Last Great MGM Musical

Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter has a nice tribute to Viva Las Vegas, which just came out in a new DVD (the special features aren't much, but at least the picture is remastered in 16:9 widescreen this time). I've always thought that VLV, and not Elvis Presley's more serious pictures, is the model for what his movies should have been like. The problem with the typical Elvis film isn't that it's too light and fluffy; movie musicals are supposed to be light and fluffy. The problem is that they're cheap, slapdash and nobody involved with the film is doing his or her best work.

That's why Viva Las Vegas is sort of the last of the great M-G-M musicals, because it's the last gasp of a particular type of musical: the short, unpretentious musical that succeeds because of high technical standards and an ability to take advantage of the stars' talents. The producer of Viva Las Vegas, Jack Cummings, was Louis B. Mayer's nephew and he had made a ton of musicals exactly like that: not prestige projects like Arthur Freed's, but films where he was given a star or two and did the best job he could of building an entertaining movie around them. He handled most of Red Skelton's movies at MGM, and then he was given Esther Williams (who was introduced in a movie with Skelton, Bathing Beauty), and had to figure out how to make a successful musical with a star whose main talent was swimming. He did it; he also figured out how to make a 3-D musical (Kiss Me Kate) and M-G-M's first good CinemaScope musical (Seven Brides For Seven Brothers).

The director, George Sidney, had worked with Cummings on Bathing Beauty, so it all came full circle: 20 years had passed, but these old M-G-M pros (and the writer, Sally Benson, who wrote the Meet Me in St. Louis stories) were still filming the same featherweight plots and succeeding because they know how to bring out the best in their stars. Unfortunately, by 1964 almost nobody was making this kind of mid-level musical. After VLV, almost every musical would be either a huge three-hour "A" production, or a cheaply-made quickie for drive-ins. The problem is that the musical, as a genre, couldn't be sustained that way. It needed the people who brought "A" production values to what could never be "A" projects.

Like many people, my favorite number in Viva Las Vegas is "My Rival" -- the song is a big nothing, but Sidney and Ann-Margret do the whole thing in one interrupted two-minute take, with all kinds of effects and stage business to make the number more complicated. It's in the great M-G-M musical tradition of doing numbers in as few takes as possible, with fluid camerawork and precise timing instead of cutting.

Sarabande

I didn't have much to say about the death of Ingmar Bergman, but I do want to note an interesting CD that was released a few years ago (and is technically out of print, but used copies are still available) of Erik Nordgren's musical scores for Bergman's early films. Nordgren scored almost all of Bergman's movies through the early '60s, until, as this website explains, Bergman decided he didn't want to commission new music for his movies any more. An un-charitable interpretation is that Bergman decided that no living composer was good enough for him; a more charitable interpretation is that he just felt uncomfortable with using music that wasn't a real work of art in itself -- and the whole point of movie music is that it isn't supposed to stand on its own, or if it does, it does so almost by accident. For the rest of his career, he either did scenes with no music at all or with pre-existing recordings of classical works like Bach's cello suites (in Through a Glass Darkly).

Given that most of my favorite Bergman movies are the earlier ones -- up to and including The Virgin Spring -- I'm not sure if the presence of real musical scores has something to do with that. I do think that maybe the musical scoring helped make his earlier movies a little more involving. Hearing a known piece of music -- whether it's classical music or (in today's movies) a pop song -- sort of takes you out of the movie by referring back to a separate work of art. A musical score created for the movie is fully a part of that movie, and doesn't distract you from getting lost in the story.

Eternal Question:

Is "What Makes the Red Man Red?" more or less likely to offend when dubbed into Polish?

Hansel? Hansel?

The complete list of cartoons for Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 5 is up. The first disc is perhaps a bit heavy on cartoons that are merely OK rather than great -- which is inevitable after nearly 300 cartoons have already come out -- but it seems like a strong lineup overall in spite of the absence of "Coal Black" (and "Russian Rhapsody" for that matter). As for the extras, I would have liked to see some new names among the list of people doing commentators -- why hasn't Greg Duffell been brought in? -- but it's good that there are featurettes about McKimson and the other less-famous WB directors.

Disc 1 (Bugs & Daffy)

- 14 Carrot Rabbit (Friz Freleng, 1952): Standard Bugs vs. Yosemite Sam cartoon with a final gag that no longer makes sense (it's a variation on what was then a familiar old joke, about someone saying "I'm waiting for a streetcar").

- Ali Baba Bunny (Chuck Jones, 1957): you probably remember this one.

- Buccaneer Bunny (Freleng, 1948): the first time Sam was cast as something totally inappropriate, in this case a pirate (this was only the second Sam cartoon released, so this joke started really early)

- Bugs' Bonnets (Jones, 1956): Bugs and Elmer keep changing personalities every time they change hats. How many cartoons are there where Bugs marries Elmer? A lot, it seems.

- A Star is Bored (Freleng, 1956): Freleng's first Bugs vs. Daffy cartoon, where he turned Daffy into a complete asshole who not only wants to upstage Bugs but literally to kill him.

- A Pest in the House (Jones, 1947): Very funny Jones Daffy cartoon, one of many excellent Daffy cartoons he made before switching over to the angry-Daffy persona.

- Transylvania 6-500 (Jones, 1963): Bugs vs. the vampire Count Bloodcount. This one seems to be particularly popular with people who grew up watching Bugs on Saturday mornings; it's one of the ones people always seem to list as being among their favorites as kids.

- Oily Hare (Bob McKimson, 1952): Bugs vs. a Texas oilman who's basically McKimson's knockoff of Yosemite Sam.

- Stupor Duck (McKimson, 1956): writer Tedd Pierce repeats some of his Superman parody gags from "Super Rabbit," this time for Daffy and with the catalyst being the popular Superman TV series (most of Pierce's stories around this time were TV parodies)

- The Stupor Salesman (Art Davis, 1948): the best cartoon with "Stupor" in the title, as obnoxious salesman Daffy tries to sell stuff to a crook in his hideout.

- The Abominable Snow Rabbit (Jones, 1961): You remember this one too.

- The Super Snooper (McKimson, 1952): Daffy as detective Duck Drake in a parody of what we now call film noir.

- The Up-Standing Sitter (McKimson, 1948): Daffy, in his transitional phase between his crazy origins and his angry '50s period, becomes a babysitter.

- Hollywood Daffy (1946 -- Freleng's unit made it, but Freleng didn't like the story so it was left without a director credit and unofficially directed by his assistant, Hawley Pratt): Daffy is chased around a movie studio by a Keystone Kop.

- You Were Never Duckier (Jones, 1948): Daffy is mistaken for a chicken by Henery Hawk, in his last appearance outside of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon.

Disc 2 (Fairy Tales)

- Bewitched Bunny (Jones, 1954): the first and best Witch Hazel cartoon, and one of my very favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons. Witch Hazel here is voiced by Bea Benaderet, not June Foray (who would take over this and Benaderet's other parts after the studio's mid-'50s hiatus)

- Paying the Piper (McKimson, 1948): Similar to Clampett's black and white "Pied Piper Porky" but weirder, as Porky goes up against a giant rat who's actually a cat in disguise.

- The Bear's Tale (Tex Avery, 1940): A Goldilocks and the Three Bears parody.

- Foney Fables (Freleng, 1942): A blackout-gag cartoon about fairy tales. (The "blackout gag" format was one that was used on and off for decades in the golden age of short cartoons; if the writer and director didn't have a story, they'd do a bunch of unrelated gags organized around a theme.)

- Goldimouse and the Three Cats (Freleng, 1960): The Goldilocks story with Sylvester and Sylvester Jr. replacing Papa and Baby Bear; the only time Freleng used McKimson's Sylvester Jr. character. Mike Maltese's story is also a bit reminiscent of his Three Bears stories for Chuck Jones (which he and Jones had to stop doing because, Jones claimed, they were bombing in theatres).

- Holiday For Shoestrings (Freleng, 1946): A Freleng classical-music cartoon based on the story of the shoemaker and the elves.

- Little Red Rodent Hood (Freleng, 1952): A Little Red Riding Hood story with a mouse and the big bad cat, Sylvester.

- Little Red Walking Hood (Avery, 1937): Another Little Red Riding Hood parody, with Egghead.

- Red Riding Hoodwinked (Freleng, 1956): Tweety and Sylvester in yet another Red Riding Hood story, with a really absent-minded wolf. You don't want to know how much I loved this cartoon as a kid; it was probably my favorite Tweety cartoon of any kind, mostly because of the wolf (who was re-used in "Hare-Less Wolf" a couple of years later). Also a reminder of how obsessed the WB writers were with Honeymooners references around this time.

