Saturday, March 10, 2012
Bringing Up Babs
By Damian Arlyn
I remember working in the video store one day when a regular customer came in to check out a few titles. He glanced at the enormous flat screen we had behind the counter, saw Barbra Streisand belting out some catchy show tune and uttered a question I got asked a lot in those days. "What are you watching?" he said. "Hello, Dolly!" I answered. He smiled, shook his head and exclaimed, "See, now, here's where I break with the stereotype. I'm a gay guy who doesn't like Barbra Streisand." I just laughed and replied, "That's OK. I'm a straight guy who does."
And it's true. Although she is by no means my favorite actress (nor would I ever see a film simply because she's in it), I happen to enjoy watching her onscreen. Funny Girl, Meet the Fockers and the aforementioned Hello, Dolly! are all films I love, but my favorite movie of hers would have to be the hilarious What's Up, Doc? which celebrates its 40th anniversary today. Nowhere is Babs' gift for comedy and sheer charisma on display better than in this film. They even find an excuse to show off her incredible voice once or twice: namely, in the film's opening and ending credits where she sings Cole Porter's "You're The Top" as well as the scene at the piano when she croons a few lines of "As Time Goes By."
It also doesn't hurt that What's Up, Doc? happens to be a really great movie. Hot off of his success with The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich originally conceived it as a remake of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby, but wisely decided (much as Lawrence Kasdan would do later with his film noir tribute Body Heat) to use Hawks' film merely as an inspiration rather than a template and to give What's Up, Doc? its own identity. As a result, it comes off more as a love letter to screwball comedies in general as well as to iconic Warner Bros. feature films (such as Casablanca) and classic animated shorts. Hence, when Barbra's character, Judy Maxwell, is introduced first to Ryan O'Neal's nerdy Howard Bannister, she's seen munching on a carrot a la Bugs Bunny and/or Clark Gable from It Happened One Night. With her brash, fast-talking, trouble-making personality and his stiff, bespectacled, long-suffering demeanor, the two leads clearly are based on Baby's Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. (Interestingly, Streisand shared a best actress Oscar with Ms. Hepburn only four years earlier in one of the Academy's rare ties. Streisand won for her film debut in Funny Girl while Hepburn earned her third best actress trophy for The Lion in Winter. Hepburn's prize was her second consecutive win in the category having taken the 1967 Oscar for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.) Aside from Judy constantly getting Howard into trouble and a reminiscent coat-tearing gag, the similarities between Doc and Baby essentially end there.
Also, What's Up, Doc? lacks a leopard. Instead the chaos revolves around four identical carrying cases containing such varied items as clothes, rocks, jewels and classified government documents. When moviegoers first see the quartet of cases at the start of Doc, it's the filmmakers signaling audiences that much confusion and hilarity awaits. At this point I have to confess that, although I've seen the film at least a dozen times, I cannot to this day follow which case is which throughout the course of the film. Every time I sit down to watch, I swear I'm going to keep track of the cases, but I always give up about 20 minutes into it. I take some comfort, however, from the fact that even the great Buck Henry, in the process of re-writing the screenplay, reportedly phoned Bogdanovich to say, "I've lost one of the suitcases. It's in the hotel somewhere, but I don't know where I put it."
The gags come fast and furious in What's Up, Doc? More than a decade before Bruce Willis and Bogdanovich's ex-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd resurrected rapid-fire banter on TV's Moonlighting, Streisand and O'Neal fire a barrage of zingers at each other so quickly that you're almost afraid to laugh for fear you'll miss the next one. The behind-the-scenes team also populates the What's Up, Doc? universe with a whole host of kooky characters, each bringing his or her unique comic flair to those roles. There isn't a single boring person in What's Up, Doc? Everyone (right down to the painter who drops his cigar into the bucket) amuses. At the top of the heap resides the great Madeline Kahn in her feature film debut as Howard's frumpy fiancée Eunice Burns. Two years before she joined Mel Brooks' cinematic comedy troupe, she proved to the world her status as one of the funniest women ever to grace the silver screen. Another Mel Brooks' regular, Kenneth Mars, plays Hugh Simon, providing yet one more strangely accented flamboyant nutball to his immense repertoire. A very young Randy Quaid, a brief M. Emmet Walsh and a very annoyed John Hillerman also show up in hilarious bit parts.
All of this anarchy culminates in a spectacular car chase through the streets of San Francisco that actually rivals the one from Bullitt. Apparently it took four weeks to shoot, cost $1 million (¼ of the film's budget) and even managed to get the filmmakers in trouble with the city for destroying some of its property without permission. Nevertheless, Bogdanovich pulls out all the stops in creating this over-the-top action/slapstick set piece that overflows with both thrills and laughs. When watching it, one can't help but be reminded that physical comedy on this grand of a scale doesn't even get attempted anymore. One wishes another director would resurrect the kind of awesome stunt-comedy on display here and in The Pink Panther series.
The film's dénouement takes place in a courtroom where an embittered, elderly judge (the brilliant Liam Dunn) hears the arguments of everyone involved and tries to make sense of it all. Howard's attempt to explain only serves to frustrate and confuse the judge further and results in this gem of an exchange that owes more than a little bit to Abbott & Costello's "Who's on First?":
HOWARD: First, there was this trouble between me and Hugh.
JUDGE: You and me?
HOWARD: No, not you. Hugh.
HUGH: I am Hugh.
JUDGE: You are me?
HUGH: No, I am Hugh.
JUDGE: Stop saying that. [to bailiff] Make him stop saying that!
HUGH: Don't touch me, I'm a doctor.
JUDGE: Of what?
HUGH: Music.
JUDGE: Can you fix a hi-fi?
HUGH: No, sir.
JUDGE: Then shut up!
The tag line for What's Up, Doc? read: "A screwball comedy. Remember them?" Well, whether people remembered screwball comedy or simply discovered it for the first time, they certainly embraced the film as it was an enormous success upon its release. It took in $66 million in North America alone and became the third-highest grossing film of the year. Since The Last Picture Show was released in late '71 and Doc came out in early '72, Bogdanovich had two hugely successful films playing in theaters at the same time. Unfortunately, his career, which had just started to rise, also had neared its peak. Although he would follow Doc with Paper Moon his directing career would only see sporadic critical successes after that such as Saint Jack and Mask. He even filmed Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show, but he'd never again see the kind of commercial or critical success he had achieved in the early 1970s. Bogdanovich would eventually end up working in television, often as an actor such as his long recurring role as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, psychiatrist to Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) on The Sopranos. The most recent feature film he directed was 2001's fairly well-received The Cat's Meow starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies and Edward Herrmann as William Randolph Hearst. Based on a play of the same name, The Cat's Meow concerned a real-life mystery in 1924 Hollywood involving the shooting death of writer/producer/director Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes) on Hearst's yacht.
When Bogdanovich was good, he was great and What's Up, Doc? is, in my opinion, the jewel in his crown. It made a once-forgotten genre popular again, it jump-started a lot of comic careers and it reminded us all that love meaning never having to say we're sorry is the dumbest thing we've ever heard.
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Labels: 70s, Abbott and Costello, Bogdanovich, Buck Henry, Cary, Cole Porter, Cybill Shepherd, Dunst, Gable, Hawks, K. Hepburn, L. Kasdan, Mel Brooks, Movie Tributes, R. Quaid, Streisand, The Sopranos, Willis
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Sunday, March 04, 2012
Pearl Tributes: Rex Hamilton
By Edward Copeland
No, Rex Hamilton isn't really 30 years old, but today marks the pearl anniversary of his most famous performance. Sure, many fine actors have taken a shot at playing our 16th president — Ralph Ince, Benjamin Chapin and Francis Ford practically made entire careers out of playing Honest Abe in film after film after film during the silent era. Among the better-known names to don the stovepipe hat on the big screen and TV include Walter Huston, John Carradine, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Hal Holbrook, Gregory Peck, Jason Robards and Sam Waterston. Many of those names would return to the role again and again — and we still haven't even seen Daniel Day-Lewis' take in Steven Spielberg's upcoming film. What none of these greats had that made Hamilton's portrait of Lincoln so much richer than any Lincoln before or since was his supporting cast: Ed Williams as Ted Olson; the great, recently passed William Duell as Johnny; Mission: Impossible veteran Peter Lupus as Officer Norberg; Alan North as Capt. Ed Hocken and, most importantly, Leslie Nielsen as Sgt. Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant, Police Squad! — a special division of the police force.
