DVD Release Roundup

This blog is always in danger of becoming a series of "Hey, I just watched this on DVD" posts. So, as an alternative, I'll do a "Hey, this is coming out on DVD soon..." post. Here are some upcoming DVD releases of interest to those with an interest in Something Old and/or Nothing New:

- May 24 brings the first DVD release of Baa Baa Black Sheep, aka Black Sheep Squadron. This is sort of the ultimate Stephen J. Cannell show, with all his strong points -- fast, funny, action-packed, great dialogue -- and weak points, like repetitive plotting and the almost total nonexistence of women. Also like most Cannell shows, it started as an attempt to latch onto a formula popularized by something else, in this case M*A*S*H and its combination of service comedy and wartime drama. You could say that Black Sheep was like M*A*S*H except with the preaching replaced by action scenes. The DVD release includes the first 10 episodes, and it's probably worth a rental at least.

- Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait is on its way from Criterion in June. I want to write more about this one, but I'll just say that this is not only a great Lubitsch movie, it is one of the great Fox Technicolor movies -- no studio ever made color movies as beautiful-looking as Fox in the '40s. The VHS version didn't do justice to Heaven Can Wait, Lubitsch's only completed color movie, so the DVD should be eye-popping.

- A post on a message board also mentioned that Criterion's releases for July will include Louis Malle's Goodbye, Children -- or Au Revoir Les Enfants if you think it's in bad taste to call French movies by English titles -- and Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours. I'm still a little disappointed that Criterion's distribution deal with Fox hasn't led to any releases of Frank Tashlin movies (somebody should release Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Fox probably isn't going to do it), but they've got a lot of worthwhile stuff coming as a result of the deal.

- Clueless, the best Jane Austen adaptation ever and a movie about which I have made my feelings known, will apparently be coming out in a 10th-anniversary special edition DVD this summer.

Songs From "NewsRadio: The Musical"

As part of my ongoing efforts to use a blog as a dumping-ground for stuff I'm never going to use anywhere else, I thought I'd post a few song lyrics I wrote a couple of years ago as an exercise: to see if I could write songs for an adaptation of a TV series. (There have been very few musicals based on TV shows, which I find surprising when you consider that there have been many musicals based on comic strips, which are at least as hard to adapt and to cast effectively.) So I picked "NewsRadio" and set to work trying to write songs that various characters on the show might plausibly sing in a musical version of the show.

As I said, it was just an exercise, but I kind of liked a few of the lyrics I came up with, and I might as well post them here. Oh, and in case you're wondering, which you aren't, I wasn't in a songwriting workshop or anything; this "exercise" was self-imposed. I have strange hobbies.

One of them I've already posted; it was As Little as Possible, a song that was supposed to be sung by Matthew, the Andy Dick character, as a peppy upbeat celebration of the joys that come to the office worker who never does any work.

The most in-character song I came up with was one for Jimmy James, the billionaire station owner. It was a song about the "wife search" that was a running gag on "NewsRadio" for the first few seasons:

---------

You Gotta Have a Wife

Refrain 1

I’m a guy with tons of the green stuff,
I’m a guy who’s done and seen stuff,
Life has been fun,
But I tell you, son,
When fun is done,
You gotta have a wife.
(Or a real good book.)
Single men can work till their backs break,
But they never get no tax break.
Wanna pay less
To the IRS?
Well, then I guess
You gotta have a wife.
(Or a good Swiss bank.)
When your life is mid,
When you ain’t a kid,
Then you make your bid
For a gal to combine with
And slowly decline with.
‘Cause when your flings are shorter and fewer,
When you’re not the stud that you were,
Time to add some value
To your life.
Let me tell you, pal, you
Gotta have a wife.

Interlude

From men with power to nuts with knives,
Ev’ryone gets their share of wives.
The lousiest louses, or is it lice,
The mousiest mouses, or is it mice,
All wind up with spouses, or is it spice?
A guy who looks like Quasimodo with hives
Somehow can scare up his share of wives.
I saw a flick where Jim Carrey got one,
That stinky Tarzan found a hot one;
I’ve even heard that the farmer took one,
And Hannibal Lecter had time to cook one;
Aladdin wished for a magic wish-wife,
And Aquaman found himself a fishwife;
Well, I don’t sneer like Hannibal
Or smell like a farmer
Or steal like Aladdin
Or hang around with fish like that weirdo Aquaman,
Though I think that Aquaman was an underrated Superfriend,
And remember Gleek and the Wonder Twins?
Well anyway, the second refrain begins:

Refrain 2

If you think you’d like it a lot to
Find a gal who’s nice and hot to
Help you cross streets,
Give you treats and sweets,
And clean your sheets –
You gotta have a wife.
(She’ll be just like Mom.)
Take the Fonz, he flirted so brashly,
Then he met that nice girl Ashley.
Ashley moved on,
And the show was gone,
Which proves that Fon-
Zie should have had a wife.
(And the scripts were lame.)
When your life’s a dud,
When you feel like crud,
When your name is mud,
Better offer your name up
And divvy the blame up.
Don’t wind up like Mister Miles Standish;
Go and get a sweet but bland dish
Added to the menu
Of your life.
When you’re older, then you
Gotta have a –
When you get that yen, you
Gotta have a –
Now’s the moment when you
Gotta have a wife.
Let me say again, you
Gotta have a wife.


The best song of the bunch, though not all that true to the show, was a duet for Dave, the program director, and ambitious co-worker and girlfriend Lisa. It was written as an exercise in doing a lyric that could make sense in and out of character context, and I actually think it's a pretty good (not great, but pretty good) anti-love-song:

A Little Relationship

Verse
LISA:
Now that our affair’s begun,
It’s time we solemnly swore
This affair will be pure fun,
With no emotional core.
We’ll settle for nothing more.

Refrain 1

We’ll have a little relationship,
No silliness,
No sweat.
We’ll promise to stay
Exactly the way
We were before we met.
A very little relationship,
No damages,
No debt.
We’ll start at the top,
We’ll love till we stop,
And then we’ll just forget.
Affection won’t affect us
If we’re lucid and smart.
I’ll stick to my prospectus
And you’ll follow your chart.
A bright and brittle relationship,
No folderol,
No fuss,
We’ll carefully check
Each minus and plus,
Then say, what the heck,
A little relationship
Is big enough
For us.

Refrain 2

DAVE:
We’ll have a little relationship,
No strings attached,
No sweat.
I’m all for affairs
Where nobody shares
Or swears or gets upset.
I’ll be a little in love with you,
Not Romeo,
Not Rhett.
‘Cause frankly, my dear,
It ought to be clear
I’m more like Boba Fett.
We’ll keep our former habits
And our normal routines;
We’ll mate like bunny rabbits
But we’ll think like machines.
A noncommittal relationship,
No messiness,
No muss,
We’ll neatly divide,
We’ll calmly discuss,
We’ll gladly decide
A little relationship
Is big enough
For us.

