Westerns

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I was born into a shit-kickin' family. My father's parents were Eastern Washington farmers, and my sister Susan married into a local dairy family, and - well, what more do you need?

Evidently it’s in our DNA. My brother Leonard worked in grocery stores his whole life, and yet he talks like Walter Brennan. He was, for a fact, born on my parents' farm, during a brief period in their early married life during which they were farming, but still!

Anyway, everyone in my family loves Westerns, and the whole Old West folklore thing. (When Leonard found out I was doing our family history, he drawled: "Are we descended from any horse thieves?" Evidently that would have been perfectly delicious. The reality - some Polish peasants, some Italian peasants, some English hooligans and riffraff - just isn't colorful enough, in a six-guns-and-Randolph-Scott way.)

Every once in a while I try to reassociate myself with my Boot Hill roots and watch a few Westerns on TMC. Sometimes they're harmless enough that they sort of wash over me. But - you know? - a lot of them - most of them - just aren't very good.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that there are some classics, like "Cimarron" and "Stagecoach" and "Red River." I have seen at least ten minutes of each of these - more of "Cimarron," because it has Irene Dunne in it – and they are all lovely. I stick by my original point, however. Read on:)

·        Westerns are all depressingly similar. I will spare you a recitation of plot points, cliches, situations, etc. I will only say that I recently fell asleep during a Jimmy Stewart western, woke up about ninety minutes later during another Jimmy Stewart Western, and was uncertain for a few minutes if it was the same movie.

·        They certainly save money on costumes and sets. I'm sure there was a kind of Studio Western Kit, containing things like 1) one chuck wagon 2) three dance hall girl dresses 3) two fancy saddles 4) one fancy lamp with a fringed shade, for indoor / city-slicker  / bawdy house scenes.

·        Scenery. Magnificent, right? HDTV has killed that illusion. In Movie #2 the other day, J. Stewart and company were riding along a dangerous mountain ridge with all kinds of mountains and forests and valleys in the distance, except that, um, no they weren't. The foreground was perfectly clear and in focus; the scenic background looked like Jackson Pollock's hick cousin Vernton Pollock had blooped and blopped together some green and blue and white paint to produce Western Background #14.

And so forth.

I am sure, as we say, that for people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like. I like all kinds of silly / stupid / sub-par things, especially in the movie category. (Next time you hear me warbling on about how wonderful "Shack Out On 101" is, give me a real hard whack on the back of my head.) But, bafflingly, I was born without the mental toolkit required to make sense of these verkakte Westerns, even though genetically I should be right in there with my relatives.

Sigh.

Okay. Now: anybody want to see "Shack Out On 101" one more time?

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Movie review: "The More the Merrier" (1943)

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“The More the Merrier” is one of those movies that seems very ordinary until it sneaks up on you and bites you on the butt.

It sounds unremarkable in synopsis: Washington DC working woman Jean Arthur decides (for patriotic reasons) to rent out half her apartment, because there’s a housing shortage. She (reluctantly) ends up with grandfatherly wiseguy Charles Coburn as a roommate. He almost instantly rents half of his half-apartment to handsome young Joel McCrea, who’s doing some kind of mysterious government work.

And, as they say, hijinks ensue.

Unpromising, right? But it’s full of delights.

First of all: Jean Arthur. She’s almost forgotten now, but she was a great comedienne with a voice that was husky and squeaky at the same time, and she had terrific comic timing and a very expressive face.

Second: Charles Coburn. He’s sly and sympathetic, and is obviously plotting to get Joel and Jean together from the very outset. (He won an Academy Award for this performance, by the way.)

Third (and not least): Joel McCrea. You know how I feel about him. He’s not traditionally handsome – his nose is a little pointy – but he’s intensely masculine without being threatening or boorish, and he has the best smile.

Some of my favorite scenes:

-         McCrea and Coburn charge around the apartment making choo-choo-train noises, pretending to keep up with Jean Arthur’s ridiculously precise morning schedule.

-         McCrea and Coburn lie on the roof, on their stomachs, reading the Dick Tracy comic strip from the paper, while Jean Arthur watches them with bemusement. (Coburn reads Tracy; McCrea does the voice of the Leopard Lady.)