The writing-directing team of brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams couldn't have been hotter following the surprise hit of their no-holds-barred comedy Airplane! Made for a mere $3.5 million, it tallied a domestic gross of $83,453,539 and became the fourth-biggest moneymaker of 1980. Paramount Pictures, headed then by Michael Eisner, was eager to work with the boys again. ZAZ (shorthand for the trio) had an idea to make a parody of old TV police dramas, but Paramount had offered them such a small window they couldn't figure out a way to turn the idea into a 90-minute script. Someone suggested that if they were spoofing a type of television show, why not make a television show? The idea appealed to them immediately since it meant having to produce a shorter script. According to commentaries on the DVD on two of the episodes by ZAZ and producer Robert Weiss (whose voices all sound terribly alike and hard to distinguish from each other), they sold the Police Squad! idea to ABC based on the opening credits sequence alone. As Airplane! took its premise from the 1957 film Zero Hour! (so much so that the rights to that film had to be acquired), Police Squad! was loosely based on the police drama M Squad that ran from 1957-1960 and starred Lee Marvin. Below are two YouTube clips. First, watch the memorable opening to Police Squad!, and then below it, the credits to M Squad, and see how closely ZAZ aped it, right down to the music.
The opening credits alone leave much to discuss. First, anyone old enough to remember series from the 1960s and 1970s such as Barnaby Jones, Cannon, The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco recalls the announcer who would proclaim the series "A Quinn Martin Production" as well as informing the viewer the title of the night's episode. In yet another instance of inaccuracy and inconsistency found on the Incompetent Movie Database, the entry for Police Squad! claims the narrator was Marvin Miller. However, the Quinn Martin announcer was Hank Simms, who IMDb also identifies as the narrator on Police Squad!, a fact verified by multiple sources across the Internet. You don't find Miller's name associated with Police Squad! anywhere else. The other distinctions that need to be pointed out about the credits is that when Simms announces the title, as in the premiere when he says, "Tonight's episode: The Broken Promise," on screen it would read, "tonight's episode: A SUBSTANTIAL GIFT." All six episodes had dual titles like that. Then there were the special guest
stars. In the clip, from the first episode, you saw it was Lorne Greene who rolled out of a car, a knife in his chest. It's never mentioned again. That happened each week with the special guest stars who always would be killed off and have nothing to do with the rest of that episode's story. In the second episode, they dropped a safe on Georg Stanford Brown, who made his name as an actor on The Rookies and went on to direct, including the third episode of Police Squad! In the third episode, Robert Goulet, the eventual villain in The Naked Gun 2½, bought it in front of a firing squad. The fourth special guest star honors went to William Shatner who dines with a beautiful blonde when a barrage of gunfire opens up on him. Shatner ducks, gets back up and fires back. He then smiles at his date and sips his wine and starts grabbing his throat. He points at her before keeling over. The fifth guest star death had Florence Henderson spoofing her Wesson Oil "Wessonality" commercials of the time. She's on a kitchen set holding a plate of fried chicken singing "Put on a Happy Face" when a hail of gunfire mows her down and she lets out a high note. We see her foot kicking up above the kitchen counter before it ends. The final celebrity death went to none other than an actual Quinn Martin production — William Conrad, Frank Cannon himself, doing a virtual shot-by-shot recreation of the Lorne Greene scene. The public has never seen the most infamous celebrity death scene and no one
knows if it has been lost or purposely destroyed. ZAZ met with John Belushi, who jokingly suggested they film him lying dead with a needle in his arm. What they did film was him having rocks attached to his feet and then sinking below the water, bubbles coming out of his mouth and a fish swimming by. The eerie part is that during the filming, something went wrong with the air, and when they pulled him out of the water, he started choking. Once he was OK, everyone was joking about mock obits saying, "Belushi was best known for his work on Saturday Night Live…" Two weeks later, Belushi did die of an overdose, so they didn't air his cameo. They thought about putting it on the DVD, but the footage couldn't be found. Of course, Greene, Goulet and Conrad all have passed on now. On the DVD, it includes a two-page memo of proposed celebrity death ideas they had (if the show had gone on) that included a shark attack, getting on the Hindenburg and signing a contract with ABC. The final credit detail worth noting is that, according to the commentary, ABC was uncomfortable with a show that aired at 7 p.m. in some time zones having a man run through the squad room on fire. ZAZ ignored them, but ABC kept complaining, and after three episodes had aired with that footage, ABC made them remove it, which was dumb considering the show was pulled after the fourth episode. Apparently for the DVD, they just used the same credits with the burning man for all six episodes.Yes, as beloved as many hold Police Squad! and Frank Drebin now, and even though less than two years earlier the comedy style employed by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers — namely having every kind of comedy running simultaneously as a nonstop bombardment of visual gags, puns, wordplay, very literal language, slapstick and more — reaped huge rewards in Airplane!, when ZAZ took that technique to TV, Police Squad! flopped badly. ABC didn't help the matter with where they placed Police Squad! on their schedule: the first show on Thursday nights opposite Magnum, P.I. on CBS and Fame on NBC (Yes Virginia, there once were only three commercial networks), filling in for Mork & Mindy. I'm uncertain what aired there for a couple weeks following its four-episode run, but then another short-lived (and truly bizarre) show, No Soap Radio, occupied the slot until Mork returned in May. While their madness appeared to be a new style of humor, on the commentaries the creators freely credit the influences of the Marx Brothers, Ernie Kovacs and MAD magazine. The trio had the right man for their star in Leslie Nielsen. In an interview on the DVD, he talked about how when he was making Airplane!, he noticed the writing-directing team watching him very closely, especially during the scene where he's trying to lift the spirits of Ted Stryker (Robert Hays) by telling him about George Zipp ("I don't know where I'll be then — but it won't smell too good, that's for sure"). "I thought, 'You know, if they watch too much, they're gonna find out I'm a fraud.' But it never turned out that way because they were watching me because they had detected in me the same wavelength in humor that they had." Indeed, aside from a few exceptions such as an early, hilarious episode of M*A*S*H, Airplane! unleashed the comic actor in Nielsen that always existed and
Police Squad! sealed it. Rewatching the six episodes, while each episode had its share of funny bits, the premiere episode, the only episode actually written and directed by ZAZ, is a gem from beginning to end. It opens at ACME Finance Credit Union where Sally Decker (Kathryn Leigh Scott) argues with the teller Jim Johnson (Terry Wills) about skimming more money for her because she owes money to her dentist, but Jim won't steal anymore. Then poor Ralph Twice (Russell Shannon) comes in to cash his last paycheck after being laid off from his job at the tire factory, giving Sally an idea as she takes two guns from her desk. Viewers who didn't already realize this wasn't your average TV comedy started to realize it as they watched Sally prepare but still heard Jim ask Ralph the usual check-cashing questions: form of ID, two major credit cards, thumbprint. Then it gets odd as Jim asks Ralph to look into a camera, to turn his head and cough and, finally, to spread his toes. Sally finishes loading her guns and she shoots Ralph with one of them and he dies in horribly fake slow-motion before she shoots Jim with the other, though he's conscientious enough to finish his paperwork before falling dead. Sally makes it look like Ralph shot Jim in an attempted robbery, and then she shot him. This leads to Nielsen's introduction as Drebin as he's driving his car.
