"My Jurisdiction Only Extends to His Navel...": Kong vs. Bob [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 10]

At every stage of my life, Bob Newhart has been there. First with seeing him on numerous variety and talk shows in my youngest days; his years on his own sitcoms: The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, and finally, Bob (all of which I consumed heartily, even the last one); appearances in films as diverse as Catch-22, The Rescuers, Elf, and Horrible Bosses; acclaimed appearances on shows like ER, The Simpsons, and Desperate Housewives; and even now when he is one of the few actors that could convince me to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory (sorry, like most of Chuck Lorre's shows, I find the humor forced and too obvious). But no matter what type of show or film, Bob has been there throughout my life, his gentle (though often agitated) take on low-boiling comedy keeping me amused through even the hardest of times.

It is my belief that his assumed gentleness and quiet nature has served to cause the world to grow complacent about Bob Newhart. We came to just accept him too much. I feel that Newhart is a monumentally underrated performer, not just on television and in film, but especially in his stand-up comedy years early on in his career. It is easy to forget, but Newhart was the very first comedian to top the Billboard charts with a stand-up comedy album. 

This happened in 1960, when he released The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, a landmark in comedy, which not only won the Album of the Year award at the 1961 Grammy ceremony, but also earned Newhart a Best New Artist award. It was the only time that a comedian (or at least an intentional comedian) has won Best New Artist, and it was also the first time a comedian won Album of the Year (though impressionist Vaughn Meader would win Album of the Year two years later with a parody LP of the Kennedy clan called The First Family. Coincidentally, Newhart starred in a film called First Family, also about a presidential family in the White House but no relation to this material, in 1980. And yes, I saw that film in a theatre.)

The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart established the comic's simple but astoundingly effective persona: that of a man, often a cog or subordinate in somebody's machine somewhere, who finds himself in an odd situation, and then has to explain his actions over the telephone with the unseen and unheard receiver of his call (sometimes even Abraham Lincoln, years before the telephone was invented). Bob would usually begin with a set-up of the situation, and if you have ever heard a comedian say, or even mock, a sentence like, "And I think it might go something like this...," such a line was likely inspired by Newhart's comedy.

This formula worked remarkably well for Newhart throughout the sixties. While his first album was still on the charts, he released The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back, and the two albums sat at #1 and #2 on Billboard at the same time. He won another Grammy (this time for Comedy Performance - Spoken Word). And then, throughout the Sixties, he continued to release album after album.

But while I saw Newhart perform many times on TV in my youth, I did not hear any of his comedy albums until I was well into my teens. I was barely cognizant of this particular stage of his career, and I came upon his stand-up material in the same manner that I discovered most of my favorite bands: by accident. A friend's house, in fact, where I happened upon a couple of old LPs of his. They were not in the best shape, but my friend had listened to them hundreds of times, according to how much he used to recite sections of Newhart's routines to me in our spare time. (This was roughly the same manner in which I discovered most of the early Bill Cosby stand-up albums, but the less said about that for the moment, the better. I will reflect upon it in time.)

And there was, naturally for me, one routine that stood out above the rest amongst the tracks that my (then) friend would play for me. It was called King Kong (Something Like This). If ever there was a comedy routine -- perhaps even more so than Abbott and Costello's famous Who's on First? bit -- that was squarely within my comic wheelhouse, it was this one. The track appears on Newhart's 1965 album, The Windmills Are Weakening, and is a perfect summation of the Newhart style: succinct, precise, and with the absurdist details sold by Newhart's perfectly timed stammer and responses, imparting to the listener that the oddball situation -- that of a newly hired night watchman dealing with the arrival of King Kong on the Empire State Building -- was very real indeed.

Here is the track:

If this is not your type of stand-up comedy, I do not apologize for making you listen to it. Newhart's style, much like his sitcom persona, is measured and methodical, and serves the strangest lines up with absurdist glee. This is a comic style that has served him well in his late '80s, where he is still making comedy tours today.

