Mark_McD

The available Will Rogers shorts show off Will's great self-effacing comedy, and ability to takes pokes at big institutions; in this case, Hollywood. In this time, movies had to be passed through a checkerboard of state and local review boards with their own moral standards. So the idea of a local "Clean Screens Society" sending someone to "investigate" Hollywood morals is not that far-fetched. Will shows up "home movies" of what no doubt were many movie clichés he and other actors were already tired of, even in film's infancy. His William S. Hart parody is yet another edition of the bad man who still comes home to his "ma." And Will's expose of what "really" happens when the posse is always trying to bust down "that pine door" is likely not far from the truth: while the posse rounds up a log to batter the door of a saloon exterior, we peek behind the facade wall to see the abducted maiden calmly smoking a cigarette while the villain has his nose buried in a movie magazine. Sometimes the best part of a comedy film is how it shows us what its audiences laughed at at the time.

I have to give this film some points for its attempted outrageousness. I can add little to the previous posters, but can suggest some observations: * Jackie Gleason actually acquits himself pretty well. His acting stays low-key, even through his "Trip" sequence. Stack this performance against his work in, say, "Smokey and the Bandit." * I don't care that Carol Channing was younger than I now am when she made this movie. I never want to see her in bra and panties. I'd rather she sing more Nilsson lyrics than watch those scenes again.

* When two or more "Batman" villains are in a movie, that should be a sign of trouble. This one had three, plus Mr. Freeze as director! To people who bash "Hollywood," I used to say "Corporate Hollywood makes only one kind of movie: the ones they think will make a profit." Hard to imagine anyone at Paramount thought this would make a profit. But then, in those days, a movie didn't have to open on 3,500 screens its first weekend. Most likely it died a quick death in the big downtown theatres before the rest of the country could even hear about it.

Those looking for elements of the Red Scare in this movie may be overlooking an aspect of life in the 1950's that was closer to the everyday lives of Los Angelinos: that the LAPD was one of the most corrupt departments in the country, and Webb was polishing apples for police chief William Parker by presenting his cops as honest dispensers of justice. We may accept Friday's "bumper-to-bumper" harassment of a suspect because he "knows" he's guilty, but at the same time, the cops were doing this and much worse to ordinary citizens, especially blacks and Latinos. Webb stops short of lighting his Chesterfields with a copy of the Bill of Rights, but clearly he, like the PD, saw it as a list of amusing suggestions. Ironically, Joe Friday has a testy exchange with a member of a grand jury about the ethics of wire tapping. When the jury member suggests that once criminals know their phones are being tapped, they'll just conduct their business on street corners. Friday's reply, "And we'll have a cop on every one of 'em!" came as Parker was pulling beat officers off the street and having them work from patrol cars. (Of course, Parker supported Webb when "Dragnet" did stories about the dangers of guns in the hands of children, much to the consternation of the NRA, but that's a topic for the listing of the TV show. Anyway, people can be more complex than we think them)

The Terrytoons of this era could run a gamut from good to bad to inexplicable. This one is pretty good. It's the usual cat vs. mice scenario, with an unnamed cat who occasionally addresses the audience in an incongruous voice-over. While tormenting a house full of mice, a box of catnip falls on him from a high shelf. This cat can read the word "Catnip," but doesn't know what it is, so he takes a deep sniff of it and gets drunk, then starts having hallucinations. His trip includes a pink elephant lifted directly from "Dumbo," human-sized mice in harem girl costumes, and a descent to kitty hell. Somewhat derivative, but some of the designs and backgrounds are very well-done.

Somewhere in the Chicago's south suburbs (after all, Cottage Grove Avenue is mentioned) is the town of Heathville, whose fortune is built not on toffee bars, but on a cosmetic company that rips off Dr. Carruther's (bela) formulas. Rather than jumping over to Helene Curtis, the good doctor goes to his secret stash of beef jerky, and with some electricity and Vigoro, makes a hanger of jerky into a giant bat puppet, like you can get at Kmart, trained to attack the scent of Bela's aftershave formula. Why exactly does he do this? Fortunately for the viewer, he monologues his motivation, both the the bats and in his own mind.

When the Heath family men start dying off, reporter Johnny Layton and photographer "One-Shot" are assigned to look into things by editor Elmer Fudd ("and get me a picture of that wascalwy wabbit!"). Layton starts wondering why everyone is carrying economy size bottle of experimental aftershave, while One-Shot tries to make time with a French maid (and with a nickname like "One-Shot," he probably never gets a second date). In true detective movie fashion, Layton gets close to the story only after Elmer fires him for sending in One-Shot's faked bat photo.