"My name is Sergeant Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant, Police Squad, a special detail of the police department. There'd been a recent wave of gorgeous fashion models found naked and unconscious in laundromats on the west side. Unfortunately, I was assigned to investigate holdups at neighborhood credit unions," he says in voiceover. When Drebin pulls up to the crime scene, his car crashes into a garbage can. They didn't end up getting to do it through all six episodes, but in each subsequent episode they would add a trash can for Drebin's car to strike, but for whatever reason the gag only got up to four cans in the fourth episode. The visual gags begin nonstop when he arrives and his boss, Capt. Ed Hocken (Alan North), awaits. One of the corpses is being brought out of the credit union on an insanely long gurney. As they go inside, they walk past the chalk outline of Ralph's body where there also is an Egyptian hieroglyphic on the floor. Someone takes a photo of a man posing on a bench with Ralph's corpse as Drebin and Hocken go to interview Sally, where Frank introduces himself with his third rank, this time captain. What follows is another great ZAZ variation on the classic Abbott & Costello "Who's on First?" routine, which they used in Airplane! among the pilot, co-pilot and navigator. It gives a great example of the absolute straight-faced style of Nielsen and North.Nielsen and this episode's writing earned Police Squad!'s only Emmy nominations. Nielsen was brilliant, playing Drebin more deadpan than he eventually would in the movies. In an interesting comparison to their inspiration, click here to watch a clip of Lee Marvin in an episode of M Squad alongside a young Leonard Nimoy. In his interview, Nielsen says he broached the idea of a movie when the show died so quickly, but ZAZ still couldn't imagine stretching it out for 90 minutes. At one point, there was talk of trying to edit the six episodes together into a feature. In fact, according to the ZAZ and Weiss commentary, that's what prompted the freeze frames at the end of each episode. It wasn't just to spoof the old TV shows that would do that, but to use them as planned transitions for a feature. Surely, they
can't be serious. That would mean the Zuckers, Abrahams and Weiss would have had to know before the episodes aired that the series would flame out in the ratings so spectacularly. Nielsen summed up fairly well why the series failed. "(Tony) Thomopolous, who was the head of ABC at that time, said the series didn't work because you had to watch it. Well, it sounds funny and it sounds dumb, but it was true. You had to pay attention. You couldn't look away," Nielsen said. "You had to watch to make sure you caught the humor or where it was coming from. People don't really watch TV…That's why you can have a laugh track. You can read a book, then look up and ask, 'Oh, what are they laughing at? Oh yeah, that's funny.' Then you go back to reading or do anything you want, but you don't really watch TV." ZAZ and Weiss said that ABC tried to get them to use a laugh track, but, by contract, the final decision on that matter rested with them. An episode actually was tested with a laugh track and without one, but the results were negligible so they got to go without one. As one of the Zuckers or Weiss or Abrahams asked, "How do you put a laugh track on a sight gag?" Remember, Drebin and Hocken had told Sally Decker that she needed to go down to the station and make a "formal statement." Several minutes passed between that direction and the payoff. Nielsen also put some of the blame on the size of TV screens at the time, which made some of the sight gags too small to catch whereas in Airplane! they were huge and hard to miss. Man cannot live on sight gags alone and that first episode contained what I think was Nielsen's greatest Frank Drebin moment as he and Hocken go interview Ralph Twice's widow (Barbara Tarbuck) in the Twices' apartment in Little Italy. Something Mrs. Twice says gets Frank a little distracted and nostalgic.In "A Substantial Gift"/"The Broken Promise," we meet two of the series' priceless recurring characters. First, we meet Mr. Ted Olson (Ed
Williams), sort of a forerunner of all those forensic specialists on the various CSI shows, only crossed with Mr. Wizard and perhaps someone who belongs on a neighborhood watch list. As Peter Graves' Capt. Clarence Oveur liked to ask young Joey uncomfortable questions such as, "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" in Airplane!, each week when Frank goes to Olson's lab, he's always visiting with a child (of either sex) trying to explain different scientific things that inevitably draw comparisons to their mothers getting out of showers or something along those lines. Each week, he leaves them with a hysterically odd line. For those six brief weeks, we hear Olson make these promises or requests to various kids:
What might be the biggest gag concerning Williams' great performance as Ted Olson is that it was his first acting role. Prior to auditioning for Police Squad! and winning the part, Williams had retired from a career actually teaching science. He's acted steadily in small roles ever since. Every visit to his lab, even in the lesser of the six episodes, usually proved worth it. In the perfection of the premiere, Olson discovers problems with Sally's story because of the depth and trajectory the bullets would have had to take to make her story true. He demonstrates this for Frank with a state-of-the-art ballistics test where he fires each weapon into videotapes of Barbara Walters interviews. His first firing goes all the way to her interview with Paul Newman where Walters "asks him if he's afraid to love." The bullet from the second gun goes through the entire row of tapes clear through "where she asks Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she would be." For a first-time actor, one thing that sets Ed Williams apart is that when Police Squad! had its resurrection in the form of The Naked Gun movies, he was the only actor other than Nielsen to reprise his role. The Zuckers, Abraham and Weiss regret on the commentary not being able to bring Alan North back as Hocken, calling him "very good." The studio insisted on a better-known actor so George Kennedy got the role in the films and as (I think it was David Zucker) said, "We folded like a cheap suit."
Another recurring joke that Police Squad! spoofed from the Quinn Martin shows were mid-episode title cards that marked the start of an episode's second act. With that in mind, I will end the first half of the tribute here with my favorite second act joke. You can click here to go to Part II to read about the other recurring characters, the remainder of "A Substantial Gift/The Broken Promise," some of the best bits of the other episodes, other background tidbits and the lasting influence of Police Squad!
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Labels: 80s, Abbott and Costello, D. Zucker, G. Kennedy, J. Zucker, Jim Abrahams, K. Hepburn, Marvin, Marx Brothers, Newman, Nielsen, Nimoy, Shatner, TV Tribute
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Friday, May 27, 2011
Centennial Tributes: Vincent Price
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Over at my usual stomping grounds at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, I’ve been known to jokingly refer to the time I spent living in Morgantown, W.Va. (1992-2000) as “my years in exile” — and one of my fondest memories during that period occurred when my co-workers at the company that saw fit to employ me decided to have an impromptu lunch at an Italian restaurant located in nearby Westover, a small burg just across the Monongahela River from Mo-town, better known as home to West Virginia University (Or as I have been known to call it — using a gag I swiped from Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman — “a stadium with a college attached”). The eatery was known as Rose’s, and I’d heartily recommend that you stop by for a nosh sometime when you’re in the area were it not for the awful fact that it closed its doors about five years back.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure — when it comes to Italian cuisine, it’s not my first choice on the menu…I’m more of a cheeseburger-and-onion rings kind of guy. But when I followed my co-workers into the restaurant I had a feeling the food was going to be first-rate (and it was…so much so that I went back on repeat occasions with a friend of mine from high school) because on one of the walls near the entrance was an article from the local newspaper that talked up the place…and mentioned that Rose’s (and her cooking in particular) was a favorite of actor Vincent Price, who made it a point to stop by whenever he was in the area. Price, known for his distinguished accomplishments on stage, screen, television, radio — just about any facet of show business you can name, as a matter of fact — also enjoyed a reputation as a gourmet cook…so if Rose’s fare had his seal of approval I certainly wasn’t going to argue. I know, it’s sort of odd that I would remember something like this but seeing as how the man christened Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was born 100 years ago on this date I guess I’m resorting to this “degree of separation” to pay tribute to one of my favorite actors on his “Vincentennial.”
Vincent Price was born a century ago in St. Louis, Mo., this date and to his dying day remained one of that city’s favorite sons…with good reason, of course. Truth be told, if Price had never set foot upon the stage his future would have been pretty secure; his father, Vincent, Sr., was president of the National Candy Company and his grandfather (also named Vincent) was the inventor of “Dr. Price’s Baking Powder” — the first cream of tartar baking powder. As a son of privilege, Vincent attended both St. Louis Country Day School and Yale University, where he developed his lifelong interest in art history and the fine arts. In the 1930s, he also began to acquire an interest in the theater and began appearing in stage productions in 1935. His big stage success came a year later, playing opposite Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina — a production that the superstitious actor believed brought him such good fortune that he named his first daughter “Victoria” (aided by the fact that her mother was raised in Victoria, British Columbia). Though he would eventually devote most of his time in show business to making movies, Price never completely abandoned his stage roots — among his triumphs in later years was a successful one-man production entitled Diversions and Delights in which he played the part of legendary author/playwright Oscar Wilde.
On the silver screen, Vincent made his debut in the 1938 film Service de Luxe — a movie he wasn’t particularly fond of, but it paved the way to future appearances in more prestigious films such as Michael
Curtiz's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex starring Bette Davis, Erroll Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (1939), The House of the Seven Gables (1940), The Song of Bernadette (1943), The Eve of St. Mark and Wilson (both in 1944). In fact, 1944 was a big year for the actor for he also appeared in The Keys of the Kingdom and a movie I’ve long considered one of his signature roles (and is the personal favorite of daughter Victoria), Otto Preminger's film noir classic Laura. As the rakish scoundrel Shelby Carpenter, Price gave an amazing performance as a cad who lies as easily as taking a breath but whose courtly Southern manner and charm (“I can afford a blemish on my character but not on my clothes”) made him more a figure to be pitied than scorned. Price would later make two additional movies with Laura co-star Gene Tierney, Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Dragonwyck (1946), and he began to develop a reputation for screen villainy with choice parts in films such as The Web (1947), The Three Musketeers (1948), The Bribe (1949) and The Baron of Arizona (1950).Playing the part of the Duke of Clarence in 1939’s Tower of London — a horror movie that co-starred Boris Karloff, a thesp with whom Price would work with time and time again — offered Vincent an indication of the direction his career would later take as a horror icon…and a year later, appeared as the titular undetectable character of The Invisible Man Returns. (Price would also play the unseen individual in a joke cameo near the end of the 1948 comedy classic Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.) His active participation in the horror genre reached full swing in 1953 with another unforgettable turn in the 3-D horror romp House of Wax, and Price followed that with such vehicles as The Mad Magician (1954), The Fly (1958) (and the 1959 sequel, Return of the Fly), The Bat (1959) and two movies he made for schlockmeister William Castle —
House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959). The actor would occasionally get high profile gigs in movies such as The Ten Commandments and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), but by the 1960s, horror had a new name in Vincent Price, who would make many of his most memorable films during that decade…the ones that endlessly captivated me as a child watching “Chiller Theater” on Saturday nights while my parents were out for the evening.