----------

And one that was supposed to be an uptempo song for three of the other co-workers, sung to Dave, and providing an excuse for a dance number:

You're Too Uptight

BETH:
You're too uptight,
And that's a prob,
'Cause all you say
Is "do your job."
You're button-down
And so repressed
In those rejected clo'es
From Father Knows Best.
Don't be a prig,
Don't be a pig,
Why don't you call the attack off,
Learn how to back off,
And if we slack off,
What's the big?
Say, aren't you bored
With always being right?
It's true we screw up,
But, Dave, you're too uptight.

JOE
You're too uptight,
You're at my throat,
I call in sick,
You want a note.
You always throw
A fit of pique.
Why should you bust my ass
For just one gas leak?
Don't make a stink,
Go see a shrink,
And if I say that my plan'll
Knock out a panel,
Why should you channel
Colonel Klink?
Now let me add
In plain and painful sight
The chart I drew up
To prove you're too uptight.

MATTHEW:
You're too uptight,
You've gone too far,
You took away
My Shriner car.
The things I like
You won't allow.
Who else banned squirting ink?
Hm -- let me think -- Mao!

JOE
So quit your rants...

BETH
And learn to dance...

MATTHEW
I've got just three words for you, sir,
Bigshot producer:
Start wearing looser
Underpants.

BETH: That's four words.

JOE
Remember when
We had that pillow fight?

ALL THREE:
Well, then you blew up
And said it's time we grew up,
Why can't you scare a clue up
And learn you're too uptight.

------------

And if you've read this far -- which I sincerely hope, for your sake, you haven't -- now you know why TV shows aren't made into musicals.

Attack of the Song Pluggers

In this post about Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, I wrote about the big musical joke in John Williams' score, which is that there's only one theme in the movie and it's heard in every conceivable form (even when Marlowe rings a doorbell, the doorbell plays the movie's theme song). I mentioned that this was a parody of the incessant plugging of movie title songs in the late '60s. But it occurs to me that it might also be a nod to a specific movie, Out of the Past. Roy Webb's score has more than one theme somewhere in there, but the main theme is heard a lot and in all kinds of different forms: when Robert Mitchum goes to a nightclub, the band is playing the movie's theme song; when Jane Greer puts on a record, there it is again. The Long Goodbye was a film noir tribute before such tributes were cool -- and it captures the messiness and freakish supporting characters of noir in a way that the tidier, more refined and humorless Chinatown can't do -- so I wouldn't be surprised if this was a conscious reference.

Roy Webb, by the way, was a pretty entertaining composer; he never made the big time among film composers, but because he was at RKO, the quirkiest of Hollywood studios, he got to score a lot of interesting movies: everything from I Married A Witch to the Val Lewton films to Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious to a boatload of films noirs. He matched RKO's tough, punchy style with tough, punchy scores that usually also included at least one big romantic string theme for the opening credits. Basically, he wrote high-quality B-movie music, but that's perfect for movies like Cat People and Out of the Past and Murder My Sweet, which are essentially B-movie material raised to A-level by imagination and energy, rather than big money or big stars.

Before Webb came out to Hollywood, he was a Broadway orchestrator who orchestrated many Rodgers and Hart shows in the '20s; most of his orchestrations are lost, but his surviving orchestrations for shows like A Connecticut Yankee and Chee-Chee are knockouts, every bit as good as the work of a Robert Russell Bennett.

The Worst of the Best

The Onion A.V. Club has a fun article about bad scenes in great movies and great scenes in bad movies. The picks for the former are mostly spot-on, while I haven't seen enough of the latter bunch of movies to comment (except Walk on the Wild Side, the most famous example of a movie where the title sequence outshines the actual film).

I should add my own choices for worst scenes in great movies, but I need to think a bit more about it. I could pick scenes that I think are just overrated -- like the hunting scene in The Rules of the Game, an overlong bit of heavy-handed preachery that drags down an otherwise subtle movie with its five-and-ten-cent-store symbolism -- but for the most part, even the lesser scenes in good movies tend not to be bad. That's why something like the psychiatrist scene in Psycho, a scene that is not only heavy-handed but cheesy, clumsily shot, and generally badly done, is a gift from the Gods: a scene in a good movie that seems to have wandered in from a genuinely bad movie. I need to think of a few more scenes like that.

One filmmaker who does come to mind as perfect for something like this is Blake Edwards. He's never made a good movie without some really atrocious scenes, and on the other hand even his worst movies have some pretty good things in them (Curse of the Pink Panther is almost -- almost worth it for that closing gag with Roger Moore). If I liked Breakfast at Tiffany's enough to consider it a great movie, any scene with Mickey Rooney would be an easy choice for the "worst scenes in great movies" list.

That Great, Great Polish Actor

I would assume that most people reading a blog like this would already have seen and loved Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be. That movie needs no recommendation from me, so instead I'll write about a couple of tangential points:

1. You may notice that Mr. Greenberg (Felix Bressart, a staple in Lubitsch movies of this period), the Jewish actor who gets the role of his life toward the end of the picture, is never explicitly referred to as Jewish; even Shylock's big speech from The Merchant of Venice, which Greenberg recites at several key points, is stripped of the word "Jew" every time he recites it, And the film never explicitly says that the Jews are a particular target of the Nazis, even though the climax of the film depends on just that fact.

Hollywood movies rarely included Jewish characters in this era, and anti-Nazi movies were de facto forbidden from mentioning Hitler's targeting of the Jews; the only American movie that did so was Warner Brothers' Mr. Skeffington, where the title character tells his daughter that he is not safe in Europe because he is Jewish. And as this article explains, that one line brought the movie under attack from all sides:

Even that single instance caused Jews of a certain stripe--for example, those who governed the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League--to have fits, and Roosevelt's own Office of War Information sent in an official complaint: "This portrayal on the screen of prejudice against the representative of an American minority group is extremely ill-advised."

So To Be Or Not To Be, like most anti-Nazi films of the time, emphasizes the general aspect of the Nazi terror -- the threat the Nazis pose to everyone -- rather than the threat that they pose to a specific group. Still, the movie finds ways to send out signals about the latter threat, mostly through Greenberg; after the montage of posters showing the mounting reign of terror in Poland, Lubitsch dissolves to Greenberg reciting: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

And one thing that may or may not have been intentional, but certainly makes the same point in its own way: after his climactic recitation of Shylock's speech, Greenberg disappears from the movie. He's not seen on the plane with the escaping actors, and he's not seen among the actors after they've escaped to England. We're never told that he didn't escape with the rest of them, and I think we are supposed to assume that they all got away, but we never actually see him again after he stands up to the Nazis. For all I know this might just mean that Felix Bressart wasn't available when they shot those scenes, but it does make a subliminal point, intentional or no, about which member of the troupe is the least likely to get away from the Nazis.

