time -- but he does it often enough to suggest that he was doing it on purpose. Here are a few passages from Martin Chuzzlewit rearranged as verse:

...each bearing on his back a bursting chest
of oranges,
poured slowly through the narrow passages;
while underneath the archway by the public-house,
the knots of those who rested and regaled within,
were piled from morning until night.
Strange solitary pumps were found near Todgers's
hiding themselves for the most part in blind alleys...

Oh, ermined Judge whose duty to society
is, now, to doom the ragged criminal
to punishment and death,
hadst thou never, Man, a duty to discharge
in barring up the hundred open gates
that wooed him to the felon's dock,
and throwing but ajar
the portals to a decent life!

The Temple fountain might have leaped up twenty feet
to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood,
that in her person stole on, sparkling,
through the dry and dusty channels of the Law...

It seems like Dickens turned to poetic rhythms and (to some extent) poetic line-lengths when he wanted to write in a heightened style, whether for a description or one of his Stirring Invocations. It's an interesting technique that has never quite been abandoned; a 20th-century example of the technique can be found in the play The Lion in Winter by James Goldman, where many of the lines are iambic blank verse disguised as prose.

On the Jazz

In my previous post I referred to Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo's The A-Team, whose first and best season is now available on DVD, as "the great cultural shame of the '80s." There were many worse TV shows that became hits in the '80s, but The A-Team had the most influence: it helped save NBC, spawned dozens of imitators in the form of dopey action-comedy shows, launched the Mr. T cult, and changed the politics of prime-time TV.

Re the politics, a good article on the subject -- and one of the few reviews of the time that bothered to take the show's success seriously; most of the reviews were as nasty as those for Gilligan's Island two decades earlier -- is this article which appeared in England's New Statesman magazine in 1983. (The A-Team was and remains enormously popular in the UK.) The politics of The A-Team boiled down to three basic points: a) Vietnam Vets were screwed over by the government in Vietnam and continue to be screwed over back home, b) The police and the government can never solve any problem; for real protection what you need is a group of armed "soldiers of fortune," and c) America is great even though the government isn't. (Asked why he and his buddies haven't fled to Switzerland, Hannibal replies: "Because we're not Swiss. We're Americans.") As the author notes, in that tut-tutting New Statesman way:

This is classic right-wing American populism -- patriotic, macho, anti-authority -- and is unlikely to be understood in Britain, where to be right-wing implies an obsequiousness towards officers and the status quo.

This kind of "right-wing populism," and in particular the celebration of vigilante justice, had been a staple of movies in the '70s but hadn't been seen much on TV; The A-Team brought it onto TV, and many action shows that followed were either about vigilantes or cops who acted like vigilantes (e.g. Cannell and Lupo's Dirty Harry knockoff, Hunter).

But what made The A-Team popular wasn't that it was populist, but that it was fun. As the New Statesman reviewer notes, a lot of it plays as parody, and the show was in large part a comedy; it was, after all, the show where nobody ever got killed in spite of all the violence, and where the plot was secondary to the jokes, as Cannell himself pointed out:

The story each week was secondary to the dynamics of the characters. We told one story over and over again - our prototype lantern-jawed heavy would try to take over somebody else's property, and the A-Team would roll into town and decimate them. It was always the same show, but we'd have different character things playing between our guys every week. Because really it's a comedy.

Two other points about this shamefully enjoyable show:

1. The fun of the first season (which I'm told looks good on DVD but doesn't have any extras) is that you can see the writers actively looking for a formula. Each of the first few episodes is in a different genre of action story. The pilot, which has a bigger budget, better dialogue and a different Face Man than the rest of the series (Tim Dunigan, who is less irritating than Dirk Benedict but who suffers from being taller than Mr. T, thus reducing his impact), is basically The Magnificent Seven. The first regular episode, written by Cannell, is a surprisingly dark and somewhat tasteless takeoff on the Jonestown cult (here called "Jamestown"). Then comes another Cannell episode, "Pros and Cons," a genuinely hilarious takeoff on every evil-prison-warden movie you've ever seen -- this is the one with the famous cry of "TRASH BAGS! I WANT TRASH BAGS!" Frank Lupo turns in an episode where the A-Team fights an evil alternate A-Team of rogue cops, and another episode, set in Las Vegas, is basically a Mission Impossible ripoff from beginning to end. Oh, and there's a hugely entertaining episode where they defeat an evil biker gang in a small town, an episode that uses the same basic plot as a Knight Rider episode from the year before. (The Knight Rider episode was called "Good Day at White Rock"; the A-Team episode is called "Black Day at Bad Rock.")