Price starred in several films directed by “King of the B’s” Roger Corman that were heavily influenced by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, beginning in 1960 with House of Usher. Classic examples of the horror movie genre followed in the same vein, including Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven
(1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). These movies serve to remind film buffs that, despite his B-movie pedigree, Corman was capable of turning out incredible work (particularly Pendulum and Red Death) but they also saddled its star with a reputation for “hamminess” that he simultaneously embraced and rejected. An example of Price capitalizing on this status is undoubtedly his starring turn in 1971’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes (a role he reprised in the sequel, 1972’s Dr. Phibes Rises Again) but Vincent demonstrated that he could reign in his hambone tendencies with an understated performance in Witchfinder General (1968; aka Conqueror Worm). As religious fanatic/evil madman Matthew Hopkins, Price could have pulled out all the stops but wisely chose not to do so…and for many fans (myself included), General ranks with some of the finest work Vincent ever did onscreen.
There are those who believe that Price agreed to undertake a starring role in Theater of Blood (1973) — a film in which a Shakespearean actor takes revenge on the critics who denied him recognition — as an answer to all those naysayers who time and time again dismissed him as a big slice of ham but Price enjoyed himself in this movie because it allowed him to indulge in another of his passions, performing the words of the Immortal Bard himself. (Needless to say, Blood was one of Price’s particular
movie favorites.) Vincent’s involvement in films began to peter out around 1975 (mostly because the kind of horror movies he specialized in were on the wane) but by that time he was already making frequent guest appearances in shows on TV, including memorable turns in episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, F Troop, Get Smart, Night Gallery, The Brady Bunch, Columbo, Ellery Queen and The Bionic Woman. His best-known TV gig is probably that of his multiple appearances as the villainous Egghead on Batman, a program on which he started a legendary food fight by lobbing hen fruit at stars Adam West and Burt Ward. He also was a frequent panelist on the boob tube game show Hollywood Squares and a fixture on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he was in high demand as a raconteur telling tales of both show business and the culinary and art worlds.I mentioned Price’s expertise in gourmet cooking in the first two paragraphs of this essay; it was such a lifelong passion of the actor’s that he authored several cookbooks (including one with second wife Mary Grant, A Treasury of Great Recipes) and hosted a TV show entitled Cooking Price-Wise. But Price also excelled as an authority on art, having graduated from Yale with a degree in such and founding the Vincent and Mary Price Gallery at East Los Angeles College in the 1960s…kick-started by a donation of some 90 pieces from his personal collection to the school in 1951. Today, the gallery contains some 2,000 works, estimated at more than $5 million, and remains a testament to Price’s legacy. Price’s celebrity status was put to maximum use in merchandising not only art (Sears and Roebuck successfully touted art works under the banner of “The Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art”) but books (a series of mystery and detective novels offered in a mail-order book club), games (he was the spokesman for several board games put out by Milton Bradley), recordings (his one-of-a-kind sinister voice can be heard on albums by Alice Cooper…and most famously, Michael Jackson), theme parks and commercial products like Polaroid and Tilex.
In the 1980s, Vincent Price continued to maintain a presence on television and in film; beginning in 1981 he appeared weekly on public television stations as the host of Mystery! (a series he relinquished in 1989 due to failing health) and continued to appear in the occasional movie such as The Great Mouse Detective (1986; he supplied the voice of “Professor Ratigan”) and The Whales of August (1987), which gave him a wonderful showcase alongside such old pros as Bette Davis, Lillian Gish and Ann Sothern. And though it wasn’t his last project in the business it can be said that his final moment of celluloid glory was an appearance (unfortunately curtailed due to his precarious health) as the inventor of Edward Scissorhands (1990). Price had worked with director Tim Burton previously, narrating the memorable short Vincent (1982)…about a little boy who, appropriately, wants to be just like Vincent Price. Years devoted to “coffin nails” finally caught up with Price, however, and he succumbed to lung cancer in October 1993.
At We Are Movie Geeks, the proprietors of that website came up with a Top Ten list of the film performances they felt represent the crème de la crème of Price’s career…and while I certainly agree with the majority of their choices (I especially enjoyed that they included his — if you’ll pardon the pun — priceless comedic turn in 1950’s Champagne for Caesar…though I would have moved Laura up the list some) they left off one of my personal favorites (they explain, however, that all of the movies on the list will be shown at the ten-day Vincentennial celebration currently underway from May 19-28): 1951’s His Kind of Woman. Robert Mitchum is the star of this spoof of he-man heroic adventures (doing his patented sleepy-eyed lug schtick) and Jane Russell plays his love interest…but Price walks off with the film as (what else?) a hammy actor who comes to Big Bad Bob’s rescue when Mitchum is kidnapped by thugs working for deposed mobster Raymond Burr, who plans to croak Bob and use his identity to get back into the country. Price’s antics are falling-down funny in this one: I love his facial reactions as he watches an assembled crowd watch one of his movies (in which he engages in some swashbuckling derring-do) and such memorable lines of dialogue (spoken to rally volunteers who will help Price’s character save Mitchum) as “Survivors will all be given parts in my next picture.”
Victoria Price once commented that her father had so much fun making both Woman and Caesar, and the proof is in the pudding — but then I can’t imagine there ever being a time in the actor’s life when he didn’t have fun and make the most of his brief stay here on Earth. Chef, art collector, gardener, opera devotee, author and an exemplary performer in nearly all worlds of show business — Vincent Price was one of the most remarkable men of the 20th century. And as far as this fan goes, he is so terribly missed to this day.
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Labels: Abbott and Costello, Bette, Books, Carson, Corman, Curtiz, de Havilland, Erroll Flynn, G. Tierney, Karloff, Mitchum, Music, Preminger, Shakespeare, Television, Theater, Tim Burton, Vincent Price
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Monday, January 31, 2011
You’re a lucky fellow, Mr. Smith
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
1989 found me gainfully employed as a “customer service representative” for our local Blockbuster Video franchise (it was a dream…I made it happen) and I proved to be remarkably well-suited for the job, owing to the fact that I’ve enjoyed a lifelong love affair with movies, particularly those of the classic variety. I would often spend hours on end chatting with many of our customers on the subject — much to the dismay of the store manager, who felt such passion-fueled conversations distracted me from my other menial CSR duties.
One gentleman who used to come into the store regularly — I never did learn his name, since he never offered and I never asked — liked to pass the time with me discussing films of the 1940s and I remember that he was enthusiastically fond of 1941’s Buck Privates, the wartime service comedy that made the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello a box office force to be reckoned with from 1942 to 1952. At the time, the store didn’t have the film on VHS but because of his affection for the movie I sort of made it my personal mission to lobby anyone and everyone I could to see about adding it to our inventory. My persistence paid off; our district manager even called me aside one day to let me know he’d ordered a copy and when I passed this information along to the customer his face literally lit up like a Christmas tree. So as you’ve no doubt guessed by now, this misty water-colored memory has been generated by the revelation that 70 years ago on this date Buck Privates was released to movie theaters; a film that ended up grossing $4 million (a whopping return on an initial $180,000 investment) and made Abbott & Costello kings of the Universal Studios lot.
There’s really no getting around it: Abbott & Costello were a real cinematic anomaly. They weren’t universally beloved like Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, they weren’t championed as brilliant satirists by the intelligentsia like the Marx Brothers — they were just a pair of hard-working burlesque comics (who partnered together in 1935) who happened onto a hilarious piece of patter material (the classic routine “Who’s on First?”) and were able to capitalize on its success by landing roles in a Broadway revue entitled Streets of Paris in 1938…the same year they also began appearing as regulars on radio’s The Kate Smith Hour. Two years later they headlining their own radio show (a summer replacement series for comedian Fred Allen) and making their film debut in a movie trifle entitled One Night in the Tropics (1940).