2. In Carole Lombard's biography, Screwball, it's mentioned that the part of Maria Tura was actually intended for Miriam Hopkins; she was one of Lubitsch's favorite actresses (she gave three superb -- and very different -- performances for him, in The Smiling Lieutenant, Trouble in Paradise and Design For Living); her career had started to falter, due in part to her own hotheadedness and unreliability, and To Be or Not to Be was to be her comeback. However, Hopkins objected to the fact that her part was clearly secondary to Jack Benny's, and lobbied Lubitsch and Edwin Justus Meyer for a rewrite to make the part bigger; meanwhile, Lubitsch was unable to get a Hollywood studio to take on the project and was having trouble raising the money to make it independently. When Lombard heard about the project and read the script, she agreed to take the smaller role (in exchange for bigger billing); Hopkins withdrew, and with Lombard's name attached, Lubitsch and Alexander Korda were able to raise the money they needed to make the film.

The Calla Lilies Are In Bloom Again

Instead of complaining about the way Hollywood buys pre-existing works and then changes them beyond recognition, I will invite you to consider the case of Stage Door (1937). This is a movie that completely trashed the play it was supposedly based on. And it turns out that that was a good thing, because the movie is infinitely better than its nominal source.

First, some gushing about the film: Stage Door, the movie, is one of the best movies of the '30s. The director, Gregory La Cava, would have been one of the all-time greats if he hadn't been an alcoholic; as it was, he made several true classics, including My Man Godfrey and this one. La Cava and producer Pandro Berman assembled an extraordinary cast for the story of a New York boarding house for struggling actresses: the lead roles were for Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, both at their very best, and supporting players included Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, and Gail Patrick. La Cava was an improvisatory filmmaker who believed in shooting without a finished script (Leo McCarey was the same way). On Stage Door, before shooting started, he gathered the cast together for two weeks of rehearsals and encouraged them to ad-lib and improvise; he had a secretary take down the best lines that came out of these improv sessions, and incorporated them into the finished film. The whole movie has this loose, improvisational quality; it also has some real insight into the questions of what we have to do to "make it," in life or in show business, and into the cruelty of the fact that some people get the breaks while other, equally talented people, do not. It's an exceptionally rich, funny, affecting movie, and one of the fastest-moving and most concise movies ever made; there's not a wasted scene or an unnecessary line, and the movie takes only 91 minutes to tell a fairly complicated story with a number of subplots.

Now for the comparison of the film and the play. I'm going to spoil the plot of the film here, so if you haven't seen it, see it and come back to this later. Very briefly, the lead of the movie is Terry Randall (Katharine Hepburn), an heiress who is determined to make it on her own. She comes to New York and stays at the Footlight Club, a theatrical boarding house. She tells her father that she wants to find out whether she has what it takes to succeed as an actress; if she fails, she'll come home. Deciding to speed up the process, her father secretly makes a deal with producer Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou): he'll finance Powell's production of Enchanted April on condition that Terry be cast in the lead role. Kaye (Andrea Leeds), a "brilliant" actress who hasn't worked in a year and who had her heart set on getting Enchanted April, commits suicide on Terry's opening night. Terry's guilt over Kaye's death causes her to lose her emotional reticence and give a great performance. There are a number of little sub-plots, but the most substantial one involves Terry's roommate and Kaye's friend, dancer Jean Maitland (Ginger Rogers), who is wooed by Powell.

Now, the play. The play Stage Door opened on Broadway in 1936; it was written by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, who had previously written Dinner at Eight together. The story of the play is as follows: Terry Randall (Margaret Sullavan) is an aspiring actress who has moved to New York from Indiana. Her father is a poor country doctor and her late mother was an actress before she got married. Terry knows that her mother always regretted giving up her acting career, and she is determined to have the kind of long, successful acting career that her mother never had.

Jean Maitland, "an opportunist; good-natured enough when things go her way; of definite charm and appeal for men," is dating David Kingsley, a producer who used to put on plays but gave it up to go to Hollywood and produce motion pictures. When Terry meets David, she tells him that his play Amaryllis was the first play she ever saw, but that she hasn't seen any of his movies: "I'm afraid I'm kind of dumb about pictures. Mother used to say the theatre had two offsprings -- the legitimate stage, and the bastard." At the end of the first act, Jean tells Terry that Kingsley has gotten both of them an opportunity to sign contracts with a Hollywood studio. But Terry refuses:

TERRY: That isn't acting; that's piecework. You're not a human being, you're a thing in a vacuum. Noise shut out, human response shut out. But in the theatre, when you hear that lovely sound out there, then you know you're right. It's as though they'd turned on an electric current that hit you here. And that's how you learn to act.

JEAN: You can learn to act in pictures. You have to do it till it's right.

TERRY: Yes, and then they put it in a tin can -- like Campell's soup. And if you die the next day it doesn't matter a bit. You don't even have to be alive to act in pictures.

Jean goes to Hollywood; Terry stays in New York, proclaiming her allegiance to the theatre: "It isn't just a career, it's a feeling. The theatre is something that's gone on for hundreds of years. It's -- I don't know -- it's part of civilization."

The second act takes place a year later. Terry is dating Keith, a young left-wing playwright who has finally sold his great play. She assumes she has a shot at the lead part, but the producer wants to cast a better-known actress, and Keith won't stand up for Terry for fear of not getting the play produced. Terry accepts it. Two months later, the play is a hit, and Keith sells out to go to Hollywood and become a screenwriter. Terry dumps him. Kingsley returns and tells Terry that she's a great actress but a lousy self-promoter; that's why she can't make it in New York. But in Hollywood, with a studio contract and the promotion machine behind her, "they'll know what to do with you out there."

In act three, Jean returns, having become a big movie star; now she's going to star in a play. Kingsley knows that Jean, having sold out, doesn't have what it takes to carry a good play, and is angry about it: "When picture people come into the theatre -- when they take a really fine play and put a girl like Jean in it -- when they use a play like this for camera fodder, that's more than I can stand. The theatre means too much to me."

Sure enough, at rehearsal, it turns out that Jean is simply not up to the part. Kingsley collars Mr. Gretzl, the producer of the play, and brings him to hear Terry do a reading. Gretzl isn't interested: "All I wanted it for was Jean Maitland, so she could make a picture of it." So Kingsley offers to buy the play from Gretzl: he's going to go back into the theatre, and produce the play with Terry as the star. And, of course, not only does Terry get the part, she gets the guy:

TERRY: David, oh, my dear, you mustn't do this just for me.

KINGSLEY: No, I'm not one of those boys who puts on a play just so that his girl can act in it... by the way, you are my girl, aren't you?

TERRY (brightly): Oh, yes, sir.

KINGSLEY: I just thought I'd ask.

(He takes her in his arms and kisses her.)

A subplot involves Kaye, a struggling actress who is running away from an abusive husband: "There's nothing else I can do and nobody I can go back to. Except somebody I'll never go back to." By the second act, Kaye hasn't worked in a year; she is broke, hungry and hopeless, and finally kills herself. The character of Kaye was retained in the movie, as was her lack of work, her suicide and that one line about "somebody I'll never go back to," but everything else about the character, including her reason for killing herself, was changed.

