Movies Til Dawn

Lets close out the year with a spectacularly entertaining half-hour interview with Anthony Burgess, conducted in 1989 on a British show called "Face To Face". If you dig AB as I do, check out the previous two posts. This is one of his best interviews. Burgess is of course erudite, but he's also sly and quite charming when he wishes to be. I find him more humane in this inteview then in many others--he's alternately charming, defensive, witty, sad, apologetic, touchy and in a confessional mode. The first volume of his memoirs--"Little Wilson and Big God" has apparently just been published and the second (the wonderfully titled "You've Had Your Time") is finished and awaiting publication.(Another Burgess title that I love: "But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?") He talks openly of his fear of death and if it was much on his mind than no wonder; he lived only another three years after this interview.   Subscribe in a reader

Apropos of my new interest in everything pertaining to Anthony Burgess (don't ask), below is Burgess writing on the etymology and proper usage of the F*#% word. And below that is Burgess speaking about F-books, specifically Barbara Cartland who he describes as "vicious". By the way, check out yesterdays post to see Burgess on a ridiculous 1964 English literary game show, inexplicably named "Take It Or Leave It". "In 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' we meet the ancient honest word fuck. Lawrence believed that it could be cleansed of its centuries of accumulated filth and stalk nakedly through his pages like Connie and Mellors themselves, standing for an act of love which had been too long swaddled in euphemisms. There are many people who cherish the fallacy of a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour in which lovers invited each other to fuck or be fucked...This was never so. The word has always been taboo. You will find no Anglo-Saxon document whic...

Where did the distinctive humor of Monty Python have its origins? Watch the above British television show from 1964 and I think we'll have answered that urgent question. The show, "Take It Or Leave It" defines English twittiness with its very premise--a quote is read and the guests have to decode who the author is. But this is really just an excuse to launch a discussion (or argument really) between the prissy and competitive participants, all eager to snootily one-up the other. Did people really watch this show? Present amidst the panelists is Anthony Burgess, not yet famous as the author of "A Clockwork Orange" but clearly eager for the exposure. In the never made Python sketch version of this, I cast John Cleese in the Burgess role. Clearly this is the sort of show the then adolescent Python cast members were watching and later, upon meeting each other, would send them into hysterics in their Cambridge rooms, thus giving birth to England's greatest con...

Above is an excerpt of the Michael Parkinson/Peter Sellers interview that I recall hearing on the Sunday morning English comedy radio program 'Cynics Choice', which I posted about yesterday . This is the mid-seventies and Sellers is thin, blue-denimed, between heart attacks and on the verge of his 'comeback' movie "Return Of The Pink Panther'. At ten minutes they show a handful of outtakes from several different PP's all of which feature Sellers breaking up for no apparent reason. (He seemed to need to do this compulsively, as if to make himself feel funny). At twelve minutes in he goes introspective, quietly reflecting on the failures of his marriages. He alludes to his affair with Sophia Loren (who denied they ever had an affair) and refers to his second wife and baby-mama Britt Eckland as "Miss Impact". When 'Return Of the Pink Panther" was released (summer '75 I believe) Sellers fame spread to a much younger generation (like me ...

When I was a kid growing up in LA in the 1970s, there were two announcer/emcee's whose shows held special import for me. One was Ben Hunter (who I wrote about a while back) , whose noontime KTTV afternoon classic movie show was often reason enough for me to play sick and stay home from school. The other was a man named Brian Clewer, who hosted a radio show on Sunday mornings called "Cynics Choice". Airing on KFAC (the go-to classical station at the time) from 9AM to noon, Cynics Choice was an all-British comedy compendium that served to introduce me to the Goon Show, Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, The Two Ronnies, Tony Hancock and even Benny Hill, whose television show had yet to come to American airwaves. Listening to CC, one was able to enter a sort of British fugue state, losing oneself for three hours in comedy, music and interviews. (I recall listening to Michael Parkinson interviewing the Goons, David Frost interviewing Richard Burton, etc.) But beyond the record...

Apropos of last weeks posting of a few numbers from the 1929 musical "Tanned Legs" , here's another number from the movie called "Come In The Water". Uh, yeah. Anyway, it's a nifty little ditty but it's the first forty seconds of the clip that I find especially interesting. Basically it's a mini-documentary of what it was like to party down on a crowded beach in the 1920s. Various details to note: the men wore shirts along with their strange semi-short pants and some appear to have socks on as well. Volleyball was already a going thing on the beach (it's always felt to me much more 1960s in spirit). And at thirty seconds in, you'll see a couple frugging, 1920s-style, to unheard music that can only have been in their heads as there were, as yet, no mobile music devices known to man--at least none that operated without electricity. Or was there electricity out there on the beach on that long forgotten but sunny and happy day in 1929? The foot...