Were it not for Bud & Lou’s antics in Tropics, the film would be largely forgotten today but at the time of its release critics and audiences were in agreement that the duo stole the movie (doing several of their routines, including an abbreviated version of “First”), prompting Universal to offer them a two-picture deal. The installation of the first peacetime draft in real life would inspire their starring debut, and Privates cast the two men as Slicker Smith (Bud) and Herbie Brown (Lou), a pair of necktie-selling hucksters who run afoul of beat cop Michael Collins (Nat Pendleton) while peddling their wares. To escape his clutches, the two men duck into an induction center (mistaking it for a movie theater) and through a series of misunderstandings unwittingly find themselves volunteering for military service.
At the same time that Slicker and Herbie are enlisting, wealthy playboy Randolph Parker III (Lee Bowman) is doing all that he can to weasel out of his draft obligation, thinking his education (he’s a Yale man) and familial connections entitle him to an exemption — a marked contrast to his valet-chauffeur, Bob Martin (Alan Curtis), who takes his military duty very seriously. Preparing for the train trip that will take the men to boot camp, Bob runs into an old friend in Judy Gray (Jane Frazee), who is one of the Army’s “camp hostesses” — a sort of goodwill attendant whose duty is to make the enlistees feel more at home by offering them treats (apples, candy, chewing gum) and providing helpful information about the camp. Randy also makes Judy’s acquaintance, though he’s much more interested in moving beyond simple friendship, something that does not sit well with Bob (or Judy either, to be honest).
Arriving at camp, Slicker and Herbie are dismayed to learn that their nemesis Collins is their drill instructor…and Randy’s attempts to get his influential father to pull some strings and get him out of the Army are stymied when Mr. Parker refuses to help his son, believing that a hitch in the service will do his spoiled progeny some good. It takes a bit of time for Randy to realize that the Army is, as Judy puts it, “the great leveler”; he lets his fellow platoon members down in a sharpshooting contest (he’s the top rifleman in the company) by weaseling out of the competition for the sole purpose of scoring a date with Judy. But by the film’s end Randy surprises everyone by turning out to be a right guy (his actions during a “sham battle” make Bob a hero and allow the company to emerge as the victors in the war game) and he’s even managed to obtain a commission to Officers Training School. Bob also will be joining him (I don’t know why attending OTS is a happy ending, but I guess we should just go with it), and both men learn that Judy will be “camp hostessing” there as well.
This admittedly thin plotline is really nothing more than a peg on which to hang some classic comedy routines from Abbott & Costello; Lou’s Herbie Brown is essentially a stock comic character who manages to screw up everything while in basic training and yet suffers very few serious repercussions as a result. The comedic highlights of Privates include a riotous crap game aboard the train where Slicker attempts to fleece “novice” Herbie (who explains that his knowledge of such slang as “fade that” and “let ‘er ride” was picked up hanging around the “clubhouse”) and a boxing match in which Herbie is dragooned into fighting a 97 pound weakling…who gets a reprieve when a larger, heavier bruiser substitutes in his place. (To add insult to injury, Sergeant Collins is the “impartial” referee in the bout.) There also is a drill routine that Bud & Lou had previously performed on stage but the set piece became longer (and in Lou’s estimation, funnier) with director Arthur Lubin’s insistence on shooting it multiple times (and piecing together the various takes) and some judicious ad-libbing on the part of the duo. Much of Abbott & Costello’s dialogue was completely off the cuff; a funny example of this occurs during the “Clubhouse” routine when Lou, explaining that the older boys wouldn’t let him shoot dice, blurts out for no reason: “Startin’ Tuesday I’m goin’ out with girls!” “I don’t blame you,” returns Bud, without missing a beat.
An example of Bud & Lou’s humor in the film, an old burlesque chestnut called “You’re 40, She’s 10”:
SLICKER: Answer this question: you’re 40 years old and you’re in love with a little girl say, 10 years old…
HERBIE: This one’s gonna be a pip…
SLICKER: Well, wait’ll I finish…
HERBIE: Now I’m goin’ around with a 10-year-old girl…
SLICKER: Well, wait a minute…
HERBIE: You got a good idea where I’m gonna wind up…
SLICKER: Will you wait a minute, please? Look, you’re 40 years old and you’re in love with this girl who’s 10 years old…now, you’re four times as old as that girl…you couldn’t marry her, could you?
HERBIE: Not unless I come from the mountains…
SLICKER: There you go…you see?
HERBIE: Why don’t you ask me something...?
SLICKER: Wait a minute…wait ‘til I finish this…you’re 40, she’s 10…you’re four times as old as this girl…now, you couldn’t marry her so you wait five years…now the little girl is 15, you’re 45…you’re only three times as old as that little girl! So you wait 15 years more…now the little girl’s 30, you’re 60…you’re only twice as old as that little girl…
HERBIE: She’s catching up!
SLICKER: Well, yes…yes…now here’s the question: how long do you have to wait before you and that little girl are the same age?
HERBIE: Well… (After a slight pause) What kind of question is that?
SLICKER: Answer the question!
HERBIE: That’s ridiculous!
SLICKER: What’s ridiculous about it?
HERBIE: If I keep waiting for that girl, she’ll pass me up!
SLICKER: What are you talking about?
HERBIE: She’ll wind up older than I am!
SLICKER: Aw…that’s…
HERBIE: And she’ll have to wait for me!
SLICKER: Why should she wait for you?
HERBIE: I was nice enough to wait for her!!!
Supplementing Bud & Lou’s hysterical antics in Buck Privates is the music of Patty, Maxene and Laverne — collectively known as the Andrews Sisters. The popular female vocal trio sing some of their best-known tunes in the movie, including “(I’ll Be With You in) Apple Blossom Time” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (which earned an Academy Award nomination for best original song, as did Charles Previn for best original score), and perform all of their numbers with a great deal of gusto — the studio made the sisters learn the choreography on their own time, but the Andrews’ dedication paid off handsomely. The girls would return (for a more prominent presence) in Bud & Lou’s second starrer, In the Navy (1941)…and because the studio was shooting the boys’ third feature, Hold That Ghost (1941), at the same time as Privates’ release Universal attached a couple of numbers by the Andrews Sisters to that film as well. (The harmonizing trio would grace a number of Universal musical comedies, as well as appearing in their own starring vehicles such as 1942's What’s Cookin’? and Give Out, Sisters.)
Buck Privates, it could be argued, isn’t necessarily the best movie in Abbott & Costello’s oeuvre (cases could be made for many of their other romps, notably Hold That Ghost, Who Done It? [1942] and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]) but it was a watershed film for several reasons. Its success at the box office rescued the troubled Universal studio from the precipice of bankruptcy (a place with which the company was familiar on several occasions in the past) and it provided a surefire formula for future A&C successes —cheap, profitable films that blended their veteran burlesque routines (often contributed by writer and crony John Grant) with sprightly music and sappy boy-meets-girl storylines. Privates also is an example of why the early Bud & Lou films often hold up the best; moviemaking was still a new experience for the duo and their performances have a crackling energy that’s noticeably missing from their later vehicles, when it often seemed as if they were going through the motions. Privates’ staggering box office take even paved the way for a 1947 sequel entitled Buck Privates Come Home, which allowed Bud, Lou and Nat Pendleton (in his final film) to reprise their roles in an outing that in some ways is more entertaining than the original, thanks to some first-rate physical comedy sequences (highlighted by a wild “midget” car race) and a meatier plot with some genuine “heart” (as our heroes smuggle a French orphan into the U.S. when they are shipped back home).
But Buck Privates Come Home ultimately lacks the vivacious verve of Buck Privates’ toe-tapping tunes (featuring some truly energetic lindy hop performers) and signature comedy routines that made its stars one of the classic movie comedy teams of all time. It’s no wonder that it remained a cherished memory for my video store friend, and its good-natured humor, music and rah-rah patriotism can still bring movie audiences to appreciative applause today. “Three cheers for the red, white and Captain Brown — hip, hip, hip, hooray!”
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Labels: 40s, Abbott and Costello, Marx Brothers, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Theater
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Wednesday, January 05, 2011
“Don’t try to understand…it’s bigger than the both of us…”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
It was an author named Walter R. Brooks who would introduce a character that would later become one of the most famous and easily recognized television icons of the 1960s; Brooks is perhaps best known for his “Freddy the Pig” children’s books — in which the titular porcine possessed the power of speech and interacted with humans — but he also penned a series of short stories (published in Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post) that featured an equally gabby horse who also had a fondness for strong drink. “Ed Takes the Pledge” was the first of 28 tales about a dipsomaniacal equine who only spoke to one individual, a young architect named Wilbur Pope, and when a CBS secretary named Sonia Chermus suggested to motion picture director Arthur Lubin that Brooks’ stories might make for a interesting television series concept, Lubin contacted the New York agency representing Brooks and took out an option on what eventually became a television series that premiered on this date 50 years ago today. You, of course, know the star of this program as…the famous Mister Ed.
