Great Lyrics, Or Dubiously-Legal Postings For a Slow Day

Not much to post today, so here are some more lyrics I love: Larry Hart's lyric for my favourite song of all time, Rodgers and Hart's "It Never Entered My Mind." Calling it my favourite song isn't just a whim; whenever I make up a list of the greatest songs of the last century, this one has the number-one spot. It's a combination of several different types of song into one: it's a torch song, but it's not as despairing as a torch song, more of a love song -- but it's also a comedy song. Its tone is at once emotional and analytical, with the singer expressing her feelings and mocking them at the same time. Rodgers' melody is one of his best, romantic/sad/funny all at once and with some wonderful surprises (especially the tricks he uses to extend the melody near the end), and Hart's lyrics are as follows:

Verse

I don't care if there's powder on my nose.
I don't care if my hairdo is in place.
I've lost the very meaning of repose;
I never put a mudpack on my face.
Oh, who'd have thought that I'd walk in a daze now?
I never go to shows at night, but just to matinées now.
I see the show,
And home I go.

Refrain 1

Once I laughed when I heard you saying
That I'd be playing solitaire,
Uneasy in my easy chair.
It never entered my mind.
Once you told me I was mistaken,
That I'd awaken with the sun
And order orange juice for one.
It never entered my mind.
You have what I lack myself,
And now I even have to scratch my back myself.
Once you warned me that if you scorned me
I'd sing the maiden's prayer again
And wish that you were there again
To get into my hair again.
It never entered my mind.

Refrain 2

Once you said in your funny lingo
I'd sit at Bingo day and night
And never get the numbers right.
It never entered my mind.
Once you told me I'd stay up Sunday
To read the Monday morning dirt
And find you're merging with some skirt.
Life is not so sweet alone.
The man who came to dinner lets me eat alone.
I confess it, I didn't guess it,
That I would sit and mope again
And all the while I'd hope again
To see my darling dope again.
It never entered my mind,
It never entered my mind.

Maltese Talkin'

Arglebargle! has a fascinating find: a 1945 issue of an in-house Warner Brothers newsletter, focusing on the WB cartoon studio. It consists of a collage of pictures of WB cartoon staffers, and a full-length article on the making of animated cartoons by the studio's best writer, Mike Maltese. Go take a look.

(Via Golden Age Cartoons)

Periwinkle Pussycat

As far as meaningless milestones go, 40th anniversaries don't have the cachet of 50th or 25th anniversaries, so I doubt anyone will be making a big deal of the fact that this year marked the 40th anniversary of the movie Lord Love a Duck. Still, it's an anniversary worth noting.

It was the first film directed by writer George Axelrod, who was best known for writing the play The Seven Year Itch and as producer and writer of The Manchurian Candidate. His work tended to be satirical and cynical, up to a point; in a script like How to Murder Your Wife (which he did the year before Duck), he would go as far as he could with the cynicism about modern life and society, but stop short of actually condemning them. With Lord Love a Duck, he stopped stopping short: this is a movie that expresses corrosive, uncompromising hatred for just about everything.

The story of a bored SoCal high school blonde (Tuesday Weld) who wants to be a star, and the weird young man (Roddy McDowall) who takes it upon himself to make all her dreams come true (though it takes him until the very end of the movie to understand exactly why he's doing it), Duck is described in a promotional featurette as "a cross between Love Finds Andy Hardy and Dr. Strangelove." You could say that Duck is the ancestor of all those indie movies where the director trashes the genre to which the movie purportedly belongs: Axelrod makes Duck sort of look like a mid-'60s teen comedy -- though it would have worked better if it had been shot in colour -- and then proceeds to condemn teen comedies, teenagers, grown-ups, consumerism, religion, sex, and various other things I'm forgetting at the moment.

Axelrod screened a Godard movie for the crew before he started shooting Duck, and he proceeded to make it one of the first Hollywood movies to really show the influence of New Wave filmmaking. Some directors had picked up on the obvious gimmicks, like jump cuts, but Axelrod really made the first Godard-style Hollywood movie, with all the jarring shifts in tone, distancing effects, and crazy tricks (like having the title sequence include behind-the-scenes footage of the crew shooting the movie) you would expect if Jean-Luc were to helm a Tuesday Weld movie.

