Thieves Like Us, LIttle Women, Holiday Affair

LITTLE WOMEN (MUSICAL).  Big voices, big dreams.  Returning to live theater in Bloomington after 2 years and the orchestra never sounded better.  A very talented cast last night for the musical version of  the 1933 RKO Radio film, the most successful in the studio’s history.  The musical has its moments but less would have been more; a bit long.  

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.  Very parallel  times; now and the Fifties when demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy smeared reputations of law abiding citizens with big red lies.  Edward R. Murrow was nationally respected journalist and famous WW2 war reporter (London Blitz).  He was a voice of reason when we needed one.  Who do we have now? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

CINEMA PARADISO.  Ennio Morricone’s haunting theme lingers long after the movie ends.  In the tradition of Italy’s great filmmakers, Giuseppe Tormatore has borrowed from his memories of growing up in post-war rural Italy where the local movie theater was the community’s nucleus.  Not a foreign thought if you grew up with the Terrace Theater in Robbinsdale to see it demolished to make way for an ugly HyVee grocery store a few years ago. Saw it at the Ebert film festival in Champaign Urbana. (1989 Academy Award winner, best foreign language film, HBO Video) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095765/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

TICK TICK BOOM.  Wake up and shake the nation — says writer Jonathon Larson who is portrayed by Andrew Garfield in this new film based on Larson’s autobiography.  Kudos to lin-manual Miranda who produced and directed this film that casts a magic spell.  After seeing this I watched “Chorus Line” with a greater appreciation for theater. Larson wrote “Rent,” a musical of the AIDS epidemic. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tick-tick-boom-movie-review-2021

THIEVES LIKE US.  Adapted from the novel of the same name and a remake of the 1948 RKO classic.  Very moody, dreamy version the remake and the actors Keith Carradine and Shelly Duvall look more emaciated than Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell in the original.  But the remake is a half hour longer to dramatize the Depression’s devastation on lives, while the original is more apt to keep our interest.  In a few days we will once again compare classic films with remakes when the big screen debuts “West Side Story” and “Nightmare Alley.”  The actors in the former may resemble teenagers compared to those in the original West Side Story.  It will be challenging to improve on the Tyrone Power original “Nightmare Alley.”  “Little Women” has been remade several times, but only the 1933 and 1994 versions are listed in the NYT bool of 1,000 essential films.

HOLIDAY AFFAIR.  A favorite holiday movie going back to 1949 when cousin Stan and I saw it at the Capitol Theater in Walla Walla.  In post-war New York a grieving war widow struggles to support her cute toothless son by working as a comparison shopper wherein she meets department store clerk Robert Mitchum who is at post-war loose ends.  RKO boss Howard Hughes thought this film would rehabilitate Mitchum’s image after his bust for weed, but it bombed badly at the box office.  It’s a December favorite on cable’s TCM channel.  Gordon Gebbert, who plays the kid, became a professor at Columbia University after he no longer was a cute kid.   A train for Christmas is the theme that binds the film with the ending on a crowded train on New Year’s Eve.

VIDEO RENTAL STORES, BEST BETS FOR HALLOWEEN, BLACK SUNDAY

ADJUST Your TRACKING.  Obsessive dudes with tattoos collect trashy low brow VHS tapes, paying as much at $670 for “Tales from the Quadradead Zone” and even Toxic Avenger, which I had and gave to a friend in Cottage Grove on Halloween. This fan-produced documentary includes an interview with an owner of a video store that rents VHS and also a member of the subculture that recreated a video store in his basement.  I have a very small VHS collection and 3 VCRs.  Some titles are hard to find on DVD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu0L8i63E8M 

BEST BETS FOR HALLOWEEN: “Zombies on Broadway” (1945, RKO) combines two popular genres — musicals and horror with comics Wally Brown and Alan Carney who are ordered by Sheldon Leonard to find a zombie for a failing Broadway bar where singer-dancer Anne Jeffreys performs.  The hapless duo take off for a tropical island in search of zombies where (to everyone’s surprise) they stumble upon a crazy “scientist” played by Bela Lugosi.  Zombieness is catching much to the chagrin of Brown and Carney.

BLACK SUNDAY (1966) — a bit of witchcraft by Gothic horror master director Mario Bava where the fog machine works overtime.  The witch played by British actress Barbara Steele (Pit and the Pendulum) was paid for her efforts in wine and free lodging during the filming in Italy.  To say it is atmospheric is a gross understatement.  No doubt Lugosi’s Dracula inspired much of this but it’s classic Gothic horror.