And with Newhart, it all comes down to precise details, that not only comment on the situation and the participants, but on the underlying fabric of the American landscape. One of my favorite bits in this routine is how the unheard boss nags the new Empire State Building guard to strictly follow company procedure even while faced with what has to be the most ridiculous story he has ever been told:

"I know how you like the new men to think on their feet, so I went to the broom closet and I got out a broom, without signing out a requisition on it....I will tomorrow, yes sir..."

Of course, the boss cannot help but to comment on the guard's efforts, but naturally, once again, the company's rules forbid such actions from being truly successful:

"Did I try swatting him in the face with it? Well, I was going to take the elevator up to his head, but my jurisdiction only extends to his navel..."

And once more, the boss' main concern is not so much the safety of the guard or the girl in the ape's clutches or the residents of the building, but the very reputation of the place:

"Well, sir... the first thing I did was I filled out a report on it. Well, I don't want to give the building a bad name either, sir, but I doubt very much if we can cover it up, sir. The planes are shooting at him, and people are going to come to work in the morning and some of them are going to notice the ape in the street and the broken window, and they will start putting two and two together."

The payoff comes with a double gag. The first is the boss' asking of a truly goofy question and the guard's response: 

"I doubt very much if he signed the book downstairs."

And then finally, the guard's idea to coax King Kong away from the Empire State Building:

"You don't care what I do. Just get the ape off the building. Well, I came up with one idea. I thought maybe I could smear the Chrysler Building with bananas..."

Brilliant...

Recently Rated Movies: Michael Gough and the Ice Cream for Crow

Find the Blackmailer (1943)
Dir.: D. Ross Lederman
TC4P Rating: 6/9

"Why, the nerve o' that tuh-mat-uh!"

Sure, watching "classic" classic film is often pretty great, though you sometimes find a dud among the films generally considered the greatest of all time. But "B" pictures are where the fun of classic film is really at, but you sometimes have to squirm your way through a lot of dross to find the real... well, "gems" may not be the word, but when you find a good one, they sparkle like any bonafide diamond. Of course, when you are hanging around such low-class digs, that gem may just be made of out paste instead.

As brisk (just 55 minutes long) as it is fun, Find the Blackmailer is a speedy little detective yarn featuring Jerome Cowan as D.L. Trees (his secretary is named Pandora Pines, so you get the gist of what is going on here), a private eye so far below public scrutiny that he gets the job in this picture just because nobody knows he is a detective. When a mayoral candidate (Gene Lockhart) gets involved deep with some gangsters, it is up to Trees to figure out the exceedingly convoluted mystery (involving the search for a talking crow) and save the day.

Find the Blackmailer is just a simple potboiler, but the performances are all engaging (I especially like Lockhart, but I like him in almost everything). The film is a wonderful showcase for Cowan, who played a lot of second bananas in his four-decade film career, including his supporting role in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, two years before this picture, where he played the tragic part of Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, who gets bumped off by Brigid O'Shaughnessy. But Cowan is the man here, an unlikely tough guy who is able to think his way out of rough spots, and is able to smart talk his way into uneasy alliances when he needs to do so.

And of course, some of that smart talk is what slowly endeared this movie to me, with lines like ""Beat it, before I throw a moth in your muffler!" Yeah, that kind of stuff gets me right here, as does all the silliness with the talking crow, which itself might be a not so subtle ribbing of The Maltese Falcon. There are worse films that have been nominated for Best Picture awards, so why not skip all of that high-falutin' garbage and just settle for a fun "B" pic? 

[Find the Blackmailer is available in the Warner Archive set, Warner Bros. Horror/Mystery Double Features, along with 5 other films. If you like "B" pictures, this is a must have set, especially for Sh! The Octopus.]


Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972)
Dir.: R. Winer / Barry Mahon "Thumbelina" portion
TC4P Rating: 2/9

This one is currently frightening audiences -- and generating big laughs -- by being shown in trailers all over the country as part of a Rifftrax program being promoted in theatres right now. Unfortunately for me, seeing a truly bad movie as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or its offshoot riffing shows does not count as my having seen the actual film. And so I had to knock off a major blank spot on my film-watching resume by sitting down to watch a full version of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.

