The Reluctant Astronaut is on. Some channel is having a Don Knotts marathon. (The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is next, but I’m not in the mood for gothic horror.) I remember seeing The Reluctant Astronaut at a Saturday matinée in Woodbury, New Jersey. And I remember thinking it wasn’t the most exciting science fiction movie I’d ever seen, but at ten, perhaps I was already too sophisticated. This was the same theater where a couple months later Son of Flubber caused a riot. Perhaps the kids knew it wasn’t a first run picture in that Summer of Love in 1967. Perhaps we were just blowing off steam. Perhaps we just wanted to die before we got old. Whatever, it sure pissed off the manager. He turned off the projector, turned on the house lights and stormed on down to the front of the theater and glared at us. If we didn’t stop running and shrieking and throwing popcorn he’d kick us all out and there would be hell to pay when our parents came to pick us up. The place grew quiet, the hail of popcorn subsided. That’s better, he said, and the lights came down, the film came on, and there was Fred MacMurray again, Professor Ned Brainard, turning people on to flubber, and everyone was bouncing and floating and high as a kite. Feed your head, Ned said, feed your head, and the kids laughed and shrieked and the popcorn came down like rain.
Category Archives: Movies
Spellbound
Watching Spellbound. First time. In fact, it was one of the only Hitchcock flicks I’ve never seen. And I keep getting so lost. It’s all about Freudian analysis, which is one of those archaic things that few understand anymore. But everyone did back then. Hitchcock just assumed that a sophisticated audience in 1945 would understand the dialog. But that was half a century ago, and since then the study of the mind became the study of the brain. It’s all about neurology now, mechanics over assumptions.
So it’s kind of like trying to watch a movie based on marxist theory. As recently as the seventies a sophisticated audience would understand the basics of Marxist thought and a plot would have to explain little. It might have been excruciatingly dull, but the hip crowds would get it. Now most of us would be lost, Das Kapital in all its turgid detail finally relegated to the 19th century. Oh it hangs on in some academic circles, in literary theory and semantics, but once all those professors retire it’ll disappear, and all the Marxist allusions in fllms of the sixties will be understood only by historians. People will read about them somewhere and try as hard as they can to understand, but they won’t. Just like we can be so bewildered by Freudian pscyhobabble. It obviously meant something to them back then…but you had to be there.
I suspect that Chomsky will go the same way, relegated to philosophy courses where the elegance of a theory is more important than its scientific legitimacy. We still study Aristotle even though, face it, he was wrong about a lot of things. But the elegance and brilliance of his thought in the context (i.e., he thought it up a helluva long time ago), and the influence it had on western thought, makes it key to the study of western philosophy. Just don’t quote him in your biology class. And Chomsky’s brilliant theories, so simple (unlike his prose) will be studied as a key to language…even though the neurological evidence is a little light so far. I mean his generative theory should hold up (although there have been some doubts thrown up there too…namely the language of the Piriha in the Amazon) but there is no center of universal grammar uncovered so far; we are not born with all the grammar in the world set in our head, like some perfectly formed language homunculus.
Of course no one makes movies based on Chomskyan theory. The dialog would drag. “For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial appears to correlate rather closely with nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory” she says breathlessly, her nude body glistening…..they couldn’t even show that on Sundance.
Anyway Spellbound is nearly over. Gregory Peck is in the clutches of the police, and Ingrid Bergman is still gorgeous. But I dunno, somehow Ingrid’s saying “People fall in love, as they put it, because they respond to a certain hair coloring or vocal tones or mannerisms that remind them of their parents.” doesn’t have quite the same punch as “Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.” That Bogie could understand.
Uh oh. Surprise ending. I won’t say who or what. No spoiler me. But Ingrid figured it analyzing dreams. Something symbolized a revolver. Voila! The killer revealed. Dreams, you know. Last nite I dreamed that my wife and I had to take two separate submarines across the East River to get to Brooklyn. Obviously the submarines are phallic. I don’t know about the East River, though. Whatever.
Anyway Bullitt‘s up next. That one I can understand. Gunfights, car chases, Jacqueline Bisset in a miniskirt and gogo boots. Maybe she’ll be in my dream tonite. Of course I won’t remember even if she is….I almost never remember my dreams. Not even dirty ones. Submarines I remember. And without Freud, a submarine is just a submarine.