Was there anything else from the play that got used in the movie? Yes. One of Terry's lines in the play was given to Kay in the movie: "You're an actress if you're acting. Without a job and those lines to say, an actress is just an ordinary person, trying not to look as scared as she feels." And there may be a few lines I've missed that made it into the movie. Otherwise, the movie is a completely original work that uses the same setting, a couple of character names, and nothing else.

The play isn't bad; as always with Kaufman plays, it is well-constructed, does a good job of handling a large cast, and has some good lines. The anti-Hollywood theme of the play was probably dear to the heart of Kaufman, who detested Hollywood; he went out there to write one movie (A Night at the Opera) and direct another one (The Senator Was Indiscreet), but otherwise he was true to New York and the New York stage, and into Stage Door he poured some of his feelings about why live theatre is better. You could argue that Stage Door is more personal than most plays from Kaufman, a mostly impersonal technician whose plays are usually defined by the personalities of his collaborators. But, all that said, it's hopelessly phony and pointless. And the play proved the phoniness of its own theme from the moment the curtain went up on opening night, because the star was Margaret Sullavan -- an actress who had found equal success in film and on the stage, and whose appeal at the New York box office was undoubtedly helped by her success in Hollywood. The presence of Sullavan proved the falseness of the authors' thesis that doing pictures makes you unfit to be a stage actor; and her presence also made them look like hypocrites for arguing, through the hero, that plays shouldn't feature movie stars.

The play, in other words, is dated, creaky, and based on a premise that doesn't hold up. The movie is none of these things. (George S. Kaufman's only comment on the movie was that they changed it so much that it should have been re-named Screen Door.) Its very excellence was further proof that the play was based on a mistaken premise: the play is about the inferiority of Hollywood movies to the New York stage, yet it (nominally) inspired a Hollywood movie that was far finer than the New York stage original.

I'll close by pointing out a couple of mini-ironies about the movie. One: that this complete evisceration of a George S. Kaufman play was co-written by Morrie Ryskind, who had once been one of Kaufman's most frequent collaborators (they wrote Of Thee I Sing and several scripts for the Marx Brothers). And two: even though the play was co-written by a woman, it ends as a conventional love story where the heroine's fulfilment is largely contingent on her getting a man. While the movie, which was entirely created by men, is one of the most genuinely feminist movies ever made, in the sense that it is about women who don't define themselves by their romantic relationships with men (there is almost no romance in the film) and who are determined to be what they want to be rather than what society wants them to be. Most "women's" stories are about women who mostly think about men. Stage Door is a movie where women actually have other dreams, other priorities, other goals. Take that, Sex and the City.

Come and Listen To My Story

Paul Henning died yesterday at the age of 93. The obit above, from a newspaper in Henning's native Missouri, is much better and more detailed than the AP obit.

Henning, like a surprisingly large number of successful comedy writers, had a law degree, though he didn't practice law; instead he took a staff job at a Kansas City radio station, and broke into the big time when he got a spec script accepted by Fibber McGee and Molly. He wrote for a number of radio comedies, but his most important credit was The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show; he was one of the top writers on the radio show, and had a big role in helping to develop the show for television. He left Burns and Allen to write and produce The Bob Cummings Show, one of the funniest sitcoms of the '50s (and certainly the lewdest; in an era where nearly every sitcom was about a family, this was about the adventures of a womanizing glamour photographer). His best-known credit is, of course, The Beverly Hillbillies, arguably the biggest hit sitcom of all time -- at the height of its popularity it pulled in a staggering number of viewers, more than any series could possibly get today -- and, at its best, which is to say in the first two seasons, a very funny show that brought the Vaudevillian sensibility of radio comedy to the world of TV sitcoms.

Henning wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode of The Beverly Hillbillies during its nine-year run; he also created Petticoat Junction and served as a consultant on Green Acres (after Variety mistakenly credited him with creating Green Acres, he generously took out an ad in Variety calling attention to the name and work of the show's actual creator, Jay Sommers). He also wrote two movie scripts with Stanley Shapiro, Lover Come Back, the best of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies, and Bedtime Story, later remade as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Lover Come Back isn't all it might have been as a movie, mostly because of bad direction, but the script, which uses the romantic-comedy formula as a pretext for a very funny satire on Madison Avenue, has some of the best lines of any comedy script of the '60s.

He was a prolific and very funny comedy writer whose good-natured humor, along with his ability to tailor his material to the strengths of his performers, has made his best work hold up very well. He also has some historical significance in that he helped to bring the concept of the "arc" show into the mainstream of radio and TV (in his radio work, and on The Beverly Hillbillies, he often did story arcs stretching story threads over several weeks or even months, instead of making every episode self-contained). Plus the theme song of "The Beverly Hillbillies" is his work, too.

We Hate Each Other Very Much

This may be a weird thing to nit-pick about when watching one of the best movies ever made, but: I was watching The Band Wagon again the other day. As you know if you've seen the film -- and you should -- the last third of the movie is mostly just a series of musical numbers representing excerpts from the musical comedy that Lily and Lester (Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant) have written for Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire). So here's what I got to wondering: how could these numbers possibly fit into a musical?

Now, when Lily and Lester are describing the plot of their show, they say it's about a writer of children's books who writes lurid murder mysteries on the side. That description provides an excuse for the climactic ballet, the Mickey Spillane spoof "The Girl Hunt." (It's also the climax of the whole film; the question in the film is whether Tony Hunter can re-invent himself for the '50s while still providing the kind of old-fashioned entertainment he prefers; "The Girl Hunt" shows that the answer is yes.) And the fact that it's supposed to be about a writer of children's stories just about explains "Triplets"; maybe it's an excerpt from one of the character's books. But can you possibly think of a plot into which "Louisiana Hayride" could fit? Or why Astaire, if he's playing a struggling writer of popular fiction, is singing and dancing with Jack Buchanan in top hat, white tie and tails? Or what that "New Sun in the Sky" thing (the weakest number in the picture, anyway) is supposed to be about?

Let me try and make up some kind of scenario for it: Astaire's character is in love with a stage performer, played by Charisse, and goes to see her perform ("New Sun in the Sky"). He and his best friend, Buchanan, discover after the performance that they both love the same girl, that she's in love with someone else, and that they rented those darn tuxedos for nothing ("I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan"). To cheer him up, Astaire's best friend, Fabray, invites him to a party where everybody has to dress up as stereotypical Southerners ("Louisiana Hayride"), but instead Astaire throws himself back into writing a new children's book ("Triplets"). Closure is achieved when he and the girl he loves get to star in an adaptation of one of his murder mysteries ("The Girl Hunt").

Well, I gave it a shot.

Self-Promotion

Hey, looks like I made it into McSweeney's.

The key to getting accepted, apparently, is to write something where the whole joke is in the title. But I like it.

Also, Yankee Pot Roast has my helpful how-to piece, A Style Guide For Blog Parodists.

Noir-y About That, Chief

WB Home Video has announced the contents of the next Film Noir Collection, to be released July 5: Crossfire, The Narrow Margin, Born to Kill, Clash by Night, and Dillinger.