The most famous scene in Lord Love a Duck, and one of the most tasteless moments in the history of movies, is the scene where Barbara Ann (Weld) tries on cashmere sweaters for her father (Max Showalter). Barbara Ann needs cashmere sweaters to get into the in crowd in school, and on the advice of the McDowall character, she is more or less seducing her father into buying them for her. This scene cuts out the "more or less" part: Barbara Ann's modeling of sweaters is treated as a sex scene for her and her father, with the both of them shrieking orgasmically over the wonders of consumer goods.



Filmbrain has a good post on what makes this scene so very, very wrong.

Dubba-Dubba

John McCann, one of the writers of Animaniacs and Freakazoid!, has a blog post called "Warners and Jean" where he talks about what made Warner Brothers Animation a good place to work in the '90s:

We were turning out 65 half-hours for the first season of "Animaniacs." At the same time, the division was making "Taz," "Batman," and wrapping up the last "Tiny Toon Adventures."

In the midst of this frenzy, there was only a single executive: Jean MacCurdy.

Jean let the producers run their shows while she ran the division. She trusted them and believed a person with passion for a series might turn out a better product than, say, a committe removed from the creative process.

Jean MacCurdy had been at Hanna-Barbera before coming to Warner Brothers in 1989 to be the "Executive in Charge of Production" for the WB TV Animation division; according to writer-producer Tom Ruegger, she was the one who convinced the WB higher-ups and Steven Spielberg that they could do "Tiny Toons" in-house instead of outsourcing it to another company. I've heard good and bad things about her stewardship of the animation division, as with every executive, but in general, what she did at WB was what executives are supposed to do: find talented people, put them to work on the right projects, and let them do their thing (within reason, budget, and network demands). Most famously, she convinced WB to let her put two youngish "Tiny Toons" artists, Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski, in charge of the "Batman" series.

McCann also pinpoints when it all started to go wrong -- as I've said before, it was when Warner Brothers started its own network and moved all its animated shows there:

In time, the WB gobbled up the division. Kids WB spun away from Jean to become its own entity with executives over her. Jean finally stepped down as division president in 2001.

But for a time, there was no place like Warners.

The move to the WB wasn't all bad; there was less censorship than on Fox, so "Batman" and "Superman" occasionally got to kill people off and the comedy shows could get a bit more suggestive. But the WB network President, Jamie Kellner, didn't like cartoons that appealed to older audiences (it made them harder to sell to advertisers whose products were aimed only at very young kids), and kept cancelling older-skewing cartoons and pushing for the remaining shows' content to be youth-ified. And so we got Pinky and the Brain moving in with Elmyra; Batman and Superman stopped in favour of "Batman Beyond" (which was good, but was made specifically because the WB demanded a Batman show about a kid rather than an adult); Freakazoid! getting cancelled after only 24 episodes.

And with the animation division being folded into the WB network, the animation division ran into the problem which the Looney Tunes ran into on Cartoon Network: because the division was only able to produce cartoons for that network and that network alone, they were in big trouble once the network execs decided they'd rather show "Pokemon" instead.

Here's a skit John McCann wrote for "Freakazoid!", about the adventures of a superhero called The Huntsman -- a hero whose show has an incredibly long introduction but almost nothing after that (a spoof of those '60s shows, like "The Incredible Hulk," that would bookend a very short segment of new animation with two versions of the show's theme song):

Musical Mayhem For a Wild and Woolly Weekend

Probably not much posting this weekend, so to fill the space, here are some clipz of Stuff I Like (tm). This particular group can be categorized as the "Music is Fun" group.

The first half of the cartoon "Hillbilly Hare" with the isolated music score. Note some things about Carl Stalling's scoring of a cartoon: when there's a big sound effect -- like an explosion -- he quiets down the music or turns it off altogether; you don't need "cartoony" music when the sound effect is carrying the burden. Also, in the conversation between Bugs and the first Martin brother, notice how Stalling switches between moods and keys (major to minor) depending on who's speaking.

The final scene and closing credits of The Bad and the Beautiful, highlighting the theme music by David Raksin -- one of the all-time greatest movie themes. And just to show you I'm a monomaniac, I'll also call attention to the fact that Vincente Minnelli does the final scene in one take, no cutting.

