Category Archives: hahas

“That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”

Posted on by under blogathon, brandie's faves, drama, hahas, summer under the stars

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) works on the lower rungs of an insurance company in New York City. He’s ambitious, but miserable–miserable because he has agreed to loan his apartment to various executives in the company to conduct extramarital affairs, forcing him to spend his nights waiting for the temporary “tenants” to vacate his premises. One day, the personnel director, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), prevails upon Baxter to use his apartment to “entertain” his own conquest. Baxter agrees and in return is given a promotion and a key to the executive washroom.

Little does Baxter realize, however, that Sheldrake’s “piece on the side” is Miss Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the comely elevator operator on whom he has a crush. When Baxter later discovers this at the office Christmas party, he is crushed–as is Fran, when she learns from Sheldrake’s spiteful secretary (Edie Adams) that she is the latest in a long line of Sheldrake’s office flings. Baxter picks up a girl in a bar and takes her back to his apartment, where he finds a distraught Fran has overdosed on sleeping pills.

Baxter nurses Fran back to health with the help of his judgmental neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen), who believes that Baxter is little more than a wastrel (having witnessed the parade of women entering and leaving Baxter’s apartment over time). In their time together, Baxter falls even more in love with Fran, though she is still hung up on Sheldrake. When Sheldrake’s wife discovers the truth about her husband and kicks him out, Sheldrake reignites his relationship with Fran, leading her to believe that they will someday be together legitimately. For his part, Baxter has finally had enough of the ills of blind ambition, and refuses to be a “bought” man anymore, leading Fran to realize that maybe she has put her faith in the wrong man after all.

The Apartment (1960), director Billy Wilder’s follow-up to his smash hit comedy Some Like It Hot (1959), is a departure from the screwball zaniness of that previous film. While the movie definitely has its moments of laugh-out-loud brilliance, it’s hard to classify The Apartment as an outright comedy; the dramatic elements, marked by an inescapable sense of pathos, belie that kind of catch-all categorization. In making The Apartment, Wilder seems to be taking some cues from predecessors/colleagues such as Ernst Lubitsch (Wilder’s admitted cinematic hero) and Preston Sturges in his attempt to mash up starkly different genres into a unified whole. And remarkably, it works: like those directors’ masterworks The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Wilder’s Apartment seamlessly meshes an entire range of human emotion into a brilliant, singular cinematic statement.

Wilder reportedly based the story of The Apartment on a tangential thought he had while watching David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945). In that film, married lovers Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard) borrow a friend’s apartment for a tryst. Wilder’s curiosity was piqued. What kind of man, he wondered, would be willing to loan out his home for such a thing? Wilder and co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond also drew on Hollywood gossip of the day to flesh out their story—most notably the Joan Bennett-Walter Wanger scandal, in which Wanger shot his wife’s agent, Jennings Lang, in a fit of jealousy over the affair between the two. To conduct their affair in secrecy, Lang had been using an apartment belonging to one of his employees (a detail that Wilder and Diamond eventually used as the crux of their tale). The seedier elements of The Apartment–which had presented issues when Wilder first proposed the idea after seeing Encounter in the 40s–were, if not more acceptable, at least somewhat less controversial by the time the movie was produced in 1960. The gradual breakdown of the Production Code (due in large part to the efforts of envelope-pushing filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Otto Preminger in the 50s) allowed the more risque elements of The Apartment to not only pass the muster of the censors, but to appeal to a broader audience hungry for more realistic, “adult” narratives.

The result was a film that volleys between farce and heartbreak, delicately balancing the lighter and darker elements while utterly reveling in the chance to reveal the seamier side of life. It’s not a happy story; nor it is an entirely sad one. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic, yet fitting. Everything that probably shouldn’t work about The Apartment ends up working beautifully. Wilder worshiped the notion of the “Lubitsch touch” (as did many of his contemporaries), but as this film demonstrates so aptly, the “Wilder touch” was nothing to sneeze at, either.

Take, for instance, one of the first scenes of the film, which establishes the “other” use of Baxter’s apartment. As he walks home down the shadowy city street, he glances up at the brightly-lit window of his apartment, resigning himself to the fact that he’ll have to wait before he can get inside to get warm. He lights a cigarette and smokes nervously. Meanwhile, inside, Sylvia (Joan Shawlee) emerges from the bedroom, humming and dancing, to greet Al Kirkeby (David Lewis). It’s very obvious that the two of them have just finished having sex; there is no question that they have “shattered the Commandments” (to borrow a phrase), but at the same time, the characters make no apologies for what they have done. Their behavior is not secretive or shameful; they are almost nonchalant in their attitudes about adultery (Sylvia: “You mean you bring other girls up here?” Kirkeby: “Certainly not. I’m a happily married man”). Wilder switches between a shot of the careless lovers, cozy in their nest, and the shivering, increasingly frustrated Baxter outside. When the couple finally leaves, Baxter is left to clean up their mess, tossing empty booze bottles in the trash and fielding Kirkeby’s request for vodka, vermouth, and “little cheese crackers.” The juxtaposition here between the couple and Baxter brings up an interesting question: who should feel more guilty–the illicit lovers, or the man who provided their love nest at the cost of his self-respect and personal dignity?