Finally, in mid-season, they do a couple of episodes where they hit on the winning formula -- the A-Team helps save a farm/ranch/business from being taken over by some evil dude who wears a cowboy hat -- and they would stick to this formula in nearly all episodes from then on (until the final season, when it was retooled). Part of the reason the first season is the best is that you get to see the characters in different kinds of stories, even if they're mostly recycled from other sources. A lot of '80s action shows were like this: they'd experiment with different types of episodes, hit on a formula, exploit that formula shamelessly throughout the run, and then desperately try to get away from the formula by the end of the run, by which time it was always too late.

2. I know this is bizarre, but I always feel sorry for Amy (Melinda Culea), the "token female" of the show in the first season. The pilot presented her as a potentially interesting character, written more or less like a Howard Hawks heroine, and then she had literally nothing to do from then on. She was fired in the middle of the second season in the most humiliating way possible (she got a script and found it had no lines in it for her character) for the most humiliating reason possible (George Peppard took a dislike to her and turned the rest of the cast against her). Yeah, I know a woman, especially a woman who had no connection with Vietnam, had no business being on the show in the first place, and that she was only there because of the belief that every show needed a female character. But the character really worked in the pilot, and with a bit better writing... well, spilt milk.

Oh, one more thing: Cannell (who produced this and many other shows independently) apparently started to run out of money toward the end of the first season; you'll notice that the last two or three episodes of the season cut corners by using stock footage, redubbed footage from earlier episodes, and even a shot from the movie Airplane! Actually, The A-Team had as much in common with the Zucker Brothers as it did with other works of "right-wing populism"; it was, above all, a funny show, and Cannell's imitators (like the totally-without-humor Glen Larson) never really got that.

New TV DVDs

Tomorrow brings a bunch of "complete first season" TV-on-DVD releases. It's getting to the point where every show ever made (except my beloved music-heavy WKRP) will have its first one or two seasons out on DVD. You'll notice, though, that a lot of shows get the first season and nothing more. The first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, released in September 2002, was one of the best-produced, best-rematered TV-on-DVD sets up to that point... and it sold so badly that none of the other seasons have come out. It's kind of a crapshoot, really, whether your favorite show will be one of the lucky ones that makes it past season 1. So here's a run-down of some of tomorrow's new sets:

SCTV: Volume 1 -- The must-buy release of the week, though I am (unpatriotically, as a Canadian) not quite as big an SCTV fan as some. The parade of knowing, in-jokey showbiz riffs and celebrity impersonations sometimes make me long for a pie in the face or a something funny in and of itself, rather than for its connection to some movie the writers saw on TV last week. But that's a quibble; there's too much good stuff in these episodes to preclude a recommendation. Note that these are the 90 minute NBC episodes, which means that the show is not starting with its first season (which consisted of 30-minute episodes shown only in Canada). A smart move, since the 90-minute episodes haven't been seen in their original form in years and thus have more scarcity value to fans; but I actually think the first season -- very low-budget but charmingly so, and with Harold Ramis as a regular cast member and head writer -- was the best.

M*A*S*H: the Complete Sixth Season. An improvement over the fifth season, mostly because it was the season that introduced Major Charles Winchester (David Ogden Stiers). Winchester was an improvement on Frank Burns, who started out as a potentially interesting character and wound up as a boring cartoon. The show continued to be somewhat sloppily written, depending mostly on unrelated wisecracks for the comedy. But then this was also true of the show during the Larry Gelbart years (seasons 1-4); it's just that the wisecracks were funnier then. The best episodes include the two written by the other main writer from the early years, Laurence Marks (a veteran of Hogan's Heroes who was arguably better than Gelbart at writing character comedy as opposed to one-liners).