-         Jean Arthur, in her room, turns on some Latin dance music, and dances to it, all by herself. (She even turns her head to check out her own butt). In the next room over, Joel McCrea (in bathrobe) slowly begins to do the same step, also all by himself. And in the next room over from that, Charles Coburn does a few steps too.

-         Joel McCrea jumps into the shower, removes his bathrobe (after getting it soaking wet!), and proceeds to slap himself all over and bark like a seal, while Jean Arthur listens in astonishment from her bedroom.

-         An astonishing scene in which Jean Arthur describes her engagement to her “fiancé Mr. Pendergast,” while Joel McCrea makes love to her and kisses her. This scene is hotter than Hades, kids! And this is something Joel McCrea does very well; he did a similar scene in “The Palm Beach Story.” The message he communicates is: “I know you think you love someone else. But I love you, and I know you love me too.” It’s a very powerful message, and he communicates it better than any actor I’ve ever seen.

This is a classic movie. It’s small, but perfect in its way. It reminds me of Jane Austen’s remark about carving her “two inches of ivory.”

“The More the Merrier” is two inches of perfectly carved ivory. And (as Jane reminds us) two inches of perfectly-carved ivory can be very lovely.

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For Sunday: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance "The Continental" (1935)

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“The Continental” was the first song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song, in the movie “The Gay Divorcee,” back in 1935.

This is a video of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to the tune in the movie. They are wonderful together.

Enjoy.

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Movie review: "The Princess and the Frog" (2009)

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I like Disney movies very much. They can be screamingly funny at their best, and pathetically sentimental at the same time; and who can resist that combination? Love and kindness always win out over greed and hatred (just like in real life). But (unlike real life) there’s always a shadow: death, separation, sadness.

The Disney studio went through a long lull in the 1970s and 1980s, with only a few movies: “The Great Mouse Detective,” “The Rescuers.” Then, suddenly, in the 1990s, they blazed to life again with movies like “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.”

Then another lull, but of a different kind. Disney was producing a lot of movies again, but they weren’t quite as good: “Pocahontas,” “Mulan,” “Hercules,” “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” “The Emperor’s New Groove.” (I’m not saying these movies are bad; all these have redeeming qualities. “Mulan” is beautifully animated and uniquely sensitive, and “Hercules” (which I saw again recently) is very funny and has some good music, and “Emperor’s New Groove” has the voices of David Spade and John Goodman and Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton, all apparently having an excellent time. But they’re flawed too: “Mulan” gets pretty dark – it’s about war, after all – and “Hercules” and “Emperor’s New Groove” both have endings that go seven directions at once. I don’t even like to think about “Pocahontas,” which has some pretty animation, but a garbled plot and not much entertainment value.)

It was for this reason that I put off seeing “The Princess and the Frog.” Disney had done a Native American princess, and an Asian princess, and even a Middle Eastern princess. (I use the word “princess” instead of “heroine,” because we’re talking about Disney. You understand.) Now – ta-daa! – they created an African-American princess. I didn’t want to see the movie. It was bound to be pious as hell, and cutesy. Oprah herself was voicing the heroine’s mother! For some, that was a seal of approval; for me, that meant that the Disney studio (with its history of racism – go watch “Dumbo” again if you haven’t forgotten) was finally making amends for its past.

And amends might be good for the soul, but they aren’t necessarily fun to watch.

Well, friends, I was wrong. “Princess and the Frog” is a jolly good time. The heroine this time round, Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose), is a hard-working Jazz Age New Orleans waitress who just wants to open a restaurant. The prince, Naveen (voiced by Bruno Campos), is a good-looking royal wastrel who’s in New Orleans looking for a good time (in the short term) and a rich wife (in the long term). The villain turns Naveen into a frog. Naveen mistakes Tiana for a princess, and gets her to kiss him (it doesn’t take him long to talk her into it!), and she turns into a frog.

Hijinks ensue.

As always with Disney, there’s lots of crossover. We’ve been in the swamps before: go watch “The Rescuers” if you don’t remember. Also, we spend a lot of time looking up at the evening star in this movie – one character even sings a song to it! – and that should make any faithful Disneycrat think of Jiminy Cricket.