Stephen Sondheim rates Noel Coward as his first choice for "Master Of Blather".  I nominate John Huston for an award similar in spirit but opposite in execution. For while Coward was expert at prattling wittily on while oftentimes not saying anything particularly witty, Huston had the anti-gift of saying very little indeed and making it all sound quite profound. The above posted two minute clip of Huston talking about Marilyn Monroe (he directed her at the beginning of her career in "Asphalt Jungle"--which was not her first film as Huston thinks it was--and in her last, 1960s "The Misfits") is remarkable for how little Huston manages to say and how long, drawn-out and pensively, thoughtfully delivered his non-information is. You stare at him, fascinated by his charisma, his voice, his cigar, the barking hounds off-camera (he was probably squeezing this interview in between foxhunts), not realizing until it's over that he took almost two minutes to e...

Re: my two previous posts containing Alka-Seltzer commercials, above I've posted what is certainly Alka-Seltzers most famous commercial and probably one of TV's most beloved stupid commercials ever. The "Spicy Meatball" ad first aired in 1969 and, like most classic cinema, was initially considered something of a disappointment. Apparently sales of the antacid decreased as most people thought the ad was for the spaghetti sauce pictured on the table and not the medicine which is loudly touted in the voiceover that closes the ad. Jesus. Aside from that, the ad is notable for being 'self-reflexive', or in the words of modern-day literary criticism "performative". It is about the making of the commercial itself; the scripted commerical becomes the real life predicament of the actor; the use of the props (in this case the meatballs) causes the actual heartburn that makes the product a necessity to the performer; the director and camera assistant are al...

Below is a quite cool little three-minute made-for-Youtube doc about the origins of the feud between Bing Crosby and Jerry Lewis, said feud being one that I never knew existed. Using three different clips (two interviews and the source material) each separated by about fifteen-to-twenty years in time, the documentarian spins a cautionary tale of show-biz vanity, fragile egos and touchiness about respect between performers of different generations. The event that set off the "phewd" (Winchellism for 'smelly feud') occurred on a 1952 Cerebral Palsy telethon hosted by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, on which Jerry and Dean made a special "surprise" appearance. Jerry was in his mid-twenties at this point--he and Dean had become shockingly, spectacularly famous only a few years earlier--and was clearly ready to take over whatever stage he found himself on with complete impudent authority. His shtick was simply unlike anything anyone had previously seen--tasteles...

Apropos of the George Raft Alka-Seltzer commericial that I posted (which I posted?) last week, above is a 1960 A/S animation, voiced by Gene Wilder. A more leisurely pace prevailed in those Mad-Menish days, allowing the commercial a full minute of meandering time to play out.   Subscribe in a reader

Here's Joan Crawford's disturbing appearance in MGM's 1929 variety-show omnibus, "Hollywood Revue" (for TV showings the title was later amended to "Hollywood Revue of 1929", lest any unsuspecting viewers think that the film was made in 1974). In this segment, Joan sings a highly forgettable period ditty called "Got A Feeling For You" and then goes into a gyrating frenzy of a flapper dance that I find more than a bit terrifying. Indeed, everything about this little clip is a misfire. Something about Joan's performance is off--she's demonic instead of graceful, demanding instead of inviting. The film is basically a recording of what would have been a sort of high-end vaudeville show with one act following another, all of which appear to flop due to the lack of any response--the players are playing to an empty house. The notion of using the camera to connect the performer with the audience appears not to have occurred to anyone--Joan sing...

Before he became famous for turning down the roles that made Humphrey Bogart famous, George Raft was a hoofer of considerable ability. He danced in New York nightclubs of the twenties, dabbling in gangsterism along the way--I think it speaks very well of the 1920s that the times were liberal enough for crime bosses to hire guys who also liked to tap dance. Get a load of his actually quite fancy hoofing from the 1929 movie "Side Street".  And read this quite fascinating Wikipedia entry on Raft's life. The gangster stuff was real--he apparently was always making phone calls to call off hits on fellow actors who'd slept with mob guys girlfriends--and I particularly like the bit where he winds up so on the skids in the 1950s that he becomes a "greeter" (aka maitre'd) at a ganged-up club in Havana. In 1959, Billy Wilder had the temerity to cast him in "Some Like It Hot", in which he good-naturedly spoofed his own long-ago image (much in the way Wi...