- The Trial of Mr. Wolf (Freleng, 1941): I think Freleng did more Red Riding Hood parodies than anyone ever did or would want to.

- The Turn-Tale Wolf (McKimson, 1952): Very funny revisionist take on the Three Little Pigs, bringing back those evil pigs from "The Windblown Hare."

- Tom Thumb in Trouble (Jones, 1940): One of Jones's sweet early Disney-esque efforts.

- Tweety and the Beanstalk (Freleng, 1957): Oddly enough, I didn't like this one as a kid at all. Maybe the giant Tweety freaked me out.

- A Gander at Mother Goose (Avery, 1940): Blackout gags about nursery rhymes.

- Senorella and the Glass Huarache (Hawley Pratt, 1964): The last cartoon made by the original WB cartoon studio, a Mexican retelling of Cinderella.

Disc 3 (The Best [sic] of Bob Clampett)

- Bacall to Arms (1946): Clampett's last WB cartoon, where a wolf goes to see To Have and Have Not and goes nuts over the hotness of Lauren Bacall.

- Buckaroo Bugs (1944): A completely obnoxious Bugs Bunny battles his dumbest adversary ever, Red Hot Ryder.

- Crazy Cruise (1942): Blackout gags about exotic locations.

- Farm Frolics (1941): Blackout gags about farming.

- Hare Ribbin (1944): Bugs is hunted by a dog who sounds like the Mad Russian from Eddie Cantor's radio show, and proves that rabbits and dogs can breathe underwater. The disc features both endings of the film (the original version was changed because Bugs was too obnoxiously evil even by Clampett standards).

- Patient Porky (1940): as in "The Daffy Doc" (see below), Porky has bad luck in hospitals.

- Prehistoric Porky (1940): Porky, a caveman (cavepig?) is a page right out of history.

- The Bashful Buzzard (1945): First solo cartoon for Beaky Buzzard. Contains my all-time favorite joke about the dangers of infringing Disney copyrights.

- The Old Grey Hare (1944): Bugs and Elmer as babies and old codgers.

- The Wacky Wabbit (1942): Bugs heckles and taunts the fat version of Elmer Fudd. Mike Maltese claimed that lukewarm audience reaction to this short convinced him that audiences didn't want to see Bugs torment someone for no reason, and from that point on Clampett was the only director who used Bugs that way.

- The Wise Quacking Duck (1943): Daffy is pursued by a meek henpecked husband (based on Wallace Wimple from "Fibber McGee and Molly").

- Wagon Heels (1945): Porky leads a wagon train into hostile territory.

- The Daffy Doc (1938): Daffy is the world's most evil surgeon. Features the famous "iron lung" gag, and it may be the only cartoon where Mel Blanc post-synched the dialogue Popeye-style (Daffy's words almost never match his lip movements in this one).

- A Tale of Two Kitties (1942): First Tweety cartoon.

- Porky's Pooch (1941): Porky is pestered by an obnoxious dog looking for a master. The inspiration for Chuck Jones's Charlie Dog series (the first Charlie cartoon is a remake of this one).

Disc 4 (The Early Daze [Black and White cartoons])

- Alpine Antics (Jack King, 1936): Beans enters a skiing contest.

- Eatin' On The Cuff (Clampett, 1942): The story of a moth, about to be married to a bee, who is tempted by a sexy black widow spider.

- Milk and Money (Avery, 1936): the early Porky Pig becomes a milkman with one of those horse-drawn milk carts.

- I’ve Got To Sing A Torch Song (1933): Gags about radio.

- Porky At The Crocadero (Tashlin, 1938): Porky works at a nightclub and wants to be a jazz bandleader.

- Polar Pals (Clampett, 1939): Porky lives up North and meets an evil furrier who wants to kill his animal friends. Joins "Lumber Jerks" and "Wholly Smoke" (see below) among the WB cartoons with a pro-social message.

- Scrap Happy Daffy (Tashlin, 1943): Daffy collects scrap metal and thereby wins World War II.

- Porky’s Double Trouble (Tashlin, 1937): A criminal who looks like Porky tries to use Porky in his evil scheme.

- Gold Diggers Of ‘49 (Avery, 1936): Porky's first cartoon after his debut the previous year, though he's playing second fiddle to Beans in this gold mining story.

- Pilgrim Porky (Clampett, 1940): Porky on the Mayflower.

- Wise Quacks (Clampett, 1939): I think this is the first cartoon to have Daffy and Porky as friends rather than antagonists. Also the first to give Daffy a wife and family.

- Porky’s Preview (Avery, 1941): One of my favorite Avery cartoons, mostly an amateurishly-drawn cartoon by Porky that makes fun of all the things that are hard to animate (like the scene where Porky can't figure out how to make a character dance convincingly, and finally just throws his body around the screen)

- Porky's Poppa (Clampett, 1938): Porky's father, a farmer, automates the farm.

- Wholly Smoke (Tashlin, 1938): A cautionary cartoon about the dangerous freak-outs that ensue when you smoke. Sort of like Reefer Madness with tobacco. Ahead of its time.

- What Price Porky (Clampett, 1938): Porky accidentally starts a battle of ducks vs. chickens.

There Is No Frigate Like a Book

I see that Up the Down Staircase will be coming to DVD on November 6. I recall being disappointed when I first saw this film for a very specific reason: it was not a comedy, and I had always thought of the book as basically a comedy. When I re-read it later I realized that it is basically a story about a young teacher trying to make a difference at a tough school where most of the other teachers have given up trying -- in other words, that the movie is faithful to the book.

But because the book is done in the form of letters (long letters by the heroine and short letters and notes written to her by her colleagues and students), a lot of it is comedy, with the students in particular doing schtick that would have fit in on Welcome Back Kotter. The makers of the movie were two of the most subdued, un-schticky filmmakers around, the team of Robert Mulligan (director) and Alan Pakula (producer) that had done To Kill a Mockingbird, so the tone is very muted and maybe not quite different enough from the average Blackboard Jungle type of movie.

Into the Blue Again

When I was doing all that research on WKRP in Cincinnati music changes a few months ago, one thing I noticed that I hadn't really noticed before was that the show had a pretty good track record of keeping up with changing musical trends. It was only on the air for five years, but you can actually hear how the music they're playing in 1982 is different from what they're playing in 1978, and this despite the fact that a lot of the songs are Golden Oldies. (As the series went on it became sort of a running theme that the disc jockeys didn't really care what the format was supposed to be, and would randomly pick any song in any style from any era.)

Sometimes the writers and the two actors playing the DJs (who picked much of their own music) would pick recent songs that weren't hits at the time, but would become hits later. In the second episode, the most prominently-featured song is -- or used to be -- "Old Time Rock N' Roll" by Bob Seger, a new song that was popular with real-life DJs at the time, but wouldn't really become a standard until Risky Business featured it five years later. And in the "Real Families" episode, which aired on November 15, 1980, you can hear a snippet of Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads, which came out only a month before, and again took a few years to really catch on:



By that point in the series some of the producers were underscoring entire scenes with rock songs, on the assumption that in a radio station the radio would actually be on in some of the rooms. So the most surreal episode, "Hotel Oceanview" (basically an expanded version of a Second City sketch by the same writer), had its final scene underscored with the then-current "soft rock" hit, Christopher Cross's "Sailing."



The sense of period is not one of the most important casualties of all music changes, but still, it's a shame to lose those subliminal indications of what was new in popular music at the time of a particular episode.

Everything's Archie

I just want to call attention to some Archie-comics related articles that I didn't mention when they first appeared:

- This long, sympathetic and entertaining article from Vanity Fair about 65 years of Archie and how it's managed to stay popular for so long.

- Scott Shaw! writes about the issue of "Archie's Mad House" where Sabrina, the Teenage Witch first appeared, and reproduces the first Sabrina story (written by George Gladir and drawn by Dan DeCarlo). You'll notice two things about it. First, that many of the details are lifted from the play and movie Bell, Book and Candle: the idea that witchse can't cry and that they lose their powers if they fall in love (this was abandoned when Sabrina became a regular series). Second, that the original conception of Sabrina was much more sophisticated than it originally became -- like Bell, Book and Candle and many similar witch comedies, it presented witches as a breed apart from ordinary humans, cooler and hipper.

- A blog post from last year about perhaps the best Archie artist, Harry Lucey -- his artwork and poses were much funnier than Dan DeCarlo, and while Samm Schwartz was the funniest of all, Lucey was more versatile.

While Archie comics are anachronistic (heck, they were already anachronistic when they started), there's been a lot of good work done in its pages over the year: Lucey, Bob Bolling, Frank Doyle and Samm Schwartz did consistently funny and entertaining stories, and I'm glad to see that the work they (and others) did is starting to get more attention.