Cesare Siepi sings Philip's aria from Verdi's Don Carlo. Siepi was a bit past his prime when this was recorded -- for German television, apparently -- but he still shows why he was the number-one Italian basso after the retirement of Ezio Pinza; Philip was probably his best role, and it's a shame he never got to record it commercially.

And finally, a clip that's "embed-worthy," the "Isn't It Romantic?" number from Love Me Tonight, where director Rouben Mamoulian and songwriting team Rodgers & Hart pulled off the most elaborately plot-related musical number in a movie up to that point: with several different characters picking up the song after Maurice Chevalier sings the first refrain, the song travels across the countryside and makes its way to Jeanette MacDonald, who sings the last refrain about the lover she hasn't met yet -- and we know who that will be.



And long as this song is, it's not the complete version Rodgers and Hart wrote; Hart wrote two additional refrains that weren't used in the film due to lack of time, including this one that was supposed to be sung by Chevalier:

Isn't it romantic?
Starting out the day
A citizen of France.
Isn't it romantic?
In the month of May
To sew a pair of pants.
My business is a honey,
Goods on ev'ry shelf.
I make so little money
I can't pay myself.
Isn't it romantic?
When each millionaire
Is broke and has the blues,
Why should I be frantic,
Pulling out my hair?
I've nothing left to lose!
I'd borrow from myself now,
But I can't afford to take a chance.
Isn't it romance?

More McCarey Madness, Or A Very, Very Short Clip

In my post about Leo McCarey I talked about his improvisational method of filmmaking and how " he would let actors do things in the finished film that would be outtakes from any other movie." I just thought I'd post a very brief example of that, a short bit from An Affair to Remember that's at least an ad-lib and possibly a mistake. Deborah Kerr claimed that it was a mistake, and McCarey left it in anyway.

The World We Live In, Summed Up in One Press Release

Via Tbogg:

"24" and America’s Image in
Fighting Terrorism:
Fact, Fiction, or Does it Matter?
Friday, June 23, 2006

Moderator:
Rush Limbaugh
Host, The Rush Limbaugh Show

This is a ticketed, invitation only event and is sold out.
NO TICKETS AVAILABLE.

Get Keifer Sutherland to actually show up for this thing, and add in somebody from a gossip magazine, and you have all of 21st-century culture, politics and entertainment rolled into a nice neat nasty little ball.

Good Tuesday

Fox's website lists a September 5 release date for a DVD of 1968's Pretty Poison, a movie that anticipated -- and in some ways outclassed -- the wave of darkly funny, tone-shifting movies that would come in the early '70s. (Another '60s movie that took similar chances was George Axelrod's Lord Love a Duck -- which also stars Tuesday Weld.)

Miss Cellany

Earl Kress reports on a great special feature that's being produced for volume 2 of "Animaniacs" (which should be out in November). Literally the entire original writing staff of the show -- twelve writers in all -- has been assembled for interviews, with Maurice LaMarche (the Brain) acting as moderator. (There's a similar "roundtable" interview with the producers of "Superman: The Animated Series" on the new DVD set with the final 18 episodes of that series.)

"Animaniacs" may actually have been the first show where I recognized the styles of individual writers, because I loved the show so much that I watched the credits at the beginning of each cartoon, and noticed that certain writers wrote certain types of cartoons. Paul Rugg wrote genuinely crazy stuff with lots of nods to (and occasional borrowings from) classic comedy like Hellzapoppin. Tom Minton, a true authority on cartoon history, wrote many cartoons with animation-history or generally historical themes (Pinky and the Brain take over for Beany and Cecil; the Warners do a "homefront" cartoon during WWII). Randy Rogel was the lead songwriter, coming up with songs like "Yakko's World" and the song where the Warners explain the five senses and many more ("There are scents you can smell, like Colombe or Chanel"). It was a great writing staff and they did some excellent work. It'll be good to see them in the flesh, or a digitized version thereof.

Kress also mentions that he'll be on an Animaniacs/Pinky & the Brain panel at the San Diego Comic-Con this July, to tie in with the DVD release:

Thursday, July 20

4:00-5:00 PM Pinky & The Brain/Animaniacs – Screening of a special feature from Animaniacs Volume 1 DVD and Pinky & the Brain Volume 1 DVD. Panel and Q&A featuring Maurice La Marche (voice of Brain and Squit), Rob Paulsen (voice of Pinky and Yakko), Jess Harnell (voice of Wakko), Andrea Romano (voice director/casting director for both shows), Earl Kress (writer for both shows), Peter Hastings (writer for both shows) and Gordon Bressack (writer for both shows). Room 6B

Break the Windows!