The songs are pretty good, especially one called “Dig a Little Deeper” (with a chorus line of pink spoonbills!):

There’s also a nicely creepy comeuppance song for the villain (voiced by Keith David) at the end:

Flaws? Yes, a few. They lay on the N’Awlins charm pretty thick, as well as the bayou slapstick. Also, New Orleans in the 1920s appears to be amazingly free from racism and segregation.

But we’re talking about a fantasy here, and – as fantasies go – this is a lovely one.

Not all Disney princesses are the same. Some are frail and need constant help, like Snow White. Some are very tough, like Mulan. Tiana is tough: she wants to fulfill her father’s dream, and she wants to make her mother happy. She’s willing to put her own happiness aside to make those things happen.

She’s a good person.

And Naveen – a shallow good-for-nothing – turns out to be romantic, and kind, and selfless.

After seeing “The Princess and the Frog,” I felt triumphant.

And that’s the way you should feel after watching a good Disney movie.

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For Sunday: Ginger Rogers sings "We're In The Money" in Pig Latin

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As a movie buff, I always stand and salute whenever any of the “Gold Diggers” movies of the 1930s come on the air. I DVR them and play them over and over again.

This is from the first (and best) of them: “Gold Diggers of 1933.”  It opens with a cheerful song – “We’re In The Money,” a renunciation of the Depression – and ends with a very downbeat musical number, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” very sad indeed.

Not your usual movie.

Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and Joan Blondell are featured, as well as some names that aren’t so well remembered: Warren William, Guy Kibbee, Aline MacMahon, Ned Sparks.

For me, one of the most astonishing things in this excellent movie is in the first sequence: Ginger Rogers singing “We’re In The Money” in Pig Latin.

Watch and be amazed.

For Sunday: Maria's dance from "Metropolis" (1927)

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“Metropolis” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a wild science-fiction romp from 1927; it’s silent, but you can now see it with its original musical score, which is very expressive.

Here’s the plot: the city of Metropolis is divided between the lofty towers of the rich and powerful and the dark underground cities of the workers. A woman named Maria (played luminously by Brigitte Helm) is preaching to the workers and telling them to expect a “mediator.” The dictator of Metropolis, in an attempt to stop Maria, asks crazy Doctor Rotwang to create a evil robot replica of Maria; the robot proceeds a) to stir up all kinds of discord in the underground cities, and b) to dance at Yoshiwara, the hippest nightclub in the tower city, and drive all the upscale men insane with lust.

This is the false Maria’s dance. It’s beyond amazing. (Just so you know: the young man in bed is the true Maria’s boyfriend (who also happens  to be the dictator’s son), having visions of the Apocalypse.)

Enjoy.

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Raymond Burr

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Raymond Burr was a handsome second-string actor who started his career in the late 1940s. He evolved into a movie villain (as in “Rear Window"), and then a heroic TV actor (as in “Perry Mason,” and later “Ironside”). He was handsome and broad-shouldered, with a deep gruff voice. He gained weight in the 1950s and 1960s, but it gave him gravity.

Also, he was gay.

He met an actor named Robert Benvenides while working on the “Perry Mason” show. They fell in love, and spent the rest of their lives together. Hollywood couldn’t endure this, of course, so the studios created a fiction about marriages and children. (Raymond was married to a woman for a while, back in the 1940s, but it ended in divorce and no children.)

He was reputed to be very generous. IMDB reports the story that Errol Flynn told him that, if he died with ten dollars in his pocket, he wouldn’t have done his job. It inspired him to be philanthropic, and he always helped his friends.

He died in 1992, and Benvenides was his sole heir, but Raymond’s family contested this. They failed, thank goodness.

How times have changed! Look at George Takei! And Neil Patrick Harris! And Ellen de Generes!

Partner and I have talked about marriage. Sadly, we’d end up paying more income tax married than we would as two “single” people. But our mutual employer, Brown University, regards us as Domestic Partners, so we enjoy some advantages that way. Also, we have not found any local institutions that discriminate against us. Lately (with all my health-related adventures) I simply introduce Partner to my doctors and nurses as “my life partner,” and he’s welcomed immediately.