Tipperary

Oh, good. Someone has uploaded the original ending of the Mary Tyler Moore finale. The episode ended with Moore bringing the cast on for a final bow, but this was not only cut in syndication, but on the otherwise uncut VHS tape that MTM distributed a few years ago. They replaced it with a set of "standard" closing credits which can be seen at the end of this upload.

These final episode lovefests can sometimes seem forced, but I think this one really works and feels genuine.

Classical Recordin's

I know Norman Lebrecht says that classical recording is dead but he apparently forgot to tell the producers of some new and upcoming recordings:

- René Jacobs has a new recording of Mozart's Don Giovanni coming out this fall. I will reserve judgment on it until I hear more than the brief excerpts on the website, but his recordings of other Mozart operas have been very good. His approach to Mozart is starting to remind me less and less of other period-instrument conductors and more of conductors like Furtwangler; he's not as slow, obviously, but the tempo shifts and playing with dynamics (jumping from very soft to very loud and back again) are basically "Romantic" conducting mannerisms. As is his willingness to add stuff that isn't in the score if he thinks it'll play better dramatically.

- I agree with Dave Hurwitz's very enthusiastic review of a new orchestral song-cycle CD by mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink and Montreal music director (albeit conducting in Berlin) Kent Nagano. Harmonia Mundi is an interesting record label because while it started as a small specialty label focusing on early music and local (French) artists, it's grown into the last label that operates the way the old "major" labels did: signing certain artists to exclusive contracts, giving them publicity pushes and recording them in a lot of major works. Fink is a good example of that: once a fine singer who made a lot of recordings without ever getting particularly famous, in recent years she's become Harmonia Mundi's star singer, releasing solo recital albums every year.

- Hurwitz also has an entertainingly nasty review of a not-very-good new Haydn recording by his bete noire, conductor Simon Rattle. For better Haydn symphony recordings, I picked up a good new SACD recording of symphonies # 88 & 101 by Adam Ficher; Fischer previously recorded all of Haydn's symphonies for the now-defunct Nimbus label, and now he's recording them again, but in better performances and sound.

The Square Of The Hypotenuse of a Right Triangle Is Equal To the Sum of the Squares of the Two Adjacent Sides

Let lyricist Johnny Mercer show you how to make a song about geometry. From the movie Merry Andrew (which was on TCM last week), starring Danny Kaye and directed by Michael Kidd.

Yogi Bear Is Made of Metal!

A most welcome comment from Tom Minton explaining one of the most obscure in-jokes in that Freakazoid! cartoon:

Mystery Freakazoid moment origin explained: that "Yogi Bear is made of metal" sign is a reference to a question asked by Jean MacCurdy in a Warners writers' meeting in 1996. She asked me if I'd like to develop a show about Yogi and I said "Only if he were made of metal." (a reference to the DC comics slant then taking over much of WB animation - you had to be there.) At any rate, this quick response got a big laugh because everyone knew I meant 'no.' A few weeks later, for reasons known only to them, John McCann and/or Paul Rugg re-interpreted the moment as me writing and holding up that sign in this Freakazoid episode, with absolutely no set-up.

Freakazoid is brimming with such arcane stuff. As the late composer Richard Stone once lovingly described the series, "the inmates took over the asylum." Now this statement will live on the Internet for seventy-five years.

Also Found on the "Popeye" DVD...

Was this trailer for an upcoming release that I don't think has been officially announced yet: "The Smurfs, The Complete First Season."

I know, I know. But I watched it as a kid, and many, many others watched it as kids. Including the creator of the movie Donnie Darko. And I have a feeling this is going to sell better than other shows that were actually good.

Interesting question is why kids love "The Smurfs." I attribute it to that whole "village" concept, the idea that the Smurfs lived in a secret village whose location was a secret to most non-Smurfs. That taps into kids' longing to have a secret place where adults can't find them and where adult rules don't apply; even though Papa Smurf is sort of an authority figure, it really feels like they're all kids and Gargamel is from the adult world. This concept was so successful that other cheesy '80s kids shows tried to do something similar; remember how on the Pac-Man cartoon, Pac-Man had a secret "power forest" that the villains were always trying to find.

What Killed the AABA Form?

I was reading something about songwriting forms, and thinking again about the rise and fall of the A-A-B-A form (A section, repeat of A section, B section in a contrasting key, and a closing version of the A section). In pop songwriting, this form appeared suddenly and disappeared just as suddenly.

Before the '20s, AABA was seldom used; popular songs were mostly either verse/chorus or A-B-A-C (or the A-B-A-C-A form heard in songs like "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Make Believe"). By the end of the '20s, AABA was the default form for popular songwriting, though ABAC was still used sometimes. "Ol' Man River," "Makin' Whoopee" and "The Best Things In Life Are Free" are examples of late '20s AABA standards written by composers who weren't using that form just a few years earlier. I've never been quite sure why AABA took over popular music so suddenly.

And then AABA more or less vanished from mainstream pop music by the early '70s, replaced by verse/chorus and other, earlier forms. I haven't seen a full explanation of the downfall of AABA; I used to think it was because of rock n' roll, but in fact the form was quite common in rock music for quite a while. But people who had used the AABA format a lot, like the ex-Beatles, sort of gave up on it. (There are a lot of Beatles songs that we don't even think of as being AABA that do, in fact, use that form -- like "Here Comes the Sun": the "A" section is the "Little Darlin'" section, and the "B" section is "Sun, Sun, here it comes".)

I'd be interested to see some popular-song expert -- which I am not, especially on more recent pop music -- explain the peaks and valleys of AABA as a songwriting form. One explanation that comes to mind, without knowing much about whether this is true, is that AABA was the perfect songwriting form for the single record release. With the rise of electric recording in the '20s (which allowed for better sound reproduction and made more people start to buy recordings, rather than sheet music, of popular songs), songs needed to be shaped so that they would work well on three-minute records. The AABA form has the perfect shape for a short record: the singer sings the song, the orchestra plays the first 16 bars, and the singer ends with a repeat of the last half of the song. It's a very satisfying format that provided the basis for the hit single for many, many years. With the decline of the single and the rise in the importance of albums -- where songs didn't need to be any particular length or shape -- the point of AABA was less clear and singer/songwriters reverted back to earlier forms.

Fetishism, Book 2

TCM ran Frank Tashlin's The Man From the Diners' Club (1963) the other day. It's not very good. It's a film made by people whose careers were starting to peter out: star Danny Kaye hadn't had a hit in a while, and Tashlin's only hits since 1956 had been Jerry Lewis vehicles (which, because Lewis produced them, weren't entirely Tashlin's movies). The low budget is painfully obvious, and while you can see why William Peter Blatty's script was considered appropriate for Tashlin -- it's got the requisite Tashlin elements of satire of modern conveniences and a gangster sub-plot -- it all feels quite tired. There are some good supporting performances from Telly Savalas and the ever-reliable Ann Morgan Guilbert, but overall it's emblematic of a lot that was wrong with movie comedy in the early '60s.

As always, Tashlin finds moments to indulge the leg fetishism I've written about many times before, like a scene that starts with him panning up Martha Hyer's legs for no particular reason. One thing I haven't addressed, though, is whether Tashlin's attitude to women is a weakness in his work. It's not that he's a sexist; he mocks women, but no more than he mocks men. But the women in his movies are usually -- I guess the only word for it is "objectified." And when a director is always calling attention to how female characters look, it's difficult for those characters to really come alive. The exceptions are the sympathetic middle-aged women who appear in several of his films (Glenda Farrell in Susan Slept Here and The Disorderly Orderly, Joan Blondell in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), and maybe Shirley MacLaine in Artists and Models, because she's one of the few young women in a Tashlin film who's allowed to get as silly as the men. (The insight that comedy is best when the leads can make fools of themselves is something that most of the great comedy directors -- Lubitsch, McCarey, Hawks -- understood, but Tashlin usually seems to throw the lion's share of the silliness to the male lead and let the female lead play it straight.) Tashlin's attitude to young, attractive female characters -- a combination of mockery and worshipful distance -- reminds me a bit of Al Capp, which is yet another reason why it's too bad that Tashlin didn't direct Li'l Abner.

Anyway, here's another illustration of Tashlin's famous leg obsession (with clips from seven or eight movies set to the title song of The Girl Can't Help It), but apart from whether or not there's anything creepy about this -- I tend to think it's a lot less creepy than, say, Alfred Hitchcock's famous sadism toward his leading ladies -- it may be an explanation for why a lot of these female characters are less than completely successful.

(The reason for putting this together, by the way, is just that I've been trying to research something else about Tashlin recently, in the process re-watching a lot of his movies, and while doing so I just put together little compilations that highlight patterns in the movies I watch. I may try to do one next on Tashlin's repeated use of sentimental lost-love sob stories, which occur in movie after movie and are always half-ironic, half-genuine.)