Apropos of my celluloid-based Long Island house search from yesterday, here's the brilliant letter-dictation scene between Groucho and Zeppo from 'Animal Crackers'. Deco-ish as the set of Margaret Dumont's house is, it doesn't match the Freedonia-based mansion she inhabits in 'Duck Soup', which looks an art deco/moderne dream you might have after watching too many Astaire/Rogers movies while ingesting way too much pizza with vodka sauce.   Subscribe in a reader

As I am currently working on a period piece (set in the 1940s in a 'Gold Coast' Long Island Mansion), I'm compelled to waste large amounts of time on Youtube in search of...stuff. Like films about Gold Coast Long Island mansions--or at least set in them. The Marx Brothers 'Animal Crackers' has a wonderful version of an art deco GCLIM--it's a set, natch, but reminds me floorplan-wise of an actual GCLIM named "Knole" . In my further searches, however, I've stumbled across two dance numbers from a 1929 musical called "Tanned Legs" which is supposed to be set at a seaside resort called "The Breakers". Now, there are two mansions with that name that I know of. One of them is a famous Newport, Rhode Island spread. But there's a GCLIM with the same name. Delighted with my find, I researched this antique musical and, to no surprise at all, found that it was filmed in Laguna Beach, California. Anyway, they're nice numbers, the...

Here's one of my favorite SCTV sketches, updating life in the Cleaver household twenty years after 'Leave It To Beaver' went off the air. The sketch cruelly mocks actor Hugh Beaumont's (Beaver's father--played by Joe Flarhety) very public struggle with alcoholism, while making reference to the urban legend that Jerry Mathers (the Beaver, natch) was rumored to have been killed in action in Vietnam. In reality, Mathers became a bank manager and later went into real estate before returning to acting (sort of--there were updated 'Beaver' TV movies apparently, mostly in the 80s). Semi-recently, Mathers appeared in a production of 'Hairspray' (playing the Divine created/Fierstein immortalized/Travolta wrecked mother role? Is it possible? More likely would be the host of the dance show...though I prefer to believe it was the former). Tony Dow, who played older brother Wally, became a TV director which seems to have provoked a case of clinical depression--h...

The genius that was John Candy is on full view in the brilliant "3-D HOUSE OF BEEF", from SCTV's early eighties network series.   Subscribe in a reader

Second City Television is either utterly forgotten by those who only half got it,  or dearly remembered by those who were enamoured with it, beginning with its inception in Canada in the mid seventies and its eventual move to US network TV in the early eighties. When it went network, CBS (think it was them) put them on in some ungodly slot--I believe it was Friday nights beginning at 12:30 AM (thus, Saturday morning). My friends and I never missed it and I recall thinking that the far-too-late hour in which it aired became part of the weird dreamlike surrealism inherent in the show. By the time it was rolling to a close, you were bleary-eyed and punch drunk with laughter and the weirdness of the sketches (and sometime anti-sketches--more than a few were aborted midway through the routine and turned into ruminations on how lousy the sketch was) all seemed to merge. Below is "Battle of the PBS Stars", with Rick Moranis's perfect Dick Cavett impression and Julia Child and Mr...

Apropos of yesterday's post about Jonathan Schwartz, below is a nice little WNEW-AM announcers tribute. You hear all of the biggies announce their names and that, basically, is that. Yet the whole thing brings back ridiculously happy memories for me. I got turned onto WNEW (1130 on your AM dial) in 1980 and listened pretty-much non-stop until the stations demise in the early nineties. For some reason the station that took up where WNEW left off, WQEW, just didn't have the same spark (though it had a lot of the same DJ's, including Schwartz). Disney brought that station down in the late nineties, converting it to "kids radio" (say what??) It all felt terribly sad at the time. But then the internet came along and...   Subscribe in a reader

While not technically a talk show host (which is the obsessive pursuit this blog has been devoted to over the past month or so) (and yes, there are serious grammatical issues with the previous parenthetical sentence but I haven't the energy to fix it), Jonathan Schwartz--a legendary New York  D.J. specializing in music from the 'Great American Songbook (i.e. Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, etc.) ... what was the subject? Ah, yes. While not technically a talk show host, Jonathan Schwartz talks to himself quite a bit on the air between records and thus I'm giving him a little space. I say "to himself" because that's kind of the charm of his act. His monologues are delivered quietly, with wry amusement directed at an audience seemingly of one--himself. Indeed, he resembles Jean Shepherd in certain ways--you frequently don't realize that he's already launched into an anecdote and before you know it you're hanging on his every word, wondering where he's...

Although I've posted previously on the cult radio monologist Jean Shepherd, and though I liked a lot of what I heard, I never fully got it until I followed the advice of a number of people who have memorialized him in different pieces over the years. The one thing that everyone who writes about Shepherd has in common is that they listened to him at night, while lying in bed in the dark. His WOR show--which ran forty-five minutes every night--aired at eleven PM (with a re-broadcast at one AM) and seemed to speak to something deep in the nocturnal soul. Last week I found this terrific site which has complete Shepherd shows going back to the fifties and through the mid-seventies, when he (more or less) left radio. I got into bed one night, put on a show which ran from the beginning (and not just an excerpted bit), closed my eyes and let him take over. And lo. The effect was as all-encompassing, deep, funny and weirdly transcendental as everyone said it was. I've been doing it ...