SPOILER ALERT Well, Bela trains a bat to attack anyone wearing his aftershave. So how do you think he comes to his justly deserved fate?

Left unanswered is why Bela enters his secret lab through a hidden door in his basement, and needs another secret door into his already secret lab.

If you have any love for Bela, you will enjoy watching him chew the scenery as his bat chews his victims' jugulars!

I caught this in TCM without knowing much beforehand, so it was a surprise and a delight. Even in its censored for re-release version, some of the pre-Code humor still pops in from left field. And the plot? Ah, well, we know the guy is always going to get the girl, so what makes it interesting is how they get there.

I'll just add some comments on specific things in the movie. So many of these songs became part of Chevalier's Gallic repertoire, it's hard to believe they were actually written by Rodgers and Hart. And, Mammoulian was apparently still working out how to present musical interludes in a movie. Having Chevalier sing "Mimi" right into the camera didn't work, I'm afraid; his expressions as he tries to pitch woo to the lens make him appear kind of sappy. Interesting experiment, though, on the title number, where Maurice and Jeanette simply sleep through "Love Me Tonight" while it plays, apparently in their dreams.

I had to go find out what Chevalier's costume and song "The Poor Apache" (pronounced Ah-Pej) referred to. For everyone's enlightenment: an Apache was a French "underworld" character, a tough, a yegg, or more often a pimp. There was a scandalous "Apache Dance" of the time in which the man, playing the Apache, would demand money from his girl, then slap her around quite a bit. It has been performed or parodied in other movies, possibly "An American in Paris," and a few cartoons. Whether they got the name from the Apache Indians, I couldn't find out, but interesting that the French missile system was called the "Apache."

Oh, and nice catch by the previous commentator that the three sewing spinsters suggested the knitting ladies before the guillotine. I just thought of them as the three Fates, spinning the threads of the characters' lives, but the previous image fits better.

And this is a great rock'n'roll movie in itself. No matter how it evolved (at point being a movie about disco), it ended up as one of the ultimate movies in which kids want to rock out, but the principal stands in their way. Think back to those rock'n'roll movies of the 50's in which the day is saved when Alan Freed comes to town with Chuck Berry to prove that Rock & Roll Music is really cool and safe for the kids, and Tuesday Weld gets a new sweater for the dance. Forward to the 1979, repeat the same plot, but throw in DA RAMONES, whom no one then realized would become one of the most influential bands of the next quarter century (and then for the obligatory DJ guest shot, "The Real" Don Steele). Throw in, too, all the elements of a Roger Corman-produced comedy-exploitation film, except for the two-day shooting schedule, some of the familiar Corman repertory players like Clint Howard, Mary Wournow and Dick Miller (there since "Bucket of Blood"), and you've got one of the great stoopid movies of the day. One of the few films that uses deliberate cheesiness and gets away with it. I showed the new DVD to a friend who could only remember seeing parts of it through a stoner- induced haze at the drive-in, and he agreed that this is one of the great movies to be watching drunk, not the least for the lovely leading ladies and the great Ramones footage.

That the Marxes could make this as their final film together (Groucho was tacked onto "Love Happy" as an afterthought and had no scenes with Chico and Harpo) means they could go out with a flourish. Groucho's jokes were back in form, not-so-sly innuendo and all, and the dross of the MGM years was cut away: the romantic leads had minimal screen time and did NOT sing, and the special effects laden last reel chase scene was cut mercifully short. Although it's unfortunate that the script had the quick-witted Marxes resort to poor stage fighting to overcome the Nazis. I believe it was while hanging from the ladder in that chase scene (in what's too clearly the California desert) that Groucho decided there must be a better way to make a living, and went to what became "You Bet Your Life."

PS: It suddenly struck me that Sig Ruman's voice, without the accent, could have been a perfect double for Marvin the Martian. Anyone know if he could have inspired Mel Blanc?

I got some hearty laughs out of it, so that's what counts in the end.