Superman vs. Popeye

In honor of the excellent new Popeye the Sailor DVD set, I propose a grudge match, a Fleischer-off if you will, between the two great superheroes that the studio adapted for the screen.

Who wins a fight between the Fleischer version of Popeye the Sailor Man (hopped up on spinach) and Superman? Will Superman turn out to be just a blue-suited Bluto? Or is the power of Popeye's spinach no match for someone whose voice drops an octave lower when he says "Superman?"

The Dulcet Tones of Walter Denton

Ivan Shreve has a great post about Our Miss Brooks and some crummy public-domain DVDs of the TV series.

Ivan hasn't seen many episodes of the TV version, but I'll go him one better: I haven't seen any episodes of the TV series. It wasn't shown when I was growing up, and for some reason I could never find a copy of any episodes (except for the movie version, which kind of ruined everything by getting Miss Brooks together with Mr. Boynton). I have heard several episodes of the radio show, and agree with Ivan that it was one of the best radio sitcoms.

Marx Mystery Solved

This is great. You know the scene in the Marx Brothers' A Night At the Opera where Groucho pretends to speak a foreign language to his brothers (and Allan Jones, in the Zeppo role)? It's often been explained that the sound people took English dialogue and played it backwards to make it sound like an obscure foreign language. But Mark Evanier asked his readers to reverse the reversed dialogue so we could hear what was actually being said. And they did it. There are no hidden messages or obscenities of any kind, alas, but still it's fun to hear.

So here is the original scene as it plays in the movie.

And here's the version that gives us the actual English dialogue:

Freakazoid At Comic-Con International

In honor of the start of this year's San Diego Comic-Con International, here's a four-minute Freakazoid cartoon called "Freak-a-Panel." It was made after the producers were on a Kids' WB panel at the 1996 Comic-Con.

At this point -- near the end of the series -- the show had gotten even more inside than usual, so here's a brief explanation of some of the references:

- The guy holding up the cryptic "Yogi Bear" message is writer Tom Minton ("Toby Danger"). The caricature makes him look like Tweety because he was producing "The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries" at the time.
- The guy representing "Superman" is Paul Dini. "Superman" was just about to premiere on the WB in 1996, so the audience was mostly asking questions about that show.
- "Hilary Bader," the writer of the Klingon book, was a writer for "Superman" and other Kids' WB series (she passed away in 2002).
- The line about Freakazoid! being popular in "state institutions" was something the writers put in when they learned that their show was particularly popular in prisons.
- The characters who show up at the end are all supporting characters from the first season who weren't used regularly in the second and final season.

The Influence of Cartoons Can Be Found Everywhere

Case in point: listen to what the Yankees' famously obnoxious Bleacher Creatures are chanting:



I'm not sure what's the point of this "Wackiki Wabbit" wefewence, and I don't think I'm going to find out, because I have a limited appetite for research into the motivations of drunk Yankee fans.

The Broad Way

Will Finn, forgetting that I am always right about everything, takes issue with my post about the Li'l Abner movie:

Boy oh boy do i have to disagree... i love/hate this old movie for all its intense corniness and it is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. i have seen it more times than i could count... i have a fascination with Al Capp that is filled with simultaneous revulsion. i can't exactly explain it but the cheap, flat-footedness of the movie captures it for me. I almost wouldn't want to see it look better, (which I'm sure it could have).

As for the soundtracks, i can't vouch for the orchestration, (i don't have a great ear for that sort of thing) but i have to prefer the vocalizations of Imogene Lynne (overdubbing the gorgeous Leslie Parrish) as "Daisy Mae" way way WAY over the horrible hoarse croaking of Edie Adams in the Broadway one. Given that the rest of the main characters (with the execption of "Mammy Yokum") are right off the stage version, i don't see what much difference it makes. i wish like crazy there was a CD of the movie--"I'm Past My Prime" is wonderful. Compare those two tracks back to back and get back to me.

Will is right that Edie Adams was disappointing on the original Broadway album. She was actually a terrific singer, better than she usually got to show in her Broadway and TV appearances -- Leonard Bernstein wrote a coloratura part for her in Wonderful Town that she tossed off effortlessly, but which everyone else who has played the part of Eileen has pretty much crashed and burned on. But by her own admission she didn't like the part of Daisy Mae as written in the show (it's not much of a part, she was right about that) and she isn't in good voice on the cast album.

Which brings up a sticky point about Broadway cast recordings in general: a lot of them have the singers in poor or tired voice. This is because of the way they were recorded. Because of a combination of two factors, union rates and the need to get the album out as quickly as possible, most Broadway cast albums are recorded in one marathon session on the first Sunday after the opening. The producer can and does try his best to schedule the recording in such a way as to make sure that each performer gets some rest between numbers (and the overture is usually recorded last, after the singers have gone home). But you've got performers who've been rehearsing for a long time, have just gotten through the difficulty of opening the show, and will soon go back and do more stage performances. And you're asking them to record, for posterity (tm), all their musical numbers from the show in one day. It's a wonder that these albums don't sound worse than they do.

Now, here's the thing: I like the way Broadway albums sound. And I think a lot of Broadway buffs do too. Yes, the performers sometimes sound hoarse. Yes, there are mistakes that the producer doesn't have time to correct. (On the Li'l Abner album, in "Put 'Em Back," you can hear one of the girls start to sing at the wrong time; it was left in because there wasn't time for a re-take.) Yes, the style of these albums is relentlessly loud, brash and driving. But all that kind of describes a Broadway show as well. And there's something exhilarating in the intensity that performers bring to a cast recording, when they don't really know for sure if the show will last and they've spent an immense amount of time and energy getting it to this point. That's why the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, recorded a week after the premiere when it was only just starting to sink in that they were a smash hit, has a vitality that was never replicated on any other recording.

Broadway cast recordings are raw and kind of desperate; they contradict the stereotype of Broadway musicals as over-polished, over-careful. And by comparison, movie soundtrack albums just seem too slick. This is also why I prefer the rougher orchestrations of Broadway shows to the lush big-orchestra sound that most of these movies (not Li'l Abner) were treated to in the movies. Rodgers and Hammerstein just sound less syrupy with canny use of a relatively small orchestra, than with Alfred Newman's over-use of a huge orchestra.

Hoppy Hoppy Grasshopper!

Does anyone know who did the voices of the two crows in Friz Freleng's "Two Crows From Tacos" (1956)? Manuel, the dumber crow, is the same guy who does a lot of voices in Speedy Gonzales cartoons (he's the guy who says "I think I kill myself, hold my sombrero, amigo" in "Here Today, Gone Tamale"), and José sounds a bit like he could be Mel Blanc but apparently isn't.


Online Videos by Veoh.com

This is an odd cartoon, because it feels exactly like a Speedy Gonzales cartoon (the crows even have the same names as the cats in "Mexicali Schmoes" three years later), but isn't, even though Freleng had already launched the Speedy series. It's also the only time Freleng worked with writer Tedd Pierce after dumping Pierce from his unit in 1950 (replacing him with Warren Foster). There are some really nice sequences, though, like the screaming, whooping interlude in the middle of the lazy opening segment, or Art Davis's animation of the two crows trying to whack the grasshopper.

Twentieth Century Fox News

Fox has set up a website for its classic film DVD releases, "Fox Studio Classics" at foxclassics.com.

Warners and Fox are the only big studios releasing old movies with any consistency. Fox has by far the better special features -- commentaries on most films, and featurettes that often manage to avoid the boredom of the standard making-ofs. (The featurettes on the Tyrone Power Collection are mostly about aspects of Power and his career, rather than just straightforward accounts of how each film was made.) Warner Brothers has gotten into the habit of using found material like cartoons and shorts as a substitute for newly-produced special features. On the other hand, Fox's transfers are variable -- often very disappointing with three-strip Technicolor films, somewhat better with black-and-white CinemaScope films. Both studios could do better but they're both doing a lot better than the other companies.

The list of upcoming releases this year confirms the plans for the John Ford box and a fourth Charlie Chan collection, and features some interesting never-on-video titles like the June Haver musical The Girl Next Door and Nunnally Johnson's early-CinemaScope melodrama Black Widow.

Hopefully they'll continue releasing old movies long enough to remember Cluny Brown, Margie or Bachelor Flat.

Mi Chiamo Mork

Did you know that a) The Italian broadcasts of Mork and Mindy had a different theme song from the original, and b) The Italian theme song was a lot better than the original one?

Judge for yourself:



And this site has some of the lyrics:

Na-no na-no
Ora che mi sei amico
non stupirti se ti dico
che io parlo con le piante,
millepiedi e l'elefante
Perché vengo da lontano

How Toyetic Can You Get?