Someone has kindly put up a clip of one of the great Vincente Minnelli scenes: the waltz sequence from Madame Bovary, with Jennifer Jones as the title character, Louis Jourdan as Rodolphe and Van Heflin as Charles Bovary. The ball scene is only loosely based on the book, but it's an amazing piece of cinema, an example of how great moviemaking brings together all the visual and aural arts: Minnelli's swirling camera movements, the "neurotic waltz" composed by Miklós Rózsa, the elaborate set design, and the physical beauty of the actress. The high point of the scene, where windows are smashed while Charles's bottle falls to the floor, all in rhythm with the music, is especially memorable.

The feverishness of the scene makes it the only part of the movie where Emma Bovary's life becomes, or at least seems to become, what she wants it to be. (When she looks in the mirror before the waltz starts, she finally gets to see herself as she imagines herself.) As Minnelli put it in the interview I linked to: "that’s the one time that the dream came up to the reality. She saw herself as wanted and beautiful; the belle of the ball, so to speak. Then it ended bitterly. Illusion."



And while we're on a Minnelli kick, here's a key scene from The Bad and the Beautiful that's filmed entirely in one uninterrupted take, no cutting -- demonstrating Minnelli's fondness for long takes.

Not So Wild About Wilder

Tomorrow, June 22, is the centenary of the birth of Billy Wilder.

I've long thought that Wilder was better when he wasn't trying to be funny. The Wilder films that hold up as undisputed masterpieces tend to be the really dark, sour movies where the only jokes are bitter ones: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole. Sometimes an otherwise good Wilder film is dragged down by bad comedy scenes: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has a lot of very memorable scenes, and a very powerful ending, but a lot of the comedy is just lame, especially the way it turns Watson into a gibbering, shouting idiot.

Wilder's comedies, on the other hand, mostly don't work for me any more. Some Like It Hot is a movie I like less every time I see it. When I was younger, I loved the picture, but now I just find it short on really good jokes, filling in the gaps with cornball stuff (plays on the meaning of "conductor" and such). The plot takes too long to get going and wraps up too quickly. The lighting and set design are undistinguished and sometimes quite ugly. The performances don't do much for me either: Lemmon is grating, Monroe has been better elsewhere -- she's not helped by the fact that her character is such an idiot; unlike Hawks's Lorelei Lee, Wilder's Sugar Kane is just a walking joke, not a person -- and while Curtis is good, the totality of his performance is hurt by the fact that his "Josephine" voice is dubbed by Paul Frees. Sure, the closing line is great, but it feels like two hours of setup leading up to that one punchline.

There's something so on-the-nose and uninteresting about a lot of the jokes in Hot and other Wilder comedies: there's no twist on the gag, no surprise. He tells you what he's going to do (Curtis will have to get out of his millionaire disguise before Monroe comes to the hotel room), he does it, and he tells you it has been done (Curtis gets out of the tub with his clothes on). He doesn't often get ahead of the audience, or give them something they haven't been set up for.

Samson Raphaelson, who wrote many of Ernst Lubitsch's movies, once sort of summed up the problem with Wilder and Izzy Diamond's gag writing, at least as it compares to truly great comedy writing. Wilder brought out the movie Love in the Afternoon, a tribute to Lubitsch (and quite a charming movie, though not particularly funny). Raphaelson went to see it and was asked what Lubitsch would have thought of it. Raphaelson singled out one gag from Love in the Afternoon as symptomatic of its problems: a couple is kissing in the streets of Paris, and they're so oblivious to everything that they stand there kissing as a street-washing truck comes by and sprays them with water. Lubitsch would never have done something that obvious, Raphaelson said: if he and Lubitsch had done that scene, the truck would have stopped spraying when it reached the oblivious couple, and then started up again once they were safely out of range. That's a small example, but it's a good one: great comedy writers (and directors) "plus" a gag, add something extra to it that the audience might not anticipate. Wilder seldom does.