The strength of The Apartment lies in the performance of Jack Lemmon. This marks the second of seven collaborations between the actor and director (the first of which was the year before, in Hot), and it presents what is undoubtedly the best role Wilder ever wrote for Lemmon. As an actor, Lemmon was a type of Everyman, highly relatable and sympathetic in a wide variety of roles, and Wilder instinctively knew how to take full advantage of that quality by crafting Baxter to Lemmon’s strengths. C.C. Baxter is many things: desperate, lonely, ambitious, love-struck, calculating, put-upon … he’s a multifaceted character if there ever was one, and Lemmon brings him to glorious life, juggling Baxter’s constantly-shifting emotions with aplomb and making the audience empathize with him in the process. [If I have only one complaint with Lemmon's performance, it comes from the unforgettable scene in which Baxter strains spaghetti with a tennis racket--and then rinses the pasta. Eek! We good part-Italian girls know you NEVER rinse the noodles!]

The supporting cast is just as strong as their leading man: Shirley MacLaine, here playing one of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girls, is lovely, lost, and conflicted; Fred MacMurray, playing against type as the sleazeball Sheldrake, is a deliciously diabolical cheating bastard; and Edie Adams, as Miss Olsen, Sheldrake’s disillusioned secretary/former mistress, is great in a small but pivotal role. Jack Kruschen turns in an Oscar-nominated performance as Dr. Dreyfuss, Baxter’s nosy, concerned neighbor (“Be a mensch,” he admonishes Baxter). And for those of us who grew up watching Bewitched reruns, how weird is it to see “Larry Tate” (David White) playing a cheating executive at Baxter’s company? (Okay, it’s not so weird–Larry Tate was an asshole, after all.)

The Apartment is the highlight of Wilder’s partnership with Diamond, which spanned a dozen films over two decades. Diamond’s contributions to the latter half of Wilder’s career cannot be discounted; while Wilder brought a more caustic, world-weary sense to their screenplays, Diamond infused them with a great deal of heart. It is safe to assume that, had Diamond not contributed to the script for The Apartment, the sweeter elements of the story, particularly the lovely chemistry between Baxter and Miss Kubelik, would have been dulled, if not lost entirely. Compare The Apartment to 1950′s Sunset Blvd., which Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr.: not a drop of sentimentality to be seen, resulting in a harsher, more unrelentingly bleak tone. And while some might argue that such sentiment in The Apartment blunts the satirical message about ambition and business culture in America, I would in turn argue that the “fuzzier” elements of the story have their merits, as one of this movie’s most important themes is the triumph of hope and integrity over cynicism, embodied by Baxter’s moment of self-realization in the end and Fran’s no-nonsense, downright unsentimental acceptance of Baxter’s declaration of love (“Shut up and deal”).

The Apartment was a hit, both with critics (well, some of them) and at the box office. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Today, it is remembered as one of Wilder’s best, if not the best product of his career, with one of Jack Lemmon’s most iconic performances. If you’ve never seen this movie, you are depriving yourself of a truly wonderful experience. You’ll laugh, you’ll tear up, you’ll cheer, you’ll marvel at the general moral depravity of humanity. What more could you ask for from a single film?

 

This post is an entry in the ongoing “2012 TCM SUTS Blogathon” hosted by Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence and ScribeHard on Film. Share the Lemmon love and check out all of the other “juicy” (sorry, couldn’t resist) entries being posted today.

There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh.

Posted on by under announcements, blogs we love, hahas

 

Today, it just feels appropriate to borrow a quote from one of the funniest screenwriters of all time, the great Preston Sturges. His 1941 opus Sullivan’s Travels, from which the title of this post derives, remains one of the best comedies of all time–incisive, witty, keenly observational, and filled with moments of rolling-on-the-floor hilarity. We film fans love to make lists of our favorite/the “greatest” films of all time, and it’s safe to say that any list of the most notable comedic films in the history of cinema would be incomplete without Sturges’ name cropping up multiple times.

All of this to say, such a list HAS been created by the good folks at Wonders in the Dark, and a countdown of those films commences today on their site!

With input from some of the most entertaining and talented film bloggers on the interwebs (and … erm … me), Wonders in the Dark has compiled a list of 100 “great” comedy films. For the next five months, five days a week (Monday-Friday), from number one hundred through number one, the contributors will give each film its due, examining what makes these movies the comedy gems they truly are. I am honored to be contributing five pieces about five of my personal favorites (my first post will go live in September), and I am very much looking forward to sharing my love for these films–and reading ALL of the entries throughout the upcoming weeks!

The countdown kicks off today with Tony d’Ambra taking a look at (fittingly enough!) a Sturges classic–the uproarious 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Head on over to Wonders in the Dark to read his thoughts and add your own in the comments. And stay tuned through December to see if YOUR favorites have made the list!

Getting to know Marilyn Monroe.

Posted on by under blogathon, hahas, summer under the stars

 

The legendary blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe, has for some time been a mystery to me. The handful of movies that I’ve seen of hers have left me unimpressed. While unarguably beautiful, she always seems to play an unintelligent, gold-digger type, which is unappealing to me (personally, I’ve always been more of a Katharine Hepburn fan: I like a strong, independent female lead). However, while researching more about the mysterious Monroe, I’ve learned that she may have been much deeper than she seemed on the surface. Monroe had a troubled childhood; her father abandoned the family, and her mother was mentally ill. She grew up in foster homes, and was said to have been abused and nearly raped at the age of six. Surely she was more intelligent than the characters she portrayed, as she took literature courses at UCLA and was said to have been well-read (from a literature teacher’s mindset, this is an obvious sign of intelligence). So why did Monroe continue to play the role of the sex symbol, the bubble-headed blonde, seemingly without fail?