How easy we have it, and how difficult Raymond Burr and his partner Robert Benvenides had it, only twenty years ago.

The world is moving in the right direction.

Slowly.

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Something light

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Since being diagnosed with an unpleasant medical condition, my attitudes have shifted subtly. In just a few weeks, yet!

I don’t think I need any philosophical lucubrations about life and death at the moment. I think what I need right now is some diversion.

So out the window with “Crime and Punishment” and the Book of Revelation.

I’m overdosing on the movies of the 1930s, especially the musicals. I’m currently watching “Love Me Tonight,” with Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald, circa 1932. It’s well-written and cute, with some chirpy little songs.

If I wanted to be dark about it, I would point out that every single person in the cast is almost certainly dead by now: debonair Maurice and squeaky Jeannette, goofy Charles Butterworth, sardonic Charlie Ruggles, clever Myrna Loy.

But when I watch this cheery little film, they’re all as alive as can be, and having a wonderful time.

How about “Gold Diggers of 1933”? Delightful. And all of them gone: Ginger Rogers, Aline MacMahon, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Warren William, Guy Kibbee.

But the film is like new: cheerful and tuneful.

This is the medicine I really need.

To quote “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”:

Nothing of gods, nothing of fate;

Weighty affairs will just have to wait.

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I am not George Bailey

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A kind co-worker checked in on me recently, knowing about my recent diagnosis of cancer, and I told her that I was really overwhelmed by how kind people were being to me. “Well,” she said, “remember George Bailey.”

Hmph! I am not George Bailey.

I am not a nice person. I am sometimes kind, but wise also, like the offspring of a bunny rabbit and a cobra.

I want to be good to people, but not necessarily to everyone, and not necessarily all the time. And I have a vicious tendency to be nasty to people who are nasty to me.

George Bailey (aka Jimmy Stewart, the big sap in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) went through his life unaware that he was just acting perfectly toward people – kind, generous, etc., etc.

I have no such illusions.

I am often unkind. I am sometimes mean. I have done unforgivable things (meaning that I have done things to people who are dead and who can’t possibly forgive me for them). I’ve been unpleasant and angry. I’ve been rude (probably on a weekly basis).

Repeat: I am not George Bailey.

If I live through this thing, I think it means that Frank Capra didn’t know everything after all.

(And, in case you can’t tell, I can’t stand that stupid movie. Life is just more complicated than that.)

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Movie review: "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954)

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“Creature From the Black Lagoon” came up on Turner Classic Movies not long ago. Apollonia shrieked when I mentioned it. “My favorite horror movie!” she said. “I was so scared when I first saw it!”

For those of you who haven’t seen it: it’s about a group of scientists who go to the Amazon to investigate some odd fossils they’ve found. There appears to be a humanoid creature with webbed appendages living down there. And you know what? There is!

The Creature is pretty tame, looked at from the standpoint of the year 2013. In its own time, however (I rely on Apollonia’s testimony for this), it was terrifying.

Now let’s talk about some of the other stuff going on here.

I don’t know if the director was gay, but the camera dwells upon the half-naked bodies of Richard Carlson and Richard Denning. There are lots of interesting views of the bodies of muscular men – Carlson and Denning, and others – all through the movie.

Hmm!

As I did research on this movie, the best surprise was the man who played the Creature. He was a diver / swimmer named Ricou Browning, and he was very handsome, and very well-built. Here’s a picture of him halfway in costume:

Browning was involved with a lot of water-related productions in Florida, including “Sea Hunt” and “Flipper.” He was a nice guy who was very serious about his underwater adventures.

And he looked good underwater.

Incidentally, the Creature is the only character in the movie who seems really interested in Julie Adams, the female lead. Denning and Carlson seem mostly interested in tussling with one another, and helping one another out of their scuba gear.

(There are lots of books about gay themes in cinema. I think someone needs to add a chapter about “Creature from the Black Lagoon.)

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For Sunday: "I Hate People," from "Scrooge"

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“Scrooge” was an interesting movie. (I know it’s a Christmas movie, but the heat of summer makes me long for midwinter.) It had some decent songs, and a couple of great characterizations (Dame Edith Evans as a starchy grandmotherly un-Dickensian Ghost of Christmas Past, and Kenneth More as a huge Dickensian Ghost of Christmas Present).