Lubin’s experience with talking animals began in 1950, when he directed the first of six films featuring a chatty mule named Francis — a character that was the focus of a novel written by author Peter Stirling (writing as David Stern) in 1946. The Francis series, which starred Donald O’Connor as young Stirling and featured the voice of character actor Chill Wills as his mule compadre Francis, was as corny as Kansas in August but boasted the distinction of saving Universal Pictures (where the movie series was cranked out) from bankruptcy much in the manner of Deanna Durbin (in the 1930s) and Abbott & Costello (in the 1940s). There were seven Francis movies in total but director Lubin, star O’Connor (who was thoroughly disenchanted with the films by this time — much of his role in Singin’ in the Rain was curtailed because he was needed on the set of one of the Francis vehicles) and voice artist Willis sat out the last entry, 1956's Francis in the Haunted House (replaced by director Charles Lamont, star Mickey Rooney and voice artist Paul Frees).
It was Lubin’s success with the Francis series that attracted the attention of comedian George Burns, who owned a TV production company called McCadden Productions, and who agreed to (apologies for the pun) pony up $75,000 for a pilot in 1958 entitled The Wonderful World of Wilbur Pope. In Pope, a young architect (played by actor Scott McKay) moves into a house with his wife Carlotta (Sandra White) to find a horse has taken up residency in the adjacent barn…and who is endowed with the power of speech. The problem, unfortunately, is that he’s the only person the horse will talk to. “Pope” sat around on a shelf for a couple of years before attracting the attention of Al Simon, the former vice president of Burns’ McCadden Productions. He had since moved on to become president of Filmways TV Productions, an offshoot of a company called Filmways that specialized in the production of television commercials and was founded by Martin Ransohoff.
Simon liked the concept of Pope even though he wasn’t too impressed overall with the quality of the pilot; he was convinced that Filmways might have a potential hit on its hands if the series was recast and retooled. It was Burns’ idea to approach Alan Young to play the lead; Young, a Canadian-born actor-comedian was quite well-known to radio and television audiences and agreed to star in the series as Wilbur Post (the character underwent a name change in the interim). Though it appeared that Young was saddled (sorry about that again) with the unpleasant task of playing straight man to a horse, his talent for physical comedy and slapstick awarded him an equal number of belly laughs alongside his equine sidekick. Wilbur wasn’t the sharpest implement in the tool shed, but he was a fiercely loyal companion to Ed and Young’s lovability aided him immeasurably in winning over viewing audiences to his side.
Cast as Carol (not Carlotta) Post was a blond starlet named Connie Hines, a marked contrast to the character played in the pilot by White, who sported jet-black hair. The actress, who passed away in December 2009, often got a bad rap for once being quoted in a TV Guide article as stating her Ed gig was “a steady paycheck.” But Connie really enjoyed her stint with the show despite the fact that (and here’s where things sort of get weird) she was really the odd-girl-out on a program that was more about “a man and his horse.” Hines wasn’t the only blonde to be featured in what would become the Mister Ed TV series; the original horse used for the Post pilot, a palomino quarter horse, was replaced by one of a lighter hue (a crossbred gelding known as Bamboo Harvester) because the darker animal didn’t photograph as well. In fact, the only actor who carried over from the pilot to the eventual series was the individual who provided the speaking tones for Mister Ed — former B-Western cowboy star Allan “Rocky” Lane. Lane took the gig at a time when his stock in the industry was at an all-time low (he was unemployed and sleeping on the couch at the residence of Ed’s trainer, Les Hilton) and the producers of the series didn’t reveal his identity until several years after the show’s cancellation.
With the elements of Mister Ed in place, Filmways shopped the revamped series — the pilot had since been whittled down to 12 minutes, with a three-minute segment preceding the presentation in which Burns introduced the new cast and horse — to all three networks…who decided to take a pass on a situation comedy that centered around a talking horse. Filmways’ Ransohoff pitched the concept to the Studebaker Corporation, whose agent Steve Mudge flipped over the idea and went to every Studebaker dealer asking for a pledge of $25 for every car sold which would, in turn, be matched with an additional $25 by the company. So if you or anyone in your family bought a Studebaker in 1960, $50 of that sale went toward financing the production of Mister Ed — and after production started in October, the series was syndicated to nearly 115 TV stations by January 1961. The strategy behind the marketing of the series was deceptively simple: the show may have been geared to 4-to-9-year-olds, but those kids had parents who were no doubt in the market for a new car.
Mister Ed was an immediate smash — the show won its time slot in practically every market — despite a thorough lambasting from most TV critics. After a successful first season Studebaker wasn’t too wild about fully financing another one, so Filmways once again beat the bushes at the networks to see if anyone was interested. It wasn’t until CBS President James Aubrey watched an episode of Ed that he made the company an offer to add the show to the network’s lineup, observing that the sitcom was “the type of show that would appeal to the people who watched television.” Aubrey, a television executive charitably known as “The Smiling Cobra,” may not have had sophistication but he did have an uncanny feel for what the American viewing public would stare at (he was responsible for getting such shows as The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island on the air) and his instincts on Ed proved to be right on the money; the show moved to CBS’ Sunday night lineup in October 1961 and immediately garnered a 20 Nielsen rating.
If sitcoms didn’t have wacky next-door neighbors then they would forfeit the right to be called sitcoms…and the new Mister Ed series fulfilled that requirement by adding two characters that were not present in the pilot (the Popes had several neighbors, but none that particularly stood out) in the form of Roger and Kay Addison. Roger, played by actor-announcer Larry Keating, was one of TV’s most endearing scoundrels — a man who would concoct get-rich-quick schemes at the drop of a hat (softly crooning “Rock-a-Bye Baby” in the process), usually with Wilbur as his unwitting patsy. Addison wasn’t particularly fond of Ed (and vice versa) and though he was used time and time again as the horse’s foil the good-natured personality of actor Keating (who was chosen for the part based on his previous experience of having worked with Burns on his and wife Gracie’s TV show, where he played the similarly pompous Harry Morton) infused the character with an unmistakable likability. (Keating also would be one of the first thespians in the Filmways TV stable — I can’t seem to stop the puns — to announce that “This has been a Filmways presentation.”) Addison’s wife Kay (played by actress Edna Skinner), once described by an author as a ‘SAP” (sitcom American princess), was the archetypal long-suffering spouse who put up with her husband (affectionately referring to him as “Doll”) despite her own shortcomings (she had a propensity for credit card plastic and her culinary prowess was substandard at best).
Early in 1963, actor Keating was diagnosed with leukemia but continued to work on Mister Ed for months afterward (he died on Aug. 26 of that year) and his TV wife Skinner continued on the show briefly in his absence (sometimes teamed with her character’s brother Paul, played by Jack Albertson) until December, when Wilbur and Carol Post got new neighbors in the form of Gordon and Winnie Kirkwood. Kirkwood (Leon Ames) — also known as “Colonel” — was Wilbur’s former commanding officer during WW2 and Winnie (Florence MacMichael) his slightly scatterbrained wife. They would remain with the series until the end of the 1964-65 season; the following year concentrated only on Ed and the Posts with occasional appearances from Wilbur’s father-in-law, portrayed by character actor Barry Kelly. Although he contributed his fair share of amusing moments to the series Ames had a particularly thankless job in trying to replace Keating; Ames’ Kirkwood was even grouchier than Keating’s Addision, who at least had some charm to go with his irascibility.
The popularity of Mister Ed led to some truly interesting TV moments with offbeat guest stars; among the celebrities who appeared (either as themselves or playing a different role): William Bendix, George Burns (natch), Spring Byington, Sebastian Cabot, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jack LaLanne, Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren, Mae West and Clint Eastwood — whose appearance on Ed must have seemed like Old Home Week since he’s also in the Francis the Talking Mule film Francis in the Navy (1955). One of the most memorable guest appearances was contributed by then-Los Angeles Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (who appeared with players Willie Davis, Sandy Koufax, Johnny Roseboro and Moose Skowran) in an episode that allows our favorite gabby horse to make a memorable slide into home plate…an indelible image that will remain in the memory long after you’ve witnessed it.