Don’t say that Hollywood never made a bad movie until you see “Teenagers from Outer Space” where “teens” who look post K-12 annex earth as a food source and let loose their monsters: lobsters magnified on the rear screen.  Quite unexpected one of the invaders falls in love with the rather hapless local Betty.  Also, the space invaders are quite adept at driving standard transmission cars which is a task that overwhelms most of us earthlings.  They also have ray guns that turn humans and pets into skeletons. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053337/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 

INVENTING DAVID GEFFEN

He’s got that Alfred E. Newman what me worry look? about him and why should we give a rip about DG?  But I was captivated by this Netflix documentary on the billionaire Geffen, the new L.B. Mayer or Jack Warner.  

Dave appears in this documentary in an off-white t-shirt with a very frayed collar that he might have picked up at the Goodwill.  Yet the Geffen rose from a humble start in Brooklyn, the son of struggling immigrant parents, with his heart’s desire the good life in LA.  Somehow that got short circuited and he returned to the Big Apple to work in the William Morris (talent agency) mailroom in 1963 while I was shlepping news film from LAX to NBC News in Burbank.  

Our paths might have crossed because he returned to LA, newly minted as a freelance talent agent/manager associated with iconic folk-rock artists Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, Jackson Browne and the Eagles.  Before he was fired by Warner Records, a stone’s throw on Buena Vista Blvd. where I worked at NBC, he invented Asylum Records and then convinced Warners that he should be a movie producer which led to “Risky Business.”  Some of the dollars from Geffen Inc. go to charities and he appears to be politically correct. 

MASH, EASY LIVING AND MORE

EASY LIVING, ’37 — Johnny: Mary you've got a job!  Mary: What is it?  Johnny: Cooking my breakfast!  Not politically correct by today's standards but a zany Preston Sturges script screwball depression era Cinderella romcom wherein a mink coat thrown from a luxury penthouse literally lands on a hapless working girl.  Hilarious slapstick automat scene as well. Great sendup on the foibles of capitalism pre-war.

NIGHT AND THE CITY — Hustler Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is chased through the alleys and back streets of London in a memorable scene from a ’50 British film noir that may not be available. Video store operators in ’92 were offered free copies of this gritty gem if they bought 5 cassettes of the remake with De Niro.  I stumbled on a promotional tape at a thrift store. Great British character actors include Francis Sullivan, Googie Withers and Herbert Lom plus American Mike Mazursky (Murder My Sweet.)

DR. X.  When you least expect it, the monster appears in bizarre colors in the restoration of this much anticipated 1932 horror masterpiece with the same cast, crew and color process as the 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum.  Lee Tracy plays a dim witted newspaper reporter and Fay Wray warms up her vocal chords with random screams in anticipation of King Kong.  Of course Lionel Atwell is the focus of the ensuing mayhem. Even the butler is super creepy.  Dr. X exceeded my expectations ten fold.  

LABOR UNION members help save an east coast plastics factory from bankruptcy by developing a unique system for manufacturing TV set knobs in 1951 in Whistle at Eaton Falls.  It may be a true story since the producer Louis De Rochemont is known for films dealing with actual events.  Lloyd Bridges and Carleton Carpenter are feature.  The film was streamed this week from the DC Labor Film Festival. 

MASH. Taking a break from writing Plan B papers in 1970, I crowded into Northrup Auditorium (U of MN) with faculty and students to see a special preview and discussion with director Robert Altman concerning his new movie MASH.  If I would have been thinking like a journalist I would have written that "this is the movie that would define the decade."  But it all went before me in a blur.  From the opening theme song, "Suicide is Painless" to the Last Supper for Painless the dentist, it was a buffet of buffoonery, irreverence and caustic commentary as the country sacrificed lives to napalm in Southeast Asia.  It takes my breath away. 

FILM NOIR MEN: BOGART, POWELL, BEAUMONT

POWELL vs BOGIE — who’s the best Philip Marlowe, the Raymond Chandler tough guy PI in Murder My Sweet (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946)?  The Bogie-Bacall chemistry would favor BS but I like Powell’s off camera narration and interaction with Esther Howard and Mike Mazursky in MMS.  I watched both consecutively.  

Bogie has the best line in BS: “She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up” in reference to the sexually aggressive Martha Vickers’ character.  Powell shows his disdain for conspicuous consumption in MMS when he strikes a match on the butt of a cupid statue.  Memorable in MMS is the drunken Ms. Florian character played by Howard when she advises Powell:  “Hold on to your chair and don’t step on no snakes.”  (Howard also appears in Detour as a diner waitress dismissive of the Tom Neal character.)

The Big Sleep is convoluted while MMS features Claire Trevor, a world class femfatale.  Yet Dorothy Malone is diverting with Bogie in BS.  Film noir moved into the mainstream with these two blockbusters from RKO Radio and Warner Brothers during the war.  Hold onto your chair!