I said "watch a full version" rather than "watch the full version," because there are actually two different takes of this film. The Santa portion of the film is actually nothing but a wraparound segment that introduces a film within the film, a separately filmed fairy tale that could either be the story of Thumbelina or Jack and the Beanstalk (both filmed by exploitation director Barry Mahon), depending on which release you were unlucky enough to have caught. The films within the film are both longer than the combined before and after Santa segments, thereby rendering the title characters to also-ran status in their own movie.

As for the quality of the film, that varies between segments. The Santa portion looks like it was filmed outside someone's Florida beach house. After first hearing some completely talentless kids dressed at elves attempt to sing (and fail) about why Santa Claus hasn't returned to the North Pole, we see Santa use his mind control powers to enlist several local kids (some of the same ones playing the elves) to help him get his sleigh out from the beach sand holding it down. The kids get various animals to try and pull the sleigh free -- a gorilla, a warty pig, a sheep, and a cow -- but all to no avail. Why Santa doesn't get his fat ass out of the sleigh when the gorilla is pulling it will tell you all that you need to know. For some strange reason, we are shown shots of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fiddling about on a raft in the water (with Ol' Man River on the soundtrack). As the kids give up hope, Santa tells them the story of Thumbelina.

The Thumbelina film not only has a different director, but is far better filmed than the Santa part. However, this is not praise, just a notice that the Santa scenes are some of the worst filmmaking that has ever been released theatrically, while the Thumbelina story is just a generic attempt at low-budget children's filmmaking. (It does raise my rating of the overall film just a tad since it so much better than the Santa wraparound.) We watch a pretty girl walk around the defunct Pirates World theme park in Dania, Florida, and she happens upon a series of diorama telling the story of Han Christian Andersen's Thumbelina. She imagines herself into the story, and then we get over an hour of slow-moving drama involving the birth of Thumbelina and her impending marriage to Mr. Mole. The songs are better than the ones in the Santa part of the film (and clearly a better songwriter too) though still not all that good. For the animals in the story, they have chosen to go with full head masks rather than makeup on the actors, and so all of the voices seem disembodied. It's dull but its better than what came before, and what will come at the end.

Returning to Santa, after the story, the kids depart for reasons unknown to the profusely sweating old elf, and thankfully he waits until they are gone to strip from his coat and belt down to his red t-shirt. When they return, all two dozen of them are hanging onto a red jalopy being driven by a poor guy trapped inside the silliest white rabbit costume that has every existed. It is the Ice Cream Bunny to the rescue, in a scene that only goes for the last ten minutes of the film, but seems to amble on for about three hours. And then these horrid urchins sing again... they... sing... again. (I'm sorry, but this film made me look up the definition of singing in the dictionary, because surely, this can't be what is meant.)

The whole affair really makes you start to hate the commercialization of Christmas even more, because without an audience out there willing to watch anything to do with the holiday, this movie doesn't get made. Maybe what we should have been teaching our children first all along was good taste. Manners, letters, numbers, potty training... that can all come later.

Oh, and singing. We should teach them to sing well too. That's something my ears learned from Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.


Black Zoo (1963)
Dir.: Herman Cohen
TC4P Rating: 5/9

Michael Gough. If there is one name that must be placed amongst the pantheon of the World's Hammiest Actors, Michale Gough must surely have a plaque there. You might know him best as Alfred the Butler in the four Burton/Schumacher Batman films, but Gough had acted for a very long time before that. For the purposes of this quickie, let's concentrate on a very small period in that career. In the late '50s and early '60s, he tore the horror world up in a trio of films for producer (and sometimes director) Herman Cohen, and where he really made the raised eyebrow and out-of-place tone of voice an art form.

My favorite of the three films has always been Horrors of the Black Museum, the first and best of the set, a Grand Guignol piece that I first saw as an older teenager and have never been able to get out of my system. (And it is one of the films to which I was tipped off by Stephen King's seminal non-fiction work, Danse Macabre.) The least of the trio is Cohen's giant gorilla epic, Konga, which while being highly derivative of better (and some worse) films, pushes the crazy factor just enough to make it interesting. Through both pictures, Gough controls your gaze for every second, his indignant face ready to burst (sometimes inappropriately) in every scene at the slightest provocation or perceived slight. And when things really start to not go his way, watch out!