Two of Monroe’s early screen performances set the stage for the persona that would ultimately define her career. In the humorous 1952 film We’re Not Married!, five couples discover that their marriages are not legal. Two years after ceremonies conducted by a senile judge were performed, the couples are informed by letters that their marriages are not official. The elderly judge is reprimanded; apparently, he was not officially in office until January 15, but he still married five couples between December 24 – January 14. Because he was not officially a judge when he performed those ceremonies, the couples involved were not legally wed. One such couple is Mr. and Mrs. Norris (David Wayne and Monroe).

When the judge and his wife recall the couple, the judge can’t stop talking about how cute the young woman, Mrs. Norris, had been: “Wasn’t she cute? Remember how she blushed about everything?” The husband, on the other hand, was remembered as a “jerk.” When we meet the couple, we see that things have changed for them: while the Mrs. is away competing in beauty contests, her husband is at home cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their infant.

Her husband is obviously very frustrated with this arrangement. When he answers the door in an apron, the postman says, “Where’s Mrs. Norris? At the office?” When Mr. Norris opens the letter that explains the couple is not legally married, he is thrilled. He immediately wires the Mrs. Mississippi committee to have her stripped of her title, since technically she is no longer a “Mrs.” He believes that this will allow him to share more of the domestic duties with her. Unfortunately for him, when he tells her the news, she is ecstatic. This means that she can compete in the “Miss Mississippi” contest instead of the “Mrs. Mississippi” contest that she’s previously been a part of.

“We’re not married!”

This is one of the few films in which I’ve seen Marilyn playing a married woman with a child. Although she is a beauty queen, she does not play the sex kitten that she has in the majority of her other films that I’ve seen. Also, although she is rather selfish and neglectful of her family, she is not the ditsy blonde that I’ve come to know as “Marilyn Monroe.” Instead, she is an ambitious woman who seems to work hard to reach her goal, which, for once, is not to bag a rich man.

Marilyn has another small part in the 1952 film Monkey Business starring Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers.

In this film, Dr. Fulton (Grant) attempts to create a fountain-of-youth drug. Thanks to a lab monkey, he is fairly successful. When he drinks the “miracle juice,” he begins to act like a young man. He goes out and purchases a new suit and a flashy sports car. Although he is married to the loyal Mrs. Fulton (Rogers), he spends time with a secretary who works at his company, Miss Laurel (Monroe). She seems to believe that he is romantically interested in her, and does her best to catch his attentions.

They spend the day together driving around in his sports car, roller-skating, and swimming at the community pool. After the drug wears off, he is no longer interested in the young, air-headed secretary. One of the most enjoyable parts of the film was watching Rogers threaten Monroe to stay away from her husband: “I’ll pull that blonde hair out by its black roots! … Put ‘em up! Put ‘em up! Put ‘em up!”

Although she fit the bill, I found Monroe’s character to be, once again, static. This is another Monroe film in which she plays a beautiful, yet ignorant blonde. She seemed to be the exact same character that she played in some of her other films, such as The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Her performance in Bus Stop (1956) was slightly better, although she still plays a naive pushover who can’t seem to take control of the situation in which she becomes involved.

After reading her biographical information, I really want to become a Monroe fan, but I’m stymied by that overwhelmingly dizzy persona. In the relatively few films of hers that I have seen, Monroe just seems either unwilling or incapable of rising above the tired blonde stereotype. Was it fear? A sign of her inability/inexperience as an actress? Pressure from the studios? Or was she just more comfortable letting people see the facade as opposed to the “real thing?”

I’m convinced that there must more to her than meets the eye. Monroe fans, speak up! Are there Monroe performances out there that prove this? Can you help point this Monroe newbie in the right direction to find some performances that reflect the more cerebral, “real life” Marilyn?

 

This post is an entry in the “2012 TCM SUTS Blogathon” hosted by Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence and ScribeHard on Film. Check out the other Marilyn-centric posts that will be submitted throughout the day, and be sure to catch 24 hours of Monroe’s films all day on TCM.

Living the American dream with Mr. Blandings.

Posted on by under blogathon, classic pairings, hahas, summer under the stars

“It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. The minute you start, they put you on the all-American sucker list. You start out to build a home and wind up in the poorhouse. And if it can happen to me, what about the guys who aren’t making $15,000 a year? The ones who want a home of their own. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you–against every boy and girl who were ever in love.”

In the wake of World War II, the great migration from cities to suburbs began in earnest as weary urban dwellers sought to escape the rigors of overcrowding and increasing rent in favor of owning their own homes. Mortgages were affordable and relatively easy to obtain–particularly for veterans–and in the decade following the war, the rate of home ownership in the United States increased by more than twenty percent. More than ever, owning a home was considered an integral part of the American dream, and it was the goal of many an American middle-class household.

Of course, the dream and the reality are often in stark contrast to one another, and many new homeowners were unprepared for the issues–monetary, physical, psychological–associated with holding full responsibility for one’s domicile. This quickly-dashed idealism is the center of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), which not only gives us a comedic look at the problems associated with building one’s own “nest,” but also gently satirizes the supposed idylls of home ownership.