In the middle of summer blockbuster season, we should always keep in mind the real purpose of any movie with a cool car or robot in it, as summed up by the first show to use the term on national TV:



Not included here is the ending of the episode, where Freakazoid is seen collecting kickbacks from the marketing department for helping to launch the "Freakmobile Toy Line." (Ironically, Freakazoid!, which was originally pitched as a more "toyetic" property than the other Warner/Spielberg shows -- the idea being that there would be cars, gadgets and other things that the funny-animal cartoons didn't have -- never spun off a single piece of actual merchandise, and spent large amounts of time bashing merchandising and product placement.)

Still Censored

I haven't seen this mentioned outside of message boards, but while the list of cartoons for Looney Tunes Collection Vol. 5 hasn't been released yet, it appears that "Coal Black" and other Censored 11 cartoons will not be included on this set.

Will "Coal Black" ever be released? I wish I could be confident of that. Remember, Turner wouldn't release it (or "Tin Pan Alley Cats" or the rest) when they were doing the Looney Tunes laserdisc sets, back before the Turner-WB merger. And Turner, which didn't own the characters, had less incentive to be protective of them than WB, which has transformed not only the characters but the whole "Looney Tunes" brand into a corporate symbol. The much-derided presence of Whoopi Goldberg on Vol. 3 -- which had hardly any cartoons with racial gags anyway -- was part of the fear that one little mis-step with the DVD sets could hurt an already fragile franchise.

I'm not sure how to get around that, because in all honesty, if "Coal Black" were released and a controversy erupted, that probably would be bad for the marketing/franchising of WB cartoons. I don't think the controversy over "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" did Turner any favors back in the '90s (Turner released it on a laserdisc but then, foolishly, released it on a mass-market VHS as well, and people who bought this thing for their kids were understandably outraged). To get a release, someone would probably have to convince WB executives that there won't be any controversy, and I'm not sure that anyone can guarantee that. "Coal Black" is a great cartoon, but I've seen the reactions to it of people who are not cartoon buffs, and it does make many people very uncomfortable and, yes, even angry.

I'm not defending WB"s corporate policy here. (And as for the WB home video department, they do some great work and release some great films, but they also spend too parsimoniously on special features for classic films, and they've got some quality control issues they still haven't completely resolved.) There's a right decision, and a wrong decision, and the right decision would be to release the cartoon. But the wrong decision -- not to release it -- is based on some legitimate concerns. Still wrong, though.

Best Animation Team Ever

Here's a pointless parlour game for animation fans: what's your choice as the best team of animators ever assembled for a short cartoon?

This is distinct from the question of what cartoon had the best animation (though it overlaps, of course; you wouldn't pick a cartoon with four once-great animators past their best). The question is more akin to those baseball questions about what was the greates infield of all time; what cartoon assembled the best group of "players" at the peak of their skills?

Mine is a very conventional choice, but I think it's hard to beat the team assembled for Bob Clampett's Looney Tunes short "Book Revue." The credited animators were Robert McKimson, Rod Scribner, Manny Gould and Bill Melendez. That's four truly great and unique animators, each one in his prime. Also if you want to take into account the overall career achievements of the animators (sort of like taking into account the "career value" of infielders), two of the four went on to important careers as directors, McKimson and Melendez.

Oddly enough, though all four of those guys were associated with the Clampett unit, this is one of the few cartoons (perhaps the only one?) where all four of them worked together, because McKimson was promoted to director almost immediately after Melendez re-joined Warner Brothers, and when Melendez was working for WB earlier, Gould wasn't there yet.

Other choices?

Brain 2008

Going through some old tapes, I found this promo that aired on Kids' WB (sorry: Kids' WB!!!!) in 1996. But I think it's time to haul this one out of storage and re-use it in 2008. I think that's Jeff Bennett doing the voice-over.

Miss Vicki Gaye

I watched Nicholas Ray's Party Girl the other day, a 1958 MGM production that in its own bizarre way sums up the state of the Hollywood studio system in 1958. It was made, the legend goes, to burn off contracts: Robert Taylor was no longer a bankable star and Cyd Charisse wasn't needed at the studio now that it was scaling back on musicals. The producer, Joe Pasternak, had made a lot of money producing family-friendly musicals, and with the collapse of that type of film, he was looking for a way to stay viable. And Ray was probably doing this film for the money, as he frequently did: he was (writer Philip Yordan once said) "always broke" and accepted some strange projects when he needed work.

The result is a truly weird mish-mosh of a movie: it's a glossy CinemaScope color movie, but it has a noir-ish plot about gangsters, but it also has glamorous musical numbers for Charisse, but it also has a lot of brutal violence, but it's also a soapy romance complete with an operation that miraculously cures the hero. Yes, it's a noir musical comedy drama gangster romance. Oh, and it's set in the early '30s but the musical numbers and many of the costumes make no attempt to even suggest the period.

The dialogue by Oscar-winning MGM veteran George Wells is often quite good, and the movie looks pretty good because it has all the MGM studio machinery behind it. But the plot doesn't make much sense, the characters' motivations are... uh... erratic. It's really basically a B-movie run through the A-picture machinery by a studio that no longer knew what to do for an A-picture.

Auteurist critics loved this film, or used to, because Ray was one of their heroes and they saw this as one of his ultimate triumphs of his incredible sense of style over the substance of a bad script. But that's unfair to the script (which, as I said, is not bad considering the inherent flaws in the story) and too nice to Ray, who doesn't seem to have been very concerned with making the picture make any kind of sense. He doesn't give the actors a lot of help, either: Robert Taylor is really good -- he was often underrated, I think, but as the embittered mob lawyer he almost makes you forget he was ever a matinee idol -- but Cyd Charisse is left to fend for herself, and her line readings are even more wooden than they usually were.

However, Charisse did get one thing out of the film: a chance to cut loose in her musical numbers in a way that she rarely could in actual musicals. By 1958, censorship restrictions were becoming looser, and unlike musicals, this was not a film aimed at a family audience; that allowed her and Ray to make the two dance numbers unusually suggestive. Or more specifically, Charisse and the choreographer get suggestive while Ray goes wild with color, light, and tricks with the CinemaScope screen (like filling the entire frame with Charisse's billowing dress).

We're Staying Home Tonight

I wrote about this song before, but here's Eddie Cantor from Thank Your Lucky Stars singing a really brilliant pastiche song by Arthur Schwartz (music) and Frank Loesser (lyrics). Brilliant because it sounds very much like the kind of song Cantor sang in his '20s and '30s prime, both in the melody and its cutely suggestive lyrics, and yet it's updated to the '40s both melodically (Schwartz's melody is trickier than, say, "If You Knew Susie" or "Makin' Whoopee") and lyrically (Loesser's references are all to the '40s homefront situation). And of course it's a great example of Cantor's willingness to portray himself as a complete asshole, something that's now common but was unusual then.

Jubilation, She Loves Me Again

I've always considered the movie version of Li'l Abner -- read Mark Evanier's great piece on it, part of a series on the Li'l Abner musical -- to be a disappointment, in spite of the great cast (which was almost identical to the stage show). The decision to treat it as a filmed stage play, with the same basic sets and stage business as the play, just makes the material feel less interesting than it could be; I don't think a stage play needs to be "opened up" for its own sake, but even when shooting on an interior set, there are ways of making the result feel cinematic. I'm pretty sure that if Michael Kidd had been available to direct the film (he pulled out of the project and his Broadway staging was re-created by others), he would have re-thought his staging and not have had everyone standing around statically.

My other problem with the movie is the musical arrangement; Paramount had a good music department, but in this case it sounds like the music was done on the cheap. To see what I mean, compare the "Jubilation T. Cornpone" number from the movie with the same song from the Broadway recording (dubbed over footage from the movie). Broadway shows usually have smallish orchestras and choruses, even when augmented for the cast recordings, but the chorus and orchestra on the Broadway recording still sound much larger and fuller than in the movie version.

Movie version:



Broadway cast recording:

Lane 2

Here are two more random Charles Lane scenes.

1. Lane, in his 30s and (as always) looking much older, appears at the end of The Big Store with the Marx Brothers, doing what Charles Lane does best: foreclosing and frowning.



2. Lane, now in his '70s, makes his first of several appearances on Soap as the judge in Jessica Tate's murder trial.

Lane

I knew it had to happen someday, theoretically, but the death of Charles Lane at age 102 still surprised me.

Mark Evanier, a big Lane fan, collects links to his previous Charles Lane posts.

And here again is one of my favorite Charles Lane moments, one of the few times he ever got to play a good guy: in Gregory La Cava's 1940 film Primrose Path, when Ginger Rogers is forced into prostitution, Lane is her first client -- and he helps reunite her with her estranged husband Joel McCrea.