Also, as a comedy director, I just don't think Wilder had much of an ability to extract great comedy performances. He didn't allow performers to be spontaneous, but unlike his idol Ernst Lubitsch, he couldn't really mold performers into being funny his specific way. Instead the comedy timing and delivery in a Wilder film often becomes a generic mush, with performers delivering their lines at the exact pace and rhythm that Wilder wants, but with no sense of character in the delivery, and not much of interest going on around them. If you compare Wilder's CinemaScope Tom Ewell-starring spectacular The Seven Year Itch to Frank Tashlin's obviously Itch-inspired comedies with Ewell the following year (The Girl Can't Help It and The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, which both pair hapless Ewell with hot blondes), you'll see the difference between a merely proficient comedy director with some good ideas, and a comedy director who actually makes something interesting and unique happen onscreen.

Now, to pull back from the Wilder-bashing a bit, there are two Wilder comedies I do love. One is his first film as a director, The Major and the Minor, a near-perfect comedy of questionable taste that has all the charm and good jokes that Some Like It Hot doesn't. It also has better comedy performances than usual for a Wilder comedy; maybe his inexperience led him to give more leeway to performers like Ginger Rogers and the marvelous Diana Lynn, to let them be themselves. The other great Wilder comedy is the nasty and amoral Cold War comedy One Two Three. Here he let two performers get away from him: James Cagney couldn't be completely controlled (though Wilder tried), and Pamela Tiffin somehow turns another one of Wilder's women-suck caricatures and turns it into a weirdly lovable character. But mostly it works because it has more and better jokes than most Wilder comedies, including one of the great jokes in movie history -- the scene where Horst Buchholtz is tortured by the East German police using the most horrible tactic the Communists can come up with:



...He even manages to "plus" the gag by adding the bit with the Russian-made record player. That one gag makes Wilder's whole comedy career worthwhile. But I still think that his real talents lay in the sour, depressed, somewhat noir-ish world of Walter Neff or Norma Desmond.

Virgil Ross Through the Ages

In an earlier post about great WB animators, I wrote that the animator Virgil Ross was great at "expressing emotion and personality with small but carefully-executed movements." One thing I didn't mention much was that Ross's style of animating was probably the most consistent -- some might say repetitive -- of any animator; he was at WB for many decades, under at least three different directors and many changes in taste and reductions in budget, yet he kept on drawing characters more or less the same way (his Daffy Duck in the '50s and early '60s looks a lot like the '40s model, who was smaller and had a thinner beak) and resorting to the same gestures: leaning over to one side, sticking arms and hands out sideways, stamping on the ground to express dismay, etc. A Ross scene from 1957 looks a lot like a Ross scene from 1937, no matter what the changes in writing and background design.

I thought I'd illustrate the consistency of Ross's style by highlighting a few scenes that show how his style remained the same in different decades, and with different directors. There's a basic Virgil Ross style of animated acting that is easy to spot once you get to know it; look at the pig director getting upset and crying in "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (1938) and then Sylvester getting upset and crying in "Snow Business" (1953) -- different directors, different times, but very similar acting because it's the same guy animating.

A Virgil Ross scene from "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (1938) directed by Tex Avery:



Bugs meets Beaky Buzzard in a Ross scene from Bob Clampett's "Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid" (1942):



Ross didn't last long in Clampett's unit, as Clampett didn't like Ross's subdued style of animation, and Ross went over to Freleng's unit, where he stayed until the studio shut down. Here's a Ross scene with Tweety and Sylvester in "Snow Business" (1953):



And finally, in front of UPA-influenced backgrounds and with reduced late-'50s animation budgets, Ross is still using his trademark poses and hand gestures in "Gonzales' Tamales" (1957):



While these are good scenes that, taken together, give you a good idea of the way Ross worked, I wouldn't say any of them are among his very best work; for an example of Ross at his very best, see this scene from Freleng's "A Bird in a Guilty Cage".

God Bleth Uth, Every One

Via Animated News, Steve Hulett at the Animation Guild Blog reports that there's a Looney Tunes direct-to-video movie in the works: Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas, with Daffy Duck stepping into the Scroogean shoes previously filled by Mr. Magoo, Scrooge McDuck, and even Yosemite Sam. Hulett says that the film is "quite nicely done," and the director, Charles Visser, has done some good work (he was a director on "Pinky and the Brain"), so hopefully it will be a better entry in the hand-drawn direct-to-video movie sweepstakes than the just-released, pitiful Superman: Brainiac Attacks."

"Consider Yourself Lucky That You Are Not At This Moment An Artichoke!"