John Gilbert
King Vidor’s The Big Parade is a helluva movie, maybe my favorite silent. The battlefield scenes are terrifying, and the end is perfect. John Gilbert was awfully good. You couldn’t see the booze yet. The story about him having a squeaky voice was nonsense, I’ve heard him in talkies and his voice was fine. He just drank himself out of a career, drank himself to death. I remember seeing him in a flick from 1934 called The Captain Hates the Sea, and he is terrific playing a drunk. A failed playwright of a drunk. Like John Barrymore and even Erroll Flynn, drunks play the best drunks. It’s amazing how many raging drinkers came out of Prohibition. That whole Bix Beiderbecke thing. My uncle Carl was one of those. A brilliant pianist who died in a cold Michigan jail of delirium tremens. You can’t even imagine how much hooch that must have been in his short, creative, sad life. That was John Gilbert’s story too. His drinking was completely out of control by the end, despite a series of heart attacks, and not even Marlene Dietrich couldn’t save him, though she tried. He died a year or so after The Captain Hates the Sea, in bed in his huge house way up in the Hills. He was thirty seven. My Uncle Carl’s age. Carl was buried in a cemetery in Flint Michigan, now completely forgotten. John Gilbert is just across the river here at Forest Lawn, on a hillside, in full light, under a blue sky.
Eighty years on we’re still talking about John Gilbert, but for the wrong reasons. John Gilbert, they say, sound did him in. He had that high, squeaky voice. It’s a nasty rumor, mean, emasculating. He’d battled the studios his whole career, and made enemies, and it was probably they–perhaps a mogul, perhaps a publicist–that spread the rumor that, in death, ruined him for good. He may have won a few battles, John Gilbert did, but the studios won the war. They always did back then.
For a long spell in The Big Parade I forgot all about this. Was completely caught up in the story, the three hometown boys, the army life, the front, the shells, the final, cataclysmic battle. This was the western front in 1918, a mad and utterly violent place, beyond all understanding then and even now. There’s a bombardment scene that is unsurpassed. There’s a panorama of a whole battalion moving forward through machine gun fire, men dropping randomly. John Gilbert is in a shell hole, his leg shot to pieces, staring at a corpse. Maddened with pain and fear and frustration he begins yelling, yelling at the top of his voice. It’s a silent, and there are no subtitles in the scene, but you can hear his outrage, and it is loud and rich and resonant. And when in the end he rushes into the arms of his girl, you smile.
John Gilbert in The Big Parade (1925).
Night of the Lepus
(2010)
I stayed up way late last night to watch the classic Night of the Lepus once again. Janet Leigh, Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, Bones and a whole bunch of huge, crazed, carnivorous rabbits. We’re talking late night early 70′s eco-horror at its finest. Or to quote the sheriff:
“Ladies and Gentleman, there’s a herd of giant killer rabbits coming this way and we desperately need your help.”
Delivered straight. High beams flash and horns blow in appreciation.
I have to say that it’s been 35 years since I first heard that line and it still packs a punch. I was young then, a smarmy teen, and laughed in hysterics when I first heard it… But last night I listened in admiration at the hapless little nothing of an actor forced to utter it (through a megaphone no less). I wondered about the talentless hack who wrote it, and how could he have ever written it, and if he was drunk at the time. Or was he suicidal even, knowing full well that this was his one shot at the big time, any kind of big time, and all he could come up was a line about giant rabbits. Audiences must have laughed themselves silly. No one blamed the actor the actor with the megaphone…who was far enough from the camera to maintain a degree of anonymity, thank god…but only the youngest children in those seats, popcorn all over their laps and ssssshing their giggling older brothers, could not fail to see just how pathetic that sentence was.
Now, though, I’m older, lots older. I’m not a rock star, or President, or a world famous writer or world famous anything. I don’t live in one of those big houses on the hill. So I can feel the pain of the actor with that megaphone. He needed the bread. He had bills to pay, mouths to feed (and not rabbit mouths). We all do humiliating things. We have all uttered warnings about metaphorical herds of killer rabbits. Or something to that effect. Just not so incredibly stupid.
The wife and I drove across the lonely stretches of the Colorado Plateau this past summer. It’s that highland — dry grasses, sparse, so lonely– that stretches from the northern third of Arizona to the Rockies, and north into Utah and Colorado. There’s nothing there. Cattle, lean and weather beaten. Some small towns, abandoned farms. Nights are vast and black and full of UFO’s and other scary things. Days are haunted by long vanished Indian civilizations. I love it there. This was the setting for the movie. Way out there. At some point on a trek, when we get off the interstate and head off on some state highway or county road and things get really empty out there, I think of Night of the Lepus. To me, the high Arizona desert and those goddamn rabbits are permanently enmeshed. And at some point on the trek, I find myself saying aloud that there’s a herd of giant killer rabbits heading this way.