Huxtable Family vs. Banks Family

A Grudge Match (tm) between two superstar sitcom families:

The Huxtables (The Cosby Show) vs. The Banks Family (Fresh Prince of Bel Air).

Will and Geoffrey, of course, count as members of the Banks family, so that's two teams of seven: for the Huxtables, Cliff, Clair and the five kids; for the Bankses, Uncle Phil, Vivian, Will, Geoffrey, Carlton, Hilary and that youngest girl whose name nobody remembers.

Will Cliff perform some malpractice on the Bel Air clan? Or will Carlton find that it's not unusual to dance on the Huxtables' graves?

My comments: This is a tough one to call, because both teams have different combinations of strengths and weaknesses. The Bankses have Uncle Phil, who could probably sit on several Huxtables, and Geoffrey, a former Olympic athlete. But the kids are huge weak links, not just Carlton and Hilary, but Will, the wimpiest guy in West Philadelphia (he got in one little fight and had to be bailed out by his mommy). The Huxtables have fewer obvious super-fighters except Clair, who is so evil that she could destroy an opponent merely by saying "Let the Record Show...", but they don't have any obvious weaknesses either. So I give it to the Huxtables, but with heavy casualties.

Now That's What I Call Improv

It's way too late to be responding to the Onion A.V. Club's article "Is Improvisation Ruining Film Comedy?", but what the heck. The discussion, which ran last month, makes some good points about the inclusion of improvised or semi-improvised moments in movie comedy today. But one thing I find interesting about today's improv movie moments is that a lot of them seem to serve the opposite purpose from "traditional" movie improvisation.

As I've emphasized before, improv was very common in movies in the silent era and even into the sound era; there were directors like Leo McCarey and Greg La Cava who simply never got used to the idea that a movie should have a tight, finalized script, and who instead would write up a bunch of scenes and create other scenes from scratch on the set. What they were trying to do, in encouraging actors to improvise, was to create a sense of naturalness that you normally didn't get in the artificial, heightened world of studio movies. The theory -- to the extent that they consciously had a theory -- was that if you create a loose atmosphere and encourage the actors to improvise, you'll wind up with characters who act like actual human beings, rather than actors. (That's probably one of the things Jean Renoir was referring to when he said that McCarey "understands people" better than any other director: because the acting in his movies is so natural and unforced, the people onscreen really do seem like people.)

The improv in your typical Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller movie usually has a different purpose. These are artificial characters in deliberately artificial comedies, and instead of making the acting more natural, the improv serves the purpose of making everything less natural: the actors are riffing on the material to make it crazier, to come up with bits of business that are larger than life.

Of course, part of that may just be the change in acting styles over the years. In Leo McCarey's time, acting was very artificial and non-naturalistic; improv was a useful tool for achieving more naturalism. Today, most actors are trained to have a certain amount of naturalism. Directors may have to encourage the actors to riff and improvise in order to get them to be less naturalistic. (The improv in a movie like Knocked Up does help to increase the naturalism of the scene, but even without it, the actors still wouldn't be talking as fast or gesturing as formally as actors did seventy years ago.)

And, of course, there's plenty of improvisation that doesn't quite fall into clear categories. Like this scene from McCarey's The Bells of St. Mary's, where he gathered together a bunch of kids, told them to do a Nativity play, and filmed the results. The result is a classic example of improvisation in film, but it doesn't fall neatly into my "larger than life" vs. "naturalistic" improvisation categories; it's sort of both at the same time.

A Different Kind of Flying Altogether

More comparisons of scenes from Zero Hour and Airplane!



It's amazing how many of the jokes in Airplane! are so dependent on the original Zero Hour material. With some of the jokes, it almost seems like we'd need to see Zero Hour in order to get why they're funny -- and yet most of us, and millions more, saw and laughed at Airplane! without knowing what movie it was referring to.

DvDetective Work

Over at Golden Age Cartoons, there's a thread about the upcoming Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 5. While the contents won't be officially announced, a poster watched a trailer for the set, and the staggeringly knowledgeable contributors to that site, managed to identify about two dozen of the cartoons we can expect to see on the set (remembering that those promotional trailers are always taken from the cartoons that will be included).

That list is here and suggests that the set will be heavy on fairy-tale cartoons (including the last cartoon produced by the real Warner Brothers cartoon studio, "Senorella and the Glass Huarache") Daffy Duck ("Srap Happy Daffy," "Hollywood Daffy," and some more Bugs-vs.-Daffy cartoons), black-and-white cartoons ("Porky's Preview," which I will be glad to see because it was edited for content when it was included as an extra with a movie) and possibly Bob Clampett ("The Old Grey Hare," "Bacall To Arms").

We will have to wait until later for a full list of cartoons and, with it, the definite knowledge that they left off the one cartoon they absolutely should have included.

You Better Get the Best For Me

A 1960s Scopitone with Julie London singing "Daddy," a 1941 song by her husband Bobby Troup, and a song that might sound familiar to cartoon fans.



And this is where you probably heard the song originally:

Beverly Sills

Beverly Sills has died of cancer at age 78.

Sills became probably the most famous American opera singer since Maria Callas. She was the American answer to the British Empire's Joan Sutherland (who sang most of the same repertoire). Her career followed a similar trajectory to Sutherland's too. Sutherland was singing leading roles at Covent Garden for years without actually becoming a star; she was the sort of person who got to be Aida or Violetta on nights when the company couldn't sign someone more famous, before she became an international star overnight in a Covent Garden production of Lucia Di Lammermoor. Sills was a bit better known for her work at the New York City Opera -- she got to record the title role in Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe -- but she didn't become a big star until the 1966 production of Handel's Giulio Cesare.

RCA made a recording based on that production, which is worth hearing for Sills and the fun of hearing all the singers perform Handel as just another opera, without the preciousness and carefulness that sometimes infects today's Historically Informed Performances. (The recording is too heavily-cut and unevenly cast to be a first choice for the opera, though.) Conrad L. Osborne's review of the recording is available online, and I can do no better than to quote from his review of Sills's work:

For most of us who attended the production Beverly Sills’s Cleopatra meant a “discovery” almost as startling as that of Joan Sutherland’s Lucia nearly nine years ago. Through the past decade, this singer had shown herself an excellent artist in a variety of roles, and in such diverse assignments as Philine and Baby Doe had hinted at the qualities finally displayed in her Cleopatra. Still. I don’t think any of us quite expected the classic exhibition of vocal control, agility, freedom, and command she gave us that evening (and on other occasions since). The singing was reinforced with splendid stylistic instinct, grace of movement, and communicative feminine warmth which would almost have been enough by itself-the effect was one of sheer magic. Cleopatra has five major arias, and five times in the course of the evening everything in the theatre was suspended on a fragile (but strong) thread of floating, silvery tone, on the proverbial string of pearls that every singer wants to make of a run, and the most gorgeous of all trills. It was a feast for sore ears, and brought with it the recognition that if the prevailing standard in Handel’s day was something like this, the willingness of audiences to sit and listen to entire evenings of arias festooned with inventions is entirely understandable-a sensuous indulgence of an almost shameful order.

The recording. happily, has found Miss Sills in excellent form, and has captured a healthy portion of the purely vocal side of the magic. It is the last three arias that really take the breath away; the first two are very fine, but there are traces of unsettlement when she sustains tones around the top of the staff. and there are other “Piangeròs” on records that offer healthy competition. But “V’adoro, pupille” is a really melting piece of vocal seduction; “Se pieta,” with its beautiful flights of trills, high suspensions, and beautifully floated harmonic turns is heartachingly lovely; and the “Da tempeste” simply takes off into the ionosphere. A measure of this singing is that Miss Sills trills a hundred times if she trills once, and one never tires of the lovely, truly birdlike sound.

Writing Credits

Speaking of Susan Slept Here, I think this scene does a nice job of summing up the world of screenwriting, even 50+ years later:

And I Can't Think Why

For some ridiculous reason (to which, however, I've no desire to be disloyal), this is one of those times when I'm somehow reminded of a 1879 poem by W.S. Gilbert, "The Policeman's Story". (This was supposed to be part of a new series of "Bab Ballads," which was called off because Gilbert was too busy with his other projects and because his new poems were more bitter than funny.)

Some time ago I met a Duke as tipsy as could be;
And when I urged him home to go, he rounded onto me;
He hit me in the eye, which caused considerable pain;
He knocked me down, and picked me up, and knocked me down again.
  So I took him into custody, and knew no fear;
  For there's but one law for the peasant and the peer.