Cary Grant stars as the titular Mr. Jim Blandings, an advertising man who lives with his wife, Muriel (Myrna Loy) and their two daughters, Betsy (Connie Marshall) and Joan (Sharyn Moffett) in a tiny New York apartment. Tired of living in such cramped quarters (and discovering that his wife has been talking to an expensive interior designer on the sly), Jim decides–almost on a whim–to move the family to the country (i.e. Connecticut). Jim and Muriel get suckered into buying a dilapidated old farm house for more than its worth, only to later be informed by their friend and lawyer, Bill Cole (Melvyn Douglas), that they have been bamboozled. But the Blandings have fallen in love with the idea of the place and proceed with the deal, against any and all advice.

As it turns out, the house is unsound and must be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up. The Blandings hire Henry Sims (Reginald Denny), an architect, to design a new home, and construction proceeds. But there are problems from the get-go, from incompetent workmen to issues with the land–not to mention the ever-increasing costs of the project. Compounded with problems at work and his growing jealousy over the “relationship” between his wife and his best friend, Jim finds his life quickly spiraling out of control. Can he survive the building of his dream home with his family, job, and sanity intact?

The opening scenes of the film–laid over Douglas’ wry narration–underscore the central conflict of the film between the bustling city and the calmer country. Bill Cole’s voice-over describes the city in flattering, incongruous terms (a crowded lunch counter becomes a “quaint little sidewalk cafe”) that humorously set up the difference between the current locale and the more rural one to come. For its part, Manhattan is a claustrophobic wonderland, overflowing with millions of people, pushing, shoving, struggling just to move through the streets. That conflict is recreated in miniature inside the cramped Blandings apartment: Jim’s search through the minuscule bedroom closet for his robe; fighting with his daughters for access to the bathroom; maneuvering around Muriel to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror while shaving (or resignedly wiping the steam from the mirror while she showers); inching around close-set tables and furniture in a long-established, intricate ballet of restricted movement.

And yet the solution to these problems–the spacious countryside, the big house with two closets and a bathroom for every member of the family (aren’t they living in a dream world?)–is not quite the idyllic conclusion the Blandings expected. The people in the supposedly more “civilized” country are potentially just as crooked as their city-folk counterparts (the shady real estate agent being a prime example), and the problems of overcrowding are replaced by the mounting expenses and inconveniences of living so far outside of the city. Though the movie ultimately finds its happy ending, with the Blandings comfortably ensconced in their new “dream home,” the costs of getting there, it seems, are discouraging and troublesome.

Grant and Loy starred in three films together, and Mr. Blandings marks the last of these. In many ways, it is also their best. As a domestic couple, they are a charming pair, beautiful, witty, and appealing. Grant is such a “dad”–he wanders around the apartment, seemingly in every female’s way, weighing himself on the bathroom scale with a rueful pat of his (nonexistent) gut and singing off-key in the shower. He’s not even able to enjoy bathroom time to himself in the morning without Muriel coming in. Still, Jim–at least initially–is unfazed by the seeming disorder and chaos that mark his domestic life; he simply sighs and squeezes the tube of toothpaste back into proper form without a word, like any beleaguered father (his performance, especially in the opening scenes, bring a myriad of hapless paternal figures from any number of sitcoms to mind).

While Grant’s befuddled and increasingly frustrated Jim is undeniably the centerpiece of the film, Loy more than matches him quip for quip. Muriel is determined to have the house of her dreams, and spends most of her time concerned about the color schemes and decorative elements of the house than her husband’s growing irritation at the ever-ballooning budget, leading to priceless exchanges like this one:

Muriel: “I refuse to endanger the lives of my children in a house with less than four bathrooms.”
Jim: “For thirteen hundred dollars, they can live in a house with three bathrooms and rough it.”

Loy doesn’t look old enough to have teenage daughters in this film, even though in reality she was forty-three when it was released. The  movie came in the wake of a four-year break from Hollywood that Loy had taken during the war, when she allied herself with the Red Cross and undertook several tours to sell war bonds and raise money for the military effort. When she finally returned to the screen, she found perhaps her greatest role starring opposite Fredric March in the phenomenal post-war drama The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The subsequent years had found her as successful as ever, with the release of the final Thin Man movie, Song of the Thin Man (1947), and her second pairing with Grant, as Shirley Temple’s older sister in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), both cleaning up at the box office. The late 40s marked the peak of her career, however, as she took on fewer film roles in the following decades.

A warm and genuinely funny comedy marked by excellent performances from its lead trio (not to mention great supporting turns from Denny and Louise Beavers as the family maid, Gussie), Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is simply a must-see.

 

This post is an entry in the “2012 TCM SUTS Blogathon” hosted by Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence and ScribeHard on Film. Make sure to check out all of the Myrna Loy-centric entries from today, and more stars throughout the month!

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House airs at 6PM EST today on TCM.

John Wayne is … McLintock!

Posted on by under blogathon, carrie's faves, hahas, summer under the stars, westerns

The movie poster, though I can’t say I like the imagery or the color …

McLintock! (1963) is my favorite John Wayne movie. Not being a big fan of Westerns in general, this hardly may be great praise, but perhaps it is. It is on my short list of “westerns worth watching.” I love the humor, the banter, and the playfulness of this movie.

My grandmother loved Westerns, and she loved John Wayne. She would have been ninety years old this past July, and that is a big part of why I volunteered to do this piece.