Chicago's local camp monster movie host, Svengoolie, just showed the flick, and its badness was just as funny without the MST3K. "Sven" even pointed out something everyone's missed, I believe: one of the scenes in the "basement" of the ship shows an open window in the background (in space, no one can hear you scream like a girl!). Best host line: "What's the deal with the 'couples only' explosions?" Looks to me like the same two stunt people in every "railing kill." And Kalgon and his crippled henchmen both get immolated by fire; looks like they could only afford to hire a "fire guy" for one day. D'ya think that with the economic boycott of South Africa on at the time, the producers took that as a license to pirate the Galactica footage? And isn't anybody disappointed that Cameron Mitchell and John Philip Law decided that yes, they ARE gonna play Sun City?

Finally caught it on TCM yesterday, and was able to watch it "fresh," compared to "The Odd Couple" or "The Front Page," which one might already know all about.

A fine study in contrasts at work here; Matthau, as the shyster lawyer has something resembling a family life, while Lemmon, ostensibly the nice guy, is shown to be very lonely, still stuck in the apartment his wife left him in (and aren't those exteriors filmed in Cleveland? I don't think those buildings on his street were seen in any other Hollywood backlot, and they looked a touch more shabby than ordinary). So we have "Boom Boom" as the real moral center of the movie. He's racked with guilt over having injured Hinkle (Lemmon), so much so that he sees to Hinkle's recovery, even carrying him around like a wounded puppy, letting his game suffer, and he's the one who's most hurt by the scam.

The movie also shows a hopeful light on race relations in the mid-60's: Ron Rich gets to play a character with some feelings and some ambition beyond the NFL, and it's he and Lemmon's characters who become buddies at the end.

Most of these reviewers are pretty spot-on, so I can just add my observations: It was a complete surprise to see a John Wayne character deliver a book critique. I was off my pins for a while until he went into his "Why don't you just stop thinking." Movie was like a collision between Ayn Rand and Frank Capra. Still, very breezy, and we enjoyed the contemporary stock location footage of Chicago... with the cute cameo by Jack Benny (taking train back up to Waukegan, no doubt). Also, it presented an interesting peek, though filtered through Hollywood's cockeyed optimism, of a question that was surely on many people's minds. We've saved the world, now how shall we remake it in our image. Surely there were many Kit Masterson writing about what we should do, My theory has long been that the postwar world was most shaped by the GI Bill of Rights, which put a college education and new home within reach of millions of veterans, and created the American middle class, for good or bad. Having lived through the crises of our new century, it's interesting to see people who realized they were standing at other crossroads in history.

If the obviously affable Robinson doesn't come across as a "good" actor, it might be more the fault of the production than himself. Though it's an important movie about a great sports pioneer, it has too many marks of a B-movie production. Too much exposition by characters who should have more interesting stories (wouldn't you want to know more about the USC athletic director who said the only color he cares about is "blue and gold?" Also, Louise Beavers gave a very subdued performance considering it was one of her few roles where she wasn't playing someone's maid. Other hallmarks of the B production were about two minutes of running used for the stock footage of calendar leaves falling to mark the passage of time, the old "spinning headlines" of newspapers with the same articles beneath, the fact that Jackie's baseball scenes were shot at just two ballparks (I'm not even sure his Dodgers scenes were shot at Ebbets Field; the field doesn't quite match the long shots of Ebbets) and the "flashback voices" that ran through Jackie's head when he was set to fight with some white hecklers. This film could also be considered as a product of the McCarthy era in which it was made. It did ignore Jackie's problems in the Army (because it's "un-American" to criticize the military) and ends with Jackie's flag-waving radio address before Congress. Branch Rickey, who in real life did spend several years trying to get pro baseball to desegregate, has a lot of "let's behave like real Americans" dialogue, but tempered with his admission to Jackie that he scouted him because we wants the Dodgers to win a pennant. Despite my quibbles, I think this is an important movie and I'm glad it's around for us to see. I am also torn between feeling that it might be better remembered had it not been a small studio picture, and the possibility that a major studio would have completely glossed over the prejudice portrayed in the film. <i>Note: Jackie's Dodger uniform number, 42, had been officially retired by every team in Major League Baseball. "42" is also the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, as explained in "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Coincidence? I think not.

I'll just add that the traditional, "Broadway" style tunes are real classics, and I'd forgotten how many standards came from that show. (In the last years of the "Ed Sullivan Show," CBS even used "Song for a Sunday Evening" in their promos (ED SULLIVAN-N-N-N-N-N!). The 'rock and roll' numbers performed by Birdie, though, fall absolutely flat. They sound like the parodies written in the 50's by songwriters who hate rock'n'roll. But best off all was the "Lot of Livin' to Do" number. Now I can say it's better to have been frozen by Ann-Margret than never loved at all!