But until this week, I had not seen the last film in the three Cohen/Gough team-ups, Black Zoo from 1963. After a beautiful girl is killed by a loose tiger on the street, we meet Michael Conrad (Gough), a British expat who runs a private zoo in Los Angeles called Conrad's Animal Kingdom. Even with Gough running about, all seems on the up and up at Animal Kingdom. Conrad leads tour groups to meet his lions, tigers, apes, and bears, and his wife runs a chimpanzee act that thrills audiences. Conrad himself seems to have an odd rapport with his predatory creatures, and he is seen to play his organ for his big cats while they fall asleep loose in his own home.

Jerome Cowan, whom you might remember from the first review regarding Find the Blackmailer above, shows up as someone attempting to swindle Conrad out of his immense property, and you can imagine how that works out. Anyone who crosses Conrad starts to disappear, and the police become increasingly suspicious, especially when the evidence at the crime scenes seems to point to animals as the killers. 

Once again, the result is a very derivative film, but what sets it apart from others of its ilk is its lead role featuring the nearly always sinister Gough. It is hard to watch this film in this age when all one can think about is the working conditions for the animals (except for the gorilla, which is not only a guy in a suit, but possibly the same suit from Konga). Even with some cool names showing up in the cast -- Elisha Cook Jr., Jeanne Cooper, Marianna Hill (yum!), Virginia Grey, and Edward Platt -- Gough is the whole show here. Like the other Cohen films, the main reason to watch is to see him puff and pout and plot his way out of and into situations. And he does it in the grandest way possible.

Yes, his hamminess is the big draw, but he was also an actor with a broad range -- appearing in Ealing comedies, Hammer and Amicus horror, Disney historical epics, and even winning a Tony Award for Best Actor in 1979. Gough, in any role, is always worthwhile, even when you really hate where they went with Alfred in the last two Batman films. Then again, I really hate where they went with every character in the last two Batman films, so I suppose that I should cut him some slack. He was just doing his job like any other working stiff actor.

Yeah, I Sat Through It Again: A*P*E (1976)

A*P*E (1976)
Director: Paul J. Leder
TC4P Rating: 2/9

"Imagine. Almost 36 feet tall... wow..." - Freighter mate on ship transporting A*P*E across the ocean at start of film.

You are going to run into this film on just about any "So Bad You've Gotta See It!"-type of site or book... and yeah, it is... and yeah, you gotta see it. Its fecundity is only matched by its stupidity, but in its tattered, zipper-up-the-back way, its actually quite clever. But only if director Paul Leder actually meant the film to be this bad. Could there be a chance that this chintzy, decrepit South Korean production is actually the most brilliant spoof in the history of movies? A film that not only mocks giant ape movies and current movie trends, but does it in the way that most common citizens "think" of or expect giant ape movies to be? Is the entire film a complete put on, and to a large degree, a cynical attempt to flip off the audience (which the big simian does at one point, though story-wise, he is actually flipping off the attacking military helicopters) and separate you from your money at the same time?

Hard to tell, but I'm banking on it just being a dumb, bad example of low-budget inept filmmaking. Not just a stumbling attempt to remake King Kong (and definitely tied to the fact that Dino de Laurentiis was legally filming his own remake around the same time for release in the same year), all the while mocking the big guy within the film to show the distance between the two apes, A*P*E also takes aim at a couple of other cultural phenomenons of the 1970s.

In the opening sequence of the film, after the ape (who is never given a proper nickname in the course of its action -- a supreme mistake on the part of Leder -- ALWAYS name your monster...) tears apart the bathtub-grade ocean liner in which he is being transported from his unseen and unremarked upon island home, the ape then immediately, without any buildup or reason, battles a giant shark to the death. Well, it would be "to the death", but the giant shark had clearly been dead long before the cameras started rolling, and the guy in the ape-suit has to do a lot of splashing and thrashing about with the shark's body in the shallow waters in which he is standing to make us believe even for a second that water is still flowing through the shark's gills, thus allowing the fish to breathe. Which the ape-suit actor absolutely fails at accomplishing. But there, in the first two minutes of the movie, Leder has not only invoked the imagery of King Kong in the viewers' minds, but has also included Jaws, of which there was still quite a mania in the media at the time.