This song is one of my favorites. I sing it to myself, under my breath, on most workdays, a little.

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Tyrone Power

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I’ve written often enough about good-looking actors: Cam Gigandet, Aldo Ray, Henry Cavill. There has never been any lack of handsome actors in Hollywood. That’s kind of what Hollywood is all about. Some of these guys have some acting ability too (all three of the above can act).

But sometimes their looks make more of an impression than their acting.

Bradley Cooper, I think, is one of this type. He did a tremendous acting job in “Silver Linings Playbook,” but all I could think of while watching the movie was: Wow, he’s cute!

Let us now turn to Tyrone Power.

He was an actor of the 1930s and 1940s. He was, to quote IMDB, “startlingly handsome.” (Ah well: some of us are born “startlingly handsome” and some are not. You either have it or you don’t.)

Believe it or not, “Tyrone Power” was his real name. He was actually Tyrone Power III, in fact. His son was (and is) T. P. IV, and there’s a grandson who’s Number Five.

Tyrone’s father was an Irish actor of some acclaim. Tyrone himself, in the movies, was always something brave: a gallant soldier, or Zorro, or a pirate, or something heroic.

His body wasn’t that great, but his face was spectacular.

My favorite Tyrone Power move is “The Rains Came,” in which he plays an Indian(!) army major / doctor. They darkened his skin a bit for the role. (Hollywood was very unthinkingly racist in those days. “The Rains Came” is set in India, but I see only one Indian actor on the IMDB cast list, and he’s in a very small role.)

Anyway: Tyrone.

Go seek out Netflix or Amazon or something, and seek out “The Rains Came,” and gaze upon him.

You’ll be very impressed, I guarantee. Maybe not with his acting. But you’ll see what I mean.

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Movie review: "Holiday" (1938)

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Partner told me that, at a recent training session, the trainer asked each member of the class: What’s your favorite movie?

  Partner found it an impossible question. Who has just one favorite movie, after all?

  I agree completely. I have about twenty favorite movies, a few of which I’ve spoken about here: “Annie Hall,” “The Mask of Dimitrios,” “Dodsworth.”

  But, absolutely, “Holiday” (the 1938 version with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant) is on my list.

  It’s a witty little Philip Barry play from the 1920, which was first made into a 1930 movie, and then (immortally) into this 1938 movie. The movie didn’t do well, supposedly because late-Thirties audiences didn’t want to see a movie in which the hero didn’t want to work. Also, Katherine Hepburn had recently been declared "box-office poison."

  Piffle.

  Summary: Wealthy-by-birth Doris Nolan meets wealthy-by-hard-work Cary Grant at Lake Placid, and brings him back to New York City as her fiancé. Cary meets Doris’s carefree sister Katherine Hepburn, and realizes within a few days that he’s in love with the wrong sister.

  There are lots of things to admire here: Lew Ayres as alcoholic brother Ned, who’s pathetic but brave; Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Cary Grant’s funny best friends; George Cukor’s quiet sympathetic direction.

  Best of all, however, is the dialogue. Many of the best lines are given to Hepburn, as follows:

  Cary Grant has just admired an icky-poo doll once owned by his fiancé (Hepburn’s sister), saying “It even looks like her.” This follows:

  Linda Seton: [Hugging a toy giraffe] “Now don't you a word about Leopold, he's very sensitive.”
Johnny Case: “Yours.”
Linda Seton: “Looks like me.” [turning its head in profile]

  Or, when Hepburn’s horrible cousins appear in the doorway:   

Linda Seton: “Oh, for the love of Pete – it’s the witch and Dopey!”   

Or, questioning Cary on his family background:

  Linda Seton: “Do you mean to say that your mother wasn’t even a Whoozis?”

  This movie is a slice of lemon meringue pie, cool and refreshing. I could watch it morning, noon, and night.

  Do yourself a favor and take a look at it.

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Appreciation: Jody McCrea

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Disney is making a Beach Party movie, along the lines of their “High School Musical” movies. To wit: two modern teenagers get thrown back to the early 1960s, into a beach-party setting, and everything goes wrong.