John Wayne as G.W. McLintock

John Wayne made a career out of being the cowboy, the “man’s man” on the silver screen–and why not? He was huge. He’s impressive on screen and was fairly impressive in person. (There is a statue of him in Madame Tussaud’s in London–or at least there was several years ago–and you can see for yourself.) He was also known not to be shy about his opinions, which pretty  much reflects his on-screen characters. McLintock! was indeed a comedy, but also an expression of his own conservative views.

McLintock’s justice–afterwards, we see the mud brawl.

He was responsible for naming the Governor (Robert Lowery) Cuthbert H. Humphrey after his own political thorn, Senator Humphrey.  The anti-feminism within the plot feels forgivable, probably due to the film’s unabashed childishness–spankings, fighting in mud, resisting decorum. More than anything, we watch John Wayne act like a very large, intoxicated child. His escapades are so well-known that the local children race to catch his hat in the morning (which he has thrown to the weather vane atop the roof in his drunken return home). To make matters more interesting, Maureen O’Hara plays opposite him as his estranged wife Katherine, all the while informing him he should act like a grown man, instead of an ape. If anyone could play this role, it was Maureen O’Hara.

Even Maureen O’Hara’s in the mud.

In McLintock!, Wayne reunites with O’Hara once more (in the fourth of their five films together), with appearances by Patrick Wayne, Stefanie Powers, Chill Wills (Best. Name. Ever.), and a goofball performance by Jerry Van Dyke. The only really sentimental part goes to character actor Jack Kruschen as Mr. Birnbaum. They made a good choice in casting him; he made short roles go far in film and television throughout his career (it appears broadcast television had to reconfigure itself to do without him after his retirement in the late nineties, as he was in countless major series for more than forty years).

What I love about this film is that it’s quotable, such as during the famous mud scene when the Chief declares, “Great party, but no whiskey. We go home.”  He’s a great character, rather Sondheim in nature, with his random appearances regarding whiskey. Then it flips and they are crucial to the development of the plot, or subplot, depending on which plot you consider primary. Regardless, he’s an excellent addition to the film and helps set the unique tone for this Western piece.

My favorite piece of John Wayne timing is the fight with Maureen O’Hara. After said fight, in which she refuses to have a discussion with “an intoxicated man” and storms up the stairs, he follows her, stating, “And I am not intoxicated. Yet.”  This scene sums up the film and their relationship in a few lines of spot-on timing.

Mrs. McLintock vs. Mrs. Warren–I do love Mrs. Warren.

This film is fun and lighthearted. It’s the type of film that makes you think they had fun making it, or at least hope they did. As I enjoy assigning accompanying foods to movie-watching, I particularly recommend partnering McLintock! with biscuits, in deference to Mrs. Warren’s cooking prowess, and perhaps a fried chicken dinner with mashed potatoes.

 

This post is an entry in the “2012 TCM Summer Under the Stars” Blogathon sponsored by Jill of Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence and Michael of ScribeHard on Film. Make sure to check in with Jill and Michael throughout the month for more entries from around the blogosphere!

McLintock! airs at 5:45PM EST today on TCM.

Mel Brooks: Silent Movie

Posted on by under carrie's faves, hahas, ripe for parody, spoofing around

Before High Anxiety, Mel Brooks starred in and directed Silent Movie (1976). The ultimate silent movie, it’s a silent film about creating a silent film. Aided by his two loyal associates, Dom Bell (Dom DeLuise) and Marty Eggs (Marty Feldman), Mel Funn (Mel Brooks) takes a silent film script to Hollywood, where he was once revered. The studio has just received word that the treacherous Engulf and Devour plan to take over their studio. Mel Funn declares that his silent film will save the studio, and he sets off to find big stars for the film (including Burt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, and Paul Newman).

Why Mel Funn wears a sailing cap, I have no idea, but they enjoy their hats in this movie.

Engulf and Devour try desperately to stop them, but they could have spared themselves the trouble. Bell, Eggs, and Funn wreak havoc on all of their stars perfectly well on their own, and the stars still agree to participate in the film. Engulf and Devour hire seductress Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to distract Funn from his mission, but as a matter of course, she falls in love with the director/recovering alcoholic for real.

Let’s make this as awkward as possible…

The comedy is brilliantly, ridiculously slapstick, true to a Mel Brooks film. To make this film special, they perform variations of the traditional gags of the master comedians (think Buster Keaton, who was Marty Feldman’s idol), and speed up the film to mimic the early rapid, jerky frames in addition to showing frantic behavior. Then there’s the comedy hallmarks that make a Mel Brooks film: irony, quotes, and absurdity.  A few of my favorite examples:

Quoting his own plot: Distracting seductive lounge singer–Blazing Saddles (1974), anyone? Not to mention, her routines are just bizarre …

Distracting much? And notice Marty Eggs’ hat…

Marty Feldman: physical comedy, can’t catch a break, and awkward, unspoken dialogue. I love Marty Feldman. You may know him as Igor in Young Frankenstein (1974). He is a great character with odd quirks as a “mild-mannered pervert,” wearing a fighter pilot’s cap even with formal wear, and always hopping out of the convertible to open the door for Bell, even though Marty sits in the middle.  Watch Marty- he has a lot of little behaviors in big scenes that are hilarious. Details, details, details.

Hiring Bernadette Peters to be the musical star in a silent film: Just in case you aren’t familiar with her, she’s well-known for her musical talent as well as acting, and has spent a lot of time on Broadway as well as film.