Who's the Boss?: the Complete First Season. Nobody will ever believe me, but Who's the Boss? was actually quite a well-written show. The creators were two veterans of MTM Productions -- Blake Hunter of WKRP In Cincinnati and Martin Cohan of The Bob Newhart Show. Their influence is felt in the writing, which is hardly witty but quite character-specific and usually steers clear of one-liners and wisecracks. If M*A*S*H was a quality sitcom with often low-quality jokes, Who's the Boss is an example of what I'd call the "bad sitcom with good writing" -- a show with a low-quality look and feel but whose writing, characterization, story structure can be surprisingly good. I'm not exactly recommending it because, let's face it, good writing or no, it's still a vehicle for Tony Danza... but it's a well-written show.

Just Shoot Me: The Complete First and Second Seasons. Created by Frasier writer Steven Levitan, this show had certain Frasier-like elements: the premise of a lead character reconnecting with a father who is her cultural opposite, separate titles before each scene (in the form of "headlines" that appear on a magazine). It was at its best in the first couple of seasons, when the relationship between Maya (Laura San Giacomo) and Jack (George Segal) was at the center of the show; in later seasons more and more episodes were taken up by various romances and by the wisecracking sidekick Finch (David Spade). The best episode is probably "King Lear Jet," where an argument about who will get to go see a production of King Lear in England turns into a modern-day retelling of the story (with Jack as Lear and Maya as Cordelia).

There's also the first season of The A-Team, the great cultural shame of the '80s. I'll have more to say about that tomorrow.

Studio Opera DVDs?

The classical recording industry isn't dying out. Most of the big record companies are giving up on classical, it's true, but there are plenty of excellent recordings being released by independent labels, orchestra's own private labels, and so on. If anything I think there are more good classical recordings being released now than in the "CD boom" of the early '90s, when the big labels were releasing zillions of classical recordings, but most of them were anonymous-sounding, hastily-assembled projects that have been justly forgotten (who remembers most of the recordings that Sony Classical released in its ill-fated attempt to be the new "German" label on the block?).

However, the one thing that does seem to be on its way out is the complete opera recording. The major labels aren't making them any more -- EMI, which had been the only big company recording complete operas on a regular basis, recently announced that it's giving up on them -- and the independent labels, as I mentioned in a previous post, can't afford to make them for the most part. (There are some exceptions; Harmonia Mundi's Rene Jacobs still records an opera every couple of years, the most recent being a fine Figaro .) So even the biggest opera stars today make mostly recital albums rather than complete operas.

What we are getting instead of opera on CD is opera on DVD. This makes sense: DVDs don't compete directly with audio recordings (and thus don't face competition from the great recordings of the '50s and '60s), they provide the visual element that opera needs and that audio recordings obviously lack, and they generally cost less. Right now most opera DVDs are of productions originally taped for TV broadcast; it's the usual process of setting up video cameras in the theatre, taping the production on several nights, and editing it all together with perhaps some "patch sessions" to cover mistakes. (There are some DVDs, like Pioneer's Met broadcasts from the '80s, that make a special point of being taken entirely from one performance with no editing or corrections, though I can't really see why this is an advantage -- maybe it's an advantage as an archival study of How It Was on a particular night, but it's not necessarily better entertainment.)

What I would like to see more of is "studio" DVD operas -- by which I mean not actually taping in a television studio, nor making a movie to a pre-recorded soundtrack. What I'm talking about is taping a stage production without the audience (some of this is already done to fix mistakes and so on). In other words, instead of setting up the cameras during the actual evening's performance, set them up and have a performance for the cameras alone. This would allow more freedom in where to put the cameras and the microphones, and allow the singers to play to the camera, just like in an audio recording they play to the microphone. I'd like to see more opera DVDs that are specifically conceived for the format, rather than just being souvenirs of a night in the theatre.

This is what the great studio audio recordings are like; the singers do not change everything for the microphone -- they still sing loudly, because they've been projecting to the back of the theatre and they're not about to stop now -- but they do do some things differently, and some singers and conductors will in fact choose certain inflections, dynamics, etc. that might not work in the theatre but do work in conveying the point of the piece for the listener at home. The potentially bad effect of this is blandness, of performers refusing to take chances in the studio that they would take in live performance. But the good effects shouldn't be underrated; a performer like Maria Callas knew how to throw in subtleties of inflection and phrasing that might be lost in a big theatre but work wonderfully on a recording. And of course a studio recording allows an imaginative producer like John Culshaw to create a sonic effect that you can't get in the theatre (I'm not talking about radio-style sound effects, but of the fact that the orchestra in the Culshaw-produced Solti Ring is recorded with an impact that it couldn't have in most orchestra pits).