Personally I’m glad they’re reviving the beach-party franchise. The 1960s beach movies were superb, in their way: Frankie and Annette, and Harvey Lembeck, and the Himalayan Suspension Technique, and from time to time people like Luciana Paluzzi and Dwayne Hickman and Don Rickles.

But I mourn the loss of the original beach kids. I mourned Annette Funicello’s passing a few months ago in this blog. And now, very late, I’ve discovered that another member of the Beach Party cadre left us some years ago: Jody McCrea.

Jody was the son of handsome / beefy actor Joel McCrea and actress Frances Dee. He was a nice-looking man who very much took after his father. Take a look at these photos of the two of them:

In the Beach Party movies, he played a character named “Deadhead,” and sometimes “Bonehead.” He was the designated dummy. He was big and adorable and stupid. In one of the beach party movies, he finds a mermaid (naturally, none of his friends believes him), and they fall in love!

He was a bodybuilder, as you can probably tell from the above pics. He was well over six feet tall, as was his father. (Jody seldom took his shirt off. Partner said: “Well, naturally he didn’t take off his shirt. He would have make Frankie Avalon look pathetic.”)

He made a few more movies after the beach fad died, but mostly left show business after the 1960s. He became a rancher in New Mexico, where he died of a heart attack in 2009.

I didn’t know of his death until the other day, when Apollonia and I began researching him.

I was so sorry.

Annette’s dead, and Jody too.

They were the spirit of youth to us, back in the mid-1960s. Knowing that they’re dead is very depressing for us older folks.

It means that we might die too.

Unless we can figure out a way out of it.

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Appreciation: Aldo Ray

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You know I have a weakness for beefy actors like Dana Andrews and Victor Mature and (more recently) Channing Tatum and Cam Gigandet. They appeal to me on a deeply hormonal level.

Here’s one I sometimes forget, until I see one of his movies: Aldo Ray.

Aldo was an Italian-American, born Aldo Da Re. His brother wanted to be an actor, so Aldo drove him to an audition; the casting director took one look at Aldo, with his football-player body and nice squint and gravelly voice, and cast him instead. (Imagine how his brother felt!)

Aldo played lots of soldiers, and a few nice guys (catch him in “The Marrying Kind” with Judy Holliday), and some tragic/romantic characters (as in “God’s Little Acre”). Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, he took whatever roles came along. He was diagnosed with cancer in the 1980s, and took any acting jobs that came along in order to pay for his health care; according to Wikipedia, he got dumped by the Screen Actors’ Guild when they discovered he was acting in non-union productions (including at least one porn film).  

Aldo, in his prime, is a pleasure to watch. He’s a physical marvel: thick-bodied and strong, with a big chest and thick neck. There’s a scene in “God’s Little Acre” when he suddenly appears shirtless, just standing there, waiting for his old girlfriend to respond to him, and I always squeal with pleasure when I see it.

There’s a wonderful interview with Aldo on Movieline.com, from 1991. The interviewer holds nothing back, and neither does Aldo (who’s going through chemotherapy at the time). We meet his family, and everything. He’s funny and unrepentant and natural.

Here’s the scene I mentioned: a bare-chested Aldo interacting with Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, for god’s sake!) in “God’s Little Acre.” 



Prepare to squeal.

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The pleasures of the elderly

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“Did you see ‘Scaramouche’ on Turner Classic the other night?” I asked Apollonia the other day.

“What? Yeah, I think I switched past it,” she said. “Who was that? Rory Calhoun?”

“Nah,” I said. “Stewart Granger.”

We both laughed. “Same thing,” she said.

“I’ll say,” I said. “I think they were the same person. Maybe he was Rory Calhoun on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, and Stewart Granger on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”

Now we were both laughing like idiots.

Off in the corner there was a table of younger staff members, listening to us. They stared at us as if we were patients in an asylum. We were aware of them. But we kept laughing. No, more than that: we laughed even harder because they were staring at us.

Questions:

·        Does any of the above make any sense to you?

·        Do you know who Rory Calhoun was, or Stewart Granger?

·        Does “Turner Classic” mean anything to you?

