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.