LEAVE IT TO HUGH.  Before he was an icon of suburban domesticity as the daddy in “Leave it to Beaver,” actor Hugh Beaumont cut a rakish figure in the underbelly of film making as the leading man in low budget film noir.  Most memorable in PRC’s “Apology for Murder” is Hugh as a homicidal reporter conspiring with femme fatale Ann Savage to dispose of her husband played by Pierre Watkins. You’ve seen this before in the iconic film noir “Double Indemnity.”  Versatile Beaumont in Lippert’s “Pier 23” played an Irish private eye who crosses paths with a bad girl played Ms. Savage.  So don’t tell Jerry and Tony that dad had a past in the “dark city.”https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037518/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1

All American Coed, House on Haunted Hill, Across the Universe

 PICKLE FACTORY. In a spoof involving a Bing dummy and brother Bob Crosby, the later fondly recalls growing up in SPOKANE and “working in the pickle factory.”  For all I know there could have been a dozen pickle factories in the vicinity.  See the RKO 50s musical comedy Two Tickets to Broadway with Tony Martin and Janet Leigh.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044158/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

“Nora, I think you’re a little upset.   Would you like a sedative?” 1958 HOUSE ON THE Haunted Hill is much better than the remake.  Besides creepy gags in the theater, the movie boasted great music and editing.  Elisha Cook Jr. is memorable. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051744/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_3

Platinum bombshell Mamie Van Doren was nearing  the end of her movie career in May 1966 when she married the hapless professional baseball player Lee Meyer at the Ada County Courthouse.  Fred was the police and courts reporter so he picked up the marriage data from the court records and wrote a short story that was buried in the paper.  I had been a Mamie fan for years and I thought her wedding in Boise deserved bigger play even if it involved a third rate ball player.  No one on the copy desk seemed concern so maybe I was making a big deal over nothing.  According to her autobiography, Playing the Field, Meyer was 25 when he died in a car crash in California — a tragic end after separating from Mamie that included an arrest in Hawaii for trying to smuggle hashish from Southeast Asia.  The Palm Springs Desert Sun thought it deserved a bigger play. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19660623.2.60&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

“You’re taking me apart,” Tommy, played by James Franco, screams in “Disaster Artist,” which focuses on a challenged dramatic “genius” who made a bad movie, “The Room,” for $5 million. Tommy and his Baby Face buddy played by Dave Franco sally forth to make Hollywood tremble.   Why is this funny?  I’ve watched it three times.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disaster_Artist_(film)

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE:  Perfect escapism back  to the Sixties with Beatles soundtrack.  Camera work is flawless with scenes of the seaside, Greenwich Village and Liverpool.  LSD trips are fun as well.  Although over 2 hours, there’s never a dull moment.  Saw it at at the Edina and bought the DVD at Target.  Also have the 2 disk soundtrack CD. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445922/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1

ZANY ZEKE frat boys infiltrate an all-girls school by enrolling one of the brothers in drag into a college that bars men entirely.  Broadway star Johnny Downs is at his best in this campy 1941 musical comedy from Hal Roach Studios with Alan Hale Jr. (Gilligan’s captain) in a supporting role.  Striking similarities between All American Coed and Some Like it Hot in 1959.  Available on the Movies TV Channel and on DVD from Alpha Video.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033323/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_8

FIFTIES, SAFFRON AND MORE

SANTA SPOILER.  Vernon Bisterfeldt, a Boise cop working off duty as a Santa, nabbed a shoplifter in 1965 at Welles department store on the Boise Bench.  I was doing rewrite on the Statesman night desk and wrote up a short story with a photo from a staff lensman.  Backlash came the next day when a reader called in to complain that I ruined the Santa story for her kids.  Sorry.

I can relate to being a stranger in strange land  during holidays because much of  65-69 that was me when I was a reporter for the Idaho Daily Statesman.  As the years went by I made friends in the community and would be invited out.  I think this has been a different kind of crazy for me with paranoia related to the virus.  In a month of two with the vaccine that could change too. 

SAFFRON. Hats off to Moinak Choudhury, University of Minnesota PhD candidate, who is teaching the U of M OLLI class on the products of Kashmir and Assam — cashmere, saffron and tea.  Saffron sells for a mere $5,000 a pound and involves labor intensive harvesting.  In a documentary we saw in class I now understand why it’s so expensive.  You might use it in a chicken recipe.  I assume it’s available at better super markets.  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327017

RETRO FOCUS.  Reading Eric Burns non fiction book “1957” prompted me to OD on all things from the 50s including “Rebel without a Cause,” “Untamed Youth” and “Don’t Knock the Rock.”  The last two feature very talented dancers grooving to a very athletic version of the jitterbug.   (I flunked Dance 101.)  Untamed Youth has the girl who invented rock ’n roll Mamie Van Doren in a campy calypso production number — not to be missed.  We shook, rattled and rolled our way through the 50s with Mamie, Elvis, Alan Freed and Bill Haley and the Comets.  