The other cultural reference? This is never mentioned -- at least, I have yet to run across it -- but while many sites (including IMDB) note the title as Ape, every video copy I have ever run across (and every film guide as well) has given the film's proper name as A*P*E. Since the film was made (and takes place) in South Korea, to me it seems to be quite obvious that the title is a reference to one of the biggest TV shows of the era (or any era, for that matter): M*A*S*H, the show (and book and movie) with military stars between the letters of its titular acronym and which also took place in Korea. If, indeed, this is intentional and meant subliminally, then it is by far the most subtle thing that Mr. Leder ever attempted in his career.

On top of title concerns and clumsy film mash-ups, Leder also chose to make the film in that cherished format which gets a resurgence now and then, especially when filmmakers are exceedingly desperate for attention: 3-D. Now, I love 3-D, but for much of mankind, it's more the idea of 3-D that is so agreeable, not necessarily the execution. I have yet to see this film in 3-D, but it is easy to see the bits that are supposed to thrill you in this manner. Arrows, helicopters... all manner of effluvia come flying at the screen and are meant to rock you back in your seat.

And speaking of rock... there is the finale of the film where the ape engages the army in a massive battle, and the monstrous ape flings a series of rocks down from his mountaintop stand. Yes, there are visible wires on the rocks as they glide not so smoothly towards the camera, just as there are visible wires on just about every flying thing in this movie. But the beautiful part is that Leder (who also edited the film) uses the exact same gliding rock shot three times in a row! Talk about filmmaking economy! Best of all are the shots of the soldiers walking straight out at the audience, stabbing their rifles in your face over and over again. This makes little sense unless the audience is supposed to have the ape's viewpoint, and if they did, they would be looking down on the soldiers. In other words... brilliance.

I could literally fill this blog for days remarking on the problems with size and scale in this film. Yes, one can imagine he is "almost 36 feet tall... wow...", but not when he is suddenly towering over 20-story tall buildings. But this film is not about such minor concerns. It's about worldly matters and heartfelt emotions. When the ape meets his fate at the hands of the cruel military, the third-rate Fay Wray actress character (played by a pre-Growing Pains Joanna Barnes, known here as "DeVarona") mentions sadly that "It's just too big for a small world like ours."

Instead, I'd like to yet again invoke the words of the freighter mate, who followed up his "wow..." remark with this one of stunned surprise when A*P*E escapes the freighter:

"Oh... shit..."

RTJ

Recently Rated Movies #7: Lemmy Caution & Mad Science Apery

"All things are normal in this whore of cities..." - Alphaville (1965)

I am gleefully stuck this weekend in Godard's Alphaville. I have not seen this film since I was eighteen and the owners of my favorite video store loaned me their personal copy of it. It has not changed: it is still one of the strangest films that I have ever beheld, and I'm sure it would tax the patience of even the hardiest of viewers. Myself, I think it is marvelous fun, and I have dug into its treasures three times over the course of the last two days. A caveat: I say that I am having fun, but of course, to me, Eraserhead is a casual walk in the park.

The film seems to take itself seriously, yet is obviously a parody of both spy and science-fiction films, especially those of the dystopian future genre. It is clearly a case of Godard having a good deal of fun at the audience's expense, especially if the decidedly mixed history of reviews for the film are any indication. I was having fun with the puzzle within the film, and even if half of the questions raised do not get resolved, I really did not care. The journey seems to be the point. And speaking of journeying, and it could be the translation is highly faulty, or perhaps in French it might make more sense, but somehow you can drive your car from planet to planet. (I just had flashbacks to the car from Repo Man...)

Eddie Constantine is absolutely riveting as a tense, bulldog-looking version of James Bond named Lemmy Caution, whom he played in several films previous to this one. He might be parodying his former turns in the role, but I have not seen any of those other films, so I cannot say such a thing with any certainty. And if all Seductresses Class Three were as smolderingly heart-breaking as Anna Karina, I think I would probably get sucked into the machinery of Alphaville myself.