I did a bunch of posts a couple months back about why the show "Bewitched" was so good in its first season (when Danny Arnold was in charge of the writing). I am still stubbornly fond of this post about how a bad "Bewitched" script was rewritten into a good one by Arnold and co-producer Jerry Davis. But the posts were sort of hampered by the fact that I couldn't post clips from the episodes. Now I can, so I thought I'd post a few samples of what made "Bewitched" work in its first season.

First, the post about the episode "A is For Aardvark" has been updated with two key clips from the episode: the scene where Darrin decides he wants to live off his wife's witchcraft after all, and the scene where he realizes that's not what Samantha wants or what he wants. As I said in an earlier post, this story was important enough to the show that it was sort of brought back from the dead: a script was written around this premise, it didn't work out, but Arnold saved the premise and some story points and had writer Earl Barret write a new script around the same idea. It's the essential "Bewitched" episode for the way it definitively addresses and resolves the biggest issue on the show (why does Samantha put up with this jerk who won't let her use her natural talents?). It's also a model of how to do a "bottle show," an episode that saves money by using the bare minimum of sets and cast members. The whole episode takes place in the house and there's no one in it except the four regulars (Sam, Darrin, Endora and Larry), but if it was done that way to save some money, it sure doesn't lose anything for that reason; it gains from being done without any outside characters or sets.

And here are three clips from season 1 episodes that illustrate how Arnold and his other writers were trying to keep the magic element to a minimum and find fantasy equivalents for real-life problems.

"Mother Meets What's-His-Name" (written by Arnold) -- when a couple is in a "mixed marriage," what happens when the bride's mother meets her son-in-law for the first time? And what happens if she expresses her disapproval of the way he's making her daughter assimilate into his culture: "What is normal to you, young man, is to us asinine!"



From "Eye of the Beholder" -- Darrin asks Samantha the familiar real-life question of how old she is, and goes through the familiar real-life fear that she won't love him when he gets old and decrepit. The fact that his worry stems from the fact that she might be several centuries old is almost beside the point. (This is another episode that was heavily rewritten from the scriptwriter's original version; the original draft was about Samantha deciding to grow old along with her husband, but Arnold or Jerry Davis rewrote it to be about Darrin accepting the fact that Samantha won't grow old, and declaring that it doesn't matter -- Darrin didn't become a raving selfish pig until the show went to colour.)



And from "The Witches Are Out" (written by Bernard Slade, his first sitcom script, though he'd written a lot of variety shows in Canada), the down-to-earth problem of Samantha objecting to the stereotypical way her group is portrayed in popular culture:



The point of all this, I guess, is that in a weird way the first season of "Bewitched" was one of the most realistic shows on the air: at a time when comedy and drama alike were mostly doing wacky fantasy stories, Arnold and Davis took a wacky fantasy premise and used it to tell fairly realistic stories about relationships.

Incidentally, TV.com has a little biographical information on freelance writer Earl Barret. He wrote the "A is For Aardvark" script, but more than that, he's one of those freelance writers whose scripts (in a time when the credited writer usually had more to do with the finished episodes than today) always seemed to be really good, often better than the level of the show or season he was writing for. He came back to "Bewitched" in the third season -- the first colour season -- to write an episode that was leaps and bounds ahead of any other episode in that season; and in the second season of "The Bob Newhart Show," the one episode he wrote is quite a bit better than most episodes from that season and really makes something three-dimensional and interesting out of the marriage of Bob and Emily. I wouldn't go too far in evaluating his work (he did co-create "Too Close For Comfort," after all), but if you're watching an old show and he has the writing credit, the episode is probably worth watching.

Oh, Dem Golden Slippers

I think my all-time favourite scene in a John Ford film -- sometimes, depending on my mood, my favourite scene in any film -- is the non-commissioned officers' dance sequence in Fort Apache. Consisting of two separate dances -- the Grand March followed by couples dancing to "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" -- it occurs just before the film moves into its climactic section. After this scene, the whole movie is about the Henry Fonda character, an arrogant creep so determined to test out his pet theories about war that he ignores the advice of characters who actually know the Apaches and the territory, and gets his men slaughtered. But the dance isn't a lighthearted diversion before the serious stuff: it's an essential part of the movie, highlighting the values of community and ritual that hold the Cavalry outpost together, and highlighting the way Colonel Thursday (Fonda) can't quite adjust to the idea of being part of a community.