Which kinda wrecks the whole mood, since it’s the stupidest line from the stupidest critters-gone-wild flick ever. Dumber even than Frogs, where the vicious racist wheelchair-bound Ray Milland gets his karmic comeuppance from a house full of frogs (not giant frogs either, just frogs) who apparently kill him in some unexplained way. Dumber even than a terrified Marjoe Gortner in Food of the Gods asking Ida Lupino where’s she’d gotten that big chicken. (Though it was a big chicken.)
And if you think about it, and I do, there is nothing so profoundly dumb as killer bunnies. Not even DeForrest Kelly can make it believable. And he dealt with Lizard Men, salt creatures, and hortas. Here he just looked sad in that little mustache. I hope Janet Leigh was nice to him.
But I digress.
There’s a herd of giant killer rabbits coming this way.
Fatty Arbuckle
Poor Fatty Arbuckle. Every time some big star becomes enmeshed in an especially tawdry scandal–and it’s hard to think of a scandal more tawdry than Bill’s Cosby’s right now–Fatty Arbuckle gets dragged into it. The Hearst newspaper syndicate (a prototype for both FoxNews and TMZ) did its job well. Fatty Arbuckle has been smeared for all time.
Of course Bill Cosby, by his own admission, is guilty as hell. Fatty was not. In fact, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was as innocent of the charges against him as it was possible to be. So much so that in his third and final rape and homicide trial, the jury composed the following note that the jury foreman read aloud in court:
“Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”
The American people didn’t, unfortunately, and Arbuckle was ruined both in life and legacy. Bill Cosby is another Fatty Arbuckle somebody said. Except that he is not. Fatty Arbuckle was innocent. Virginia Rappe, the young woman whose death in 1921 sparked the entire media circus, is buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery. The interment was a spectacle, with throngs of reporters and the morbidly curious. They are still curious. They pass by her grave every year, and the lascivious details are repeated, every one of them as false as when they were first written, and often as not believed.
Fatty Arbuckle died in 1933. Things were finally looking up, and he had just been signed that day to a new movie deal. There was a celebration at dinner with his wife and friends, then home to bed. He died in his sleep. The service was small, after which the body was cremated, the ashes scattered over the Pacific and blown away with the wind.
George Sanders
Village of the Damned might not be the greatest movie ever, but the ever great George Sanders does say “Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… I must think of Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… I must think of Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… I must think of Brick Wahl… It’s almost half past eight… Brick Wahl… only a few seconds more… Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… nearly over… Brick Wahl….”
Then all goes boom.
Admittedly I would have preferred an Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth or Lena Horne chanting my name, perhaps all three, but you take whatever screen credit you can get in this town, even if it means changing a letter, capitalizing two others and dropping an article or three. I doubt I would ever make the effort had it been, say, Jerry Lewis. But there’s a cachet to George Sanders, who, after all, was the quintessentially loathsome critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (“You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.”). As Brick’s Picks wore on I would slip into Addison DeWitt (“After Hef’s personal nurses revived us with smelling salts and feathers we remembered that pianist Josh Nelson is at the Blue Whale on Saturday.”) But even that wore thin.
Life itself wore thin for George Sanders who, one sunny day in Spain, swallowed five bottles of Nembutal and exited, stage left. He left a note:
“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”
Night fell inevitably as he lay cooling, and with it another morning, and another night. He was cremated, and his ashes scattered over the English Channel, swirled about by the currents, reduced to molecules, and dispersed across the oceans at the speed of electrons. I wonder if any of the electrons that recreate him on my television now, chanting my name, were ever him.
“You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.”