Regardless of the black-and-white starkness that much of the film takes place in, Godard fills the film with visual punnery, and he gives many of the characters that we meet or hear of names from all over popular culture, and seems to take great delight in giving it to practically all ideologies right in the ass. Not a perfect film by any means, and it trips over its own feet here and there (or does it, Jean-Luc?), but I feel it is far better than I have read or remembered from my previous viewing.

On the sleazier side of the tracks, I next watched a poverty-row Monogram thriller starring Boris Karloff from 1940 called The Ape. as readily as I will view anything that the Great Karloff appeared in, this proved to be not such an enjoyable undertaking. However, it provides me the opportunity to add a side-note on Curt Siodmak.

Siodmak adapted the play (!) and co-wrote the screenplay for this one, and while the film seems to be a horror film, it is actually a rather under-average thriller, wherein the doctor played by Karloff, in order to obtain spinal fluid in which to restore hope to a young woman's stricken with polio, kills and skins an escaped circus gorilla, and then dons the skin to take out his victims while all of the blame is placed on the "killer gorilla". This would be a great idea if the entire county weren't out for blood and shooting at anything hairy that moves. Thus, the doctor's plan and timing are sheer idiocy. Since he already has the gorilla's skin, why doesn't he just bludgeon his victims, extract their precious spinal fluid, and then leave tufts of the gorilla's fur at the scenes of the crime? Why parade around in the gorilla suit? Luckily for him, the circus gorilla has apparently been groomed to look and trained to move just like Ray "Crash" Corrigan in an unrealistic gorilla suit, so the doctor doesn't have to work too hard to effect the proper (improper) gorilla impression.

I mention all of this because The Ape is another Siodmak film, much as in Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956), where the supposed "monster" is revealed at the end of the film to be simply a man in a "monster" suit, though the difference this time is that the audience is in on the killer's plan, rather than an audience full of kids believing they are watching a monster movie and then having the rug pulled out from under them at the film's conclusion. So, did it take Curt over fifteen years to finally stew up a variation on the ol' "blame everything on the escaped gorilla" plot, which this extremely average Karloff "thriller" embodies? (There is a fellow who wrote a review on IMDB who says that, like him, you have to be a fan of the old black-and-white horror movies of the 30's and 40's to enjoy this film. Well, I am, and no, I did not...) Even taken as cheese, it is unfulfilling even as an appetizer.

I followed this inanity with another similarly produced PRC poverty-row effort, though of considerably greater quality, from 1944 called The Monster Maker . Despite sporting another guy-in-a-bad-gorilla-suit, the film is directed, with far greater talent than I expected, by PRC vet Sam Newfield, This film is a surprisingly nasty piece of work, especially given the era in which it was made. J. Carroll Naish is a clearly mad scientist who craves the affections of a piano virtuoso's daughter, who just so happens to be the spitting image of his dearly departed wife. To force her hand in marriage, Naish injects the father (Ralph Morgan) with the virus that causes acromegaly, which is the affliction that cursed Rondo Hatton. The makeup work on Morgan is extremely weird-looking and well-done, somewhat approaching the look of the real-life "Elephant Man," Joseph "John" Merrick. There is a stunning-looking shot of Ralph Morgan done up in overcoat, hat and scarf that totally reminds me of Darkman, at least, to my eyes. All in all, I am saddened that I took so long to actually watch this film, as I have had a copy for a number of years yet had never gotten around to viewing it. Of this, surprises are often made...

As for Bharat Mata (English title: Mother India), this supposed Bollywood "Gone With the Wind" I found by turns beautiful, enchanting, funny, tragic, and ultimately, after an interminable nearly 3 hours, boring and disappointing. I found the resolution completely unsatisfying (though a bit shocking, which was nice) as I would have taken care of the nasty business that occurs about 15 years earlier than it does in the film. I'm sure there are details about Indian village protocol that I am not privy to here in the U.S., but I found the molasses-like way that the put-upon family deals with the villain completely annoying. I did not have any problem with the musical sequences, though they are the source of some comedic chuckling amongst people generally unfamiliar with Bollywood films. I will admit to being a relative novice myself, having only seen about fifteen examples of the genre or so, but to a certain degree, most of those examples have all seemed to be the same movie in many respects. While there is a good deal of variety within each film, almost like someone is re-assembling the same grab-bag of ideas for each film, I prefer some elements of my films to be separated once in a while. In the end, while I have no problem with lengthy Bollywood epics, and look forward to seeing others, this one left me wanting something a little more.