Mister Ed was put out to pasture (this is the last one, I promise) at the end of the 1965-66 season and spent its advancing years in syndicated reruns…but the series would win a brand new audience when it became one of the signature shows of Nick at Nite’s classic TV schedule beginning in 1985; it was, at one time, the cable network’s highest-rated program. It left Nick at Nite in 1993 but resurfaced on sister network TV Land from 1996 to 1998 (and again from 2003 to 2006) and can currently be found weekday mornings on participating This TV affiliates (paired with The Patty Duke Show). At first glance, Ed seems like a silly, one-joke show that provided endless hours of amusement for my brother-in-law and his fraternity brothers but the show’s impact was much more than that—it was the first in a series of successes for the Filmways company, who later mined boob tube gold with such smashes as the aforementioned Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, The Addams Family and Green Acres.
Mister Ed also ushered in an era of what came to be known as “escapist television” — fantasy-based comedies that had no tenuous connection to what was really going on the world outside of television (though the first fantasy sitcom, Topper, had premiered on TV in 1953) but provided audiences with a half-hour of non-think, nonsensical entertainment with such series as My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, My Mother the Car and The Flying Nun. The merits and demerits of such shows are certainly subject to furious debate but as an individual who’s fed up with the current glut of TV’s “reality shows” I welcome a little “unreality” every now and then.
If anything, Mister Ed provided us with one of TV’s most memorable theme songs—an infectious earwig of a tune (written by tunesmiths Jay Livingston and Ray Evans) that rivals that of the themes for Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch; even if you've never wasted a half-hour with an episode of the show you could probably sing it at the drop of a hat. (And if you thought you were going to get through this essay without the lyrics I’m dreadfully sorry to disappoint you.)
And no one can talk to a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed
Go right to the source and ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse
He's always on a steady course
Talk to Mister Ed
People yakkity yak a streak and waste your time of day
But Mister Ed will never speak unless he has something to say
A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And this one'll talk 'til his voice is hoarse
You never heard of a talking horse?
Well, listen to this: “I AM MISTER ED…”
Thank you…and I hope I passed the audition.
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Labels: 60s, Abbott and Costello, Eastwood, TV Tribute
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Wednesday, October 13, 2010
All the world's a stage
By Edward Copeland
Many elements can contribute to a classic film: stylish or revolutionary direction, a unique or powerfully told tale, a performance so great it raises the quality of an entire production. While bits of most of those appear in All About Eve, in the end its status in the stratosphere of cinematic greatness gets set in cement by Joseph L. Mankiewicz's brilliant screenplay and, more specifically, its dialogue. You could close your eyes and just listen to it and be blown away by his work. Maybe it's because I worship the written word that it holds such appeal because All About Eve celebrates the witty rendering of language and does so through the vehicle of some of movie's most memorable characters.
No matter how different all my greatest (or favorite) films are, the singular thing they have in common is that each time I re-watch them, I discover something new. In the case of All About Eve, I put something together for the first time in this visit: several of my very favorite films not only contain voiceover narration but multiple voiceover narrators. Both Henry and Karen Hill narrate portions of Goodfellas. Rashomon tells its tale from several points of view. Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters offers the voices of the three sisters plus Allen and Michael Caine's characters. Citizen Kane's structure consists of interviews with different subjects and, in one case, the reporter reading a witness's papers. Here, in All About Eve, we alternate between the takes of theater star Margo Channing (Bette Davis), her good friend Karen (Celeste Holm) and acerbic theater critic/columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). The technique is not a magic bullet, however, because it only made The Thin Red Line even more unbearable than it already was.
Addison, wonderful wry Addison, bats first in terms of the film's narration and who better to guide us into this backstage drama since he lives and breathes theater, though he does it through his writing, not through any actual participation in the theatrical arts himself. In a way, he's the theatrical version of the title of Howard Cosell's autobiography: I Never Played the Game. Of course, while DeWitt may not act in, write, direct or produce plays, he's definitely into gamesmanship. Toying with those who do contribute to theater, that is Addison's sport of choice.
As All About Eve opens, we watch as Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) receives the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement in the theater. This event's description that Addison deciphers for us begins with an
introductory speech by an older actor of some renown. DeWitt explains, "Being an actor, he'll go on speaking for some time." The camera also pans down to show all the empty spaces where the evening's previous awards used to reside. Addison runs down the meaning of that for us as well as those awards' relative meaninglessness in comparison to the one Eve receives. "The minor awards are for such as the writer and director since their function is to merely construct a tower so the world can applaud a light which flashes on top of it," DeWitt tells us as we briefly see dour-looking playwright Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe) and sour-looking director Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill). That night that light belongs to Eve, who Addison informs us, has become the youngest person ever to win the Sarah Siddons honor. Also present in the audience, looking none too pleased at Eve's good fortune, is that great actress Margo. DeWitt informs us that she made her theatrical debut at the age of 4 as a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream when she strode on to the stage stark naked and she's been a star ever since.It's at the point where Mankiewicz's camera switches its focus to the audience, specifically to Karen Richards (Holm), wife of the playwright and best friend of Margo, that the voiceover narration gets handed over to let Karen tell the beginnings of the story, namely how she's responsible for bringing Eve Harrington into Margo's
life in the first place. Karen had noticed the poor, dowdy Eve hanging by the stage door night after night, performance after performance, during the run of Margo's latest hit play. The kind-hearted Karen finally takes it upon herself to ask Eve what she does during the beginning and end of each show and Eve tells her she goes and sees the show, that she hasn't missed a performance of the play yet. Karen finds this so impressive that she decides that Margo just must meet this woman who goes beyond the definition of a mere fan and takes her backstage to meet the star. Knowing how mercurial Margo can be at time, Karen enters alone at first where she finds Margo with her dresser Birdie (the sublime Thelma Ritter) and her husband Lloyd. She's currently haranguing the playwright about plays written about Southern women such as the one she's starring in right now. She wants to know why playwrights insist on depicting all these romantically challenged women in the South.
Coming from the region herself, Margo declares, "Love is the one thing we were never starved for in the South." Karen tries to ease in to her introduction of Eve by talking about fans in general, but this only launches Margo into a rant about the mobs waiting for autographs outside the stage door. "Autograph fiends — they're not people," Margo spits. "Those little beasts that run around in packs like coyotes." Karen tries to get Margo more charitable, but she's on a roll and can't be stopped. "They're nobodies! Fans! They're juvenile delinquents! They're mental deficients! They never see a play or movie. They're never inside long enough," Margo's monologue continues. Karen breaks in long enough to tell her there's one of those fans she wants her to meet. When she describes Eve and how she's always there and has seen every performance, Margo knows immediately who Karen is talking about and is game enough to allow her into the dressing room. Eve enters meekly and after prodding, shares her tale
about how she lived in San Francisco with her husband who was killed in the war, but she saw Margo give a performance and after a brief detour for a job at a midwest brewery, she came to New York with nothing, just to watch Margo perform. It's as if Channing is The Grateful Dead and Eve is a Deadhead. The entire room is touched except for the suspicious and cynical Birdie who adds at the end of Eve's story that it has "Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end." Margo makes Birdie apologize, though she's the only one whose instincts will be on the mark from the beginning. Unfortunately, at some point in the film, her character just sort of vanishes without explanation, which is too bad because I love Thelma Ritter and it denies Birdie her deserved moment of "I told you so." Sometime during this sequence, they are joined by Bill, who not only directed the play but is Margo's significant other. It also signals that soon we'll be switching to our third narrator, Margo herself. Something in Eve though appeals to Margo and she invites her to accompany them to dinner after they drop Bill at the airport for his flight to Hollywood to direct his first film. Interestingly enough, Darryl Zanuck, the producer of All About Eve, is named as the producer of Bill's fictional film as well. It's funny to listen to
successful Broadway director Bill discuss his shot at directing film as if he's abandoning a medium for the masses for a chance to make movies "which mean something." Was there ever this perception? It's also funny to remember how income tax rates used to be. They don't mention what Bill will make for directing his film, but presumably the salary was a lot lower than directors make today, but it still must have been a heady paycheck. So, the next time you hear a millionaire whining about possibly having to have his tax rate rise 3% to 39% show him All About Eve when Bill tells Eve that "80% of his salary" for directing the movie will go to taxes. Then they can shut the hell up. Since this is the portion of the film where Eve bends over backward to ingratiate herself with her newfound theater companions, she volunteers to check Bill's luggage and then bring his ticket to the gate so that he and Margo can have some private goodbye time. Bill comments that he "forgot they grew them that way." Eve has such a lack of pretense. Margo feels she must watch out for her as if she's "a loose lamb in the jungle." Margo continues to be the narrator and takes Eve under her wing as an all-purpose assistant, though Birdie still remains the sole person with qualms about this "lamb."