Marcel Marceau speaks!

Mime Marcel Marceau having one of almost the only sounds: they call a mime on the phone (ha ha), and he answers his resounding “non/no” to being in the film, which is funny, because he’s in the film …

While I wouldn’t call this my favourite Mel Brooks piece, it’s definitely funny and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.  Being silent, it doesn’t work at all if you multitask during the movie (a habit I tend to have), so watch it when you have time to actually sit down and watch it. I recommend lemonade and some sort of light finger food with this one–perhaps peanut butter and jelly cut into fourths.

 

This post is the second entry in Carrie’s ongoing tribute to the filmography of Mel Brooks. You can find more entries in that series here.

Discussing All-American Co-Ed.

Posted on by under B is for B-movie, discussion post, hahas, magnificent musicals

 

Last year, Brandie found a cheap collection of random classic musicals (mainly from the 1940s) and gave it to Carrie as part of her Christmas present. Though the collection features a number of well-known classic Hollywood stars, most of the films are relatively obscure, and the prints are admittedly not the best quality (considering all of the movies have lapsed into the public domain, this is not really surprising). The most well-known film in the collection is probably the Fred Astaire-Jane Powell musical Royal Wedding (1951).

A few months ago, Carrie started working her way through the discs, and when she came across one 1941 film in particular, the unadulterated WTF-ery filling that movie led to a very entertaining series of text messages between Brandie and Carrie. When the True Classics crew gathered in Birmingham recently for a movie-filled girls’ weekend, Carrie brought the DVD along and we all marveled at its utter strangeness.

In the spirit of last year’s discussion on the equally WTF-ery-filled musical Cinderella Jones (1946), Carrie and Brandie bring you All-American Co-Ed: A Viewing Experience.

Brandie: So. This was an … interesting movie.

Carrie: To say the least. You should have been ME the first time I saw it.

Brandie: I already know the answer to this question, but for the sake of our readers–what were your initial impressions?

Carrie: “Oh, my God, what is this?” When I first started watching, I didn’t catch that it was about cross-dressing. I was just paying slight attention to the “showgirls” in the opening scene—I was getting ready for bed at the time. I knew from the description on the DVD case that it was about a girls’ college—the names of the schools, “Mar Brynn” and “Quinceton,” were listed. But it took me a moment to notice that the “girls” looked rather manly … and that the lead singer wasn’t even trying to sing in falsetto.

Brandie: Before we go any further, I guess I should interrupt you here so we can set up the plot so folks know what we’re talking about. Although even with a plot synopsis, it’s pretty hard to see where the movie’s going, because it moves so fast and character development is nil. But would you like to explain what’s going on in this film, Carrie?

Carrie: Damn it. I knew you were going to ask me to do this part. Okay. In a nutshell, the headmistress of Mar Brynn, Mrs. Collinge (Esther Dale) is trying to increase her enrollment. She and her press agent, Hap Holden (Harry Langdon) hatch a plan to offer twelve scholarships to “twelve unusual girls.” By “unusual,” they mean “twelve beauty queens,” which I found very weird. Being a horticultural school, they choose “queens” of various agricultural industries. To top it off, they publicly insult the Quinceton Zetas (who are noted for their musical revues, which they perform in drag). Reading this, the Zetas devise a plan to humiliate Mar Brynn by sending in a female impersonator as a scholarship recipient. So Bob (Johnny Downs) “wins” and is admitted to Mar Brynn as “Bobbie,” the Queen of the Flowers. Unfortunately, Bob almost immediately falls in love with the headmistress’ niece, Virginia (Frances Langford). What ensues is a misguided courtship attempt, silk pajama sing-alongs, and possibly the most disturbing agricultural pageant ever conceived. For the rest, you just have to watch the movie and see for yourself.

Brandie: Yes. We didn’t call this an “experience” for nothing. For only being forty-eight minutes long—yes, forty-eight minutes—this film packs a lot of insanity. It is one of the more entertaining B-musicals of the 1940s, if only for its outlandish plot. Out of all the movies in that DVD collection, what drew you to this one to watch first? Is the girls’ school element what first attracted you to the film?

Carrie: Well, naturally, that was a big part of it. Then I saw that they were also making fun of “Quinceton,” and the thinly-veiled references to those real-life schools were entertaining. What were your initial thoughts?

Brandie: When I received your text messages during the movie, I thought, “Surely she is exaggerating.” But then again, you are not prone to over-exaggeration, so I started to wonder what the hell kind of rabbit hole I’d sent you tumbling through by giving you this movie. And when we finally watched it together—oh, holy hell, this movie is weird and wonderful.

Notice they misspelled the name of their own school …

Carrie: I really love the scene in the beginning when they hatch their plot in the frat house, and you meet all the brothers. Especially the one who does impersonations for no reason whatsoever—

Brandie: Other than the fact that he’s played by notable impressionist Kent Rogers. [Rogers was a Warner Bros. voice-over artist who was the original voice of Beaky Buzzard and Henery Hawk. He died in 1944 while in flight training for World War II, weeks before his 21st birthday. All-American Co-Ed marked Rogers' final onscreen appearance.]

Carrie: Right! But there’s no reason for him to be imitating Gary Cooper there! They crafted the scene around that, just for the sake of having it. It’s really strange.