Thursday goes along with the ritual nature of the dance, of course; he's a by-the-book commander and he would never fail to do what's expected of him. But he doesn't crack a smile through the whole thing, unlike Sergeant O'Rourke (Ward Bond), who, though his family has been wronged by Colonel Thursday, smiles while dancing with the Colonel's daughter (Shirley Temple). When he has to dance a lively dance, he does proficient but stiff-jointed steps, never looking like he's having any fun, giving a militaristic air even to a one-on-one dance.

The way it's shot is quintessential Ford too: long shots where you can see lots of people at once; few medium shots and no close-ups; a lot of low-angle shots with the floors and ceilings visible; little character moments in the background and foreground like the guy pointing to Thursday as he dances, or Victor McLaglen's attempt to dance gracefully. Watch it (and then buy the DVD and watch the whole thing):



One thing I once saw pointed out about Fort Apache (can't remember where) is that it not only has two big stars at their peak, Fonda and John Wayne, it also has an unusual number of former stars in it, or stars who weren't known as stars to the film's audience. McLaglen had played leads in the '30s, including several in Ford movies; Shirley Temple had of course been a huge star in the '30s; George O'Brien (Sam Collingwood) was a star in silent films, including Ford's breakthrough Western The Iron Horse; Dick Foran was a star of B-movies; Pedro Armendáriz was a star in Mexican films, as was Miguel Inclán, who played Cochise. It's interesting that in making a movie about the disaster that results when one man tries to lord it over everyone else, Ford assembled a cast of people with legitimate claims to be stars in their own right.

Grudge Matches I'd Like to See: Rockford vs. Magnum

Jim Rockford (James Garner, "The Rockford Files"), a popular TV private detective who drives a cool car and has a great Mike Post/Pete Carpenter theme song, vs. Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck, "Magnum P.I."), a popular TV private detective who drives a cool car and has a great Mike Post/Pete Carpenter theme song.

Who wins: Rockford, the '70s P.I. who lives a frugal hand-to-mouth lifestyle, or Magnum, the '80s P.I. who lives a life of decadent luxury? Please post your thoughts in Ye Olde Commente Sectionne.

You could say, by the way, that the difference between '70s and '80s pop culture is pretty much summed up by the difference between these two TV detectives. Rockford lived in a trailer, struggled to get paid, and his best buddy was a fellow ex-con; Magnum lived in a tropical paradise, riding high on the largesse of Higgins Robin Masters, and had buddies who would help him do guy stuff. Magnum was the P.I. for the Robin Leach era.

Also by the way, the DVD set of the second season of "Rockford" is a big improvement over the first: single-sided discs instead of double-sided; the complete series pilot, with Not-Noah-Beery playing Rockford's dad, is included (and looks terrific), and the episodes are all uncut and look very good, once you adjust for the fact that these early '70s Universal shows don't have the most stunning production values. Whereas other studios had a certain gloss and glamour in their TV work -- Fox and Paramount liked to make things look as pretty as possible -- Universal tended to go for a grittier look, with lots of real but unspectacular-looking L.A. locations and sort of harsh sound recording. But adjusting for that, the prints used for this set are quite good, much better than I've seen in syndication.

The bonus feature is a nine-minute interview with Stephen J. Cannell about the origins of the series. I'm not sure how much of his stories are true -- he seems to downplay the fact that the show was conceived as a spinoff of "Toma," ignores the rumour that other people were offered the part of Rockford before Garner got involved, and doesn't address how much the finished product was influenced by Garner's movie Marlowe. (This was an updated version of Chandler's The Little Sister that lent a lot of its style to "Rockford"; an early episode of "Rockford" even lifted a line, "Does your mother know what you do for a living?", from Marlowe.) But he's a fun talker and has a lot of fun things to say about the show, the style of it, how hard it was to come up with answering machine messages, and other such matters.

Assuming season 3 gets released soon, that will be the start of the golden "Rockford" period, because season 3 is when David Chase joined the writing staff -- few shows have ever had three writers as good as the "Rockford" trio of Cannell, Juanita Bartlett, and Chase.