As I alluded to at the beginning of the piece, great actors delivering 40-karat dialogue powers my love for All About Eve. As many times as I've seen this film in whole or in part, if you asked me to name a particularly great shot or an interesting camera move than Mankiewicz employs to tell his story, I'd come up blank. This isn't a negative criticism: The film might be chock full of them but the words he wrote produce such magic that I'm mesmerized by them to the exclusion of the technical aspects. The only shot I can really recall is not a good one: it sticks out like a sore thumb. Late in the film, when Eve has landed the lead in a play written by Lloyd and directed by Bill, it's receiving an out-of-town tryout in New Haven, Conn. She and Addison go for a walk on the street from the theater and the marquee can be seen behind them in a horribly obvious back-projection shot that I can't understand the necessity of using. Couldn't the conversation have been staged elsewhere or the theater marquee set up simply somewhere? Still, a minor criticism for a film that's such a verbal masterpiece, even if it's not also the visual wonder that the bounty of other great 1950 releases are such as Wilder's Sunset Blvd., Reed's The Third Man or Huston's The Asphalt Jungle.
Having written about Sunset Blvd., so recently for its 60th anniversary, its interesting what it and All About Eve have in common. Though Bette Davis' Margo Channing isn't insane like Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond,
both are actresses involved with younger men worrying about their age. Granted, Margo's Bill is only eight years her junior and he's her willing love interest not part of a con that has turned into emotional blackmail such as William Holden's Joe Gillis. Also, Norma is 50, 10 years older than Margo and gave up working when sound came to the movies. Margo, being a creature of the stage, has kept working steadily, but having hit the dreaded 40, worries about her future, especially in regards to future employment. Karen tries to reassure Margo that eight years isn't that big a difference, but Margo tells her that, "Those years stretch as more years go by." It also can be an easy sore to puncture should there be a lovers' spat as when she and Bill fight once and he says, though in a tone indicating he means to be funny, that he always denies the rumor that she was starring in Our American Cousin the night Abraham Lincoln was shot.Speaking of age, writer Matt Zoller Seitz pointed out a flaw in All About Eve that I've always chosen to ignore, but that I really couldn't any longer once he wrote his piece "Trash-talking nine classic movies" for Salon. The article wasn't a contrarian view out to tear down classics of cinema — he admits he adores the movie — just that some of the greats bear significant flaws and he finds that Mankiewicz's movie's weakness turns out to be Eve herself. Seitz writes:
"The only weak spot, unfortunately, is the casting of the title character, Eve Harrington. Anne Baxter is a shade too old to be playing the 'girl' or 'kid' described in much of the dialogue (she was 26 when the film was shot), and more damagingly, she's simply not as compelling and imaginative as her fellow actors."
It's hard to argue with his judgment. When I watched the film again for this tribute, frequently stopping the movie to jot down yet another line of dialogue that I loved, not a single one was dialogue that sprang forth from Baxter's lips. Granted, Eve Harrington's scheming requires her to pretend to be mousy and meek, so it would be out of place for her to toss off one of the pithy bon mots that the other characters do with ease. At the same time, the film makes the point from the beginning that Birdie can smell the fraud, how does she so easily fool the rest? During the
initial scene where Karen takes Eve into Margo's dressing room, I scrawled the note, "Awfully accommodating to a stalker." Seitz writes further on this point that, "I don't believe that Baxter's version of the dewy-eyed foundling routine could fool so many battle-scarred showbiz veterans, except maybe Celeste Holm's kindhearted Karen." Actually, that is the truth because Karen is the one she ultimately tricks to get what she wants in terms of being Margo's understudy and delaying her on purpose so she'd miss a show and Eve would get her chance on stage. Later, when Eve has dropped the pretense of being the innocent, she uses that information to force Karen to make Lloyd give her the lead in his new play instead of Margo. Karen gets saved by the lucky timing of Margo passing on the part to spend time starting married life with Bill. Karen's relieved laughter is hilarious, even though none of her dining companions know why she's laughing, especially after returning from a meeting Eve had summoned her to in the restaurant's rest room.Of course, Birdie truthfully isn't the only one who has Eve's number early. Addison knows her game pretty much from the outset, but it's not in his professional interest as a columnist or his personal interest as an
asshole to warn anyone about her. Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage" and that's how DeWitt views it. Who is he to interrupt the players before the final curtain falls? The movie's great centerpiece is a party that Margo holds to celebrate Bill's homecoming and a belated birthday bash, but which she really regrets having before it starts because of rising tensions between her and just about everyone. In Margo's narration, she says, "Even before the party started, I could smell disaster in the air." It's the scene where the film's most famous line appears: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." That is just but one of the priceless quotes that fly from the various characters, including an uninvited Addison squiring an aspring actress named Miss Caswell and played by Marilyn Monroe. Even Marilyn gets some laugh lines. When she wants another drink, she calls out, "Waiter!" Addison corrects her that the man is a butler, not a waiter. Miss Caswell suggests that someone could be named Butler and that might cause confusion. "You have a point," DeWitt responds, "an idiotic one — but a point nonetheless." Going back to Seitz's piece, I think another problem with Baxter/Eve comes from the fact that Mankiewicz's screenplay doesn't provide Eve with any levity. She's the film's only humorless character.
Then again, Eve isn't Hannibal Lecter, a villain who should come with his own set of drums to deliver rimshots after each of his lines, so perhaps that's OK because the rest of the cast provides such a bounty of well-delivered dialogue that you can listen to over and over again. As I mentioned before, most of my notes on the film consisted of lines from the film. Now, it would be fairly ridiculous if I just listed them all, especially for those out there who haven't experienced All About Eve. People get all bent out of shape about spoiling a movie's plot twists, but for me it's even a greater sin to ruin all of its magnificent lines, especially when you're dealing with a screenplay as sparkling and crackling with wit as Mankiewicz produced. Still, I'm compelled to single out a few otherwise how can I convince the uninitiated that I'm not selling them a bill of goods? I will list them by the characters who spoke them.
LLOYD: You knew when you came in that the audition was over, that Eve was your understudy, playing that childish little game of cat and mouse.
MARGO: Not mouse, never mouse. If anything rat!
LLOYD: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's speaking and HER thoughts she's expressing?
MARGO: Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theater!
LLOYD: What makes you think either Miller or Sherwood would stand for the nonsense I take from you? You'd better stick to Beaumont and Fletcher! They've been dead for three hundred years!
MARGO: ALL playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!
LLOYD: There comes a time that a piano realizes that it has not written a concerto.
Eve would ask Abbott to give her Costello.
The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!
You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.
(To Margo) Many of your guests have been wondering when they may be permitted to view the body. Where has it been laid out?
Every so often, some elder statesman of the theater or the cinema assures the public that actors and actress are just plain folks, ignoring the fact that their greatest attraction to the public istheir complete lack of resemblance to normal human beings.
(To Eve) Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on, that you have the same contempt for me as you have for them?... Look closely, Eve. It's time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody's fool, least of all yours.
That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. But that in itself is probably the reason: You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also our contempt for humanity and inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.
There, I've said too much, but the words that flow from All About Eve are infectious, thanks in no small part to the stellar cast that delivers them. Bette Davis gives what may be her finest work and I'd still place her second that year to Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond. Two of the greatest performances by actresses in the
history of film and they both lost the Oscar to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. I don't mean to cast aspersions on Holliday, but let's be serious. Thankfully, George Sanders did win his most deserved supporting actor prize as Addison DeWitt, another of filmdom's all-time great characters. Thelma Ritter and Celeste Holm both earned nominations for supporting actress but I have to admit that Ritter had better parts (as in Pickup on South Street) and Holm already had an Oscar for being the best part of the terribly creaky Gentleman's Agreement, so I can't argue with Josephine Hull's win for her delightful turn in Harvey, which also turns 60 today. The most amazing achievement though belongs to Mankiewicz who won writing and directing Oscars for two years running, the previous year being for A Letter to Three Wives. There's no disputing the worthiness of that prize for writing, but as much as I love All About Eve, I question his directing win when he was competing against John Huston for The Asphalt Jungle, Billy Wilder for Sunset Blvd. and Carol Reed for The Third Man. Still, slight reservations aside, I always will worship All About Eve, today on its 60th anniversary and on all anniversaries yet to come.Tweet
Labels: 50s, Abbott and Costello, Arthur Miller, Bette, Caine, Carol Reed, D. Zanuck, Gloria Swanson, Hannibal Lecter, Holden, Huston, Mankiewicz, Marilyn, Movie Tributes, Sanders, Thelma Ritter, Wilder, Woody
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