Brandie: The cast as a whole is not particularly well-known, but some familiar faces pop up throughout the movie. Langford was primarily known as a popular radio star who worked with Rudy Vallee, Dick Powell, Bob Hope, and Don Ameche. Downs was mostly known for his role as Johnny in the Our Gang series in the mid-1920s (which, incidentally, was produced by Hal Roach, Sr., the father of this film’s producer).

A chap with a chip on his shoulder.

Carrie: Unfortunately, he didn’t make for a very attractive woman.

Brandie: The leads may not be well-known, but some other familiar faces pop up throughout the movie. For instance, Noah Beery, Jr. and Alan Hale, Jr. both appear in minor roles (each of them later found their own measure of fame in character parts on popular television shows–the former was the title character’s father on the 1970s series The Rockford Files, while most people today remember the latter as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island). And Esther Dale plays the headmistress–

Carrie: Who was pretty obsessed with the size of her girls’ “tomatoes.”

Brandie: Disturbingly so. Dale is probably familiar to some folks for a number of dowager roles she played in movies like The Awful Truth (1937), Curly Top (1935), and Margie (1946). And then there’s Harry Langdon, the former silent movie star who plays the overeager press agent. At one point during the silent era, Langdon rivaled Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton for popularity, though he has not enjoyed the same level of longevity as his three counterparts.

Carrie: That character wore some very dreadful ties.

Langford, Langdon, and a real winner of a tie.

Brandie: Yeah, and they were actually some of the more tasteful accessories in the movie. Let’s just talk about those pageant costumes, huh?

Carrie: I felt so bad for the people who had to wear them. I thought that was just cruel. I think they picked the actors they liked the least to wear them—I can’t even decide which one was the worst because they were all awful. And that horrible song they had to sing about the farmer’s daughter …

Brandie: Those girls had giant pieces of fruit in places no self-respecting fruit should go.

Carrie: Pretty much.

Brandie: The actress who plays Bunny, Marjorie Woodworth, was probably the most appealing female character. It’s a shame she didn’t have a longer-lasting career. She had some entertaining moments of mild slapstick, especially the scene where she somehow manages to contract measles and then tries to escape quarantine.

Carrie: She really is the brilliant hysteric. She manages to make it funny as opposed to over-the-top. And it cracks me up to realize that everyone is essentially chasing a “bunny.”

Brandie: It does seem rather deliberate. Although I have to say, the scene where she and her fellow students are lounging on the lawn in silk pajamas during a singalong is highly unrealistic. We went to a girls’ school and never once did that. It’s like a male fantasy brought to life on film—that girls’ schools are like dens of hidden sex. Like the idea that all the girls have naked pillow fights in the dorm every night, when everybody knows we only did that on Thursdays. [Editor's note: KIDDING!]

Carrie: Well, Bob needs to be enthralled by something while he continues his masquerade.

Brandie: Most of the humor comes from the cross-dressing elements—the filmmakers seem to take particular pleasure in forcing “Bobbie” to extricate “herself” from the clutches of amorous men—one of whom is a fellow Zeta (albeit from another university).

“Go ahead and ring my bell.”

Carrie: Some elements of this film reminded me so much of Mel Brooks’ type of humor. Like the sign on the campus bell: “Pull rope and release. Bell will ring automatically.” Well, duh. It’s a bell rope. And the fact that bell “hasn’t worked in years”—how can it not work? It’s a BELL. The entire logic of the situation is skewed in a really funny way. The whole thing reminds me of the sign on the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous in High Anxiety: “Keep In” instead of “Keep Out.” It’s that same weird sense of humor.

Brandie: All I can say is, I think everyone should see this movie. It’s available in its entirety on YouTube. And, conveniently enough, TCM has scheduled All-American Co-Ed to run TOMORROW (July 18th) at 1:30PM EST! Set your DVRs, kids–you’re not going to want to miss this glorious bit of strangeness.

Carrie: This film—though it may be scarring for a vegetarian—pairs very well with a mellow pinot noir or zinfandel. Or beer. Definitely beer. Whatever you can get your hands on, really.

Brandie: Agreed. If ever a movie cried out for booze to accompany its viewing, it’s this one.

“Successful angels do not use sarcasm!”

Posted on by under hahas, lit adaptations, supernatural films

Charles (Clifton Webb) and Arthur (Edmund Gwenn) are an unlikely-named pair of angels who are sent down to earth to fetch a young soul named Item (Gigi Perreau). Item has been hanging around the home of the Boltons, Jeff (Robert Cummings) and Lydia (Joan Bennett), for seven years, waiting to be born. But the show-biz couple are too busy to have a baby–even though Lydia says she is ready to have a child, Jeff insists that they dedicate themselves to the theater and their new play instead.

Charles and Arthur try to convince Item to come back to heaven with them, but she steadfastly refuses, because she has grown to love the Boltons and wants them to be her parents. Charles decides that the best way to convince the Boltons to start a family is to materialize into human form and pose as an “angel investor” to back their new play. Item takes him to the movies to see a Gary Cooper film, The Westerner (1940), and Charles bases his new persona around the actor, taking on a cowpoke accent and claiming to be a sheep rancher from Texas named “Slim Charles.”