Burns book is subtitled “The Year that Launched the American Future” or at least the ’57 Chevy Bel Air which he thinks defines that year.  I beg to differ.  Richie Cunningham drove a Chevy in American Graffiti.  DIG IT!  

SLAVE TO MADISON AVENUE. Author Sloane Wilson’s 1953 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is considered to be “prototypical of the fifties,” wrote Eric Burns in his nonfiction book 1957.  Also comedian Stan Freeburg on his 1958 CBS Radio show did a mashup of Suit and the cult horror flick I Was A Teenage Werewolf.  I concluded that Suit was another commentary on the vapidness of Madison Avenue, but actually it dramatizes the paucity of rewarding work for returning war heroes who suffer from post traumatic syndrome while trying to fit in.  Tom, the central Suit character, gets a PR job with a TV network and soon learns that the stress and demands of this work will make him crazy so he negotiates with the network chief for a less demanding job and gets it.  I find this unbelievable, having worked for less than two years in network TV news.  I also watched the Suit movie of 1955 with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, who is memorable as Tom’s wife.  Family life is sacrificed at the altar of Madison Avenue in the Suit novel and movie.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049474/

STRANGE ONE, BIG BOY, LOVE SENSATION

 TAKE A BOW “You’re a Big Boy Now,” is one of my favorite films with the nightlife scenes in the seedier parts of 1966 Times Square.   Couple that with frolicking in Central Park and you have a big wet kiss to Manhattan.  There’s also a nod to avant-garde theater and dance clubs with go-go dancers.  Elizabeth Hartman gets top billing as the fem-fatale heart breaker Barbara Darling but Geraldine Page playing the neurotic mom was nominated for an Oscar.  When Sun Coast Video opened in Southdale I bought the VHS tape. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061209/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

AUTOCRAT.  Ben Gazzara is chilling in his 1957 film debut as a cunning viper out to destroy established authority at a military academy. The highly rated film also features George Peppard.  Docile fellow cadets sheep-like submit to his assumed authority.  Look for parallels with recent political events.  On the schedule for the Movies TV Channel in your city.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051019/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_3

LOVE SENSATION.  A 70s disco hit from r&b singer Loleatta Holloway is my favorite morning workout music.  Feel free to share music that jump starts you in the morning. I scored the LP at the clearance basement sale at the Wax Museum in the early 80s.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Sensation

Joan Didion, Master Story Teller

DIDION GEM. Regarding the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s, Joan Didion wrote: “This is the California where it is easy to Dial A Devotion, but hard to buy a book.”  Her article, “Lifestyles in the Golden Land,” is true crime reporting at it’s best and you can find it in a compilation of her non fiction work “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.” https://www.thejoandidion.com/about/

ABOUT HUGHES.  He was a hermit with money which gave him “personal freedom, mobility and privacy” which is what we want.  Right?  Journalist Joan Didion in ’67 wrote the definitive essay on the illusive millionaire Howard Hughes, “7000 Romaine Street,” Los Angeles. Hughes “communications center” was located.  It could have been the setting for a film noir with criminals lurking in every shadow.  Nearby was the RKO Radio Pictures at 780 Gower that Hughes once owned and mismanaged into extinction. See her book, “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.”  https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/7000-Romaine-St-Los-Angeles-CA/13691826/

Joan Didion in an essay on Haight-Ashbury referenced a song she heard on KFRC radio which was the “Flower Power” station in ‘67.  When I lived in the Bay Area in 64-65 KFRC was MOR, playing Jack Jones and Sinatra — my favorite station. According to the Bay Area Radio Museum site: “In the mid-1960s, KFRC changed to a Top 40 rock’n’roll format, and quickly became the dominant station in the region with that format through the 1970’s, featuring the tight, carefully programmed sound developed by RKO-General’s star programmer, Bill Drake.

In 1969 I wanted to be the guy who wrote brilliant articles about urban affairs, like Joan Didion’s 1989 article “Down at City Hall” where she highlights the inconsistencies about Los Angeles residents’ attitudes.  Most people in ’89 had enough of LA and would move to San Diego given the chance.  Most of them supported LA Mayor Tom Bradley who was mayor when the quality of life deteriorated yet he managed to hold together his Black-Jewish coalition.  By 1993 LA would be increasingly populated by LatinX and Asians, Didion predicted, and Bradley might be irrelevant.

When I lived in LA in 63-64 doing rewrite at UPI and answering the phones at NBC News, nominal Democrat Sam Yorty was the mayor and would take the air out of “news” by proceeding his remarks with “as I have said one-hundred times before.”  This frustrated NBC government reporter Bill Brown no end. Reference: “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.”