It's often complained that studio recordings have given us all an expectation of polished prettiness and sterile perfection. But my desire for non-live DVD recordings has nothing to do with "polished perfection" -- indeed, so-called "live" recordings are often just as polished and smoothed-over as "studio" recordings (since "live" recordings tend to use snippets of other performances, rehearsals, etc. to correct mistakes -- and rightly so, because a mistake that is tolerable in live performance can be intolerable on repeated viewing). It's just that what works in the theatre might be subtly different from what works on DVD or CD, and I want to get the work re-thought for the different medium.

For an intriguing and infuriating take on live performance vs. recording and live recording vs. studio recording, you can read this High Fidelity essay by the intriguing and infuriating Glenn Gould. It also includes snippets of various opinions by the likes of Culshaw, Leopold Stokowski, Goddard Lieberson, B.H. Haggin, and others.

Why Sondheim Can't Write a Love Song

Well, why can't he?

It's not news that Stephen Sondheim's body of work doesn't contain a lot of love songs. Even when he does a show with a love story -- even love stories that end happily, as they do in A Little Night Music -- you won't usually find a number where the lovers express their love in song. Instead he'll provide torch songs for the moment when love seems lost ("Send in the Clowns," "Losing My Mind") or songs about how love sucks ("Every Day a Little Death"). Even Passion has hardly anything that can be called a love song, though this may be because it has hardly anything that can be called a song.

This leads to a lot of speculation about why Sondheim doesn't write love songs. There are two standard explanations for this, the esthetic and the psychological. The esthetic explanation is that Sondheim is the guy who moved beyond all the banalities and lies of the traditional Broadway musical, and that includes the lies of the traditional Broadway love song. In other words, Sondheim won't have a character sing "There's a small hotel" because then that character would be lying: there isn't a small hotel! Nor a wishing well. It was all destroyed along with the American dream sometime around the Korean war.

The other explanation is that there's something in Sondheim's psyche that makes him unable to write a straightforward love song. Sammy Cahn, a specialist in superficial but successful pop lyrics, once said that Sondheim was "afraid to say I love you" in song, and others have offered the same explanation using more redundant words.

I'd like to offer an alternative explanation: the reason Sondheim doesn't write love songs is that he's not very good at writing them.

(Note: what I write below is mostly about Sondheim as a lyricist. His music has its problems too when it comes to love songs -- most notably that his constant repeating of musical phrases tends to make love sound indistinguishable from obsession.)

Sondheim's strengths are well-known; he's great at writing for character, putting complicated concepts into song ("Finishing the Hat" is not nearly as good as Cole Porter's "Never, Never Be an Artist," but it undoubtedly has more to say), and creating genuine musical theatre that moves the show along rather than stopping it. Give Sondheim a specific theatrical situation, like, say, two people singing about making corpses into meat pies, and he'll come through. But give Sondheim a spot for a love song, and he collapses into generalities and cliches. "Johanna" in Sweeney Todd is a collection of banal ballad-isms:

I was half convinced I'd waken,
Satisfied enough to dream you.
Happily I was mistaken,
Johanna.

"Not a Day Goes By" from Merrily We Roll Along, in both its versions (it appears in the show as both a straightforward love song and an anguished "don't leave me" love song), is a love song without a single distinctive image in it, a generalized Ballad 101:

Not a day goes by,
Not a single day,
But you're somewhere a part of my life
And it looks like you'll stay.

This tendency to generalization and cliche reaches its apogee (apex? something that starts with ap) in Passion, where a ballad called "Loving You" starts with a line that could have come out of an I'm-OK-you're-OK pamphlet:

Loving you is not a choice,
It's who I am.

Sondheim's problem with love songs is that they require the exact opposite of the kind of talent he has. Sondheim's talent is for specificity: taking a very specific character or situation and building a song around it. (When preparing to write "I'm Still Here" in Follies, he made notes about who this woman was, what her background was, what she'd done, who she'd known -- and put it all into the song.) A love song requires that the songwriter build a song around the most generalized situation imaginable: one person in love with another person or vice versa. Sondheim specializes in finding ways to say what no song has said before; the key to writing a good love song is finding a unique way to say what has been said a million times before.

