Movies Til Dawn

  Subscribe in a reader What on earth was the above video made for? It's a short film in the style of a tourist-lure travelogue promoting New York. Only its point is how lousy New York is. The Youtube poster is at least ten years off in his estimation of when it was shot--he says early sixties but the cars (among other things) show it to be the notorious New York of the early 70s. The funk music helps solidify this as well as the cabbie who uses the word 'kooks' to describe the crazy people he encounters in his job. Now dig: 'kooks' was a 50s/60s word so one could be forgiven for thinking that the use of the word places the film in the early 60s. But the cabbie is at least fifty-something years old, meaning that his use of the word 'kooks' was new and fresh ten years earlier and--as is often the case with us older ones--is a stale leftover of the hip world that he remembers from his fast-receding youth. Do you buy it? Well if not, here's the ultimate ...

The toweringly talented writer-director Preston Sturges (no, I will not give credits since you must be crazy to be reading this blog if you don't know who Sturges is) appeared on screen as an actor four times. Twice were cameos in his own films ("Christmas In July" and "Sullivan's Travels"--damn, I just gave credits) and once as himself in a Paramount war-time musical ("Go over there boys and knock 'em dead for us dames!") called "Star Spangled Rhythm." The fourth appearance came in 1958 (the year before he died) in a Bob Hope movie called "Paris Holiday." As Sturges appears to have left behind no filmed (or recorded) interviews, this is our only chance to see the great man in the filmic flesh, to watch how he handled himself, what that magnificent head of hair really did when he walked around (it flounces a little) and to take in the strange sort of late 19th/early 20th century Boulevardier manner with which Sturges walke...

Above is a 'featurette' made for God knows what reason about the making of the 1977 movie version of the musical 'The Wiz'. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film was an enormous and enormously expensive undertaking--the most expensive movie ever made in New York at that time (according to this mini-doc)--and was an enormous failure, both critically and commercially, ending the cycle of 'blaxploitation' films that had begun earlier in the 1970s and dooming the Hollywood musical for quite a long time. Lumet is interviewed as is Rob Cohen, the producer. That it took two New York Jews to end the resurgence of black cinema is a fact one can't comfortably look away from (or comfortably look at, for that matter). Lumet blathers platitudes about how fabulous Diana Ross is, how 'truthful' young Michael Jackson is ("you have to work very honestly around him...' etc.). He also performs a very interesting dance step at 4: 40--did he choreograph as well...

Last weekend I went to the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood and saw (among a couple of other films) 'Bye Bye Birdie', starring Ann-Margrock--er Margret--Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Paul Lynde etc. The film, shot in 1962/63, holds up only reasonably well with Margrock--er Margret--being the best reason to revisit it. Part of the problem is that it's poised uncertainly between the disappearing oldish Hollywood and the emerging newish Hollywood--even though 'A Hard Day's Night' hadn't yet appeared it's clear that Hollywood knew that something new was coming on 'the scene' and that musicals needed to be more inventive, filled with a different energy than they'd had in the already forgotten 1950s. The old-school MGM musical was dead, courtesy of the dissolution of the Arthur Freed unit at the end of the decade and MGM's failure to ever get its much touted biopic of Irving Berlin, 'Say It With Music', off the ground. Musicals were still ...

My previous two posts (scroll down, toots) have reawakened my childhood obsession with 'I Love Lucy', without however managing to focus on that legendary show. This all began with my musings on 'The Lucy Show' and has now moved backward a few years to yet another Lucy-centric television hit. The hell with it. Enough's been written about 'I Love Lucy'. In between 'I Love Lucy' and 'The Lucy Show' came 'The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour', an expansion of 'I Love Lucy' featuring big-name guests--Red Skelton, Ernie Kovacs, Talullah Bankhead, Danny Thomas etc. The specials were infrequently aired--thirteen were made and shown over the 1957-1960 television seasons and the last one aired the year the Arnaz's divorced. As a kid I recall KTTV (Metromedia Channel 11 of blessed memory) occasionally airing them on Sunday evenings. I especially recall the credit sequence featuring an animated Lucy and Ricky standing on Conga drums--why the...

Last week I posted a clip from 'The Lucy Show' (scroll down, baby) which featured Lucy and Vivian Vance meeting Joan Crawford. It renewed my interest in the series, which was Ball's second and which came four years after 'I Love Lucy' had ended its run. As a child I remember watching 'The Lucy Show' with mixed feelings. It was funny, of course. Ball was always wildly watchable and beyond funny with both physical and verbal humor. But what happened to Ricky and Fred? And why did Ethel's name change to Viv? Why did Lucy work in a bank and why had she moved from New York to Los Angeles? The answers are: 1) Ricky and Lucy got divorced and Fred got a role in 'My Three Sons'. 2) With the disappearance of Fred, Ethel reverted to her stage name Vivian Vance. 3) Because the character she played, Lucy Carmichael, worked in a bank in the book on which the series was based (called "Life Without George") and moved to LA as a lifestyle change after...

"The Lucy Show" was the follow-up  color version of "I Love Lucy", sans Desi Arnaz and William Frawley (who, in my opinion, were sorely missed). Such was the greatness of the earlier show that this series has been largely ignored in the popular culture universe. Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance are still best friends only now they're 'Lucy and Viv', lending the whole enterprise an aura of laziness. They couldn't even think up new names? And somehow Ball's voice dropped an octave in the two years that intervened between the shows, making her sound like a female impersonator doing Lucille Ball (think Harvey Fierstein). Nonetheless, the above clip is nothing short of frigging hilarious. I can't find the entire show on Youtube so I've no idea of how the situation resolves itself, but Lucy and Viv inadvertently wander into Joan Crawford's house and meet the star herself, who--through a little contorted logic and circumstantial evidenc-- t...