I would have liked to see something by Nicholas Ray in there (either They Live by Night or On Dangerous Ground), and I never really thought of Clash by Night as noir (it's based on a play by faux-naturalist Clifford Odets), but overall it's a good selection: four films from the ultimate film-noir studio, RKO, plus one delirious crime drama (Dillinger) from the King Brothers, producers of that other delirious crime drama, Gun Crazy.

Unfortunately I see that one of the commentaries has Peter Bogdanovich involved. But on the plus side, John Boorman's "neo-noir" Point Blank will be released on the same day as the new noir set.

He Never Does Anything Twice

Doesn't seem possible that Stephen Sondheim could be 75. While he didn't really start all that young, by Broadway standards -- Richard Rodgers had his first hit show and song at 23; George Gershwin had a smash hit song at 21 -- the image of him in the minds of some of us show-music buffs is of the young-looking, shaggy-haired composer-lyricist who was coming in to shake up the squares of Broadway. Even though he was 40 by the time Company premiered, he looked like an enfant terrible and sometimes played the part in interviews, as in his famous early-'70s interview where he said nasty things about the craftsmanship of Larry Hart and vaguely condescending things about his mentor Oscar Hammerstein. But now he looks and sounds like an elder statesman, and that's what he is; he's the last link to the Hammerstein tradition, and he has no apparent successors in carrying on the tradition of creating true musical theatre -- songs that are not just songs but theatre pieces, songs that carry the action forward instead of slowing it down. (Too many post-Sondheim songwriters think that the way to write a good character song is to have a character stop and sing about his or her feelings. That's not it at all. A good theatre song is one where we wind up knowing more about the character's feelings than he or she could tell us directly, whether it's Hammerstein's "If I Loved You" or Sondheim's "Could I Leave You?")

The pros and cons of Sondheim have been endlessly debated and rehashed. His strengths are well-known, and in the type of shows he's chosen to write, his major weakness -- his problem writing good love songs -- isn't all that relevant. I also don't think he's to blame for the rather odd cult of Sondheim-Firsters who like Sondheim but don't like musicals (there seem to be quite a lot of these Sondheim-Firsters in England, for some reason). It may be unfortunate that he was pronounced a genius so quickly and so persistently; by 1970 his name was already a byword among people who wanted musicals to be Art, and by 1973 he was already getting retrospective galas that seemed to appeal more to people in the musical-theatre business than people who just liked musical theatre. All this, combined with Hal Prince's desire to do Important musicals and drive away all his backers, may have helped push Sondheim further away from the disciplines of traditional songwriting -- the A-A-B-A form, concise melodies, comprehensible lyrics -- into long, rambling, diffuse songs.

The Sondheim I like is the Sondheim of the Harold Prince shows, up to Merrily We Roll Along; his best songs were tougher and darker than the average Broadway song, but still with the kind of pep and showbiz punch that is as much a part of good musical-theatre writing as subtext and characterization. After Merrily, a flop full of traditional A-A-B-A songs that didn't catch on with the public, Sondheim stopped doing overtures, dance breaks, applause-baiting crescendi, A-A-B-A refrains, and just about anything else that smacked of showbiz or song-plugging. Yet the unique appeal of the Broadway musical is based in part on its showbiz component, of the attempt of songwriter, performer, designer, director and choreographer to knock 'em dead in the aisles while still making each number dramatically relevant. Something like Sunday in the Park With George, where everything is dramatically relevant, every song sounds the same and all traces of "showbiz" have been purged, just isn't of interest to me. (And if you're going to write songs that exist only to serve the drama, it would help if the drama being served wasn't created by James Lapine, a writer whose lines sound like they were translated from the original Sanskrit and a director who coaches actors to speak as if English wasn't their first language.) Someone on a theatre newsgroup once put it succinctly: He wanted "More Sondheim shows with overtures." Sounds about right to me. And another showstopping, crowd-pleasing, applause-baiting theatre piece like "A Weekend in the Country" wouldn't hurt either.

One more thing: I still hold to the once-conventional wisdom that Sondheim is not a very good melodist. This doesn't have a great deal to do with the charge that his tunes aren't "hummable" (I don't think they are, but that doesn't mean they're bad melodies). It's more that Sondheim's songs often don't have a very strong melodic profile. Sondheim builds his melodies out of little phrases that get repeated a lot; some of his songs, like "Now You Know" from Merrily We Roll Along, basically consist of one phrase repeated over and over and over. This is, or can be, a legitimate way to build a melody, but it means that the opening bars of a Sondheim melody often don't sound like much at all -- it takes a long time for a lot of his songs to make their melodic points, establish what the style and tone of the melody is going to be. And in writing theatre melodies, that's a big minus, because the crucial point in a theatre song is the beginning of the refrain; it's the part that establishes, in the listener's mind, the melodic profile of the song. When you hear the first bars of the refrain of "Some Enchanted Evening" or "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" or any number of great theatre songs, you hear a distinctive melodic idea right away, something that clues you in on the point the melody is making, and thus the theatrical and character point that the song is making overall. Sondheim's melodies ramble, they dither, they take a long time to make their points. (His most popular melody, that of "Send in the Clowns," is also one that starts up-front with an intriguing melodic idea that sums up the mood of the whole song.) And in theatre music, you don't have that much time; everything is zooming at the listener at top speed and it has to communicate instantly. Without a melody that establishes a profile up-front, right away, a song is hobbled as a theatre piece, because its ability to give the audience a quick impression of mood or characterization is limited. And that's part of the reason why a lot of Sondheim songs seem to make a bigger impression with their lyrics than with their music.

This rambling post is less grateful than it perhaps should have been to a great theatre songwriter who has brought great pleasure to many people. So I'll just close by saying thank you, Mr. Sondheim, happy birthday, and many more, and quote a Sondheim lyric about giving thanks for what we've been given, from Do I Hear a Waltz?:

Thank you so much, sir,
Wasn't it fun?
No reason at all to cry.
Let's keep in touch, sir,
Now that it's done;
You can't say we didn't try.
Did it go by so quickly?
Really, it seems a crime.
But thank you so much
For something between
Ridiculous and sublime.
Thank you for such
A little but lovely time.

A Short Post

My knowledge of the late Bobby Short and his work is rather limited, but The Bobby Short Saloon will tell you everything you need to know.

The Short recording that sticks in my mind the most is on one of Ben Bagley's "Revisited" albums (he was a regular contributor to those, since he shared Bagley's enthusiasm for the lesser-known songs of the great American songwriters), where he did a duet with Barbara Cook on a rare Jerome Kern song, "The Blue Danube Blues," consisting of a jazzy main melody (Short) sung in counterpoint with the melody of "The Blue Danube" (Cook).