The great writers of lyrics for love songs tend to be the ones with an offbeat, whimsical sensibility, the ones who approach familiar things from unusual angles. These include two lyricists whose work Sondheim has criticized: Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin. Both had a tendency to cuteness and self-conscious playfulness; both had trouble writing in character voices other than their own; both could be sloppy (though Hart's technical sloppiness, which Sondheim often complains about, didn't really become a problem until late in his life, after his drinking got worse). But both of them could turn these things to their advantage when it came time to write a love song, because they were the kind of lyricists who would ask themselves: what's a new, offbeat way to say "I love you?"

You can see this most easily in the titles of their love songs: not boilerplate like "Loving You" but specific-sounding titles that don't seem to have much to do with love. Taking Hart as an example, the titles of his love songs include "Have You Met Miss Jones," "I've Got Five Dollars," "Like Ordinary People," "Every Sunday afternoon," "I'll Tell the Man in the Street." One favorite trick of the great writers of love songs was the "concealed" love song, where you don't know it's about love until near the end. The Gershwins' "They All Laughed" starts as a list of famous people whose innovations were laughed at; then in the B section we find out what the song is really about: "They laughed at me wanting you." Rodgers and Hart's "I'm Afraid" is a list song about all the things the singer is afraid of, but reveals its true colours at the very end of the refrain:

I'm afraid of Fu Manchu,
And of tigers in the zoo,
But most of all
I'm afraid I'll fall
For a horrible thing like you.

Another trick in writing a love song is to load the song with unusual images or metaphors, to disguise the usual-ness of the subject matter. Hart, again, does the metaphor bit a lot, as in "Love Never Went to College" from "Too Many Girls":

Love never went to college,
Ignorant boy, that,
But think of the joy that he starts.
His work requires no knowledge,
So he can do it
By using intuitive arts.
He just says "You two kids,
Start falling in love.
I ain't got brains
But I reigns over all these parts."
Love never went to college,
Never had teaching,
And yet he keeps reaching our hearts.

Sondheim can't do this kind of thing very well (all right, I guess he'd jump at the chance to write that "A horrible thing like you" line) because writing a good love song depends on a willingness to approach things from an unusual angle, and Sondheim doesn't do angles; he tackles things head-on: what is the situation, who is the character, what will express this situation and character in song. That's not to say that he's unsubtle (as someone once said on a newsgroup, Sondheim has a character sing "Here's to the ladies who lunch," not "I'm a bitter old cynic"), just that he focuses on specific things, specific situations. His images are of things that are physically there (George is finishing a painting of a hat, so he sings "Finishing the hat"), his metaphors are those that people might plausibly use in conversation ("The road you didn't take"). All this works fine when you have a unique character and situation to work with. But with a love song, you have nothing specific, or almost nothing; you're left with the necessity to find a way to say what has been said before. In that kind of situation, a talent like Sondheim's -- rational, measured, kind of literal -- is at sea, while an off-the-wall talent like Hart or Gershwin or Harburg or even Bob Merrill will be right at home.

Constructive Criticism of "Constructive Criticism"

A great exchange about the function of criticism, from the wonderful 1945 play Dream Girl by Elmer Rice (written as a vehicle for his wife, actress Betty Field). Georgina, the daydreaming heroine, asks the straight-talking hero, book critic Clark Redfield, to tell her what he thought of her unpublished novel. He replies "It stinks." Georgina is of course offended:

GEORGINA: I don't call that an opinion. Just a nasty, insulting --

CLARK: I see! You only wanted a favorable opinion.

GEORGINA: Nobody wants criticism that's just destructive. I say if a critic can't be constructive --

CLARK: You mean you want the critic to do the creative job that you failed to do? If that's his function, we might as well dispense with the writer in the first place.

(I will write more about the underrated Dream Girl when I get a chance.)

Peanuts' Peak

The publication of the first volume of the Complete Peanuts raises the question that Peanuts fans love to debate into the small hours -- or would, if we Peanuts fans weren't too square to stay up that late -- when did the strip hit its peak, and when did it pass its prime? (I'd prefer not to say "jump the shark" unless it's completely unavoidable.)