The magistrate he says, "To such assaults I do assign
A month's imprisonment, without the option of a fine.
A man of education too! What is his name, I pray?"
And I says, "So please your worship, it's the noble DUKE OF A."
  And I didn't care a rap; for it seems quite clear
  That there's but one law for the peasant and the peer.

The worthy beak he hummed and hawed, and looked extremely blank,
And said, "I didn't know you were a gentleman of rank.
To see you standing in the dock gives me a moral wrench;
Pray take your seat with me upon the magisterial bench.
  You'll see more plainly, if you'll step up here,
  That there's but one law for the peasant and the peer."

My evidence I gave in my uneducated way.
The beak remarks, "Your grace has heard this poor policeman's say;
I needn't say how kind 'twould be, if you should think it right,
On his Boeotian words to throw a little ducal light.
  You'll pardon me, I'm sure; when I sit up here,
  I've but one law for the peasant and the peer."

The Duke he up and says, says he, "I haven't any doubt
I most unmercifully banged that officer about.
I had been dining very free on port and sherry-wine,
And richly I deserve to suffer in a heavy fine;
  And I beg to say I rejoice to hear
  That there's but one law for the peasant and the peer."

The beak replies, "I'll measure even justice to your grace.
I hold the magistrate who would deal hardly with a case
Because the prisoner's a Duke would not be worth his salt.
That you're the DUKE OF A. is your misfortune-not your fault.
  And I don't see why I should be severe
  Because you're not a peasant, but a first-class peer.

"Your grace's noble conduct in consenting to a fine
Reflects the brightest lustre on your proud ancestral line.
The two assaults at less than half-a-crown I cannot fix;
The summons is two shillings; and the total's one and six.
  And I trust your grace won't think it dear;
  There's but one law for the peasant and the peer."

And the Duke did wed the daughter of that beak; a girl of charms.
And, on the strength of it, the beak did buy a coat-of-arms;
And as he had to choose a crest, the whole affair to clench,
It was a Flunkey Rampant on a Magisterial Bench,
  With the pregnant motto, on a scroll, "Up here
  There is but one law for the peasant and the peer."

Woody Woodpecker: An "Andy Panda" Spinoff?

Sean Gaffney has the titles and descriptions of all 75 cartoons in the upcoming Woody Woodpecker set.

Woody was introduced in an Andy Panda cartoon, hence the subject heading. He's hardly the only popular cartoon character to start out in someone else's cartoon. Popeye's debut cartoon, "Popeye the Sailor," is sort of an early version of a stealth spinoff pilot -- since it launched the character in a Betty Boop cartoon. Daffy Duck, of course, made his debut in a Porky Pig cartoon.

What other theatrical cartoon characters (as opposed to TV cartoons like Yogi Bear) made their debuts with established series cartoon stars?

AYPWIP?

A handy compilation of most of the Pinky and the Brain "Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?" responses. (There are probably a few missing, but not many.) And if you don't like Pinky and the Brain you can always listen to the music (a Rossini overture).

Update: Corrected with a version that doesn't have the music drowning out the dialogue.

Don't Be a Fool, Stryker!

After writing my post on Zero Hour and Airplane!, I found this transcript of Zero Hour that highlights the lines that were re-used in Airplane!. Example:

TRELEAVEN: All right, Harry, let's face a few facts.  As you know, I flew with this man Stryker during the war.  What you don't know is, that doesn't make my job any easier here tonight.  Frankly, I think you'd be a lot better off if you got somebody else who doesn't know him at all.

BURDICK: I don't think that has anything to do with it.

TRELEAVEN: It has everything to do with it.  In the first place, I think it's a mistake if he knows that I'm the man who's talkin' 'im in.  He'll have a million things on his mind without being reminded of those days when ... well, when things weren't so good.

BURDICK: Right now, things aren't so good.  And while we're talking, there are 38 lives waiting on us for a decision.

TRELEAVEN: Let me tell you something.  Ted Stryker was a crack flight leader up to a point, but he was one of those men who ... well, let's just say he felt too much inside.  Maybe you know the kind.  Ate his heart out over every name on the casualty list.

BURDICK: Well, what's wrong with that?

TRELEAVEN: I'll tell you what's the matter with that.  He went all to pieces on one particular mission.  I've never felt there was the slightest excuse for it.  The upshot of it all was that ... everything turned sour ... he left some mighty fine men behind him.  Now I may be wrong, I hope I am, but my feeling is that when the going gets really rough upstairs tonight, Ted Stryker's gonna fold up.  That's all I can tell you.

BURDICK: Look, Martin, I want you to get on the horn and talk this guy down, no matter what you think.  Now you're gonna have to let him get the feel of this airplane on the way.  You'll have to give him a landing check.  You'll have to talk him onto the approach.  And so help me, you'll have to talk him right down to the ground.

TRELEAVEN: All right, Burdick, I just want you to know what we have to contend with.  ... Very well, it's settled.  Who's got the cigarettes?

JOHNNY: Here. ... Matches?

TRELEAVEN: Yeah.  Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smokin'. [lights up]

Hawks and Hawkins

The new DVD of Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs looks all right, though it certainly could look better (the process shots in particular show their age). Peter Bogdanovich's commentary, with interview excerpts of Hawks, is surprisingly good: he doesn't like the film much, and that seems to make him more inclined to say interesting things and less inclined to name-drop.

Hawks didn't like the film either, though a lot of that may simply have been due to the fact that it failed at the box-office. (I don't think Hawks believed in the concept of a worthy failure: if the public rejected a movie, that was his cue to figure out what was wrong with it, not to defend it.) The Hawks cult that developed in the '60s also didn't spend much time on this movie, even though it's really quite a bit better than some of the later Hawks movies that the auteurists defended. It is coming in for a bit of a re-evaluation lately, as you can see in this positive review from DVD Savant, and I think people who see it in the "Cult Camp Classics" collection will be surprised at how un-campy it is.

I like Land of the Pharaohs a lot, and had a good time watching it last night. It isn't one of Hawks's best movies, of course. The plot structure is very confused, with plot points drifting into and out of the movie almost at random. While the dialogue is better than a lot of these '50s sand epics, Hawks and the writers (including William Faulkner) felt compelled to respect the convention of having slightly flowery, stilted dialogue -- which meant that Hawks couldn't let the actors improvise lines of dialogue on the set. (Though there are some bits of dialogue that sound very natural: people mock Joan Collins' cries of "I don't wanna die!", but that's exactly what you would expect a person to say in that particular situation.) And as Hawks pointed out, the main character (Jack Hawkins) is such a selfish jerk that we have no one to root for in the film.

But there are a lot of really strong scenes. Almost everything involving the building of the pyramid, and the engineering technique for sealing it (which when we see it in action, is almost like a serious take on a Rube Goldberg device), is excellent. The sets by Alexander Trauner are very imaginative, not gaudy or trashy like the sets in most films of this type. The murder scene with the cobra and the flute, while a bit implausible, is very suspenseful, and it's a great Hawks touch to play the mother's sacrifice matter-of-factly, without sentimentality or pathos. Joan Collins is in a different, campier movie from everyone else -- and, being a Hawks leading lady, is contractually required to speak about an octave lower than she normally does -- but she's a lot of fun, and because she's so evil she's almost more likeable than Hawkins (who does equally horrible things but thinks he's the good guy).

All his career, Hawks had tried to make movies that copied whatever kind of picture was popular at the time, but put his own spin on them. If Casablanca was a hit with its combination of wartime propaganda and romance, Hawks would make To Have and Have Not, a combination of wartime propaganda and romance. After The Robe came out, it was only natural that he would try to put his own stamp on the vogue for widescreen epics. He did this, as usual, by borrowing heavily from his previous work: as co-writer William Faulkner was the first to point out, Hawks just wanted to do Red River again, with the building of the pyramid replacing the cattle drive.

But the thing that really makes Land of the Pharaohs different is that whereas all these other ancient-world epics were religious, or at least metaphysical and philosophical, this is a movie about practical issues: how do you build something, how do you solve an engineering puzzle, how does an architect (whose job is very much like a film director's in this context) continue to supervise the work when his eyesight is failing? Though the Pharaoh is sort of religious in that his whole enterprise is based on a belief in life after death, the enslaved people led by James Robertson Justice don't seem to have any religion (Justice says only that he doesn't believe in life after death). And the conclusion the movie comes to is that what survives us is not our reputation, nor our wealth, but our work: if we work hard and create something really good, then that will be what keeps us alive after death. It's a theme that's so obviously related to the movies -- after all, what's keeping Hawks alive now is his work, the stuff he "built" -- that I'm amazed the auteur critics preferred to focus on a less interesting Hawks movie like Hatari! instead of this one.