More M*A*S*H-Bashing

Not a lot of posting time today, so I'll do what I did last time I didn't have anything to post about and bash M*A*S*H and Larry Gelbart. One of the things I was thinking of when I talked about Gelbart's "one-note characterization" was the way Frank Burns actually regressed as a character. In the first season of M*A*S*H*, we were occasionally given a hint that Burns might develop into an interesting character, a three-dimensional antagonist. Nothing major (no pun intended), but an occasional glimmer of complexity. In an early episode, "Henry, Please Come Home," Colonel Blake mentions that Burns is hard to get along with "but he's a good surgeon and we need him." In another first-season episode, "Sticky Wicket," Hawkeye is tormented by his inability to diagnose what's wrong with a patient -- and Frank, pleased that Hawkeye is the loser for once, taunts him for it. But at the end of the episode, when Hawkeye finally figures out what's wrong, Frank has a moment of unexpected graciousness, saying: "Anyone could have missed that," to which Hawkeye replies, "Thanks, Frank."

That's the kind of moment that helps humanize the antagonist, remind you that not even a creep is a creep 100% of the time, just as the hero isn't always heroic. But as the series went on, Burns became less and less human and more and more of a cartoon antagonist, even more of a one-dimensional cartoon character than in the movie (which is saying something). He became such an incompetent surgeon that you wondered how he ever could have practiced back home without being thrown out of the profession; he was never allowed to be right or to be unambiguously friendly or nice. But think of what another showrunner than Gelbart could have done with a character like this; he's a hypocrite, sure, but there's also some potential sympathy for someone wants to think of himself as a conventionally good person but winds up giving in to his "sinful" desires. Just because a character is a jerk doesn't mean there can't be some sympathy for him; think of the great humanized jerks of sitcom history, like Ted Baxter, Herb Tarlek, Alan Brady, Louie DePalma, and of course, Archie Bunker. Characters who are basically horrible but very human and real. Gelbart didn't do this with Frank Burns; he made him not a person, but a function -- the designated Always Wrong guy. There were other examples of bad characterization in the Gelbart years of M*A*S*H, like the generally poor writing for Trapper John (could anyone blame Wayne Rogers for not knowing what his function on the show was supposed to be?), but that was the worst.

The question that now arises is, do I prefer the later, post-Gelbart seasons of M*A*S*H? I definitely think that some of the writing on the later M*A*S*H episodes, with the addition of writers like Ken Levine and David Isaacs and further contributions from Gelbart-era writers like Laurence Marks and Everett Greenbaum and Jim Fritzell, was better overall than in most of Gelbart's scripts (Gelbart's writing has always struck me as a bunch of platitudes overlaid with soulless Bob Hope-style one-liners). And Major Winchester, as an antagonist, was everything Burns wasn't: a humanized, interesting, but flawed character. But those seasons had their own problems, notably the legendary insufferability of Alan Alda and the descent into unfunniness of almost every character and performer. On the whole, I just feel like I've watched more episodes of M*A*S*H than I probably should have, and I'll stick to my "Hogan's Heroes was better" mantra.

Doom and Gloom!

The new DVD of Finian's Rainbow is worth it just for the commentary track by director Francis Ford Coppola. Instead of just saying how great everything is -- which is what most directors do when commenting on their movies, good or bad -- he gives real, concrete information about the problems encountered in making the movie, evaluates the good and bad points of what he did, and criticizes his own mistakes. You can tell that with all his mixed feelings about the film, he still has a great affection for it, as well he should; with all its flaws, it's one of the better movie musicals of the '60s (and a hell of a lot better than Coppola's other attempt at a musical, One From the Heart).

Considering the way the film was made, it's amazing that it turned out as entertaining as it did. The Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow has one of the best musical theatre scores, perhaps the best; Yip Harburg's lyrics are dazzling and each of Burton Lane's tunes is extraordinarily memorable and rich in invention (there's hardly a single song in the score that follows a conventional A-A-B-A structure). The book, by Harburg and Fred Saidy, was funny but somewhat bizarre. Harburg, one of the few politically-active people among the great Broadway songwriters, wanted to do a story about a racist Senator who turns black, but he couldn't think of a way to fit this in with his preferred style of whimsical musical comedy. Finally he and Saidy came up with the idea of doing it in the context of an Irish fantasy story: an old Irishman steals a magic pot of gold from the leprechauns and comes to America with it, hoping to bury it in the ground near Fort Knox (he believes that the soil will make the gold increase in value), and an accidental wish made on the pot of gold is what sets off the Senator's transformation.

The show was a hit in 1947, running a then-excellent 725 performances. But hit or no hit, no studio was willing to do a faithful film version; at first it was considered too politically risky, and by the time it wasn't politically risky anymore, it was considered dated. The creators wouldn't sell the film rights unless the story was left intact, so twenty years went by without a film being made.

At some point, Warner Brothers bit the bullet and bought the movie rights, and a youngish writer, Joseph Landon, set up the project as his first (and last) film as a producer. By this time, 1967, Warner Brothers was in trouble: their most recent big-budget musical, Camelot, was an expensive disaster, and they were about to get bought out. By all accounts Jack Warner didn't really want to make Finian, but they had the property and someone had convinced Fred Astaire to play the old Irishman, so WB agreed to let Landon make the film on condition that he made it for a low budget ($3.5 million, compared to the $17 million that the studio had spent on Camelot) and shot the whole thing on the studio backlot and leftover Camelot sets.

As Coppola mentions on the commentary track, the studio felt that a young director might help give this aging property some youth appeal, so they narrowed it down to two promising young directors, Coppola and William Friedkin; Coppola got it on the basis of his student film You're a Big Boy Now, which had been commercially released as a feature and had done rather well. Coppola, in true film-brat fashion, came in with lots of Big Ideas about how to shoot Finian's Rainbow. He wanted to shoot the whole thing on location in the South (the studio said forget it). He had the whole cast do intensive rehearsal of the full script, as a stage play, to get them used to their parts (he admits on the commentary track that this may have been a mistake, since it got everybody acting in a broad theatrical style). Midway through the shooting he fired the choreographer, longtime Astaire associate Hermes Pan, and dithered about hiring another one, with the result that he had to stage many of the musical numbers himself (he talks on the commentary about reaching back to his "experience" staging musicals in college). The crew consisted of WB studio vets about to be thrown out of work by the total collapse of what was left of the studio system. The project was the first, but definitely not the last, example of a Film Brat in way over his head, and Coppola's commentary track is fairly up-front about the fact that at certain points he didn't exactly know what he was doing.

And yet the movie is way more entertaining than Camelot or Star! or Hello, Dolly! or any number of late '60s musicals. It also did better at the box office; according to the IMDB it cost $3.5 million and grossed $11 million, a tidy profit compared to the huge losses being posted by musicals right and left in this era. Coppola does a number of pointless things, doesn't always seem to know how to stage a dialogue scene, and his solution to shooting a musical number is to cut to various vignettes while the song plays on the soundtrack. But some of his ideas work better than they have a right to, like staging the number "This Time of the Year" with some elements of late '60s Civil Rights protests (sit-ins, shaking police cars), or imparting some real sexual heat to the staging of one of the sexiest songs ever written, "Old Devil Moon," or staging "The Begat" as a cross-country car trip. And even the bad ideas have an energy to them; the film is just way more energetic and loose than the stodgy work of Joshua Logan (Camelot, Paint Your Wagon and other cinematic horrors), or the post-MGM Gene Kelly (Hello, Dolly!), or any number of other, more experienced directors who were doing movie musicals at this time. Finian may be appalling at times, but it doesn't put you to sleep.