Some have argued that Peanuts jumped the shark (there, I said it) when Snoopy displaced Charlie Brown as the primary focus of the strip. This was the theme of a widely-discussed article called Against Snoopy. It's a good article, and a plausible argument, because it's quite true that by the time the strip ended, Snoopy had taken over the strip to an unhealthy extent, supplanting Charlie Brown's trademark bittersweet humour with more upbeat, fanciful material. The problem with the argument is that when the strip was at its peak, Snoopy was not the one-dimensionally happy character that the author seems to think he was. Snoopy's humor derived in part from his frustration at being just a dog ("If I were a human, I wouldn't even own a dog!"). He represented the alternative approach to Charlie Brown: Charlie Brown hates his life so he gets depressed, while Snoopy, who hates his life just as much, creates alternative fantasy lives for himself. In that sense, they are the two sides of Charles Schulz: the depressed moper and the creative artist. Both depression and creativity are responses to the same feeling of dissatisfaction with one's life.

I would say that Peanuts' peak period began in the late '50s, when Schulz started doing continuing stories in addition to daily-gag strips. (The early strips are almost entirely self-contained gags.) Doing stories about Charlie Brown's agonizing failures, or Snoopy's fantasies, or Linus and his teacher Miss Othmar (like the story where Linus assisted Miss Othmar during a teachers' strike and inadvertently caused her to get fired), helped to establish those characters more firmly and expand what we knew about them. The strip pretty much went from strength to strength for years after that.

The first "shark jump," in my opinion, occurred when Woodstock got his name. This happened late in 1970, the year which is currently being reprinted at the Peanuts Website, so they should be getting to it soon. Before that, Snoopy was mostly just irritated by Woodstock, calling him "that stupid bird" and sitting by while Woodstock did something stupid. After the bird got his name, Snoopy and Woodstock were suddenly best friends, and while their relationship produced some nice moments, it also produced some cutesy-poo and sentimental moments, and took up a lot of time; even Schulz said in 1971 or 1972 that he'd gotten complaints that Snoopy and Woodstock (whose strips often appealed mostly to the strip's younger readers) appeared too much. It also took the edge off Snoopy's character. It used to be clear that he fantasized as a way of escaping from a life he doesn't much like; after he obtained a permanent "best friend," he was just too happy-go-lucky, and he and Woodstock started eating up too much of the time in the strip, which left less time for the characters of Charlie Brown or Linus to be developed.

And come to think of it, the introduction of Marcie in 1971 or so may have been a similar problem -- i.e., giving Peppermint Patty a permanent sidekick took the edge off *her* character, since she was originally defined as being lonely.

By the mid-'70s, while Schulz's extended stories were as good as ever and perhaps better than ever (Peppermint Patty's skating odyssey, Charlie Brown and the EPA, Linus on the barn roof), the daily gags had gotten sillier and less philosophical than before, so you sometimes have to sit through a lot of "Woodstock does something cute" gags in order to get to the next story. Also, all the attention paid to Peppermint Patty and Marcie, while often entertaining, helped take the focus even further away from Charlie Brown.

In the end, I'd pinpoint the end of the peak period around 1975, with:
a) The introduction of Spike and other Snoopy relatives b) A slight change in format, with thinner panels and thus less room for interesting visuals, and c) The Snoopy and Peppermint Patty stories have begun to take up so much time that there's no more room for interesting Charlie Brown stories like the Mr. Sack series (from 1973).

I don't have much of an ending for this, except to say that:
- There were still worthwhile strips in the last 20 years of the strip; the kids' visit to a fundamentalist summer camp, in 1981, was a classic, and rather gutsy (Peppermint Patty: "Forget it, ma'am -- maybe the world will end tomorrow, but I wasn't born yesterday"), and the last few years of the strip produced some surprisingly fine strips with Linus and Lucy's previously useless little brother Rerun.
- It's amazing that a comic strip could have a "peak" that lasted (at my estimate) something like 20 years. Most strips don't even last 20 years, and those that do usually burn out much earlier than that (Walt Kelly's Pogo was already getting sort of tired by the early '60s; and let's not even talk about how far Calvin and Hobbes had declined into preachiness and self-conscious artiness by the end of its short run).