Turner Classic Movies, almost unwittingly it seems, showed a pair of Jack Arnold films over the weekend that he directed for Universal in the same year (1957). No comment was made by Ben Mankiewicz in his introduction, which might not be surprising as he is not actually doing the intros live, but Turner did show these films within the same 24-hour period, and I thought that maybe a little contrast and compare would have been interesting. Turner does often sync these things up, so I was surprised that no mention was made.

In the first, a modern western called Man in the Shadow, Orson Welles stars in a fun but small and ultimately indifferent role as shady ranch dictator Virgil Renchler (who has a grown-up daughter with the moniker Skippy! She also has a pet kangaroo named Jif... nah, I'm pulling your leg). The film moves nicely to its predictable conclusion, there are many comments made about racism and class distinction, and Jeff Chandler takes a pretty impressive screen beating as the sheriff in over his head with trouble.

However, if I were a shady ranch dictator, and one of the migrant ranch hands were beaten to death on my property by a couple of my boys, and all of the evidence were taken care of and there wasn't the slightest possibility that anyone in a predominately white county bought and paid for by my money were going to take the word of another migrant worker seriously, I think my orders would be to let the sheriff onto the property unprovoked and without sticking guns in his face. On my end of things, as that shady ranch dictator, why act unbelievably suspicious and distrustful? Were it me, I would have been, "Come on in! Take a look around! Have some coffee? Game of checkers? Take a ride on Skippy?"

There are two other amusing things in Man in the Shadow: Royal Dano plays a character named Aiken Clay. That's right: Aiken Clay. And William Schallert shows up dressed up in cowboy gear. Pretty funny, given that he plays the doctor in the next film that I watched: the still worthy science-fiction classic, The Incredible Shrinking Man. I don't need to say much about this one, except that they keep trying to recast this film as a comedy, and I believe that is a mistake. They failed with the distaff Lily Tomlin version, and I am not holding out much hope for the upcoming Keenan Ivory Wayans version, which I'm sure will be top-loaded with penis jokes.

Sure, the original version has moments of unintentional comedy, especially to eyes viewing it almost fifty years later, but that can be said about nearly any film made in another era when attitudes, acting styles, and technological effects are so different from what we know today. Remember, or try to understand, the era that this was made in, and you will discover a very sober and somber reflection of a man dealing with his rapidly changing place in the universe, and I believe that the movie's effects, on the whole, hold up remarkably well today, especially once the shrinking Scott Carey (Grant Williams) ends up trapped in the basement and his epic battle begins against the resident spider. (The house spider is slightly miscast as a tarantula, but they are scarier looking. At least to most people; not to me.) The movie has one of those endings where I am not sure whether I am happy or sad for the protagonist. Just as he has to shuffle his feelings toward his experience, the viewer seems to be asked to take the simple stance of acceptance in the face of amazing odds, rather than railing against them. Whether this a good idea or not (I would rather go down spitting in the face of such odds myself), it is a remarkable stance for what most would consider a standard B-picture. At least, all of the picture's existential musings haven't been ruined by a plethora of dick jokes.

Herewith, all of the films from the past week:

Alphaville, une etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) Criterion Collection DVD - 8
Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) (1960) DVD - 8
Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (1958) DVD - 9
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) TCM - 6
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) TCM - 5
The Ape (1940) DVD - 3
The Monster Maker (1944) DVD - 5
School of Rock (2003) DVD - 7
The Last Waltz (1978) IFC - 8
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) TCM - 9
Blade II (2002) DVD - 7
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) TCM - 8
Bharat Mata (Mother India) (1957) TCM - 6
Man in the Shadow (1957) TCM - 6