Also, whereas most musicals in this era had horrible, horrible casting choices -- see Ball, Lucille (Mame), Eastwood, Clint (Paint Your Wagon), and Everybody, Everywhere (Camelot) -- Finian's Rainbow is, glory be, entirely cast with performers who actually have a right to be doing a musical: Fred Astaire, Petula Clark, Tommy Steele and Canada's own Don Francks. (Steele is insufferable in this movie, as always, but he's not miscast, just annoying.) The chance to see and hear Petula Clark in a movie musical performing good songs is a special treat, since Clark was the kind of performer who should have had a big career in movie musicals but had the misfortune to rise to prominence just at the time when musicals were fading away. (The multi-lingual Clark also dubs her own dialogue and singing on the French soundtrack.) Add to that the fact that almost the entire Broadway score is intact, with only one song, "Necessity," being cut, and that the orchestrations are tasteful and not overblown, and it's clear that the score gets much more respect than Broadway scores usually got from Hollywood.

One thing that Coppola's commentary doesn't make clear, unless I missed the part where he explains it, is why the movie uses the script of the Broadway show almost verbatim. The writing credit reads "Screenplay by E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy," but in fact there doesn't seem to have been a screenplay at all; nearly all the dialogue in the movie is taken directly from Harburg and Saidy's original libretto, and any "adaptation" simply consists of moving various scenes to different locations. Considering that Coppola mentions that he was distressed by the dated aspects of the show's script, and wanted to make it more relevant for the late '60s, one wonders why the hell he didn't do what all other movies do and write some new scenes. I can only think that it might have been part of Harburg's deal that his dialogue should be intact; that would certainly explain why it took so long to get it filmed.

Heigh-Ho, the Glamorous Life

Re-reading John Van Druten's 1943 play The Voice of the Turtle, a rather melancholy comedy about an affair between a young actress and a soldier on leave. I'd like to write a bit more about this one when I get a chance, but in the meantime I'll quote a bit of dialogue that caught my eye as an amusing and even insightful (in a Broadway-comedy kind of way) take on the difference between what you're taught as a child and the way you wind up living as an adult in the city. This is a dialogue between Sally, the heroine, who has just come off an unhappy affair with a producer, and her more experienced actress friend Olive:

SALLY: If I'd stayed home in Joplin, none of this would have happened.

OLIVE: Don't they... in Joplin?

SALLY: Olive, tell me something. Something I want to know.

OLIVE: What?

SALLY: Well, do ordinary girls? I was raised to think they didn't. Didn't even want to. And what I want to know is -- don't they? They don't in movies. Oh, I know that's censorship... but... the people who go and see the movies... are they like that too? Or else don't they notice that it's all false?

OLIVE: I've wondered about that, myself.

SALLY: Even in Shakespeare, his heroines don't. Ever. Juliet carries on like crazy about not. I don't know whether what Mother and Father taught me was right, or true, or anything. Were you raised like that?

OLIVE: Oh, sure. And I wasn't even legitimate. But Mama raised me just as strict as if I was.

SALLY: Did you have qualms when you started?

OLIVE: Never.

SALLY: What did you feel?

OLIVE: I just felt -- "So this is it! I like it!"

Picture Olive's lines being spoken by Blanche on The Golden Girls and you'll realize how close the style of old-fashioned Broadway comedy is to the style of the TV sitcom (which eventually co-opted most of the writers who, in another generation, would have written plays).

Addendum to My Last Post

The excellent Judy Holliday Resource Center has some background on the filming of Bells Are Ringing, which helps to explain things like the staginess of the film (Comden and Green were too busy with other projects to substantially re-think their stage script for the screen), Dean Martin's unengaged performance, and other stuff.

Hialeah, Hialeah

My copy of the Classic Musicals Collection came today, and the first title I popped in was Bells Are Ringing. It's not the best in the set (that's The Band Wagon) nor the worst (that's Brigadoon, with its long, dull nonmusical stretches and its horrible studio-created heather on a horrible studio-created hill), but it was the one I was most happy to see on DVD, just because I'd never previously been able to see it in widescreen. Vincente Minnelli was one of those directors whose idea of how to use CinemaScope was to fill the frame with as many people as he possibly could, so you'll often get people talking from opposite sides of the screen in Minnelli's trademark long takes. In pan-and-scan you have to cut back and forth between the two halves of the image, and Minnelli's careful compositions -- he was, some actors said, more interested in composing the image than in helping actors give good performances -- are lost.

Not that Minnelli is at his best in Bells Are Ringing. It was his next-to-last musical, and Arthur Freed's last, and one gets the feeling that Minnelli wasn't all that interested in the form anymore; his musicals after The Band Wagon don't have the kind of visual imagination and flair he brought to his melodramas like Some Came Running and Two Weeks in Another Town. (Even Gigi, a movie I persist in liking a lot, is a little stodgy, visually, more like painting than cinema.) In Bells Are Ringing he sets up the shots nicely and moves the camera in and out at appropriate times, but not much more. And in a movie whose script sticks rather closely to the stage play -- too closely, as Adolph Green admits in an archival interview in the DVD's making-of documentary -- the proscenium-style CinemaScope shape makes it look even more like a filmed play.

Other flaws in the film include the decision to drop one of the show's best ballads, "Long Before I Knew You," and the casting of Dean Martin. There's no real reason why Martin shouldn't have been good in the movie; he'd been very good for Minnelli two years earlier in Some Came Running, he could sing and act, and he was certainly an appropriate choice to play a character whose creative partner has broken up with him, and has to learn to succeed on his own. But at times he has that slightly bored, spaced-out look he gets when a project doesn't really engage him. You can't really see why Judy Holliday would care so much about him. He does come to life during the "Just in Time" number, a typical Comden-Green mixture of romance and clowning (a few years later, in a show called Subways are For Sleeping, they did a very similar number called "Comes Once in a Lifetime," a peppy charm song followed by a nonsense French verse and a silly dance).

The flaws don't really matter, though, because it's got Judy Holliday, and Holliday is so good that she could make this movie watchable if the director was Ed Wood and her leading man was Rin-Tin-Tin. She is so lovable and genuine, and so expressive with every line reading and gesture, that you almost forget you're watching a movie; when she sings "It's a Perfect Relationship" it's like she's there in the room with you, telling you her feelings. The show was written especially for her by her old friends and performing partners Comden and Green, and it's the essence of a star vehicle: the star gets most of the numbers, gets an opportunity to show off every single thing she can do (comedy, romance, pathos, pratfalls, impressions), every other character is focused on her and when she's not around, they're talking about how wonderful she is. And in this case, she is wonderful, so it works.