Jeff is thrilled by the prospect of finding someone willing to fork over the funds, and he invites Charles to join him and Lydia at their dairy farm in Pennsylvania, which the pair has converted into a summer home. When Charles seems less than willing to write a check for the play, Jeff tells the playwright, Daphne Peters (Joan Blondell), to cozy up to “Slim” and convince him to sign on the dotted line. Charles finds himself enticed by Daphne, and experiences the first stirrings of love. Arthur, who has tagged along to keep an eye on Charles, tells him that falling in love would be the worst thing he could do, and puts him back on track to complete his mission.

In a private moment, Lydia confesses to “Slim” that she thinks her marriage may be over and she regrets never having had a child. Charles convinces her to fight for her marriage, and that she needn’t consult Jeff first if having a baby is what she really wants. Charles and Arthur set the mood for the couple that evening, hoping for the best. But soon enough, trouble arrives in multiple forms: Daphne’s ex-boyfriend, B-movie actor and wannabe gangster Tony Clark (Jack La Rue) arrives to win her back; a former angel investor, Tex Henry (Harry von Zell) arrives, interested in financing the play himself; the IRS gets involved when no record of a “Slim Charles” can be found; more marital tensions build between the Boltons as their anniversary approaches; and Charles finds himself corrupted by some very human temptations as his plot goes off the rails. It’s up to Arthur and Item to remind Charles of who he really is and help him get his plan back on the right track.

For Heaven’s Sake (1950) was adapted from Harry Segall’s 1949 play May We Come In? by writer/director George Seaton. Segall was well-versed in the topic of angels–his play Heaven Can Wait was adapted for film three times, as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Heaven Can Wait (1978), and Down to Earth (2001), and Segall won an Academy Award for Best Original Story for that first picture. Nor does this film mark Seaton’s first go-round with fantastical or supernatural elements; his screenplay for the perennial Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947) won Seaton the first of two Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay (the second, incidentally, was for his decidedly non-whimsical script for 1954′s The Country Girl).

Clifton Webb was at the height of his immense stardom at the time he made this film. After becoming an almost overnight sensation as viperous Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), Webb had reached new heights of stardom with the introduction of Lynn Belvedere, know-it-all extraordinaire, in 1948′s Sitting Pretty. The naturally sarcastic and biting edge that marks those roles works well for him here, too, as the impatient angel who finds himself tempted by the spoils of humanity. Though he’s surrounded by a capable supporting cast (including lovely performances from Joan Bennett and an always cheeky Joan Blondell, as well as a nice turn by Seaton’s former Santa Claus, Edmund Gwenn), Webb is the center of the film, and he carries it with an air of suppressed glee that underlies many of his scenes.

Take, for instance, the sequence in which Charles plays the blues on his harp. As the camera pans around the room, we see all of the decadence to which Charles has aligned himself as a human–cigarettes, booze, glossy-mag photos of beautiful women, a copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary … it’s a veritable den of iniquity. There’s a hilarious double-take by the camera as it passes over a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, stops, and jerks back to bring the picture into frame once more. Then we finally see Charles, clad in a silk dressing gown, plucking his harp and scatting, throwing around slang, and giving himself over to the “musical profanity” (as Arthur calls it) without a care in the world. As he plucks and sighs and hums along to the tune, waving his hands in the air and rolling his eyes in ecstasy, it’s obvious that Webb is having quite a bit of fun in his role (to say the least).

The other highlight of this film is a delightful sequence in which Daphne’s ex-boyfriend, Tony, confronts “Slim” over Daphne’s affections, while Daphne reacts with sarcastic commentary and ample eye rolling. It’s a bit of a “meta” moment: the actors are playing characters who are themselves playing roles and maintaining a certain facade within the movie, with Charles (the angel) playing the Western hero, and Tony (the B-movie actor) portraying the hardened gangster. The scene is an entertaining mash-up of genre cliches and hackneyed impersonations:

Charles: “I wouldn’t try to molest the little lady if I was you.”

Tony: “Out of my way, stupid.”

Charles: “When you say that, stranger, smile.”

Tony: “If you wanna collect your old age pension, you better not start nothing, see?”

Charles: “Now, I ain’t a-looking for trouble, stranger, but if trouble comes a-looking for me, I won’t be hard to find.”

Tony: “Tough, huh?”

Charles: “When I’m riled.”

Tony: “Yeah?”

Charles: “Yeah!”

Daphne (mockingly): “Yeah!”

As if the dialogue isn’t perfect enough, the staging of this scene is hilarious. The two men, clad in their respective cliched garments–Charles in a plaid shirt, Tony in a suit and fedora–get right in one another’s faces. Tony hulks menacingly and pulls a knife, while Charles puffs out his chest and nonchalantly rolls a cigarette. Tony threatens to cut a button off Charles’ shirt, and Charles, forgetting all angelic decorum, blows the tobacco in Tony’s face and decks him. Daphne is thrilled–”Beautiful, Slim! Gary Cooper couldn’t have done it any better”–and Charles stands tall, a satisfied smirk on his face as he hitches up his pants and tosses her a wink. Beautiful, indeed.

All in all, For Heaven’s Sake is a delightful entry in the “supernatural fantasy” genre that found such popularity in the 1940s. Like many of its brethren, this film succumbs to sentiment in the end–almost cloyingly so–as Charles finds redemption and Item’s dream comes true. Still, despite the mushiness of the ending, the story leading up to that inevitably sappy finale is an entertaining one, and the film is well worth a viewing or two, especially for Clifton Webb fans. I wouldn’t call this his best role, but as a cinematic brother to Webb’s far superior Mr. Belvedere, Charles the angel is undeniably appealing.