Sunday, May 17, 2020

Growing Up Absurd with Bernie Chantecleer

YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW.  Coppola’s first big budget movie defined me in 1967 wherein a suburban nebish escapes a clininging mother (Geraldine Page) to sample the temptations of New York City.  With the Lovin’ Spoonful (John Sebastian) on the soundtrack it had a subversive counter culture tone. Peter Kastner is the big boy.   

Big Boy Bernie is introduced to drugs by his shallow, poet co-worker (Tony Bill) and promptly falls for a man-hating actress/go go dancer (Elizabeth Hartman).  Memorable scenes:  a quick tour of sleazy sex shops in Time Square, flying a kite in Central Park on a sunny day and the off-Broadway risque play “The Department Store.”  

Memorable line:  Bernie learned from his parents “self loathing and self doubt.”
I ordered the VHS tape from Sun Coast Video in 1992 at Southdale and bought the soundtrack LP at a Woolworth’s in 1972.  

Big Boy was overshadowed a few months after it debuted by another coming of age comedy, The Graduate, which was dark LA while Big Boy is whimsical NYC.

Monday, May 04, 2020

Shock Corridor, Long Voyage Home, East Side Kids, KBOI

WHAT WAS playing at the Bijou on the day you were born?   
While I was working my way down the birth canal, New Yorkers were queing up at United Artists’ Rivoli Theater to see the much acclaimed premier of “The Long Voyage Home,” adapted from a Eugene O’Neil short story.  Aqui es la vida!
No use crying of spilled popcorn.  So I said to myself:   “Relax kid.  You can catch it on VHS in 40 years.”  
Truth be told, ’40 may have not been such a great movie year in the shadow of 1939 with Gone With the Wind, The Hunchback of Norte Dame and more.  It was somewhat reminiscent of now.  War was raging in Europe and it would soon engulf us, sending Dad to Japan with the Allied Occupation Forces.
(Ironic that the movie “Childbirth” was also playing in NYC.  I am sure that was a gas!)

EAST SIDE KIDS — The character Muggs Malone played by Leo Gorcey in the East Side Kids comedies bears a striking resemblance to the contemporary Gorilla and Chief in DC.  
Muggs was the ad hoc leader of the hooligans in these 1940s Monogram films and considered himself an “expert” on most everything.  Of course he was a dunce like his pals.  
Muggs was famous for malaprops, like “It’s a lovely sediment.”  Typically his leadership resulted in out of control anarchy and confusion.  Sound familiar?
Their best film featured Bela Lugosi — “Spooks Run Wild” — (1941) with lots of slapstick comedy in a “haunted” house.  A sequel, “Ghosts on the Loose,” featured lovely Ava Gardner and Lugosi and is less hilarous. The “kids” kept Monogram Pictures afloat until the mid-40s when it became Allied Artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Gorcey

HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND.  Where did you first see this? Who were you with and what did you think about it?  What was your favorite line?  The Vietnam war was playing in the background.
I first saw it at the Vista on the Boise Bench by myself which wasn’t unusual then.  Memorable line:  Dad to Ben: “What are you doing?”   Ben:  “Drifting, just drifting.”  This defined that moment in my life — doing rewrites on Little Britches Rodeo, fender benders and obits.  (In later years I saw the Statesman as the defining time in my life.)
That summer I saw this movie again at the Tops in downtown Caldwell and then again in ’69 at the Midway in St. Paul.  Bought the VHS and then the DVD, which has an insightful interview with Hoffman.

BOISE WAKEUP MAN.  Marty Holtman was the fast talking morning wakeup DJ on KBOI (950 CBS)  when I lived and worked in Boise in the 60s.  Holtman was a standout in flyover land.  Hub Warner, very low key, did afternoon drive.  Lon Dunne did mornings on KIDO (NBC) and recorded a soundtrack to a pollution slide show I did for the Capitol Jaycess.  
Holtman is featured in a photo in a VW Beattle doing a promotion for the movie “Love Bug.”  The photo is in “History in the Headlines,” the Idaho Statesman story.
By 1969 KBOI moved to about 670 on the dial and 50,000 watts, continuing with MOR music.  Holtman is featured in a November 2019 featured in the impressive Idaho Press. 

SCHOCKER.  When I was a flunky at NBC News in 1963, I got a lot of press preview passes for movies and I went to all of them.  I remember little about most except Allied Artists’ “Shock Corridor” which doesn’t fit neatly in any a catagory, film noir or horror? I saw it in a suburban bank auditorium, possibly in Glendale.   I have seen this Samuel Fuller epic several times since and it is crazy wonderful.

Casablanca, Hollywood, Citizen Kane, K-tel, The Oscar

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID.  It feels like we’re in a war so why not immerse myself in war-time movies and music.  Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains were a good place to start since they are outstanding in “Notorious” and “Casablanca.”  These two classics form a super double feature.  

WORKOUT MUSIC.  Hit after Hit Today’s Top Tracks audio casette from K-Tel (1986) is an ideal soundtrack for aerobics videos like those from YMCA 360.  If you like REO’s “Can’t Fight the Feeling,” Patti Labell’s “New Attitude” and more then you are on your way to wonderland.
An amazing casette from a company that was located in a nearby suburb. 

(K-tel was far more than a record label. Sure, the brand made its name selling disco compilations and Hooked on Classics tapes through television ads, but K-tel also pushed a plethora of quirky products. It was a true pioneer of the "As Seen on TV" phenomenon.)

WHAT IF …. In 1947 a Hollywood studio was run by a woman and produced a film with an interracial love affair and Anna May Wong won an Oscar?  That’s the story line on Ryan Murphy’s most provocative series, “Hollywood” on Netflix.  (I binged on the comings and goings of Jack Costello, Rock Hudson and more this weekend.  Call me crazy!)

THE OSCAR.  The lead character Frankie Fane in this 1966 movie is actually a thinly veiled Sinatra.  It took me two viewings of this frothy drama to figure it out, but the ironic ending when real life Sinatra accepts an Oscar is a device to divert us from the inspiration for this melodrama. It’s Sinatra, of course, in his Rat Pack days, punching out guys and being unfaithful to his wife. 

WHAT IF Orson Welles hadn’t portrayed Marion Davies as a lush in “Citizen Kane”?  Might Hearst have ignored the indulgence of a 24-year-old and not declared war against Welles?
By the 1950s the world had rediscovered CK through re-releases with the realization that this was a cinematic masterpiece. 
 And by 2011 Warner released a two-DVD set with a 4K restoration of CK and a super documentary, “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” from PBS,
In retrospect, Welles, with his career ruined, wished he had left Hollywood after CK and pursued his writing, theater and politics.
Hearst, after destroying Welles, was remembered as Welles portrayed the “fictional” character Charles Foster Kane — an angry tyrant.  Susan assembling the pieces of a puzzle is symbolic in that the Kane story is a puzzle.