It’s a habit of the elderly to mumble and cackle over the past. But this is a game we elderly people like to play: making reference to things that happened long before the other people in the room were born. It’s a way of getting even with those young people, with their music and their slang and their television programs that we’ve never heard of, and their texting jargon that we still haven’t quite figured out.

This is one of the great pleasures of the elderly: to make younger people uncomfortable.

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For the Fourth of July: the National Anthem, from "A Boy Named Charlie Brown"

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I’m not terribly patriotic, so I never know what to put here for these patriotic holidays.

Then I remembered this very cute little segment from the 1969 animated movie “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” in which Snoopy manages (with very limited means) a very dramatic presentation of the National Anthem.

Enjoy.

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Movie review: "Man of Steel"

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Partner and I saw “Man of Steel,” the new Superman film, last weekend.

As a film, it mostly stinks. The more you think about it, the worse it gets. Imagine Pa Kent telling young Clark that he maybe shouldn’t have rescued a schoolbus full of children, because he might have revealed his secret identity!

It’s basically a redo of the second Christopher Reeve movie from 1980. General Zod is back from Krypton. There’s a big battle for the planet Earth.  Guess who wins?

Many critics have pointed out that this Superman doesn’t seem to care much about collateral damage. His extended battles with the villains take out a big chunk of Manhattan, ahem, Metropolis. This is strange for someone who, to paraphrase him, “just wants to help people.”

And so on, and so on.

But there are two bright spots.

One is a new plot point: Lois Lane (played by Amy Adams) is the first one to figure out that Superman is Clark Kent, very early in the movie. There’s a cute scene at the end of the movie when she’s introduced to him in disguise, and she does a very comical little double-take at him. This, for me, is a relief; the whole secret-identity thing is a little exhausting sometimes, and – let’s face it – if you can bend steel in your bare hands, you really shouldn’t be all that worried about people knowing your real name.

The other bright spot is Henry Cavill.

You know I tend to gush over beefily handsome actors. Well, here goes again. Henry Cavill is just about perfect. He has an adorable smile and a wonderful profile, and he has the face of an angel and the body of a Bengal tiger on steroids.

All through the movie, all the while I was hating the tiredness and confusion of the plot and direction, I was loving me some Henry Cavill.

If you haven’t seen it on the big screen yet, skip it. Wait for the DVR / Blu-Ray / Netflix version.

Because you don’t need to see it on the big screen, but you really owe it to yourself to see Henry.

He is the stuff that dreams are made of.

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For Sunday: Trixie Friganza does her "Bag o' Tricks"

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My friend Apollonia told me about Trixie a long time ago, and I never forgot the name. Trixie (born Delia O’Callaghan in Grenola, Kansas) was a vaudevillian, a singer and comedienne and musician. She was a powerful supporter of women’s rights also: go read about her and it will make you proud. (Trixie was a nickname, which she kept because she always hated the name “Delia.” “Friganza” was her mother’s maiden name. When an interview asked her about the name, she said “I didn’t marry it,” and this was considered a borderline-scandalous thing to say. My goodness, how times have changed!)

This is Trixie’s gift to later generations: a Vitaphone film recorded around 1930. The first few minutes are audio only; around halfway through, we get the full Trixie, complete with her solo on the double-bass.

Enjoy.

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John Cazale

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John Cazale was an important actor who appeared in exactly five movies. You have almost certainly seen him in at least one or two of them.

To wit: he was in “The Conversation” with Gene Hackman, and in both “Godfather” and “Godfather II” (as poor doomed brother Fredo), and in “Dog Day Afternoon” (as sad-sack gunman Sal), and in “The Deer Hunter.” All five of these movies were nominated for Best Picture. Three of them won.

John Cazale was peculiar-looking, but strangely sweet, with a gigantic forehead. He was dying of cancer when he appeared in “Deer Hunter,” and the producers were thinking about replacing him, but Meryl Streep (who was his romantic partner at the time) threatened to leave the production herself if Cazale got booted.

And what would “The Deer Hunter” have been without John Cazale or Meryl Streep?

Strange how such a short career can make such a big impact. I mentioned him to someone recently, and she said: “Oh, he was amazing. He was in so many movies!”

“Only five,” I said.

“Only five?” she said, crestfallen. “It seems like he was in so many more!”

It does indeed.

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