Two Bricks
5 Against the House (1955, from a Jack Finney story published a year earlier) wasn’t that much of a flick, but it does have a cool gnarly macho cynical smart assed brain damaged guy named Brick (Brian Keith). The chicks dig him–the bad women, especially, molls like Jean Willes–and he digs chicks, something the Brick (Paul Newman) in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958, though the play premiered in 1955) was a little weak on. That Brick was a football hero, this Brick a war hero. That Brick had been disintegrating for years, a lush, a loser, a bum knee, while this Brick (who’d apparently taken a bullet or shrapnel in the noggin while earning a medal) disintegrates by the end of the movie, a tough guy PTSD mess, dangerous and out of control. He’s no Tennessee Williams tragedy, in fact there’s nothing Southern Gothic about this Brick at all, rather he’s yankee to the core, efficient, a doer and when he sets his mind to rob Harrah’s in Reno with his Korean War buddies–Robin and the 7 Hoods copped this tale–he gets it done. It’s only then that he totally freaks like Bogie in Treasure of Sierra Madre, consumed by greed and paranoia, and you know he’s gonna go down. Suddenly the plot does a goodie goodie 180° turnaround–like I said, this is not Tennessee Williams–and Brick’s heist mate pals talk him into surrendering, which means a stretch in a padded cell and no Jean Willes. Shit. The other Brick winds up with Maggie the Cat. Shit. Too many guys named Brick winding up losers. Hate to think it’s an omen. I mean I got the bum knee and the brain damage….
Brick (Brian Keith) wowing Virginia (Jean Willes) with his charm, gnarliness and existential nihilism.
George Kennedy
(You never know what will get to people, and this was a couple hundred words I dashed off on Facebook the day George Kennedy died that got a great big response.)
I see George Kennedy died, another big–6’3″–lummox of a Mick with kraut mixed in. He signed up for the infantry in the War, just a kid, and wound up an officer and spent sixteen years in uniform. I remember a zillion years ago him telling some interviewer, Larry King I think, about how the Army gave him his start in show biz. Seems the Pentagon assigned him to the Phil Silvers Show as official US Army advisor. The Army wanted Sergeant Bilko done just right. I don’t think George advised anybody anything, but he watched and learned. He was never a great actor–he himself said that–but he was a good actor, and he knew how to laugh a big laugh on cue and he sure could charm an audience. I even think people, deep down, identified with him more than Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.
He almost lived forever, George Kennedy did, to ninety one, and he made who knows how many movies. You never switched off the television because it was George Kennedy. And he played everything and anything, a real journeyman, good at no matter what it was the director wanted. They don’t even call them emergencies anymore, he said as George Petroni in some ridiculous Airport movie, they call them Petroni’s. That’s the only line I remember from that movie, and he’s the only cast member I can name. There’s some big guys you never forget, and once gone, you’ll always remember.
Cool Hand Luke
Harry James’ pad
My wife was just reading aloud from an article in the L.A. Times about the Bert Lahr Estate going for a cool $28.5 million. Beside the fact that I can’t figure out how an old vaudevillian could afford to have an estate in 1941 (he couldn’t have made that much money off of Wizard of Oz in those days, could he?), the place was also owned by Betty Grable and Harry James. I don’t know how long the two lived there, but I was dying to see what kind of life a jazz trumpeter could have during the swing era. In fact, even though his wife was a screen idol, he might have raked in more dough…those swing stars made money by the truck load back then.
So I took thirty seconds and found the address, and it’s worth taking a look on Google maps satellite view. The pad (hey, it may be enormous but it’s still a jazz player’s pad) has probably been expanded somewhat since then, maybe not all the outbuildings were there in the 1940’s. Still…there isn’t a trumpet player alive today that makes that kind of money. Not Wynton. Not Chuck Mangione. Not even Chris Botti. It’s not even imaginable.
Harry James and Betty Grable, 1943.
Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and Karl
A bunch of us were trying to watch Duck Soup last night as a guy provided unsolicited Marxist subtextual analysis. It was quite illuminating. For example, I had never realized that Edgar Kennedy, selling his lemonade, represented Capital while Harpo, the peanut vendor (or El Manicero, badly whistled), was Labor. Their struggle was represented brilliantly by the metaphor of the burning straw hat and even more so by Edgar Kennedy pushing over the peanut vendor’s cart and then Harpo dancing in his lemonade. It’s so obvious, he said, which made me feel so clueless as I’d always thought it was just really funny.. The mirror scene was also a metaphor of class struggle. And the whole motorcycle and sidecar thing. I bet you never knew this. The primary theme of the film, however, was how Big Capital and the duped American working class embraced isolationism instead of entering WW2. When Groucho tricked Ambassador Trentino into calling him an upstart and declaring war he was trying to tell the American public that it was time to confront their anti-Semitism and enter the struggle against Hitler. All this was particularly prescient in that WW2 was not happening at the time, nor, indeed, was Hitler even in power when the screenplay was written. This was pointed out and while the narrator agreed that such was the case, it only proved his point. Continue reading
Brick's Picks 