It's also the last movie where Hawks really tried something different: all the movies he made after Pharaohs were in genres he'd tried before, and borrowed heavily from his earlier movies. Even if Pharaohs doesn't completely work, and it doesn't, it still is enjoyable to see Hawks doing a type of film he'd never done before -- and going much darker than he would ever go again. (I suspect that the negative reaction to this film was one of the things that put Hawks off ever making another movie that wasn't basically light-hearted, hence his unfortunate decision to rewrite Leigh Brackett's dark, tragic first draft of El Dorado into a Rio Bravo rehash.)

Oh, and one more thing: people often talk about Hawks's tendency to try and turn pretty young actresses into stars instead of casting his films with experienced leading ladies (unlike many people who tried this, he usually made good choices, as he did with Collins in this film). But he also tried to do this with young, inexperienced male actors too, and his biggest push for stardom was clearly with Dewey Martin. He cast Martin in three movies: The Thing, The Big Sky (why isn't that on DVD yet) and this one. It didn't work out, obviously.

Act 1: You Really Know How To Hurt a Guy, Don't You?

Good news: after its superb work on the Get Smart set, Time-Life has announced that it's doing another complete series set for a '60s spy show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. Who would have thought that Time-Life would be on its way to becoming classic TV's answer to the Criterion Collection?

(Subject heading comes from the Mad magazine parody of the show, "The Man From A.U.N.T.I.E," which made fun of the practice of giving each act its own title.)

O Mio Direttorino Caro

The announcement that Woody Allen will be directing a production of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi (William Friedkin will direct the other two one-act operas that make up Puccini's trilogy Il Trittico) seems to me to make a lot of sense. Placido Domingo's attempts to get big-name movie directors at the L.A. Opera has been dismissed as a publicity stunt, and sometimes it's just a bad idea (see Marshall, Garry). But generally I'd rather see a good movie director's take on a classic opera than many of the people who direct operas on a regular basis.

A movie director, even one without opera experience, knows how to do two things: co-ordinate a big production with a lot of elements to it (even a low-budget production like most of Woody Allen's movies is "bigger" than the average stage play), and how to fit action to music. When you cut action to pre-recorded music, as Allen does in both his good and bad movies, that's training for opera, where the director has to understand how to stage action that goes with the music instead of fighting against it.

There have been many major movie directors who also directed a lot of opera -- Visconti, most famously, also Tarkovsky, Bergman -- but not so many U.S. directors. Or at least it seems that way offhand. John Ford once told a story that the Metropolitan Opera asked him to direct a production of Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West. He turned them down, he said, because he thought Girl of the Golden West was "a lousy opera," but he told the management that if they wanted him for another opera, like La Boheme, he was available. He never heard back from them, he said; they were willing to let a director of Hollywood Westerns loose on Girl of the Golden West, but nothing else. Of course, as with many stories told by Ford and other Hollywood directors, it's an open question as to how much of that is true (it certainly sounds plausible, though).

Crazy Woody

Watching the preview of the Woody Woodpecker DVD set at WoodyWoodpecker.com, it occurred to me that the early, crazy Woody -- the one with the long beak, red chest and absolute pride in his own insanity -- always seems strange to me. The early, crazy Woody cartoons are the best, I know that. But because I grew up mostly watching the later Woody Woodpecker, with his more streamlined design and toned-down personality, that is established in my mind as the definitive version of the character. Not the best version, but just the one that comes to mind whenever I think of him.

I think that with any cartoon character who went through multiple designs or developments, we tend to think of one version as the definitive version, even if that's not the one we like best. With Daffy Duck, for example, I prefer the '40s Daffy, but the greedy, nasty late '50s and '60s Daffy is the one who still feels the most "real" to me because that's the characterization I saw most often when I was a kid. Someone who grew up watching Daffy cartoons in the '40s would probably think of that as the "real" Daffy. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are people who instinctively think of Daffy as the character who chased Speedy Gonzales; no matter how good or bad the cartoons are, they create an image of the character for people who watch them as children.

The One Where the Dad Has a Beard

Season 2 of Family Ties is on the schedule, but I wouldn't get too excited until we find out which episodes Paramount has cut up for music-related reasons. And when they get to the later seasons, the results will be horrific; I'm not saying "At This Moment" is a great song, but I can't imagine this episode (from season 4) without it:



Something to note about all this music-licensing business is that whether you actually like a particular song has very little to do with whether it works in the context of a show. I've seen some shows where I thought the showrunners must have appalling taste in music, but nonetheless, it's their show, they used the song for its emotional or thematic value, and it's entirely possible for a very good scene to be built around a mediocre song.

Speaking of Failed Pilots

YouTube has the first part of an unsold pilot (burned off on a Failure-Theatre show called "Vacation Playhouse") that I've always been a little curious about: "Three On an Island," a 1965 sitcom pilot with Pamela Tiffin, Julie Newmar and Monica Moran (Thelma Ritter's daughter). It was produced and directed by the veteran director Vincent Sherman, of all those Warner Brothers movies of the '40s.

With that cast and director, I wondered how it could have failed to sell. Now I know, and it's what you would expect: the script, Hal Kanter, isn't very good. From the section excerpted here, it comes off as a slightly more modern-feeling variation on How To Marry A Millionaire or Tiffin's just-completed The Pleasure Seekers, the only difference being that the three girls appear to have some other interest than just landing a husband. It also seems like if it had been picked up as a series, it would have been the Charlie's Angels of its time. The first few minutes are just Tiffin and Newmar stretching a lot, and it's proof that this is, in fact, not enough to make a show entertaining.

Moran, who I suppose would have been the Kate Jackson of the series, didn't do much after this pilot failed (I think she understudied some parts on Broadway). She comes off as a younger, cuter version of her mother. Tiffin could be a terrific comedienne when given the chance (see One, Two, Three, where she delivers the best and funniest performance in the movie), but she doesn't have much material to work with here and falls back on looking cute and befuddled. And Newmar is, heretically, the weakest link: she can play robots, Catwomen and other cartoon characters, but delivering one-liners was not her thing.

Probably not worth watching all the way through, then, but worth a look if you want to know a) Why this show didn't get picked up, b) What Vincent Sherman was doing by 1965, and c) What Thelma Ritter's daughter looks like.

Sequences That Belong In Another Movie

As part of my neverending quest to find obscure Tashlin movies, I stumbled on a VHS of the 1954 Susan Slept Here at Sam the Record Man's going-out-of-business sale. (Yes, I did feel like a vulture, thank you.) This is the one where writer Dick Powell somehow gets talked into letting juvenile delinquent Debbie Reynolds stay over at his house at Christmas; this leads to misunderstandings, complications, a paper marriage and a Red Skelton cameo appearance.

It's based on a play by RKO writer-producer Alex Gottlieb and Steve Fisher (who was better-known for crime novels like I Wake Up Screaming); Gottlieb is credited with the screenplay, and it feels like Tashlin must have come into the project fairly late, because whereas most Tashlin movies have almost nothing to do with their source material, this is a pretty stagy movie, taking place mostly in Powell's house. You can hear Tashlin's uncredited rewrites in a lot of moments at the margins -- having the film narrated by Powell's Oscar statuette, or some moments for Glenda Farrell that were basically repeated in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

What obviously interested Tashlin about the material was the bad taste aspect of having Powell romance a girl less than half his age, and who (in the story) is under the age of consent; instead of trying to make it more palatable as any other filmmaker would do, he goes out of his way to make it even ickier than the writers could possibly have imagined, and mine comedy from our discomfort.

But the strangest part of the movie -- and this finally brings me to what this post was supposed to be about -- is a six-minute sequence about two-thirds of the way through, where Debbie Reynolds has a dream. The scene really has no business being in this movie at all: it's a weird combination of fantasy, dance and psychology. It seems to be at once a parody of pop-psychology dream sequences and, well, a pop-psychology fantasy sequence. (It may also be a spoof of the vogue for fantasy ballets in movies like An American In Paris and plays like Oklahoma!) It is related to the themes of the movie -- Reynolds dreams up appropriate roles for herself, Powell, Anne Francis (as Powell's bitchy fiancee) and the young Alvy "Hank Kimball" Moore (as Powell's buddy). But it seems to belong in another movie altogether, and I have no idea what 1954 audiences must have made of this bizarre interlude in the middle of a stagebound romantic comedy.

So watch the sequence -- apologies for the scratchy print (I imagine that a better print would look really good, since it was photographed in Technicolor by RKO's great cinematographer Nick Musuraca) -- and answer the question for the day: are there any sequences you've seen that simply seem to be out of whack with the rest of the movie? I'm not talking about dream sequences that sort of fit the tone of the movie, like in Vertigo; I'm talking about scenes where the movie just becomes another kind of movie entirely, like Susan Slept Here suddenly morphing from a romantic comedy to a weird psycho-babble fantasy.