YouTube Goodies

Jussi Björling and Renata Tebaldi in the '50s singing most of the final scene of Act 1 of La Bohème:

Björling in "Che Gelida Manina":



Followed by Tebaldi in "Mi Chiamano Mimi", and the duet that concludes Act 1:



I'm not sure where exactly this clip comes from. One thing about the way they're recorded here is that, unlike more high-tech audio and video recordings, you really get a sense of the size of the voices -- Tebaldi's voice was huge and the microphone sometimes sounds like it's having trouble recording it; Björling's voice, while it never had any trouble projecting, was smaller than hers and sometimes gets drowned out when they're singing together.

Free To Be On ABC

"That Girl": The Complete Second Season (October 10) kicks off the best part of that show's run, and it's not coincidental that the show got better when Danny Arnold joined as producer. (He'd directed one episode in the first season, but hadn't been involved in the writing.) The episodes of the second season are overall smarter and faster-paced than the first season's, where the producer was Arnold's friend Jerry Davis.

Someone on a message board once suggested, in response to my point about the superiority of the first season of "Bewitched" (the only year Arnold was there), that the Arnold-produced seasons of "That Girl" give an idea of what "Bewitched" might have been like if he'd stayed with it, and that's not a bad point. The formats of the shows were entirely different, but he brought the same sense of strong character comedy, and working in more interesting real-life problems than the normal sitcom complication, to both shows. It's odd, though, that a writer/producer who often produced shows with women at the centre wound up hitting it big with a show that never came up with a strong female character ("Barney Miller").

OT: Sadly, No? Happily, Yes!

Sadly, No! has a good post on the latest Ann Coulter flap and her defenders. The upshot of the post is that those who defend Coulter immediately insist that she's making a point against the "infallibility of victims" or some such thing. But what's actually happening is something different. Coulter, and many others in the "mainstream" and online media, make a living attacking people not on the issues, but personally. And someone's status as a victim makes it harder to launch a personal attack; hence, the victim status must be stripped away so that the personal attacks can continue. There's nothing stopping her from saying "despite the tragedy that befell this person, he or she is wrong on the issues, and here's why." Nothing, except that she doesn't do issues (and is wrong on the few issues she does deal with). It's not that the background of John Kerry or Cindy Sheehan or John McCain or whoever makes it hard to attack them on the issues; it's that it makes it harder to attack them on irrelevant grounds. Or as Travis G puts it:

Look, it works like this: Disagree all you want with a victim. Sometimes their views are lacking in reason, common sense or sound judgement. (That’s why victims don’t sit on juries.) It’s okay to do that. Victims don’t have ultimate, unassailable credibility, because no one has that, but they’ve got some credibility they earned the hard way, and which they would gladly hand over if it were that easy. But you can’t bend the rules, twisting the truth itself, and imply that their unfortunate status as a victim is somehow false because it makes it harder to prove your point.

And, really, if you honestly believe that a person would want to be the victim of a tragedy so they can go on television, sell a few books and meet Jay Leno, would you please tell the rest of us, so we can be sure to stay the fuck away from you?

Also check out this follow-up post: ...As well as the contribution to the commments section by Michael Bérubé.

Sadly, No! is probably the best of the mordant humour blogs that have proliferated in the last few years; they pick kind of easy targets sometimes (obscure commentators at WorldNetDaily and such), but their in-depth analysis of bad political commentary is both hilarious and depressing.

Evil! Eeeevil!

Thad has the Larry Doyle "Looney Tunes" cartoons up at his site. Beware. Some of these are worse than you could possibly imagine; the Porky Pig thing, which spends the last minute abandoning the plot and cutting away to a fake commercial for a "stuttering pig" record, is the worst of the worst.

To get the bad taste of those cartoons out of your mouth, here's a real Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoon that hasn't been pulled from YouTube yet:

The most bizarre Foghorn Leghorn cartoon ever made, "Fox Terror" (1957), one of only three Bob McKimson cartoons written by Mike Maltese (who of course usually wrote Chuck Jones's cartoons). Though the story has a premise that is typical of the series -- the conflict between Foghorn and the Barnyard Dog is exploited by a third party -- the way it plays out is so strange and surreal that it's like a Foghorn story rewritten by Luis Bunuel. It also has better animation than most McKimson cartoons from around this time; the opening scene with the Dog and the weirdly-designed chicken is quite nice (I think, though I could be wrong, that the animator here may have been Keith Darling, who McKimson picked up from Jones's unit).