Bells are Ringing is a fairy tale, but with a twist. Most fairy tales are about overcoming external barriers, like class or financial barriers. Bells Are Ringing is about people who are held back by their lack of confidence. Ella, the Judy Holliday character, reaches out to a man who doesn't believe in himself, and gives him the confidence he needs to succeed. But she herself is held back by her own lack of self-confidence: she can see what's special in other people, and help them see it too, but she doesn't think she herself is anything special at all. Of course she is, and she comes to understand this in the (you'll hate me for giving away this spoiler) happy ending.

Trivia note: Bernie West, who played the songwriter/dentist Dr. Kitchell on Broadway and in the movie, went on to become a very successful TV writer. West, Michael Ross and Don Nicholl became the head writers of All in the Family for the first five seasons (the show's quality nosedived after they left); they also wrote and produced the first season of The Jeffersons, and developed and ran Three's Company.

Oh, Heck!

Bill Crider has a post about Henry Wilson Allen, who wrote Western novels under the name Will Henry, and wrote dozens of cartoons for Tex Avery under the name Heck Allen. Allen gave an interview about his cartoon work to Film Comment magazine in 1975. It's not really true, as Bill speculates, that he thought his work for cartoons "wasn't worthy"; he seemed quite proud of having worked on those cartoons. But he insisted that all the credit was Avery's; he said that unlike Chuck Jones, who had tremendous help from writer Michael Maltese, Avery was his own best gagman, his own best writer, and his writers (Allen and Rich Hogan) were around to help him realize his vision.

A number of the cartoons Allen wrote for Avery are Westerns, like "Wild and Woolfy" and "The Shooting of Dan McGoo." But I also notice that Allen wrote the cartoon "The Three Little Pups," which contains my single favorite gag in an Avery cartoon: in one scene, Droopy and two other dogs defeat the Wolf with a violent gag involving the destruction of their TV set. In the next scene, as the Wolf returns for another attempt, the dogs are watching TV; Droopy turns to the audience and says: "Now, don't ask us how we got the television set back."

Sherman's March

Mark Evanier reports that the complete recordings of Allan Sherman are finally due to come to CD, in a limited-edition box set entitled, of course, "My Son, the Box."

Evanier also maintains a terrific Sherman annotated discography, listing all his recordings, and providing an excellent overview of his rise and fall.

I've always thought of Sherman as one of those entertainers whose popularity couldn't survive the Kennedy assassination. I don't really have any proof of this; it's not like he was Vaughan Meader or somebody. And Sherman had some hits after 1963, like his hilarious single "Crazy Downtown" ("Every time we ask you what you're doing after dark there/You just say that you were frugging to Petula Clark there"). But Sherman's humor just seems to me to have the flavour of the early '60s, the era of the Great Consensus. His Jewish-themed humor was the humor of integration, of assimilation, of ethnic groups becoming a part of that consensus. The post-assassination era in ethnic humor would belong to those who emphasized the difference, not the similarity, of ethnic groups; the most influential Jewish comic of the era, Lenny Bruce, and most influential Jewish humor writer, Philip Roth, emphasized the degree to which Jews are not assimilated into American culture. (I've written about this before.) And apart from the ethnic-humor angle, Sherman represented the middle-aged middle-class guy who loved show tunes and was suspsicious of rock music and youth fads in general; that's what some of his funniest songs, like "Crazy Downtown," are about. Up until around 1964 you could make a living by making records for that audience; by the late '60s, that audience had either disappeared or fragmented.

Sherman didn't help himself with his attempts to "mainstream" his appeal, to abandon the ethnic humor in favor of a more generalized appeal; this approach brought him his biggest hit, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh," but it prevented him from really establishing a clear identity as a performer.

One other thing about Sherman: kids love him. I mean, love him. I was introduced to his records as a child and I thought they were the funniest things I'd ever heard; I made cassette tapes of them and played them in the car for the kids in my carpool, and they thought they were hilarious. A few years later I went to babysit the next-door-neighbor's kids, and found that they loved listening to, yes, their parents' Allan Sherman records. I'm not really sure what it is that makes his songs so appealing to kids -- not just "Hello Muddah," but all of them. It's a tribute, I think, to how simple and direct his comedy is. Sherman's lyrics may not be brillantly crafted (as he admitted in his autobiography, he wasn't writing according to rules of craftsmanship: "I was writing by feel"), but they are full of clear, well-timed jokes that sit perfectly on the music; he had an instinct for using rhyme and rhythm to sell a joke, and that's what you need for a good comedy song.

Shadows, Cigarettes and Hats

Newish article on the recent surge in popularity of film noir, as evidenced by the DVD best-seller status of movies like Out of the Past and, of course, the increased number of people you see on the street, standing in the shadows, smoking cigarettes and wearing hats.

I'd try to give a cultural explanation for the current fascination with film noir -- as in, these are dark and ambiguous times that make these dark and ambiguous movies relevant. But I can't really say with any confidence that the current era is darker or more ambiguous than previous ones. (The tendency to think that things are getting worse, when the opposite is probably true, was nicely parodied in a line from King of the Hill: "It's tough being a kid these days, Hank. All we had to worry about was Vietnam, Charles Manson, swine flu.") My own suspicion is that people just love the coolness of the film noir world, a world where a bad-ass like Robert Mitchum gets to smoke a lot, toss off snappy one-liners, and punch people out without changing his expression, and where women get to be sultry, dangerous, or just plain evil. Whatever you may say for or against current movies, blockbusters and indies alike, they tend to be seriously deficient in cool. Even the stars don't seem to be cool, given that the current ideal of a movie star is to inspire US Magazine to gush about how they're just regular folks like us. The extent to which movies have lost their cool in just a decade can be guaged by comparing Get Shorty to the inappropriately titled Be Cool. So, desperately searching for movies with cool people doing cool things and acting tough in the face of danger, viewers pick up on film noir as the emblem of movie cool.

The other thing about film noir is that now that it's a mainstream term, its actual definition is more elusive than ever. Fox has started its film noir DVD series with three movies: Laura, Panic in the Streets and Call Northside 777. You could make a very strong argument that none of these three movies are "true" noir. By this argument, Laura is a chic murder mystery, not gritty enough to be noir, Panic in the Streets is a naturalistic melodrama, and Call Northside 777 is a neorealist-influenced crime procedural. Personally I think of Laura as noir but not the other two. Others would have different opinions. Does The Big Sleep qualify as a noir? Most people would say so, but, being a Howard Hawks movie, it's pretty upbeat and chipper despite the lurid subject-matter; maybe it's just too happy a movie to be noir. And so on, and so on. A real nit-picker could probably disqualify every movie ever made from being classified as a film noir. Well, except Out of the Past.

Clearly film noir is like pornography. We know it when we see it. But I think we can agree that to be a film noir, a movie must at the minimum contain those three magic elements:
a) Shadows
b) Cigarettes
c) Hats.